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Comment by ericzawo | Hacker News Reader

Restaurants are a lot of things. But lazy is not one of them. Have you ever worked at a restaurant?

I’ve been an AGM and worked the industry six years plus four years adjacent in catering before finishing college and moving into SWE.

Yes an awful lot of them are lazy. I mention him only to mention the scary accuracy of it, but the late Anthony Bourdain has a chapter dedicated to crappy restauranteurs in nearly every book he’s written on the topic of food service as a career (of course his distaste for crappy restaurant owners is poignantly dotted through the entirety of “Kitchen Confidential” to be fair), and I often wonder to this day to hear his voice on the state of affairs in food service during a pandemic, and the micro economy that’s sprung up in food delivery.

You are right, lazy is the wrong word, irrational perhaps?

I have worked in commercial kitchens and have plenty of friends who run restaurants and have spend time in their operations. They regularly complain about the 30%+ they fork over to grubless. 30% is an insane fraction in a business that barely makes an accounting profit!

In established restaurants, a significant fraction of the orders come from repeat customers. Moving these repeat customers to a 5% friction channel from a 30% channel can be a game changer.

Now when I walk past restaurants, I see banners imploring folks to order from their website. I guess, one silver lining from this pandemic.

The challenge is how they would do that. It requires expertise which itself costs money and time to gain, and it's an ongoing maintenance cost for a small restaurant that may have extremely seasonal revenue.

It's not actually clear to me that every restaurant acting individually can actually recover that delivery service fee. There's no economy of scale for them to exploit.

Restaurants might not be lazy in their core business functions, but that doesn't make them non lazy on other matters.

You need to find a different word that isn't "lazy".

Perhaps a better way to say this is: restaurants are good at being restaurants, but aren't always good at establishing an online presence. A big part of why these delivery services succeed is that they provide a function that restaurants aren't well suited to provide on their own.

This isn't about being lazy, it's about an industry needing to adapt to the new expectations of the app economy, and often not having the expertise to do so.

> Perhaps a better way to say this is: restaurants are good at being restaurants, but aren't always good at establishing an online presence.

That's the majority of all businesses. And like many similar industries, the razor thin margins don't allow restaurants to properly invest in tech.

A restaurants entire purpose is to provide food for people that’s more convenient than the alternative. If they can’t do that, there is no reason for them to exist. If they can’t survive, someone who can come up with a business model that meets the needs of consumers will take their place.

Times change and circumstances change. Businesses either evolve or get replaced.

The problem now is that delivery services are being subsidized by VC money or however Uber is getting new money after their IPO.

I think you may be conflating the cooks, waitresses etc. who are certainly not lazy, with the management who tend to be lazy and set in their old ways, not willing to innovate unless absolutely forced to. I suspect the OP had the latter category in mind.

OK, complacent then. It doesn't change the argument.

It's very common for businesses of all sorts to view anything not their core competency as a cost to be minimized or a distraction, instead of an investment with return.

a website and online menu is something that they felt they could get away with the bare minimum, no regard for surfer experience. it, along with maybe throwing some money in an seo pit, with a checkbox in a playbook.

what OP describes makes sense to me. but you are right, it is perhaps not laziness. it's a case of not knowing how to do it.

i mean why isn't dominos, pizzahut, etc. teaching them how to do delivery?

with everything going on, with these apps not helping restaurants, i decided to stop using these apps and go get my food myself. i only use apps when i get lazy like OP says.

To your point, Dominos is. Their pizza order tracker is open source [1]. The code is now two years old but I thought it was really cool of them to even do this in the first place.

[1] https://github.com/nikolas/dominos-pizza-tracker

(I’m still hunting the original article where this was announced, the first version they released I’m pretty sure was linked here on HN in the mid 10’s?)

oh wow, thanks for sharing!

I think they in the parent comment means customers.

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