Apps commandeered the age-old idea of takeout | Hacker News Reader

Apps commandeered the age-old idea of takeout

wired.com

34 pointslxm57 comments

When was this magical world where you could get a list of hundreds of restaurants of all possible cuisines from any part of town with all their menus and prices in one place and have food ordered from them in minutes?

Up until the rise of these services if you weren't a cheap pizza place or Chinese restaurant you likely weren't doing delivery at all. Doordash and others probably saved the restaurant industry in most major towns during the pandemic.

It was an archaic tome known as the Yellow Pages printed on a thin material called paper.

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

They had a whole menu in the yellow pages?

They had a lot of menus in the yellow pages. Pages and pages of menus. Not for every restaurant, though, just those that paid for them.

And some people had a crazy idea, call a restaurant and ask what they can recommend or what they specialty is.

"Radio on the internet"

s/Radio/Phonebook

Ah yes, the Yellow Pages food delivery service. Don't know how I missed it.

MenuPages.com -> Seamless -> Grubhub

https://web.archive.org/web/20120503213748/http://www.menupa...

Wow that takes me back. I was the backend tech lead for menupages after it got acquired by NYMag. I built that site!

For a brief period of time, Amazon had restaurant menus too.

The way it used to work in NYC was you'd just collect takeout menus from restaurants you passed by that you thought you might want to order from. Then you'd call, place an order, and that was it. Delivery was free, too, before the apps took over.

The system worked fine. Biggest problem was sometimes the person who picked up the phone had a heavy accent, but that's why the menus numbered their items.

In NYC, all Seamless has added to this equation is the ability to pay to get food from outside your delivery zone.

I know this was the case in NYC before from watching TV, but in my city the only places that delivered were pizza places and a handful of Chinese places, and delivery was never free.

> No part of delivery is new, other than the predatory companies making it irresistibly easy—and using that ease to wedge themselves between restaurants and their customers.

Not new? I don't know what other peoples' experiences are, but before the delivery apps the only delivery food I had ever gotten was pizza. All other takeout was was food we'd pick up on the way home.

Also, it seems even the delivery apps lose money. So everyone is losing except the consumer that is getting a product for below the true cost?

Chinese food often had delivery even in places that don't have many delivery options. You're right otherwise. Nothing else offered delivery here.

What's interesting is that in my neck of the woods most places serving Chinese food were actually Vietnamese restaurants, and none of them ever delivered, but several of the much smaller handful of Chinese places did. (Usually had a large minimum order and a very short delivery range, though.) I always wondered why that was.

> Also, it seems even the delivery apps lose money. So everyone is losing except the consumer that is getting a product for below the true cost?

Maybe, your cost for "delivery" is high - but most things are so much more expensive on doordash without dashpass that often I'd rather just use their app to order free pickup so I don't have to explain my accent to a human over phone.

> order free pickup

It may be free for you, but not for the restaurant. They still have to pay a double digit commission for pickups. Consider just calling them to truly support local business.

Most apps charge <5% for pickup orders and that includes stuff like credit card commissions. Unless the restaurant has a team of software engineers on staff full time they aren't getting anything for cheaper than that. I don't know of any restaurant in my area that even takes orders over the phone or through their own site. They will simply say "order on Doordash".

100% of restaurants will take pick up orders over the phone without requiring Doordash. Delivery is another story.

When was the last time you picked up the phone and checked? Serious question, because I try it all the time, by default. They will either not answer the phone, refuse entirely, have a problem with payments, or mess up/deprioritize your order. In fact a lot of restaurants that do take phone orders still use Doordash and the like on their end, and you'll end up getting an email/text from them regardless.

> When was the last time you picked up the phone and checked?

100% of my takeout orders are made via phone call, and I've never had a problem.

It's 50-50 for me. Half the restaurants tell me to just order through Doordash/UberEats/etc. Clearly they are busy in the restaurant and don't have time to translate my verbal commands into some terminal.

I'm sure there are other aspects of unifying all remote orders under one system that they like

> So everyone is losing except the consumer that is getting a product for below the true cost?

