San Francisco will permanently cap food delivery fees for apps like DoorDash

The first is that DoorDash and its ilk did not invent food delivery. Delivery services have been around for decades, if not centuries, and San Francisco (or any other major city like this) never felt the need to cap fees until recently. There's probably a reason for that, which is something along the lines of "the fees are rising faster and higher than is reasonable." Cash grabs, potentially? I don't know what it was, but something changed enough for a municipality to get involved. Which begs the question of whether the assertion that they cannot lower prices is true or not. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

The second is that your statement "paying a driver to deliver food is expensive" starts with the premise that delivering food is expensive. That's not necessarily a true statement. It certainly costs money, but "expensive" is a tricky thing to define at this level. To me, the real question is whether DoorDash's business model makes it expensive to deliver food, and that is almost certainly the case. There are plenty of restaurants and businesses that rely 100% on delivery that don't charge the exorbitant fees that DoorDash does -- restaurants and businesses, I might add, that are profitable and not VC-backed like DoorDash is. My brother owns a Dominos pizza franchise, for example, which is probably 90% deliveries. They have dedicated drivers. That's a completely different business model from DoorDash, which is a fleet of drivers that will pickup/deliver from any restaurant.

Now, does a driver at Dominos make a lot of money? No, not at all. But for Dominos it's profitable enough that almost all of their food is delivered, with a small percentage at pick-up. The same thing goes for most of the other big pizza chains, not to mention the thousands of Chinese and other Asian restaurants that rely heavily on delivery/takeout for their income. Whereas DoorDash has much, much larger overhead for drivers than a Dominos franchise does, and so its fees must be higher. That's fine and that's true, but just because it's expensive for DoorDash to deliver food does not mean that food delivery in general is prohibitively expensive.

The third is your suggestion that this will lead to people stopping delivery. That may be true for restaurants that don't deliver very much at all, or that didn't deliver pre-COVID and now they do out of necessity. But there are enough restaurants that were successful at delivery before DoorDash showed up and that will continue to be successful after DoorDash is long gone, and those delivery fees won't be dynamic and (often) through the roof like DoorDash's. I'm just not sure I buy the premise of this prediction.

My last thing is that I really don't care that much about DoorDash, and the intent of my original comment was two-fold: 1) to bring awareness that disabled people (et al) can be and are disproportionately burdened by the rapidly rising delivery fees which this SF cap will stop, and 2) to describe my rationale for no longer taking delivery via apps like DoorDash.

Are there side effects to this cap? Absolutely. Will it stop some restaurants from offering delivery? Almost certainly! Will delivery go away for good? I seriously doubt it.

Thanks for the discussion. I enjoyed it. Have a great week.