Hacker News Reader

The growth at all costs model also tends to treat things like hygiene standards as annoying red tape.

I remember seeing a journalist a few years ago demonstrating, tongue in cheek, how there is zero vetting of restaurents. He set up an account as a restaurent, put up a barbecue in front of his house on the same day and got an acquaintance to order from him. Driver showed up shortly afterwards to pick up the food (which had been dropped on the floor to make a point for the camera), no questions asked.

They're happy to run marketing campaigns about "Food Freedom" [1], but it seems like it's old "we're just a platform" selectively applied when it suits them.

[1] https://invidiou.site/watch?v=o2HaQEH6MPo

I think you meant this BBC article with the fake burger restaurant: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-48762211

Unrelated to Deliveroo, but "How to Become TripAdvisor’s #1 Fake Restaurant" (2018) was very telling as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8

From the video description:

> The Shed at Dulwich was the number one rated restaurant in London, with foodies, celebrities and bloggers trying to get a table. The main obstacle for them, however, was that it didn't exist. Over the course of 8 months VICE's Oobah Butler used an assault of fake reviews to get his 'restaurant' to the hallowed top spot on TripAdvisor.

That's the one. Well found :)

They will also ban you if you call them out on their bad service and request refunds for wrong/damaged food (and persist even if their CS tries to fob you off, which in an of itself is wrong in my opinion).

I'm assuming they have a per-user metric of overall profit and mine ended up being in the negative so it makes sense from a business point of view. However, I would be worried about their business if they can't properly deliver enough orders to make a profit when someone is holding them accountable.

The business model appears to be based on fobbing the customer off and letting them hold the bag should things go wrong, which is sadly a common thing in large-scale VC-funded startups.

> Trying to run ghost kitchens

Is a ghost kitchen that different from the kitchen in a regular restaurant? Either one doesn't strike me as the best working environment, not necessarily anyway.

A ghost kitchen is a kitchen associated with a restaurant that doesn’t serve walk-in customers or have the capacity to allow customers to sit-in.

Often times these kitchens are anonymous looking from the outside, often located outside of the town centre

In the UK they should be beholden to the same hygiene standards as any other food preparation business

Some of these kitchens have their own branding and are not associated with a restaurant, but if you know your local area and see some restaurants which you don’t recognise on deliveroo or the other food delivery services, it’s possible that they are a ghost kitchen.

The Guardian ran a few alarmist articles on them going back a while which might have sparked some of the outrage, including this opinion piece [1]. It turns out these "dark satanic mills" are often: hot, without windows and cold in winter.

I don't advocate for bad working conditions, but it must be hard for anyone who has ever worked in a kitchen to keep a straight face when reading that. Even many Michelin starred kitchens are horrible environments.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/09/dark-k...

Edit: This isn't meant to be whataboutism, just pointing out that a "ghost kitchen" is only really different from a normal kitchen in its business structure. By and large, catering is not, and has never been, a glamorous industry. If you want to stop kitchens being difficult places to work, that's a worthwhile cause, but much, much bigger than Deliveroo.

It would be better to report those too rather than dismiss something because something else is worse.

So what if the rest of the industry is terrible, how does that make ghost kitchens acceptable?

It doesn't make ghost kitchens acceptable. However it does mean that it's misleading to criticise ghost kitchens specifically, while implying they're worse than other kinds of restaurants.

It's not the fact that it's a ghost kitchen that's bad right? It's the poor treatment of workers.

Focusing on a poor correlation is not solving the core problem.

The ghost kitchens are really consistent, the quality of food is much better than the majority of restaurants on Deliveroo.

I think one issue is, they separate branding from production. Ordinarily, you expect each restaurant to be independent, have their own style and recipes and quality standards. It's something you can learn, and then choose the restaurants that suit your standards and taste the most. In a world of on-line orders and delivery, a ghost kitchen operator - or a "clever" entrepreneur subcontracting one or more of such kitchens - can set up an arbitrary amount of "restaurants", each with completely different marketing copy, but all ultimately delivering the exact same food. Or totally random food, if there are multiple ghost kitchens placed behind a (food ordering equivalent of) load balancer.

