Thus the “monopoly” you allegedly get later is deeply unsustainable at the profit level and scale required to recoup losses on any timescale that would work for investors, assuming you can even hold onto it in the face of constant reemergence of competitors.
This is what Naked Capitalism has been point out about Uber for years and years. Uber just keeps changing the story. First rideshare itself would be profitable. Then logistics and trucking would be a sexy new profitable area. Then self-driving cars, then food delivery.
It’s frankly just a Ponzi scheme at this point that was foisted onto unwitting retirement plan investors.
GrubHub / DoorDash / etc., are just more of the same.
You can’t take businesses like taxis or food delivery, with well understood economics, round trip costs, density requirements, low margins, etc., and just slap an app on top and make them somehow different than they really are.
Artificially increasing the supply of something that’s fundamentally not sustainable at that price just will not work.
It's difficult for any company to abuse their position as they're easily repalcable. So the margins will get lower, and more of the money paid by the customer will go directly to the supplier. Efficiency incarnate.
This is the part that makes me the most mad. The delivery companies have almost no value as business entities, all of their value is in the technology, and the technology is not complicated at all.
The job that's being done by doordash and grubhub and all of them would be accomplished much more affordably, sustainably, and ethically with a marketing co-op, which is already pretty common in the food industry in America (Blue Diamond, Land o Lakes, Ocean Spray, Sunkist, Sun-maid, Tillamook, Welch's, etc). There's no need for a separate VC-backed for-profit here, a simple confederation of restauranteurs would work fine and be just as effective and way better for the whole marketplace.
DoorDash has managed to change my behavior to the point that it is where I do when I am hungry, so I can see that being viable for a portion of the population.
I suppose the fact that I left UberEats for DoorDash as soon as there were coupons suits your point though.
I'm not sure if it'll last forever, but I'd be willing to bet I will be dead before that cycle ends.
I am not sure that making something a commodity is necessarily bad. You can go to the grocery store and get store brand macaroni & cheese, kraft dinner, or some organic brand. Kraft and Amy's stay in business, so people must be buying those despite the higher cost. But the lower quality / lower cost version is available for people that want money more than better cheese powder. I don't think that's a bad thing, and is the direction that food delivery is going. (Starbucks didn't kill independent coffee shops, McDonalds didn't kill fine dining. DoorDash seems like that kind of thing to me.)
I think DoorDash will ultimately be profitable for its investors. I don't think it's good for society (gig economy, growth by getting people to eat more calories, etc.), but that doesn't mean they can't make a lot of money.