Uber Eats Nationwide Shipping | Hacker News Reader

Uber Eats Nationwide Shipping

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56 pointskirubakaran85 comments

This must be a marketing thing, right? (I had to check the date to make sure it wasn't April 1st)

The use case is bagels or pizza across the country? If you don't eat those within the hour they're not good anymore. Other than that, I really can't think of a situation where I would be willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money for cold food.

Doordash has had similar. Such an incredible waste of resources.

> If you don't eat those within the hour they're not good anymore.

Blasphemy. Pizza is best when served cold the next morning.

I assume that they have to be reheated at the destination city before delivery. They may even be cooked there. In Australia several years ago you could get "freshly baked" French croissants from the supermarket. They were actually frozen "parbaked" goods that were cooked on the day.

> If you don't eat [bagels] within the hour they're not good anymore

This is a very New York/New Jersey perspective. And I respect that your palette is too refined to ever accept a non-fresh bagel.

But there are people who live outside of NY/NJ, who don't have a bagel shop down the street. And you may be surprised to learn that some of us love bagels, and will even eat a toasted bagel. I understand this is an abomination no New Yorker or New Jerseyan would ever touch. But I can assure you many of us with lower standards get quite a bit of joy out of a good re-toasted bagel. If a bagel is sliced and frozen shortly after baking it actually keeps fairly well.

Again, I can't recommend you ever try a toasted bagel yourself. You would certainly be disgusted by it, as any respectable New Yorker would be. But for the rest of us they can be quite enjoyable.

I’ve used GoldBelly to ship Philadelphia tomato pie to Florida for an inflated price. Same idea. It’s great for special occasions and gifts.

Yeah it just looks like a goldbelly competitor.

Is this market bigger than I might be thinking it to be? It's a cool feature, but my investor hat seems less thrilled. It seems expensive and seldom used. But the profit margins could be good.

> It seems expensive and seldom used.

You Have (1) Missed Call from: 1-800-FLOWERS

Flowers seem something of an exception. A number of occasions where sending flowers is something of an expectation however unreasonable the markups.

Flowers aren't shipped nationwide. Flowers are ordered nationwide, and delivered by local florists.

:O I attended college in upstate New York, and I practically lived on the pizza from one particular pizza place there. I've been back home for 7 years, and I still crave it and miss it. If they expand from NYC to the larger New York area and include that one pizza place... I will pay any premium for it.

To anyone saying "but the pizza will be cold": I used to order an extra large chicken-bacon-ranch pizza just for me, and have refrigerated -- and not reheated -- leftovers all week. Still delicious. I've tried to recreate that pizza myself many times, and it never comes out quite the same.

...now I want pizza, dammit.

Which spot?

Pizza da Vinci! (Not to be confused with the many restaurants around the country named DaVinci's Pizza.)

Mister Shoes?

Nope, Pizza da Vinci! (Not to be confused with the many restaurants around the country named DaVinci's Pizza.)

Bruh, I Loves on 4th was so much better than that poor imitation of pizza bella.

If I remember right, I Loves was okay, but not even close to Pizza da Vinci, in my opinion.

I live near one of those pizza places! We also have a Da Vinci Donuts that is not affiliated with the pizza place.

I thought it was a April 1 joke. Are they planning to freeze the food first before shipping through Fedex?

Typically these things will ship deconstructed and require minimal cooking/assembly, like a weekly meal delivery kit. For example, you might receive a roll in one type of packaging and the sandwich contents in another, boxed with a few freezer packs.

Me too, what kind of nonsense is someone paying 200 dollars for some reheatable pasta and having it delivered thousands of miles? It sounds like an exercise on how to create the most wasteful and ridiculous business ever.

Goldbelly does this, it's very much a luxury/gift thing but yeah I don't get it

Omaha Steaks has been mailing frozen meat around for 70 years

Meal kit companies are also pretty booming at the moment

Well yeah, but neither Omaha Steaks nor meal kits are advertised as being already prepared. Sending frozen steaks or a refrigerated box of ingredients seems far more reasonable than flying an entire already-made pizza cross country.

Grocery store freezer sections are full of pizzas shipped half way across the country.

I imagine that these food items will be shipped in an appropriate manner as well, or they won’t be very successful.

Well yeah, but those frozen pizzas ain't advertised as being already-prepared, either. You can't usually just thaw a frozen pizza and expect it to be edible. They also tend to be made pretty differently than how they're made at a pizzeria.

The market for frozen food is already well served.

If you want food from a particular restaurant, then you probably want it in the way that restaurant prepares it.

I have a favorite pizza place, from the town I grew up in. But there's no particular reason to believe their their pizzas will handle being frozen and then cooked at my place better than, say, DiGiorno -- if anything DiGiorno should have a pretty big advantage, they specifically designed their food to come from frozen and be warmed in a normal oven.

The only use I can think of for this is specifically for people who are feeling nostalgic about the leftovers they ate in college...

