Comment by jelliclesfarm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jelliclesfarm | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for sharing the Uber Burrito experience.

Have you heard of Mumbai’s dabbawallas? What are your thoughts about that system? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala

https://phys.org/news/2006-06-bombay-dabbawalas-high-tech.ht...

[..] Indeed the Dabbawala's method of lunch delivery is unique. Their origin dates back to the 1890s, a period when Bombay saw an influx of people from various communities and regions of India migrating to the city to seek livelihood. According to the Association, there were no canteens or fast-food centers then, and those who could not take a packed lunch from home since they had to leave early invariably had to go hungry.

Besides, different communities had different tastes and preferences that could only be satisfied by a home-cooked meal. Recognizing the need, a migrant from the Indian state of Maharashtra called Mahadeo started the lunch delivery service with about 100 men, and the rest is history.

For over 115 years these lunch deliverymen who were subsequently started to be called Dabbawalas have been collecting lunch packed in three or two-tier metal boxes (called dabbas) from subscribers' homes and delivering them to their workplaces.

Today the 5,000 Dabbawalas make about 200,000 lunch deliveries in the city and have become famous for their clockwork precision and efficiency. Reportedly their mistake rate is just 1 in 16 million deliveries, which caused the Forbes Global magazine to award its Six Sigma certification in 2001. According to Forbes the Dabbawalas work with 99.999999 percent accuracy.[..]

Thanks for sharing, had no idea about the dabbawalas but that's fascinating. Definitely I think the demand and supply patterns of such a system have found their equilibrium over the past 115 years. Which is probably what makes it work and makes it resilient to all the societal changes we've experienced since then.

Much harder to replicate something like that on a shorter time frame of 6 months!

supply chain is supply chain is supply chain.

you need collection from multiple nodes, aggregation, sorting and then distribution to multiple nodes.

uber model is likely flawed because there isnt enough volume to scale. without aggregation, you cant capture economies of scale. there isnt standardisation at source or end points to justify aggregation. the game is over before it starts to make $$.

my 2c.

on a related note and going back to the actual topic of discussion: this is why mobile delivery of vaccines door to door will work better than the public driving down to isolated hospital centers to be vaccinated.

at this scale...and for CA alone, it's 40 million residents...its never going to be possible to vaccinate us all. and also why africa and china and india(1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 billion people respectively) will be able to do a better job than the usa when it comes to covid. again.

You're partially right, and creating additional supply (especially with restaurants) was one of the main challenges. We tried bringing chain restaurants like McDonalds to table to start to address this. The latest version was a concept of ghost kitchens (restaurants with excess production capacity that was under utilized for in-person dining, with more flexibility on cuisine choices). Super interesting topic as well.

There is another supply issue with door-to-door vaccine delivery which is the courier distribution. Amazon Flex works because its fairly low barrier to spin up vans and delivery drivers. With vaccines you get into compliance/regulatory challenges as well as refrigeration etc. Some of these regulations would likely need to be intentionally loosened to enable a greater volume of delivery drivers and vans to hit the road.

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