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There's a reason why, before door dash and seam less and grub hub, pizza dominated food delivery in the United States. And it's the same reason why "delivery pizza" developed as a style of pizza: thicker than 'thin crust' pizzas, cooked at lower temperatures than Neapolitan, a higher ratio of cheese to sauce than those two styles, not as heavy as Chicago deep dish...

That kind of pizza can be put in an insulating cardboard box, and then a warmer, and driven 20-45 minutes to a customer's house and it arrives in a condition that is comparatively palatable. It can also be made rapidly in bulk using conveyor-belt ovens.

Delivery pizza thrived on this model, and still does. Delivery pizza from a local operation (or a national chain) that employs their own drivers is still affordable and decent.

Other kinds of food are delivered disappointingly for a reason. The only styles that come close to pizza in terms of suitability for delivery are bulk noodle dishes and sandwiches (and both of these styles had delivery cultures before the rise of software middlemen).

Do thin crust pizzas, or those closer to the Italian style, not survive deliveries, what happens?

Just get cold faster.

I'd just like to add my own anecdote in here. Delivering food for Doordash/Uber Eats is the reason I was able to stave off homelessness last year. By adhering to a strict schedule, I was able to make ~$1000/week in a moderately populated area (~180k pop) where the average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment is $800-$1000/month. The reasons I stopped was

1. Their "automated" systems are trash. I was supposed to receive some perks for being one of the better drivers (higher ratings, consistently accept offers, etc.). And I did receive them. Then I didn't. Then I did. Then I didn't. Over and over again over the course of a day, and none of their support staff could speak proper English, so trying to communicate that problem was absolutely miserable. Over all it was such an awful experience that I just gave up on delivery all together.

2. Hours were long. 12-14 hour days, 6-7 days per week. Great for learning discipline. Not so great for enjoying life.

> ~$1000/week

Does that include car-related expenses? If not, what did they amount to?

That's a good point, and it's still probably higher than average, but one should also consider what car-related expenses someone has at a 52k/year salary job commuting 1 hour to and from work each day. (I imagine the delivery driver used their car cumulatively more than 2 hours per day, but how much more, I don't know.)

My car was sitting in parking lots, being turned on and turned off, and driven around for about 12-14 hours per day towards the end there. That only happened for maybe 2 months. After I was finished and managed to land a better paying job, I ended up getting some much needed repairs on my car that would have not been fun to make up the cost of while I was delivering.

On the high end, gas was ~$200/week. I was getting a $70 oil change every 1.5 months. I can't think of anything else off the top of my head (I only delivered for 7 months with a much slower pace at the beginning, from about January to the beginning of August of last year). So nearly 25% of my income was going to just maintenance, but the miles from driving as well as all expenses to maintain my car could be written off on my taxes. I think with everything involved I only paid something stupid low like a couple hundred in taxes.

The worst part of this “gig economy” is that it has allowed entrepreneurs as well as governments to parade around these gig jobs as “full time employment” and thump their chests and wash their hands off of any real employment generation.

Gig jobs do not equal employment. Employment comes with benefits and stability that allows one to plan ahead and invest and grow and even take some risks.

Gig work is essentially the illusion of work. On the surface, it makes you money and your bosses money and your customers good (food, transport, whatever). But it hollows out your society and makes it a little less future-focused, a little more insecure. Gig workers can’t plan their retirements or growing their families like normally employed people do.

Great for profits. Terrible for society at large.

The problem that I have yet to see DoorDash et. al. solve is that they're injecting a middle-man where one doesn't need to exist. The typical delivery model of a local restaurant worked just fine without them, but with a third entity holding their hand out for money in that system it becomes net negative for pretty much everyone involved.

There is a place for a middle man, but these guys aren't occupying it yet.

Take 100 customers ordering food from 10 different restaurants, and 5 delivery drivers. There's an optimal delivery schedule where everyone gets their food warm and relatively promptly, and all the drivers are somewhat busy. That's a valid logistical problem that a middleman can solve.

If all the driver is doing is pickup, delivery, pickup, delivery, ad infinitum, then yeah, there's no unique middleman position there.