This makes it very hard for an established restaurant to compete on-line - from outside, the five real restaurants in your neighbourhood look no different than 20 "virtual" restaurants. There's no way to tell. In this reality, as a customer, I have to resign to expect completely random results when I try to order food. These are also perfect conditions for a race to the bottom.

It's hard for established restaurants to compete on-line because they are kitted out for a dining room, paying a lease on the square meters for said dining room, and a kitchen setup to only handle a single set of menus.

> Ordinarily, you expect each restaurant to be independent, have their own style and recipes and quality standards.

Pretty sure no one who works in the restaurant industry thinks this. There's always a supply chain. Further, traditional restaurants are also running multiple virtual restaurants (e.g. one menu for katsu curry, and another for sushi).

> Pretty sure no one who works in the restaurant industry thinks this. There's always a supply chain.

Perhaps not. And yes, I know there's a supply chain. But every restaurant I've been to - or ordered from - where I live[0], each one has its own distinct and consistent style. For instance, being a pizza aficionado, I could tell you just by looking and tasting, which restaurant you ordered a pizza from in the town I now live, and which major pizza parlor[1] you ordered from in Kraków (the city I spent most of my life in).

This is what I'm concerned about. While not perfect, the restaurant's name was something you could use to "hash" a particular style of a particular dish by. They may have all supplied themselves at few well-known wholesalers[2], but they each processed the ingredients differently. Ghost kitchens + "virtual restaurants" kill that mechanism.

To be clear: I don't mind the concept of ghost kitchens per se. Done well (i.e. regulated well), they'll be able to deliver consistent quality at good price. My problem is with the other half of the equation - the virtual restaurants.

Something like this has already happened with consumer goods - so many of them are white-label goods these days, each sold by many fly-by-night brands. Consumer's ability to use branding as a proxy for quality (or quality of support) has been destroyed, DDoSed by the proliferation of such transient brands. I consider this a loss to customers and to the market at large (it increases information asymmetry). I worry the same is about to happen with food delivery.

--

[0] - I love my country for being just enough developed to get all the fun stuff conceived in the US, but just enough not developed that they come with a delay of a few years - giving us time to see the expected social impact things will have :).

[1] - At least until recently. Now there's too many small operators offering delivery services to track - but I can still distinguish between the ~6-8 places I used to order from. When these small operators started showing up, many of them were delivery-only, so I suspect they may have graduated to ghost kitchen frontends by now.

[2] - Or discount supermarkets :). My wife and I have a bunch of stories about it. Notably, I remember once being in the queue behind a couple who were buying the entire stock of chicken breast and invoicing it to a company - presumably the Asian restaurant nearby :).

> so many of them are white-label goods these days, each sold by many fly-by-night brands

I don't know the Polish market, but I'm not sure what you mean by all these fly-by-night brands. For white goods, you have Samsung, Bosch, Whirlpool, Zanussi, LG, Sharp, Siemans, Miele, etc. Did these go away or are not available in Poland? Do you guys not use Pro Test when researching white goods?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Consumer_Researc...

>My problem is with the other half of the equation - the virtual restaurants.

Virtual restaurants are used by actual restaurants - not just ghost kitchens. Maybe you don't see it in your area, but actual restaurants do it for a few reasons:

1. Delivery companies limit the delivery distance based on the items on the menu. e.g. sushi must be fresh so you must order it from places close by. Curry keeps so you can deliver it further. Therefore to make sure most stuff is available at a distance, a restaurant can offer a subset for long range delivery.

2. Branding isn't [only] for you. Delivery companies will offer a discount from the eye watering 30% for exclusive listings. So if you setup a virtual restaurant - a few menu changes, and, hey presto, this is an exclusive listing with a discount.

> I don't know the Polish market, but I'm not sure what you mean by all these fly-by-night brands. For white goods (...)

I meant white-label goods. It's when a producer churns out a product with no branding on it, to be bought by resellers, who put their own branding on it and pass it on as theirs. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-label_product. What I mean by "fly-by-night brands" is that there's a lot of these small resellers, and some resellers may sell the same product under several brand names. These brand names are often temporary - they get used for a year or two, and then a new name may be created (particularly after previous name starts showing up with bad reviews in search results).

