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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

I'm much more interested in a free-form decentralized general delivery platform for food. The customer places the order directly with the merchant, and the delivery person just delivers and is paid directly for delivery.

Why? Because I'm very annoyed at postmates/uber eats, doordash, and grubhub. At my fiancee's place, there is a restaurant we love. Neither we, nor the restaurant moved, and yet postmates suddenly claims that it is now "too far to deliver". The restaurant is on doordash, but they gatekeep the menu, and basically none of the restaurant's menu is available except for soda and extra napkins. The place isn't even on grubhub. There are many more places like that. I've placed orders for pickup and round-trip uber'ed to get them, but that's a huge waste of time.

What I want is a service where if I place an order myself for pickup, I can book a courier to get the food for me. Please tell me somebody is working on this.

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Everyone wants this but no one really wants this. The reason these restrictions exist is because of food quality issues, conditions at the pickup, wait times, courier feedback etc. Every food delivery co at some point did deliveries from certain places and went on to restrict them because for one reason or another the experience was not great for the customer / fleet or the merchant. At least that's how we did things at Postmates

Why is the delivery service concerned about the food quality at all? Post office is not concerned about quality of products it ships and I don't see anyone expecting it to be.

Customers turn to the food delivery service first. The pressure to meet all customer expectations is huge given the competition.

The Postal service is a utility competing on efficiency and price. That's not what "tech unicorns" get billion dollar valuations to compete on. Tech is about building a "platform" to siphon off money for all eternity while doing little of the ongoing labor of delivering or producing the value. To build that platform you need a moat, because otherwise somebody will come in a compete on price, so you build brand loyalty by gate-keeping the quality of stuff on your platform. That way any competing platform will initially be primarily populated by all the stores too "bad" to be marketed with the incumbent.

It's quite simply not financially lucrative enough to run a utility for venture capitalists. In a more sane, less inflated economic climate, this might change.

Because they aren't just "delivery services" and don't want to be, as a delivery service (or any other sustainable, boring "utility business") has poor potential for monopolising a market and the "growth & engagement" VC tech-bros want.

I'm not a fan of companies telling me what I want. I'm aware things take time, and the food we order from this place travels well and reheats well. Post a click-thru warning and let me decide for myself.

The restaurant probably doesn't want the bad press associated with other customers getting cold/melted/soggy/etc food. Also, the restaurant may want to limit the amount of takeaway, as the venue may be small to accommodate too many carriers coming and going. Also, the courier may not like the route, maybe it takes too long (due to distance, but also traffic and other road conditions) and it's not worthwhile for them. The point is that you are just one piece of the equation and those apps are not necessarily telling you what you want, but telling you what they want.

Shouldn't those concerns be addressed by the restaurant itself, rather through various delivery platforms? After all, there's no real difference between you going to pick up the food yourself and you hiring a contractor to do it.

There is a difference. People are far less likely to go themselves, so that may be manageable by the restaurant. The app brings a lot more orders in. The restaurant possibly solved the problem by telling the delivery platform. If they suddenly had a bunch of couriers showing up at their door at peak times their solution would likely be similar, by telling the customer that they live too far away so they won’t let them order takeaway or something else along those lines. But the restaurants probably prefer to deal with a single party that can handle that bit of customer satisfaction for them.

This would be great, but you still need the oversight and accountability that the apps provide. That needs to be offloaded to either you (you pay and trust your courier) or the restaurant (they charge you for their trusted couriers).

It makes more sense to me for the restaurant to validate their own team of couriers, so what you really need is a company that builds a widget which allows restaurants to cheaply host a grubhub/doordash equivalent on their own. They just need some super low-code no friction solution because restaurants can be pretty tech averse. You would need to really figure out what the killer features of grubhub/doordash are and how to put those in the hands of the restaurant, I imagine the 20+% cut that grubhub takes would make it an easy sell.

A courier’s union could provide oversight and loss compensation. It’s the most decentralized way to do it imo. EDIT: and health insurance and worker protection!

Isn't a union just another form of centralization? Ostensibly the whole appeal of decentralization is that larger organizations incentivizes stray from workers and customers, and a large union is a large organization. The idea of a restaurant being the central unit appeals to me because it is never going to be > 30 individuals so will always be exposed to workers interests.