I haven't used Doordash in a while, but Uber Eats is definitely attempting to do what you're describing. You have to pay additional money for someone to drive directly from the restaurant to you, or else they'll often stop to do another pickup or delivery on the way.

There is a few things:

Food marketing.

Delivery orders for companies without a website or app for ordering. This is worth Pennie’s per order not a hefty %.

Delivery service (logistics and Human Resources). This is hard and not solved.

The hardest part of the problem has not been solved and the tech firms don’t deserve a big cut of food companies revenue for the incomplete service.

> they're injecting a middle-man where one doesn't need to exist

a food logistics service should exist, as (if done well) it should scale better than local restaurants doing their own delivery.

The "if done well" is key though.

One specific example, but Pizza delivered by apps is basically garbage. Actual pizza delivery drivers that work for the restaurant have special boxes that control temperature and humidity, enable them to easily carry lots of pizzas and keep them relatively horizonal, etc. Pizza from the app delivery drivers inevitably ends up cold and sad and bunched up to one side the box.

Pizza drivers only need one bag thing, but your food logistics service would definitely to give the drivers a few different sized containers that can keep some things hot, other things cold, be able to be carried a medium-length walk (sometimes you have to park far away), etc. and they definitely don't do that today.

> the typical delivery model of a local restaurant worked just fine without them

The typical delivery model of my 4 favorite local restaurants was to not do delivery at all. With DoorDash, they're offering a middle-man as a service when the overworked and understaffed local restauranteur doesn't feel like adding a hat to his collection for managing a delivery service.

The problem, though, is that this service does not come without added risk for said restauranteur - ther business lives and dies on a combination of online reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations, both of which can be harmed by DoorDash.

I think a lot of small restaurants would disagree.

Managing a fleet of drivers on top of managing your kitchen (and often a front-of-house too) is a nightmare. You have to surge in ways that go beyond day of the week, you have to handle short-time route management and work out how much return to base will affect your availability. Plus insurance. Plus fraud. Plus systems handling. Doing this independently might cost more both up-front and in running costs.

Using a third party, most of those problems are now not yours. It's on the intermediary to make sure they have a driver available, and another, and another, and another because everybody decided they want Chinese tonight. And if nobody wants Chinese, you're only paying the standing fee.

We have a nearby Thai restaurant that just stops taking delivery orders when their one driver is fully booked for the next hour. They lose money. And on a slow night, they're paying for a delivery driver they're not using.

I think most of the value proposition of food delivery is for people who can't do the drive.

People who happen to be drunk, or stoned, or don't want to take their eyes off the football game, or don't have a car, or their partner is using the shared car, etc.

But yeah if you're able to drive, it almost always makes more sense to just phone in the order and drive to the restaurant to pick it up. It's faster, cheaper, the food is actually still warm, you're not forcing the local restaurant to pay a 30% cut to a middleman, and so on.

> I think most of the value proposition of food delivery is for people who can't do the drive.

This. If you live alone and can't drive, it's a nice to have option for some variety. I never thought I'd use DoorDash, Grubhub, etc. for the reasons you mention; then, I lost my right foot. I'm not yet to the point where I can drive a modified vehicle; so, I sometimes use them. (The same thing applies for grocery delivery service.) Most of the time, though, I order from a pizzeria or Chinese place which have their own delivery drivers.

Absolutely. I was at a kids' birthday party. The pizza arrived 90 minutes after it was supposed to. It took 2+ hours to deliver it. The pizzeria claimed they had nothing to do with it. It was all UberEats. What a bogus product. They have no control over their drivers.

That’s an unfortunate situation, but I’m not surprised to hear this.

I worked in a single-location pizza shop when I was in high school and there is a lot more customer-benefitting coordination going on between the inside and the drivers than may be obvious. (These applied to my shop; I’m not sure if the big chains actually do this kind of stuff.)

* Most shops have a delivery radius of less than 10 miles and it’s pretty impressive how detailed a driver’s address knowledge of the area can get after just a few months.

