Deliveroo is leaving Australia
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
Deliveroo enters administration, leaving riders, restaurants and customers in the lurch
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-16/deliveroo-enters-volu...
> Deliveroo has entered administration, leaving 15,000 local riders — and the thousands of restaurants that use them — in need of new work and a new service to move food.
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> Despite starting in the market ahead of Uber Eats, it fell substantially behind its rival.
> Competitors Menulog and DoorDash also overtook Deliveroo, pushing it into an unsustainable fourth place in an already-crowded market.
> Deliveroo got out of the German market in 2019, and already this year has quit The Netherlands and Spain.
As an Australian myself I'm rooting for "gig workers" being treated as well as regular workers wrt awards and conditions and am quite happy to see creeping US wage slave practices culled.
Let's see how new and future conditions play out.
Thanks!
Some of them order just a can of soft drink. If they went to the grocery store and bought a pack of six cans, it'd cost them the same as just one can from the restaurant. Not to mention another $4 delivery fee!
It's not a bad business to be in. Personally, I dislike them all as I like getting my own food and mostly eat at home. But there are heaps of people who're happy to pay exorbitant prices to have things delivered to them. I can't imagine how much it adds to our carbon footprint!
What's "exorbitant" is relative. Back when I was making not a lot of money, I'd go to the farmer's market and pick some of the nicest looking cheap tomatoes.
A few years afterwards, as my income grew, I just started going to the supermarket and picking what I liked. Someone asked me at home: "What was the price of those tomatoes?" and I didn't remember because I stopped checking.
> I can't imagine how much it adds to our carbon footprint!
And this is why we need systemic measures (i.e. regulation, national and international), not "personal responsibility". Either due to financial pressure or convenience, people's revealed preferences say that individually they don't really care about the environment. They say they do, because talk is cheap, but when they find out what they're about to lose to save it, everyone (99.999%) chooses what's cheaper or more convenient for them, personally.
Don’t know about 99% but I also vote for those who support cheaper and convenient policies. If, as you say, 99% prefer such policies too - how would you get the votes?
I'm not always sure it adds to the footprint, though. While I'd take public transport now, it hasn't always been the case. Each of those folks ordering delivery would likely take their private vehicles to the eatery - each order = 1 vehicle. On the other hand, you can deliver more than one thing per trip. 1 vehicle = multiple orders. And it gets even weirder when you consider that some of the folks delivering are using bicycles instead of cars - I certainly wouldn't be able to bike. I simply don't have the leg strength to get up the mountainy inclines here. And then everything changes if they are using electric bikes, too (I don't have access to this one).
It's not always convenience; how much will it cost those people to leave their working place? Imagine you are a trader or a doctor. Now suddenly, leaving your workplace for a bag of nice hot chips means not saving someone's life or losing a good trade that could earn you a yearly bonus. Those $4 sounds cheap to me in those cases.
New laws coming in 2023 that probably made the 'gig' part more like 'casual worker' which means they pay extra per hour worked, minimum 3 hours paid per 'shift/callout'.
> “A delivery rider on a bike who is at the mercy of an algorithm on their phone is not the same as a genuinely empowered contractor who runs their own small business,”
We have a social safety net and a hot job market, there will be other better employers available.
Some kind of Co-op arrangement where delivery drivers band together and offer a platform that companies can subscribe too could also work (assuming a simple enough backend system).
Generally, if a job market is hot, it means employers are incentivized to not be jerks and try to lure workers to them with perks, thereby giving plenty of alternatives to those who feel exploited.
And given a social safety net, wouldn’t one not feel “stuck” in said job as a necessity to live?
If someone still chooses something “exploitative”, then perhaps there is a benefit to that job that makes it worth while in a way that regulators (and others privileged enough not work said job) don’t see themselves.
Most companies will settle on the lowest level of worker compensation, benefits, security & support that they can get away with. Worker choice is an illusion when most jobs reach these low levels and it is up to governments to raise the level. While the loss of these bad jobs is a short term pain to those affected, the long term effects of working bad jobs is much worse. People aren't working there because they love the low pay, inconsistent hours and lack of security, they're working there because better options aren't available. It is the responsibility of governments to ensure companies provide jobs that pay a livable wage and reasonable benefits.
As someone who runs a business down under, this is just a pretty poor excuse. Well compensated workers mean well compensated customers, and even our high unskilled wages don't come close to the output of a well managed worker.
Exactly, a fat middle class means more economic activity, and services are at a higher standard overall because people can afford it.
The free market concept applied to labor is a farce, because people have to work to live, people can't vote with their wallets and are forced to take whatever's offered to them. Regulation is required, because history shows us that an entirely free labour market will lead to a race to the bottom, resulting in exploitation and a cheapening of services as no one has money to spend.
1. Uber switched to delivering multiple orders per driver trip and then charging extra if you wanted priority. I imagine this would've helped their unit economics immensely and allowed drivers to make more money.
2. Deliveroo had a functioning customer service who would often refund orders and give discounts in order to deliver a great experience. Uber deliberately didn't. No support = more profit.
3. Uber would charge multiple tiers of fees. Service fee. Delivery fee. Eventually they were charging twice as much on top of the order as Deliveroo and it took a while for them to do the same.
And then Uber One subscription likely did them in the end. The ability to save on both home delivery and trips was pretty compelling.
So no, they don't care here in Belgium. At all. But none care.
Also Uber and Deliveroo cost quite often way more than local platform.
The platform has to manage against people that seek to abuse relaxed customer service. A third in a row seems reasonable threshold and I would hope you are an outlier of this happening to a genuine customer.
