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Comment by djaque | Hacker News Reader

I'm not surprised. In my region, delivery companies add on something like $10 (~$5 for the actual delivery, $2 for the company's cut, and another >$2 for the recommended tip). Compare that with "delivery native" companies. I pay like half that for pizza delivery for instance.

I can't afford to get $20-$30 delivery food every week, so I've moved to doing takeout instead.

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A recent $30 Thai dinner for myself and my wife came to $58 after delivery fee, service charge, and tip. Ridiculous for the convenience of saving 20 minutes (round trip) of drive time.

Of course we didn't pay it did takeout instead. I feel bad because there's a tier of service workers that I'm not supporting anymore, but marking up ~100% prices us out.

Shoot, a McDonalds burger meal and some nuggets ran me damn near $33 CAD for Uber Eats.

I don't have a car, otherwise I'd just hit the drive through myself.

The only reason pizza delivery "works", is because it's a very high margin food.

In no real world can <$5 on-demand delivery work out unless you have a very high volume of order and can pool the delivery.

This exactly. Having been a former franchisee of one of the big three pizza companies, I can attest that this is true. On a typical evening there could be as many as 30 to 40 deliveries in the store per hour. With that kind of volume, it is easy to route drivers where I can send 2 or 3 orders together to the same geographic area. It's just logistically easier when there is a high volume of orders and the geographic area of the store's delivery zone is small.

Did you have route optimization software to help?

Yes we did, but most often you could just look at the delivery map and see what deliveries would go together. Optimization won't tell you which orders were not complete (waiting on an item that needed to be remade or was made wrong, etc.) and many times just eyeing the map and knowing the delivery area was all that was needed. Drivers also knew which shortcuts would be beneficial to use that the optimization would not know. The software at the time also would not be able to factor current traffic in the equation. It's been a while, maybe they do now, I don't know, I've left for greener pastures.

Just curious. I wrote software for the old ruggedized Windows Mobile devices for field service workers over a decade ago. The holy grail was route/cost optimizations. Near the end of my time there we integrated with a third party route optimization service.

This was the main issue with the software we used. When it was slow, it would recommend that one driver take three orders to the same area while leaving others in the store with nothing, but when it was busy, it would suggest a driver only take one order even if there was three others in the immediate area and no drivers in the store. It didn't take into account the labor and mileage costs of its decisions. This was also a decade ago, I'm sure the software has been optimized for better results now.

I came across these guys sometime back on HN and have them bookmarked to try one day. Poking around the website, it looks pretty cool

https://graphhopper.com/api/1/examples/#optimization

In Europe I get 1.90 delivery for a 10eur pizza. No hidden service fees/taxes/expected tip or anything. 11.90eur is the final what I pay. When I visited US however this shit with hidden fees was terrible. Where I live I never cook nowadays. I don't even shop. I only order in. Couldn't imagine this to be a possibility without food delivery apps.

Some delivery companies add an additional fee for smaller orders. A sandwich could end up costing $25-$30.

Yeah, and it might just be that there was a surge of hiring recently, but I've had a lot of bad luck. Two delivery drivers showed up at the wrong street and I had to guide them to my place. One managed to deliver it inside the next door apartment and not call me, so I had to wait an hour for my neighbor to get back from errands to give me my order. Another time delivery took like two hours.

I think restaurants/delivery companies are having a hard time adapting to all of the new (different type of) demand while at the same time having a huge cut in profits.

So we've come full circle to at home 'room service'? :)

Where I am pizza costs about the same as what an uber-eats purchase would once you factor everything in (eg the tip).

I think the reason it has worked for pizza, is that pizza always had that extra cost baked into the product itself.

Good on you for doing takeout instead. It's safe with a mask, gloves, and care. It nets you a nice break from the house, and it directly supports the restaurant staff.

Also, IME, the order accuracy is vastly superior. In fact, a few people ordered lunch to our workplace yesterday, and they didn't have one of the non-meat items I ordered (intentionally), so they replaced it with a meat item, without even trying to contact us first. Just insane to think someone thought that was an acceptable substitute, let alone without even confirming.

I enjoy driving to get food because it's literally the only thing that actually makes me get out of the house now.

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