I got a 100 dollar gift cert for a company that did just that, I ordered FIVE burritos for that amount to be delivered, and they were the smallest, shittiest garbage burritos I have ever had, and there was no good way to reheat them since they were in a paper/foil wrapper that had frozen onto the burrito, so I had to first try and defrost them with water in a bag and then remove the wrapper and microwave them. It was absolute trash and now other companies are expanding into this biz?

VC's are fucking insane to support this nonsense.

Read the room, Uber. We are in a climate crisis.

My god. In my opinion this is downright offensive. Even if for no other reason that in city delivery french fries are an abomination.... but also all the other disgusting carbon and workforce issues that this is going to encourage.

MMMMMM. $5000 Nobu from 10 hours ago! THIS SHIT IS DELICIOUS!

You are basically eating microwave food when it gets there.

For $200, you might as well go to a restaurant in-person.

I was in New York last Christmas, as for most Christmases since my wife's family all live there, and my wife insisted we stay on the lower east side because she went to school there and had some nostalgia. The end of the block our hotel was on had a place called Katz's Deli with a line that was around the corner and a several hour wait pretty much starting at 7 AM or earlier every morning.

We never went because I didn't want to stand in line for that long, but I noticed the side of the building said they'll ship nationwide. That seemed crazy to me, like no matter how good the meal is, it can't possibly be as good once it's been in transit for a day. What sorts of meals don't degrade in texture and taste within a few hours of being cooked? I would love to send my friends and family in other parts of the country some great Texas BBQ that has no equivalent anywhere else I've ever been, but even that isn't nearly as good once it has gone cold and been reheated. Unless you ship it in a humidor, I don't see how you avoid losing moisture. Is that what they do?

This post amuses me because of the classic Katz Deli slogan of WWII: “Send a salami to your boy in the army!”

I can answer this! Last Christmas someone sent us a big box of stuff from Katz's. The meats (there were 3 or 4) were vacuum packed, and there was some condiments and some bread and I forget what else. It was all packed in a big box with ice packs. I think it was shipped over night from Katz's.

I assume that most deli meats don't lose much being packed up like this? I can't say for sure, but this kind of stuff is probably already served in a similar state, not right out of the oven. So I can only assume it tasted more or less like it would if we have gone to Katz's. The bread no doubt would be better fresh.

It all tasted... ok. I expected it to be awesome, but it was just ok.

I had Goldbelly ship me a brisket from a BBQ place in Texas and I felt like it traveled well. It shipped frozen, and they provided instructions on thawing and reheating, and it really turned out to be delicious. Not quite as good as fresh from the smoker in Texas, but better than brisket I can get in my area.

Sounds like a story I heard about people sending task rabbit'ers to stand in line at 6am for a "Cronut" at some shop in SOHO.

I've mail-ordered Katz's corned beef and pastrami and it holds up pretty well. It's not cheap but then it's not cheap in the restaurant either. If you love their stuff I recommend their mail order service.

There's a Saltlick in AUS. It travels.

I would love to hear Dara or Uber PR squeam trying to explain how this isn’t flagrantly hypocritical to any climate change “green” talk they do. If I was an employee who cared about those things, I’d be feeling pretty betrayed.

https://www.uber.com/us/en/about/sustainability/

Reminds me of Ezell's Chicken in Seattle. Apparently Oprah loved the place (they had a big photo of her on the wall that she'd written a fairly lengthy note on) and supposedly she would regularly have their chicken delivered to her by plane from Seattle to her home in Chicago.

Which is wild cause I lived in both and while ezelles is good, there’s tons of just as good places in Chicago

now you can buy an In-&-Out burger + fries from the east coast for $100

Is this an extremely delayed April fools joke?

I also wanted to parse it as "Uber devours, consumes, masticates Nationwide Shipping" and that they had bought DHL or something.

I had to read it thrice before I realised "Uber Eats" was a thing. Very confusing title

I look forward to ordering my favorite Thai delivery[1] from LA

[1] http://www.tgexpress.net/

Wonder how In-n-Out burgers would taste if they were frozen like White Castle sliders.

I don't know about the burgers, but I'm reasonably sure if they did that for the fries it'd be a vast improvement.

Having it delivered probably won't take much longer than it would to get through the drive-thru line.

This seems like it will require coordinating with the local entity (I mean they aren't going to ship the whole meal all made up, right? It'll have to be a microwave-dinner-ized version I guess?). Is this really a core competency of Uber? I thought their main business model is ramming through services by ignoring local entities.

If we can't get the fabled SF -> NYC burrito tunnel [0] I guess this will have to do.

[0] https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...

I despise UberEats.

Their customer support is a scripted, gaslit hellscape where the customer is always wrong.

Me too. I vouched to never use them. I prefer calling directly to the restaurant (it's also cheaper for customers and the place can retain that 30% which is crazy to say the least).

This seems strange especially when the target market seems small as I don't see many people would have such cravings to get NYC food delivered to LA. But I am not sure. On the other hand, I would really love to get some Neapolitan pizza from Napoli. :)

What if they get the order wrong?

Also, is there anyway they have logistics to handle something like this?

This could be a ploy to make stuff in local cloud kitchen, charge for cross country shipping and delivering locally cooked stale food.

