Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kronopath | Hacker News Reader

That pizza graph is extremely misleading. It shows only online pizza sales, not in-person or phone sales. Of course that would be totally dominated by big brands, your local pizza shop can’t afford to develop a website or app for their business alone. But they still take calls, pick-ups, and dine-ins.

View on HN

Seems like a comment from 2019. To sell online, pizza place needs just to create account on uber eats or door dash.

But a spot that does primarily in person sales before 2020 won't make a huge pivot to online sales just because they open a website.

I'm a software dev, I own a Fitbit and Alexa's, I still just call the local pizza place. It's just as fast as most apps and means better margins for a local businesses.

Selling on door dash or uber eats destroys the pizza business model. Pizza is one of the only foods that is profitable to deliver. A pizza is extremely cheap to produce with markup that can be in excess of 1000%. This allows the pizza maker to pay a driver to deliver the pizza. The driver doesn't make anywhere near the cut Uber takes from each order.

> pizza is extremely cheap to produce with markup that can be in excess of 1000%.

This is true, and more: pizza is well suited to delivery versus other foods. For example, french fries age quickly, becoming unappealing in 10 minutes[1]. Chicken katsu ("chicken cutlets") travels so poorly my local shop sells them to go uncut. Between the The end result is that Dominos Pizza Inc outperformed GOOG in the past 5y[2]

Unfortunately, Pizza's viability and profitability in delivery service also undercuts your argument. That mom & pop Curry Pizza place someone mentioned _is_ on ubereats. I spent 15 minutes looking for a pizza place near me that wasnt on uber and failed. Even places that normally don't deliver are on it: Pasqually's is a ghost kitchen selling pizza and wings that is just Chuck E Cheese rebranded[3]. The margins are so high the logic is pretty simple: selling a pizza for only 500% profit is better than no profit at all.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2019/10/23/772775254/episode-946-fries-o... [2]: https://g.co/finance/DPZ:NYSE?window=5Y&comparison=NASDAQ%3A... [3]: https://onezero.medium.com/the-artisanal-pizza-you-ordered-m...

Because pizza is so cheap, you can undercut on price by not using Uber Eats. With other foods, they can't be delivered more cheaply than the Uber Eats price, so the only option for consumers is to pay the 30% markup + tip or not eat at all.

I work part time at a local pizza restaurant. We do not do business with any app-based delivery service. We have drivers on staff and that's it.

We tried DoorDash many years ago, but the DD drivers were always slower than our drivers and delivered cold pizza (because they cover a much larger delivery area). Then the customer complains and we have to give them a free pizza, and they still write a bad review for us because of something out of our control.

Even worse, it only shows online pizza sales for the three big pizza companies, it specifically excludes small pizza retailers.

People in New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco aren't ordering their pizza from Papa John's.

> That pizza graph is extremely misleading.

Agreed. I give them bonus points for using a pie graph to represent pizza, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com