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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

- Restaurants have to pay a big chunk of their margin to delivery apps.

- Consumers see increased food prices and other misc charges, greatly inflating their bill (sometimes up to 2x), and get a sub-par experience (long delivery times, cold food, incorrect orders).

- Drivers get no benefits, have to pay for fuel/depreciation/taxes, and sometimes end up making less than minimum wage.

- Uber Eats, Grubhub, Doordash etc. all lose billions of dollars every quarter (and are still valued in the tens to hundreds of billions).

I genuinely do not understand this industry.

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My chief motivation for using these apps is that I don't want to deal with a phone call. I'm happy to pay a premium for that. I switched to primarily ordering online around 2000 and go out of my way to avoid ordering from places that are not accessible somehow. I hope that in the fallout of the obvious bad situation we're in now is not to roll back to days gone by on this front.

But.... why? I don't know where you're ordering from but calling the place is generally way faster than trying to futz about with an app to order a burrito or whatever

A typical exchange for me is:

"Hi, Jose's tacos"

"Hi, I'd like to place a to-go order."

"Sure, go ahead"

"Get me an OMG burrito and a large diet coke please"

"No problem. What's the name on the order?"

"tomc1985"

"Ok tomc1985, that'll be $8.43 and be ready in about 15 minutes"

"Thanks!"

A few reasons:

1) I hate talking on the phone 2) Your experience is very different than my experience. I find it much easier to click through what I want than to do it via voice 3) My original motivation was around accuracy. There were many times where I'd get off the phone and was pretty sure there had been some miscommunication. Now they get a readout of exactly what I requested.

4) I have had my credit card number stolen by restaurant employees in the past, and will now never give it out over the phone

I’ve had just a couple restaurants text a payment link for a phone order. I wish this would become more popular.

I hate talking on the phone too, but ordering food is usually the simplest of all phone interactions, unless they put you on hold and forget about the call.

And for order accuracy its a wash. There's no guarantee the restaurant will fill the order accurately even if its printed out in triplicate. Now that I think about it, the app experience is generally worse, accuracy-wise

My angle here is that I don't want to see these delivery companies rent-seeking on mom-and-pops profits when they really need them. Restauranting is a harsh industry and these delivery apps are really putting the squeeze on, and the app experience isn't even really that good unless you're picking from the featured list.

"ordering food is usually the simplest of all phone interactions"

It's reaaaaallllyyyy not though... Or at least not for everybody :-)

Never mind the jargon of main order you prepped for, I still freeze when I encounter dozen unexpected follow up questions on sizes sauces cooking cutlery garnishments combos packages savings whatnot. :O

I am with you on morality and approach and downsides of these apps, and how sustainable or fait the model is. But that's an entirely separate chain of reasoning from whether phone or app ordering is preferred :-/

For me, I highly value switching to an asynchronous order system and the apps give me that. In the pre-app days, I'd sit on hold for significant amounts of time trying to get an order in on a Friday or Saturday night. (For one of my favorite local places -- in Chicago -- this is still the case as I have to fight through a busy signal every single time.) If a restaurant offers a self-managed online order system, I'm all for doing that instead.

I think its always a good exercise in empathy to try to imagine some reasons :)

- English as a second language. You need fairly basic proficiency to order online vs far higher proficiency to order via phone - specific jargon, high pressure, no non-audio clues

- even as first language many people dislike phone. Again, lack of visual feedback and other aspects

- harder to be certain you ordered correctly. You can review online order, you can easily mishear even a repeated order. Same for address, which can be complex in some cases. Then you get into discussion with either driver or restaurant on whether you did or did not specify east vs west, crescent vs road, sixteen vs sixty.

- timing. You can take all the time in the world to order online vs a very specific real time slice requirement of phone call. You can order online while on 2hr phone conference or watching tv etc etc.

Heck I've just persuaded myself not to use phone ordering :-)))

re: English ( or whatever main language of the country is), in a lot of cases traditional restaurants ( various Asian, Italian, Spanish, Mexican, etc.) are owned and run by non-native speakers. As some anecdata, i tried ordering by phone from my local Korean restaurant, and i could barely understand the person on the other side due to their heavy accent, especially on Korean words ( which the menu items are in) and the fact i'm non-native myself.

Giving my address is a huge PITA. you dropped it from your process too.

Couldn't agree more; but some people are genuinely, staunchly opposed to making a phone call. We all have our crosses to bear, and I'm glad that particular one is not mine. I find a 30 second phone call way more appealing than futzing with an app.

Worth noting that if I'm calling the restaurant, I'm doing a pickup order. Delivery, whether its through an app or not, is a pretty awful (and expensive) experience; and I avoid it whenever I can.

Um, no. A not small number of my orders go like this:

"I'd like to order a pizza."

"Okay, man, like, I just need to find the pad."

"Okay."

"... ... ... Oh, there."

"I'd like to order a large <some hipster name for pepperoni pizza> for delivery."

"Okay, so that's like, a pizza, right?"

And it went on and on and on ...

"Oh, shit, who let <soandso> pick up the phone." <stomp> <stomp> <stomp>

"I'm sorry. I can take your order now."

Had we been quicker on the uptake it would have been a viral recording.

I sincerely hope that the dude was blazed out of his mind and that wasn't his normal state.

Imagine having to do this every day, sometimes multiple times in a day. It gets annoying really fast, especially just having to repeat the same thing all the time.

Also you have to "please hold" for variable amounts of time.

Just another instance of VCs pumping money into a bad but appealing idea and propping it up indefinitely at the expense of society at large. This kind of investment really needs to be more closely regulated - the businesses never even have to be successful for the investors to profit as long as they go public in time to leave retail investors holding the bag before the crash.

And here's the latest one, Deliveroo set to float with an expected $10bn valuation: Deliveroo: taste test [1], (non-paywalled version) [2]

From the article: That Deliveroo could not turn a profit in a year when sales were up more than half is concerning. It is operating in a ferociously competitive market. Deliveroo is proud of its gross profit margin — as a percentage of gross transaction value it is up from 5.8 per cent in 2018 to 8.8 per cent in 2020 — but it is slim by the standards of other industries.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/17dc510c-b396-4dc5-84a8-243a5bfa7...

[2] https://archive.is/i1Mor

> I genuinely do not understand this industry.

A great many restaurants do not know how to run their own effective delivery operation or do not want to. Third party apps handle all of this.

> I genuinely do not understand this industry.

Consumers are willing to pay for the convenience and deal with cold food.

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