The Uber Eats / Doordash execs are not losing money, even if the company is. They're rich as fuck and building their fortune on quasi-slave labor from thousands of immigrants who patrol the streets with bikes/motorbikes all night long for poor wages

The restaurants lose by having to deal with fucking algorithms and a non-existing company support. They get to deal with angry customers when the app accepted payment for something that's not available today, or when the shop has already closed, for example.

Curious why no one challenged them. The market has high locality, so you wouldn't even have to mount a nationwide delivery service.

Pick a second-tier city, sign up a dozen or so of popular restaurants, get a catchy domain like TulsaDelivers.com or SpokaneTakeout.com, and find some local driver partners.

Is the app loyalty that high at consumer level? Or would a localized delivery app still not make the margins to offer better terms to drivers?

There are people doing this, eg. coopcycle.org.

But there's a few barriers:

- people who are not from the neighborhood will be familiar with UberWhatever but not with your local platform (network effect)

- local platforms can't get away from working regulations (and that's a good thing) so they need much higher margins than multinationals in order to respect the law

- small local platforms need actual money/clients to grow, while multinationals like Uber get VC/whoever money "for free" to spend at a loss just to gain market traction in hope for future profit

So it's like can you and a few neighbors fight with sticks against the tank of a well-funded invader? Sure, but the odds of success are not great. My best regards to worker coops worldwide who help make capitalism a nightmare of the past.

Here's what I miss, there were these two hole in the wall restaurants in LA that we discovered,we would travel for an hour due to traffic. The food was amazing and we would always have time to chat with the owner and staff, it was always just a few tables filled, beautiful paintings. Then one day, we went to one of them and the line was out the door, inside was packed. The owner was surprised at the growth but some Hispters put it on yelp with good reviews and it just blew up from there.

The quality of the food went down in a big way, especially the speciality drinks they would make but the owner was able to open up 3 more of those restaurants. The other restaurant still hasn't been discovered and is not on yelp but we haven't been since the pandemic. I guess,something is lost and something is gained but I miss finding high quality, low trafficked restaurants and sharing them with close friends.

What really pisses me off about this whole paradigm is that nowadays I'll go to what seems to be a quiet sit down restaurant and it will take me 45 minutes to get a meal because the kitchens, for some reason, prioritise their zero- or negative-profit delivery customers over patrons who choose to eat in. It happens all the time and for every venue that pulls that crap it's the last visit they'll ever get from me.

Or maybe because the people who ordered delivery ordered first. Why shouldn't they be served first?

I would be pissed off if my order got delayed because they prioritized someone in the restaurant who came in after I ordered.

FIFO/queue has been around forever in F & B.

Because if you want local, dine-in business, then you can't take a customer in and then hold them captive for 45 minutes just waiting on the queue. Whereas for delivery it's ok to be more async.

Dining in person is in part (maybe large part) about the experience of being there and being served, even for lower budget fare. This is restauranting 101. If a restaurateur cares about their customers they'll set an appropriate rate limit on call in orders so that they can properly prioritize dine-in customers.

Those that don't are optimizing for revenue since of course online customers will pick another place if the reported delay is too long. It's customer hostile to keep your dine-in customer captive for 45 minutes because they are there and will sit there and be "forced" to accept it due to a kind of sunk time fallacy.

And you can't really hire for peak times if your peak to average ratio is too high.

Do you not find it rude that when there's a long line at your favorite coffee shop or whatever, that people that come late order online using their phone then move over to the pickup? Getting served before the folks in front of them in the physical queue?

In short: customer service matters in the restaurant industry and that is why online order shouldn't be served first, simply based on having a single queue for orders.

> Dining in person is in part (maybe large part) about the experience of being there and being served, even for lower budget fare. This is restauranting 101. If a restaurateur cares about their customers they'll set an appropriate rate limit on call in orders so that they can properly prioritize dine-in customers.

Yes, it's the restaurant responsibility to rate the customers coming in so that they can serve dine-in customers in a reasonable amount of time.

That doesn't entitle the dine-in customers to cut the queue.

> Do you not find it rude that when there's a long line at your favorite coffee shop or whatever, that people that come late order online using their phone then move over to the pickup? Getting served before the folks in front of them in the physical queue?

I do not know where you live but where I am, there are shops that have a separate queue for dine-in and take out. No one would bat an eye if you decide to go take-out instead for faster service

tons of places like that near me. it’s the norm. but very clearly the parent is talking about places that don’t do that. and your earlier response was much more hostile than this. more like how dare he want good in person service?