IDK, I seems to have a pessimistic view of it at the moment

I think you are right. If you order a pizza from NYC, how are you sure it's from NYC and not from your local store?

Charge a big shipping fee while getting a local product.

I really hope they go under this decade.

Doesn't really make sense generally. But it can make sense to ship frozen or smoked food in moderate quantities. There are a few companies I periodically order from--usually around the holidays. Not cheap but if it isn't something you can get locally and it can survive shipping reasonably, it's reasonable to order as an occasional thing. But it's usually a fairly big order. I can't imagine having a pizza shipped.

Oh man... If I thought a sandwich could travel... Freshly Baked Eatery in downtown San Jose. Hands down my favorite sandwich place on the planet. The bread is always fresh. It wouldn't survive a flight from SJC to AUS and I'm moving even further in a few weeks. One of th top five things I miss about the bay area.

My favorite sandwich ship on the planet is Two Cousins in San Carlos.

Forget this. I just want to be able to buy something from the other side of the city. There are such small delivery areas for large cities (London).

I desperately want to order from a favorite place in the city but I'm out of the area. I would be happy to pay extra and wait a bit longer for this perk.

This sounds like a nightmare in cold chain logistics waiting to happen, where Uber brokers the deal between the end user and restaurant, then subcontracts the necessary steps out. An example from the meal kit services industry is where a truck is required to stay below 40F so that raw meat doesn't grow bacteria during transport, or else the entire truck is deemed a total loss and the affected parties have to create an entirely new shipment. There's some insulative material between the your food and the outside air but the handoffs will have to be timed well especially in LA during the summertime.

My guess is that shipping companies like UPS have built out excess cold chain capacity intended for vaccine rollout during the pandemic, and now are sitting on a lot of empty subzero-capable freezers in their warehouses that Uber is renting for pennies on the dollar. As far as how excited people are to get a glorified TV dinner of leftovers not designed to be frozen then eaten a week later? The entire idea has a bit of silliness in that you could get prime ribeyes for 2 at a high end steakhouse locally versus a stale spaghetti dinner at the same price. And the bonus of not frivilously contributing to climate change in the process.

I wouldn't mind getting some Voodoo Donuts from Portland, even if it did take a few days….

I first thought it was some kind of april fool's joke. Many people who care about climate change are taking their bike to go to work, or avoiding taking a plane for their holidays, and then there's this. I am genuinely shocked.

Ah, they're going after Goldbelly. Checks out.

I thought April Fools day was a few months ago.

I suppose someone needed to take it up after Diablo Immortal launched...

Uber is like the Michelangelo of losing money.

As if they aren’t bleeding money fast enough…

It's finally happened.

A shipper I trust less than fedex.

Amazing.

Too bad they don’t have Daw Kun Thai yet from new hampshire.

1. Announce a ridiculous product.

2. Spark discussion / controversy.

3. Increase brand-awareness.

4. Profit!!

Not all press is good press. Look at Facebook, for example.

must be good for the environment!

What a fantastic waste of carbon emissions to fly some donuts across the country, rather than buying something locally

I thought this was hyperbole but it's almost verbatim their 2nd sentence. What a waste of all kinds of resources.

Having worked in logistics and fulfillment for eCommerce, I am fairly certain this service will stop as soon as someone starts to look at actual profitability. Problem just might be that nobody does for quite some time.

You underestimate what Americans are willing to pay for convenience. People already pay nearly double to order from local restaurants now on these platforms.

Steep carbon pricing is the only way to fix this... Only when a good chunk of your salary is going into carbon taxes will you choose to do things that don't have hidden carbon costs.

VCs seem to love supporting luxury services they themselves want to consume. Which is understandable, but in bad taste given how many of their portfolio companies are doing layoffs and hiring freezes. Rescinding offers. Etc.

This level of insane decadence being offered by a capitalistic company just might tell us how close we are to crash of current civilization.

I somehow understand factory made food, or even transporting items that last good while, but individual orders?

You could use “insane decadence” to describe a lot of modern services like commercial air travel and cordless phones.

This has been a business for a long time. Selling flash frozen NYC pizza on the west coast, overnight shipping of unpreserved caviar etc. If a restaraunt can prep a dish that lasts 24-48 hours, there isn't any hard reason they can't

Presumably they are traveling via standard freight routes and not paying someone to hold a single meal on a passenger flight...

There is a market for long distance food deliveries. Even more international. When a friend hears I'll be travelling nearby, its not uncommon for me to get special requests for food not available locally.

Bringing Central American fried chicken into the U.S in family trips was so common, that the fried chicken restaurant had to make special packaging so the smell wouldn't escape from the box to the airplane cabin.

They even ran an ad about that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFd3a4g8dNc

I think the increase in these services (GoldBelly, DoorDash National Favorites, etc...) also coincides with the COVID-driven increase of home food deliveries along with the modern restaurant/food social media lifecycle (think: Eater, Food Insider, Munchies, etc).

So, right after someone in SF watches a video describing in great detail how amazing a new NYC chicken sandwich pop-up is, they're almost certainly willing to pay a premium to try it.

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