Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is completely backwards. Restaurants don't have to partner with delivery apps. If they're not organized to make a profit given those margins, they should stop participating. If they can't turn a profit, they should naturally go out of business.

Likewise, no one is forcing people to use delivery apps. The apps provide a benefit of convenience without a huge cost overhead. If people don't want to use the apps, they shouldn't use the apps. If they can get higher value by going to restaurants directly, rational customers will do that.

Delivery apps are simply helping to sweep the market clean of inefficient mom'n'pop food shacks and helping us get to healthier business reality where restaurants are better aligned with diners. Have you seen Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares? Most restaurants are run by insane people who have no idea what they're doing!

If diners really expect undeliverable value and restaurants must be held together with duct tape and baling wire, it is an unhealthy market and will naturally destroy itself.

The point is that even good restaurants operate on margins that can't afford places like doordash to take 10-20%. Diners expect what's offered to them in the market, and if doordash is offering me your restaurant quality food delivered to my door for $2 then that's the value. It doesn't matter to the customer that it's the result of several billion dollars of venture capital with the expectation that to make that investment worth while the entire western world would need to become indentured servants.

Sure, so diners should look at Doordash, see that all that's available at a sustainable price is Taco Bell, and decide whether they want Taco Bell or not. Restaurants that can't afford to be on the platform shouldn't be on the platform.

Also, it doesn't cost a billion dollars to open a restaurant. Restaurants are wasteful, but not that wasteful. And diners don't care how much your restaurant cost you to open, or that you had to get venture capital to do it.

The larger services engage in predatory practices.

From the article:

"With deep pockets, the dominant app companies have devised ways to put pressure on restaurant owners to sign contracts with them, including downloading menus without restaurants’ consent and then offering their own delivery. Grubhub registered internet domain names of tens of thousands of independent restaurants. Legislators should curtail such anticompetitive practices."

> without a huge cost overhead

DoorDash and Uber Eats are extremely expensive.

So is running your own delivery service. And if a restaurant wanted their delivery service to be as good as Uber Eats or DoorDash it would be more expensive than Uber Eats or DoorDash.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com