So I dont feel this is 'they don't care', more a sad reality of the world that some people abuse systems if they can, and you unfortunately got caught up in that.
That's also the beauty of the internet and customer reviews. If a restaurant is that bad frequently, reviews will end their business so they can't survive on churning people trying something new.
Menulog and DoorDash appear to work pretty well. Sad to see Deliveroo go.
Typically works great but the edge cases are where real customer support helps.
Edit: to be clear, I’m not suggesting the business model/treatment of ‘contractors’ is ethical, but fewer companies will not solve that, regulation will.
Easi (now owned by HungryPanda) is also big in cities for Asian food.
Its by no means an uber eats monopoly. There are others also
I remember working in a pizza shop 10 years ago and Menulog's business was taking online orders then having an offshore call center call the restaurant to place the order. They would just invisibly mark up the cost to consumer to cover this.
(It was always a pain to take these orders as the callers english wasn't great and the call audio volume was low making it difficult to hear when busy causing incorrect orders, missed items etc.)
If they were to quit I probably just switch to a local service (we have one and it's based on Facebook Messenger, ugh). Uber One has no appeal here cause there's no Uber in Italy anyway.
[1]: Glovo in particular I had experiences where I was outright left without any food after long delays because of the rider's ineptitude and was told "oh that sucks, well better luck next time :P"
My experience with Deliveroo in Ireland has been completely the opposite of that. I was a Deliveroo Plus subscriber, but now I don't use Deliveroo at all.
Customer service was non-existent, orders would vanish and no one cared. When I cancelled Deliveroo Plus there was no attempt at retention.
Sure they charge extra, but they still don't give you priority.. or even complete your order mostly. I get like 95% reliable delivery with deliveroo, but not more than 50% with uber.
These restaurant-delivery services offer(ed) a convenient way to get your restaurant takeaway delivered initially for surprisingly-not-that-much-more money than going by yourself But they work by charging the restaurants very high fees plus the fees the customer pays.
Even with all of those fees, because there is no coordination with the restaurants themselves (to batch up multiple orders from the same restaurant like happens when a restaurant runs it's own delivery), it ends up being only viable for each delivery ride to take about two meals -- the algorithms try to create a path of "pickup A, pickup B, dropoff A, pickup C, dropoff B, ..." in an effort to mix efficiency with acceptable food temperature upon delivery -- but even with that pattern, many items get delivered cold or delayed and two orders per trip just doesn't create enough margin to pay both the driver and the large high-paid software engineering staff behind the app.
In a world without continuous capital injection, these companies have an unworkable business model (I mean, they were always unworkable, but in VC-unicorn-world, they could pretend for surprisingly long).
edit: also, if any health regulator ever decides to look in to food temperature upon delivery for these companies, all hell will break loose in the business -- there is no way that the average dish reaches the customer at a legally food safe temperature.
I was using Seamless in SF Bay Area and these parameters were actually rather good. Especially if a restaurant took care of delivery itself (some did, mostly Chinese). But I was always checking the distance.
There's an extremely shallow one in "I already have A on my phone, it would be three minutes of clicking and enterring my payment and delivery info to try someone else."
If you could give-away-the-store to get sufficient market share-- maybe like 70-80% or more-- you might be able to start leveraging the restaurants, demanding exclusivity (or offering some cross-promotional incentive in exchange for it) to keep competitors from emerging.
Or maybe this was an offshoot of the Uber endgame hypothesis: if you can survive long enough to get to driverless vehicles, you can own the largest fleet and actually get your hands on economies of scale.
[0] - https://www.statista.com/topics/3294/online-food-delivery-se...
let's be honest, meituan is mostly used by not well educated & low income people who don't know anything about food safety & personal hygiene. Quite often you get "food" delivered from some dark alley home to tons of mouses & cockroaches. There are a crap load of videos uploaded by those meituan delivery guys showing people how awful are those "food" & places where "food" get prepared. e.g.
https://www.ixigua.com/6659332103689208333?logTag=a74d3ebf56...
In case of any doubt, just ask your friends will they be willing to feed their young kids with those "food" from meituan. ;)
"An independent registered liquidator (the voluntary administrator) takes full control of the company. This allows the director or a third-party time to find a way, if possible, to save the company or its business." [1]
[1] https://asic.gov.au/regulatory-resources/insolvency/insolven...
If so, I'm guessing they won't see much of, if any, of it?
Pretty low to withhold tips from their contractors.
Given that it's voluntary administration and not forced, I would expect a lot of the regular creditors (including drivers) to be paid to some degree, as Deliveroo Australia probably still has some cash. But they can't just predict that to be the case and distribute the company's assets on that expectation. Administration means handing it all over and wiping your hands clean. Whatever's there will make it to whoever is owed money if the company has the assets.
How many markets will deliveroo be pulling out of??
*edit - I’ve since read they are compensating riders, so I’m retracting some of my snarkiness.
Scale brings complexity, and complexity has its own cost.
I'm talking about physical products and/or services. Delivering a single package to an individual has a very real cost that doesn't really go down with scale.
If a bar had 1 customer only, it should price drinks so that the entire rent and salaries were covered by that 1 customer. Which is not how it works in reality.
Just don't accept pickups from Montrose Charcoal Chicken. :)
Happy to hear otherwise, I’m not a bankruptcy lawyer.
> In Australia, we have concluded that achieving a sustainable position of leadership in the market is not possible without a disproportionate level of investment which would have highly uncertain returns.