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Comment by turtlebits | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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