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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

"By 2030, the National Restaurant Association projects that 80% of all restaurant items will be eaten at home..."

I doubt it. I'm not convinced that any of the delivery app companies are really making money; by 2030 they may not exist any more.

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I mean delivery has always been a thing. Before the delivery-app-err it was maybe mostly pizza, but I don't see why delivery in general can't still be a major thing.

Also take out is always an option!

It was never 80% of food though. It's not even really 80% today.

If VC funding were to dry up I'd imagine either the higher delivery fees or the higher order minimums of the past would come back, and then consumers would respond to prices and reduce ordering out.

No argument there.

This probably depends a lot on autonomous vehicles. Right now VC money is subsidizing deliveries, but that's mostly subsidizing the driver.

Especially for items like this, because if you take the driver out of the equation and create purpose-built autonomous vehicles that aren't intended to have human occupants, they can be much smaller and don't have to worry about passenger safety. You could have autonomous electric vehicles the size of RC cars delivering takeout to your door.

Right. There's a startup which uses cute small robots to deliver food in Berkeley right now [1]. There are still a lot of humans in the loop - handling the actual pickup, remote-controlling the robots from Columbia - but even so that could save money compared to having a local driver in a car to make the whole delivery.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Kiwibots-win-fa...

Interesting. What happens if someone attempts to rob the robot?

Presumably the same thing that happens in most normal robberies; the robber gets the item but gets reported to the police. Presumably the delivery robots have cameras, making it easier to identify the criminal.

it's pretty hard to make delivery work if you (the business) have to pay the delivery person yourself. the key issue is that one person just can't deliver that many orders in an hour. food has to be sent out soon after it is made so it doesn't get cold (although you can do some amount of staging by keeping it on top of an oven). once the food is in the car, you have an even harder time constraint to have it still be hot when it's delivered. this means the delivery person can only carry a limited number of orders and will need to circle back to home base fairly often. basically you have a spinning hard drive trying to fulfill random, low queue depth io requests while maintaining low latency. it doesn't work well. even if you pay the person minimum wage, it's hard enough to break even during peak hours (the profit on an order is already low). it's really hard not to lose money on the driver off-peak.

the way your typical pizza delivery place makes this work is by skimping on the ingredients big time, then charging the same amount as nearby takeout places plus a delivery fee. you may have noticed that takeout-only places tend to be a lot better for the same price.

now you might ask why restaurants can't just make good food and charge enough so that they actually make money on delivery. unfortunately, most hot food really suffers from being crammed into a little box for 15-20 minutes until it gets to your home. it ends up being closer to reheated leftovers than freshly made food. this tends to create a ceiling for how much money most people are actually willing to pay for takeout/delivery.

source: worked in a takeout place and asked the owners of several of my favorite pizza places why they don't offer delivery.

Here in the UK, delivery was standard well before apps—almost every local take-away offered delivery if you phoned up and ordered.

Maybe just because the UK is smaller and so they need to cover less distance? I often see people talking about grocery delivery the same way, when all the major supermarkets have been doing it as standard here in the UK for years.

it could be that the UK is mostly dense enough. there are a few very dense parts of the US where you've been able to get pretty much anything delivered (eg, NYC) for a long time.

I don't know much about grocery delivery, but I can think of two reasons offhand why it would be more viable. the first is that the delivery window for groceries is much more forgiving. if you have a cooler, you can keep refrigerated/frozen items at the correct temperature indefinitely. this allows you to load a lot more stuff in the vehicle and plan a more efficient route. the second is just a guess, but I'd bet the typical grocery order is larger than a typical food delivery order, so you make more money per stop.

Certainly delivery was commonplace in the UK by the late 90s. It was unusual in the late 80s. Douglas Adam's first Dirk Gently novel (1987) has an American character who complains frequently about the lack of delivery pizza in London.

Yes, many delivery apps may close down. But I think 80% number will prove to be correct. What many miss is that huge number of meals served at restaurant are not leisurely dinners. A large number of eaters just want a meal with minimum fuss because they don't have 1) time 2) kitchen 3) skill or desire to cook.

It will be different from normal restaurant delivery in some ways. As 'cloud' kitchens can analyze large data sets on what gets ordered in a neighborhood on a particular night and prepare it in bulk further driving down cost leading to more deliveries.

I'm not convinced by this trend either. Everyone who's gotten delivery has had food that doesn't travel and feels like they paid more for a worse quality product.

I hope that eat at restaurants will have a renaissance. It's nice to eat out, be in a different space than your home, etc...

Maybe in the USA. I doubt that will be true in Japan and other places that value the social aspect of eating out often.

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