As for white goods, i.e. domestic appliances, we have every one of these brands you mention. I didn't know what Pro Test is, thanks for mentioning it!

ok i knew what white-label was. I must be too tired and have to stop commenting. :|

> Trying to run ghost kitchens ... likely with ... slave labor

If you know that Deliveroo are using slave labour then you should call the Police right now.

If a company is doing bad things on that scale that'll just ruin your life.

I think he was referencing non Western markets Deliveroo operates in. In the Middle East for instance, deliveries are taken by severely underpaid workers in delivery contracting agencies which are the "contractors" for Deliveroo.

From the news, this sounds like the general economic model in the richer parts of the middle east.

It's presumably not isolated. I lived for a while in Oman, and for example construction workers and bar staff are significantly shipped in from India and a few other places, and are not paid well, and are put up in cheap cramped accommodation, work very long hours and the places hold on to all their passports.

They also held all my band's passports as a musician, but we knew that if we were to rock up to the British embassy / consulate and requested assistance we'd have been helped to leave the country without our passports on emergency travel document, and I suspect that the Indian workers who were, in my opinion, poorly treated - they had a lot less options.

> I suspect that the Indian workers who were, in my opinion, poorly treated - they had a lot less options.

so why isn't there an indian embassy to look after their citizens overseas there? Even you admit that you cannot be poorly treated because there's a british embassy offering some level of protection.

So the root cause is that the country does not care about its citizen.

You're mistaken about the root cause. So say the Indian government decide that enough is enough, they offer a repatriation scheme for Indian nationals based in Oman, so that whoever needs consular assistance to return home has all that they need. We have solved the root cause!

But wait, there are still buildings needing constructed in Muscat and there are not enough local people willing to be worked long hours for poor pay. So these Omani companies begin to step up recruiting in Bangladesh and now those workers start getting treated exactly as poorly as they were before.

So did we identify and solve the root cause? No, we just shuffled around the nationality who was being abused. In an ideal world everyone who needs consular assistance can get it wherever they are based, but the root cause here is abusive employment practices, do not try to pretend otherwise.

Yeah, the global marketplace of many countries willing to offer cheap labour for securing jobs means that competition keeps and drives the prices down. The only solution is minimum working conditions which vary from place to place, and can make a huge difference.

The UK for example has loads of jobs like fruit picking done by the cheapest labour allowable, in the worst conditions allowable. Those conditions are just legally mandated to be a bit better, they're still not great but the UK can afford and is willing to offer that basic level.

On UK fruit picking: yes and this is why I find the national post Brexit news here hilarious. "Farmers say locals can't be hired to pick fruit"- yes! at the wages being offered. For > £20p/h I'm sure the workers would materialise.

I think the level of assistance offered to the number of people who need it, the cost of it and the extent to which the country needs the jobs for its citizens, and working conditions in the country itsef are all factors. I think "does not care" might be a less-than-charitable interpretation.

Significantly being repatriated without a job and no money back to the UK and India are not like for like. Even if the assistance is technically there it doesn't mean that it is equivalent.

We have that model in the West, too. Economic slavery is not hard to see if you're looking.

Yes, I’m based in the Middle East so my view is more negative as a result. It’s really bad here - riders risk death to make deliveries while Deliveroo and other aggregators put all the blame on them and pay very bad.

Many people here are anti food delivery brands, it’s really exploitation here - bad food, risk to drivers, restaurants losing out

Maybe I had an unusual experience, but while in London I never once got a Deliveroo order correctly. Items missing, order forgotten, double charges, et cetera.

The cream on top of it all was their lack of phone or chat support. Instead, one emails an address that auto replies with a “we will get back to you within three business days” message. Not helpful when I’m trying to eat tonight!

In London the deliveroo motorcycle drivers are often very aggressive and dangerous. The company seems to incentivise drivers to deliver as quickly as possible without regard to safety or traffic rules.

Similar experience here. I ended up requesting so many refunds that they banned my account. I guess they didn't expect someone to actually hold them accountable?

No billing issues on my side though. I've always found the platform itself to be solid.