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You may overestimate the tech skills of "mom and pop" restaurants. They're one of the shrinking segments where people without much education and language skills can make a decent living with some hard work.

If they knew how to maintain the web site you want, they'd probably be in a better paying, more academic career.

Disclaimer: This is just my impressions from the outside. I know nothing. But I doubt mom or pop will show up on HN to tell their story.

No, you're right. Many people on HN would scoff at UberEats taking a 30% cut or whatever from orders, but how much would it cost for every mom and pop to try and implement something like that themselves? And have someone to maintain it? Whatever people want to say about it, these are orders (or at least a signficant number of them) that the restaurants would've never received, if not for the app existing. 70% is better than 0%.

And that 30% isn't in stone. Last place I worked at, they were able to negotiate for 15% because of how desperate Uber was.

Hey if this is exposed there can certainly be non profits who setup delivery systems like this with a goal of providing a service, getting paid, but not trying to keep growing and growing.

It would allow users to understand this isn't free and actually pay for a subscription that essentially does this.

This regulation creates an opportunity for new business models.

Very good point. I hadn't considered this, transparency allowing for potential competitors to differentiate.

Remember before uber, yellow cabs had their own app. The experience was shitty. Nonprofits are not known for great software products and operational skills.

Yellow Cab Company is the furthest thing in the world from a nonprofit. They recently went bankrupt, but a century of monopoly tactics and mafia ties preceded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Cab_Company

As much as consumers would love the idea of non-profits sweeping in and doing the same service as businesses sans the profit margin, this is simply not what we observe in real world very often. Running an organization is hard, and people doing that usually want to be compensated for their efforts.

> people doing that usually want to be compensated for their efforts.

Non profit does not mean free. People can be paid salary, but the business does not need a 30% Profit margin.

If anything non profits have a somewhat of a reputation for being a way to pay the top people big salaries without the pressure of having investors pushing for more profits & getting the image of being "good" mostly for free since it's a non profit.

Most of the food deliveries services are running using VC funds. I don't think there's much scope of profit here for a ~$5-$7/delivery charge having someone someone pickup and deliver a package along with other costs like building/maintaining the system, credit card charges etc,

Frankly, I feel something like peach which bundles multiple orders from a few restaurants is the way to go if you want to make money as a food delivery service.

It will probably be hard for a non-profit to do all of that (especially ethically like paying fair wages) considering Uber, Grubhub and Doordash are all losing money while charging 30%+ for the current services.

Non profits don't need to make money for investors.

Just enough to pay their workers and themselves.

70% is better than 0%.

This really depends on their margins.

Exactly you can’t make up the losses with volume as the bank in the SNL skit.

If the restaurants were losing money on every order then they wouldn't be on Uber Eats in the first place.

70% isn't always better than 0%. But if a small restaurant did this, they would tack on delivery charges. The customer should be paying for the service, not the restaurant. I realize that a delivery charge is also added on. But it feels like the restaurant does most of the work, and the delivery company makes all the money

What about the people who use the app instead of ordering directly? They lose 30% on that sale for no reason.

The food still has to get to your house somehow.

Tock To Go only charges 3% for this service.

You don't need to "maintain a website". You can do all of this trivially from within Facebook if you don't want to "maintain a website". In the country I live in, only the hugest businesses have a website. 99% of businesses run off of Facebook (you generally order by just sending them a FB message saying "send me 12 of X" and then you pay Cash On Delivery).

Here's how you add a Menu to your restaurant's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/help/533179700126832

"Cash on delivery" would not allow the OPs requirement of contactless delivery.

You could theoretically place said cash in an envelope in the trunk for the exchange

This is sounding a lot more difficult than ordering from an app.

If you have exact change.

Or if the USA had contactless cards it would not be problem

$60 in cash typically last me atleast a month. Making special trips to the bank to get out cash is the last thing I want to do during all of this.

So go to the bank the same number of times and adjust the amount of cash you'll need to withdraw over that period of time.

Facebook is worse than delivery companies. No way I'm doing that.

I don't usually have cash on me other than a tiny amount for emergencies, and looking at my Facebook page I see a smaller and smaller portion of my connections are online regularly.

To me a business that is only on Facebook doesn't exist as far as I am concerned.

You did not pre lock down get some extra emergency cash out just in case.

No, I didn't. I had no reason to, and have used exactly 0 in cash during lockdown.

So lose all customers that do not use Facebook?

Facebook can be viewed through any browser and public pages like those of restaurants can be accessed without an account...

All they need to do is watch one of the endless youtube ads for squarespace or wix...

No one needs web developers anymore, you just need to sign up for a wix account it will do everything /s

Shopify rather than those two since they also need to sell a product. Or a new platform (opportunity) that also takes care of food delivery or connects couriers to restaurants.

Wait! You really think that restaurants are even remotely capable of handling customer support volume, that delivery companies work with?

Of course they can, their whole business is designed around service.

LOL! No they don't, they laid off all of their waiters already!

Fuck! I routinely cannot get through to restaurants that I ordered from, without a lockdown in place.

It's 100x worse now.

Sounds like a good venture for Uber

I expect a restaurant to have a working bathroom, the owner doesn't need to know anything about indoor plumbing, that's why even a mom and pop shop hires a contractor to take care of that. Don't see why web is any different.

Out here in the hinterlands of "fly-over country", I just want a phone number, address, menu, and hours of operation. I don't care what form they take be it website, Facebook, a Yelp page, whatever. Something that a search engine can index. Just those 4 things can be something of a large ask from the mom and pop places around here.