Not at all. I was playing devil's advocate and taking the perspective of someone who ordered online. They are as much as a customer as one who dines in.

I don’t understand how it’s rude to do this. If everyone did that they’d still be served in FIFO order, and they’d save the overhead of ordering verbally so the system as a whole would be more efficient.

I'd give priority to people who show up.. I worked in a fast food place where the manager used to tell me the doordash and uber guys can wait but we had to first finish with the people who were in front of us.

My brother worked at a fast food place for a few years as a teen. He gave me two pieces of advice: don't eat at fast food places, but if you do, you'll get better food if you dine in.

How do you know that's why you're waiting?

Because I see several meals coming out of the kitchen in paper bags being picked up by helmeted people.

So it's okay to make delivery drivers wait but not you?

Or, more to the point: is no one else allowed to get their food before you?

Yes.

How do you know those meals weren't already being made before you got there?

If restaurants are making zero or negative profit from delivery customers, they could simply stop serving them. They could reject the orders. Indoor dining is open now, and there is simply no reason for a restaurant to fulfill an order for a loss.

Few restaurants have their own delivery drivers, and for many, delivery services were the only way they could sell their food during lockdowns. Even at a loss, it made sense to have revenue. But that does not explain why restaurants continue to fulfill delivery orders now -- the only reason they still do it now is that they do make some money from it.

Back in the early 2000s (maybe 2006, 2007) I visited Montreal, and there was a pizza chain similar to Domino's that we ordered from one night. They had a single phone number for ordering (as opposed to having to look up your local pizza place), and the call experience was fantastic. The person was attentive, got the order right, was not worried about seven other things going on at the store, and could route the pizza to the closest chain (or even the second closest, if the closest was overloaded).

Even back then, it was clear that there was room for drastic improvement in the food ordering process. I worked in NYC during the Seamless web food delivery era, and while terrible, it was still ten times better than the alternative...

Pizza Pizza? That was something they used to advertise a lot. I know in the GTA the number is (or was) 967-11-11. I think the exchange could vary from place to place but it always ended in 1111.

Do these apps do any sort of aggregation? Like if 10 households in one neighborhood order from 10 restaurants which are clustered around downtown, will the app just send one delivery driver around to fulfill all the requests?

That would seem to be useful. If they are just doing single transactions, one at a time, then it smells to me like the main value they provide is circumvention of local labor laws...

DoorDash does that sometimes. I’m not aware of the others, but I imagine they do as well.

They do, and they also charge an extra fee if you want to ensure you get yours first, of course.

I was aware of apps for delivery but not take out. We just call.

But now I’m curious about delivery. Are pizza and Chinese shops migrating over to those services, willingly or unwillingly? As long as I’ve remembered, they’ve always offered delivery for free.

As long as I’ve remembered, they’ve always offered delivery for free.

I think that's an NYC thing.

The mom and pop Chinese, Thai, Korean, have always delivered for free in my south Florida city. I’ve also passed by the restaurant and it was tiny. Like 1 table, 2 chairs. Whatever they weren’t spending on dining floor space was used for delivery. In retrospect you could say they were the primordial ghost kitchen concepts.

A lot of places have their own app or website where you can order takeout for free with no markup, and delivery with no markup and only a small fee.

ChowNow and Toast do that. They sell payments and other back-end systems to the restaurants, so they can commoditize the takeout/delivery experience and give it away for free.

I used to call, but between connection noise, having to give a name, accents, background sounds, them being in a rush, etc. we don't even understand each other. That's why I use apps.

The difference in price between two Chipotle dishes, a barbacoa bowl and a sofritas burrito, that I priced a couple days ago through a delivery service that shall not be named and Chipotle's own website was almost 8 dollars BEFORE delivery charges. These companies are gouging the crap out of consumers and tacking fees on top of that.

There's a market there for a takeout-only site that charges a flat fee per order.

Yes its ridiculous, higher per item, delivery, service charges etc

Last time I ordered Chipotle it turned out their own delivery app is just white label DoorDash.

Interestingly, when I’m in the Bay Area, I find myself calling restaurants and picking up the food myself because it’s significantly faster than any delivery service.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com