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Comment by dvduval | Hacker News Reader

The restaurants need to work through their own trade organization where they band together and push out the delivery businesses that are costing them money, and then allow delivery companies to bid for their business.

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I suspect the larger restaurants have negotiated deals already, so they would not be amenable to this.

In the end the customer needs some single easy interface where to order food from. It is kind of difficult to see how this could work in a way where restaurants would dictate how customers prefer to order.

Why doesn't Google build this as an extension of Google Maps?

Charge restaurants no fee for the platform, if they provide their own drivers. Charge restaurants money through Google Ads to promote their restaurants for higher results.

In a few years, get Waymo's driverless cars on the game.

Google is already facing antitrust lawsuits from the EU, DOJ and US states, and you want them to add more fuel to the fire?

Why? All I want is for each restaurant to have their own website (which most already do), and to have a menu, a way to place an order, and a way to enter a credit card online, or for the person who comes to my door to be able to take a credit card. I don't care about an app or centralization, or having it be the same for every business. I just want to give them my money for their food in my house. So long as it works, doesn't get in my way, and doesn't cost me 30% extra, I don't have too many preferences on how it's done.

Same as it works today, but replace the VC funded app with a different app that a critical mass of restaurant owners get behind. That app could be owned, funded, managed by a group of restaurants in order to better serve their needs. Perhaps there could be some kind of federated standard.

Yelp actually provides a platform that integrates ordering from multiple providers into listings.

The restaurants (that aren’t mega chains like McDonalds) are usually utterly incompetent in spheres of logistics and IT. I don’t see how this can end up well.

That's what federations and marketing co-ops are for. They're really common in the agriculture sector. Nut, dairy, berry, and fruit farmers buy into groups like Land O Lakes, Blue Diamond, Sun-Maid, Tillamook, and Welch's, and then those entities handle the logistics and distribution and pass back the profits.

Platforms like grubhub and doordash could and should still exist, but they shouldn't be separate VC-backed for-profits, they should be restaurant-owned.

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