What you're asking for sounds like science fiction.

Then you won't be buying food from dark kitchens which is what these food delivery apps encourage.

True, but dark kitchens/ghost restaurants aren't really a thing around here.

Most of the "flyover" country isn't even on these apps.

I'm surprised by the number that are around here. The town of 7,000 people I live in (Marshall, MI) doesn't have a lot in the way of delivery app participation. However, 15 minutes away is a town of 52,000 people (Battle Creek, MI), and I would say at least half of the local mom and pop places there are in bed with at least one delivery app.

> Just those 4 things can be something of a large ask from the mom and pop places around here.

i bet that there's a way to turn this sort of need into a utility that can be provided with a very simple method. It used to be very difficult to operate a telephone when it was new. Now it's ubiquitous. Calling somebody meant looking up their number in a phonebook. And it is because of standardization.

So i propose that all businesses standardize in describing what they sell - make this a requirement by law, and there will be companies that can provide cheap services to do this task for them. Using this standardization process, online ordering and other (like inventory tracking) can also be "standardized" in such a way that makes it outsource-able.

And then they charge 30% or the cost of operating such a machine is 30% of average sales volume... and we're back to the beginning.

Science fiction? What's wrong with the Facebook and Yelp you just mentioned? You don't need a perfect website, right?

Even in Seattle, I find Facebook and Yelp's hours to be inconsistent and wrong.

My neighborhood bar hasn't updated their Facebook page in years.

Nothing at all wrong with Facebook or Yelp. The issue is a lot of them are auto-generated pages by those websites. So they're usually nothing more than placeholders created with the hope that the restaurant will claim them, and then populate them with info.

The science fiction is bit_logic's requests from up at the top of the thread:

* A way to order and pay online.

* Details on their contactless pickup procedure if I drive there. I want them to bring it to my car, then I can unlock my trunk, and they can place it inside and close it.

There is another big advantage that aggregators have; I only have to enter my address and payment info once, and can order from a ton of restaurants. It can save all my orders from lots of places so I can reorder. It can find all the places that deliver to my address.

I know, why don’t the waiters just edit the website, the cooks integrate a payment api, the cleaners implement a back of house system, etc....

Crazy.

There's is an alternative, it's called the telephone!

Are you that terrified of making a phone call?

If it's a small restaurant, just ring up and ask them how you'd like to pick up the food!

> I want them to bring it to my car, then I can unlock my trunk, and they can place it inside and close it.

That's a little excessive given there are lots of customers and only a handful of restaurant workers.

What I have seen restaurants do is that they put your food on the tables (which are idle anyway) with a number. If you tell them who you are when you walk in, they tell you the number and you can pick it up without interacting with people.

I've seen this as well, at the ~60% of restaurants who will still serve me without my having a car. Walk in, give name from safe distance, get food from spot.

What sucks about the other 40% is half of them are "our door is locked, pay a delivery service" and the other half are "use our drive-thru and if you come in anything other than a vehicle with a license plate we will yell at you." I don't want to do the former because delivery people seem incapable of working out where I live and I can't do the latter.

I've been buying groceries in this manner. (I submit a MS Word document with my order, they call me to arrange payment and double check that whatever substitutions they need to make are okay, and I show up in the afternoon and pop my trunk.)

Probably not practical in big cities, where parking can be haphazard, but many restaurants have parking lots right in front.

Is there some reason you can't (or don't want to) call them?

Many people these days just flat out don't like having to make or receive a phone call.

The idea here is to avoid contact with human beings altogether.

Language barrier and awful call quality also come into play. It's sometimes next to impossible to understand them and that's even assuming a strong language grasp. Much of the best food comes from the old dude/woman who's been cooking all their life, but not necessarily the easiest to communicate with.

I can re-order my previous orders from Grubhub or DoorDash with one hand on my phone while I chase after the kids or am busy doing something else. Don't have to enter payment info, find my wallet, look at a menu, or worry about the noise level.

Have you talked over the phone to an average Chinese restaurant lady or Taco place? If I had to ask for the menu from my local, one of the best that I had, taco truck - I'd hang myself by the time I got to actually deciding what my order would be.

Waiting on hold, handling payment details over the phone, miscommunicating an order, language barriers (not everyone who runs a restaurant speaks the local language fluently, and not everyone living in a place speaks the local language fluently), not having to explain my address.

Then there's the benefits of online - menu is accessible, often they're using stripe/Shopify so my payment info isn't everywhere, it's one click, I get email confirmations and receipts, I can leave free form notes easily, and last but not least, I don't have to talk to a person who may or may not want to talk to me.

How's the whole "I can unlock my trunk, and they can place it inside and close it" going to help?

If you're worried about exposure, someone still prepared your food, touched it in the kitchen, brought it out to your car...

I'd much rather get my food from someone that has not been interacting with the previous 100 customers.

And now every customer after me won't be exposed to me, either.

They’ll have touched the trunks of the 100 previous people, and breathed concentrated common air from the 80 of them with an SUV, minivan or truck. Is this really better than having the customer walk into a big open room (with a mask in some jurisdictions), and pick up a bag?

I’m perfectly happy phoning in an order, walking in and sticking my credit card in a slot. I’m orders of magnitude more likely to catch it at the grocery store, or during a trip to our partially-closed and therefore over-crowded parks.

However, no one in our house is in a high risk group. We’d rather get one of the two strains that are common now (preferably the first one!) than roll the dice with whatever’s common during the second surge later this year.