* The people taking orders over the phone were often delivery drivers waiting between runs and will clarify addresses and locations as well as delivery instructions (drop off locations, gate codes, etc.).

* The inside crew will typically batch deliveries headed for the same area and time the oven to get all the food out around the same time.

* If for any reason a delivery can’t be made (car accident, flat tire, made a wrong delivery and no longer have the right food for the order, etc.) the driver will call the shop which will remake the order and send it with either another driver or an inside crew member.

> Most shops have a delivery radius of less than 10 miles and it’s pretty impressive how detailed a driver’s address knowledge of the area can get after just a few months.

I delivered pizzas back in the day as well. One night as I was headed out to my car, a woman asked me if I could help her find an address. I said sure, I'll give it a shot. With just a street name and number I was able to rattle off turn-by-turn directions, ending with, "It'll be the third house on your left. Maybe the fourth".

My delivery area wasn't a grid or anything. The house numbers didn't neatly align with streets. It was a typical suburban area with random bendy streets and addressing that didn't correlate with a central "State and Main" center.

But after a year or so of passing damn near every house in the area, I had fantastic intuition about these things. I had a knockoff, generic, store-brand version of The Knowledge. :)

> I could have /walked/ 2.3 miles there and back, sat down for dinner in the restaurant, and still done it in less than 75 minutes while saving $14.

The goal is not to save money -- cooking is even more efficient -- the goal is to trade money for time. Presumably you still could have worked all of those 75 minutes and gotten some value that way. Now the service could probably work better along other metrics but it does seem like the value delivered is non-zero.

Seem to be missing the forest for the trees a bit, with this take

Not necessarily. They're describing the benefit for me. I only really use these services during the work week for lunch. My wife and I both work from home and sometimes we didn't make something in advance or stop at the store to pick something up for lunch. We don't always have that 75 minutes to step out and buy something. It takes 5 minutes to order through the app and they leave it at the front door so we can plan to have it arrive during the time we're planning to have lunch. Then we can just focus on having lunch together before getting back to work.

This doesn't explain the value of eating cold, unappetizing food for a high price, though.

If you're only trying to consume nutrition, there are any number of ways to do that both cheaper and faster.

I've never understood the food delivery services at all. Maybe it's a different experience in the Valley. I would gladly pay for delivery to try a new restaurant that's across town. But instead all the offerings that I can choose are within 4-5 miles of my house. I could literally walk to some restaurants much quicker than I could get a delivery. Locally its mostly college kids using the food delivery services.

I can provide a few use cases:

1. Too lazy to drive 2. Too drunk to drive 3. Too lazy to walk (see 1) 4. COVID or other potentially contagious illness 5. Delivery driver is cute and you are lonely 6. Live event, can't take a break to go get food 7. You may not own a car or bike. (see 3) 8. Agoraphobia

In the UK, there are now a lot of places that have delivery app only hours or are even exclusive to delivery apps.

For example, my local McDonalds "closes" at 9pm but is actually open on Uber Eats 24/7. Deliveroo has Five Guys just down the road in a warehouse kitchen, but the nearest actual Five Guys is a 30+ minute drive.

I mostly don't order food any more, but when I do, it's hard to avoid the apps.

I used to get groceries delivered from Vons. It was $10 more than in-store shopping, and totally worth it. About a year ago they shit-canned their delivery drivers, and went with Instacart.

The first order I had with them after that was terrible. The driver got the food from the store at 7am, to be delivered before 10am. By 3pm that afternoon—no delivery yet—I cancelled it. I didn't trust that the produce, meat, and other perishables weren't just baking under a hatchback window all day.

I think if people were more diligent about where and what to order for delivery it would turn out better. We rarely have issues with food delivery. Arrives hot/warm and in around an hour. I won't order from anywhere that is more than a 1.5 miles away. 2 miles is a very long distance in a city like Chicago. If it's pasta I'm ordering it better be close to walking distance.

My family orders carry-out and I pick it up on my bike. That's an option in a "sufficiently urban" area.

Safeway suffers from a similar pricing problem. Ordered items that cost $42 on the receipt but $35 on DoorDash, with fees and tip.