Centralization describes a system where one organization controls the whole network. This is like Uber or Twitter. Decentralization describes a system where multiple organizations work together and there is no central point of control. This would be couriers unions or mastodon. In mastodon a single server can host thousands of users but no server controls the network. Then there is peer-to-peer and this would be like Matrix chat or a system where customers pay couriers as individuals. Here is a diagram: https://teblocha.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/sas.png

A system where restaurants take responsibility for deliveries is in principle decentralized as well, but I would argue that being a restaurant and managing deliveries are generally different tasks. Without other controls that system would likely devolve to one central firm contracting our delivery workers to restaurants, which is essentially exactly what we have now.

The issue with worker protection is not really about the size of the organization, but about who has control and decision making power. I suppose I should have said a cooperative of delivery drivers instead of a union, because in the USA the Taft-Hartley act severely compromised how unions behave and centralized their power in union leadership. So that was my mistake in phrasing.

But I believe a cooperatively run delivery service would better look out for the rights of delivery drivers specifically, compared to restaurants who are more focused on managing food service and would be likely to subcontract delivery service to a centralized firm.

Or look we have it both ways and restaurants subcontract to a cooperative of delivery drivers. My point is delivery drivers should organize and collectively manage their jobs. Actually I think every firm in our economy should be a cooperative.

ah cool that is a good description. The line between de & centralized is a bit blurry.

We seem to have, in our fervor over decentralization, forgotten that centralization of systems and services leads to lower cost and higher efficiency. That's why we do it now, and that's why it's been an emergent property of human systems for millennia.

A decentralized uber - just like a gig economy uber - cannot benefit from pooling leases, cannot benefit from pooling insurance and as a result has a higher cost basis than a taxi service. People will take the cheapest option when a service is a commodity.

This is just as true of food delivery.

Decentralization has no inherent value to a customer beyond the ideological. Stop decentralizing things for its own sake and start focusing on the economics.

Is it true that the absolute costs associated with centralization is lower than decentralization? Maybe there's some efficiencies in bulk orders, but there's so much overhead with BigCorp I would expect that the actual operating costs would be lower.

No evaluation of a decentralized idea is complete without an economic assessment because we know that the economics are a serious potential issue. If you do that and it makes sense, go with god, but the burden of proof is on the proposer that the business makes even the slightest bit of sense.

It isn't inherently more efficient, humans are just bad at organizing past a certain scale so companies needed middle managers/accountants/executives. A single individual handling insurance/billing/accounting/legal would be crazy in the past but it is feasible today. In decentralized the centralization still exists it is just offloaded to software.

Is there, today, a single decentralized system that is measurably more efficient than a centralized solution? Please do not include regulatory arbitrage where rules are simply not followed due to lack of will or ability to enforce.

You can use a service like TaskRabbit for it.

Some ride hailing apps have courier option available. Perhaps not in the US though? You could order a taxi and ask driver to retrieve your order for you for a tip?

Hmm.. Lyft has no option for consumers (though they do have a delivery service open to businesses)

Uber has a package delivery option. That actually sounds interesting. I may try that the next time we're at her place.

Probably because they eat the cost of a refund to the customer over a bad order.

> The place isn't even on grubhub

What are some reasons a restaurant owner would not want their restaurant on GrubHub (let alone their listing as fleshed out/optimized/detailed as possible)?

They're either too busy or they're deliberately ignoring it/avoiding it for ______ reasons (they don't want the headache that comes with "grubhub" style customers/orders/confusion?)

Some kind of food really doesn't travel well or needs to be eaten soon after being prepared, and customers frustratingly mentally take it out on the restaurant instead of the delivery platform. The results in a ton of complaints and even lost future customers. These complaints are extra brutal because they might be left on Yelp instead of merely on GrubHub. There are also apparently a ton of cancellations via GrubHub, so the restaurant can end up eating the preparation cost of a bunch of orders. Things can also be super confusing for restaurants that don't have an essentially-permanently fixed menu, because GrubHub will result in a ton of obsolete menu items being ordered by people who then have to talk to the restaurant in frustration. This last bit can be fixed if you pay GrubHub to become a "partner", but now that's a complex business model decision that might simply not make sense for every restaurant.

In Texas, Favor (owned by HEB, the grocery chain) allows for this. They interface directly with some restaurants like UberEats or Grubhub, but you can order anything from anywhere and they’ll go and place the order as a regular to-go request.

Seems to me one strongly enables the other.

A better solution is just to drive your own car (or bike) to pick up your food.

And for those of us with neither? Or mobility issues? Or who are drunk?

Come on. If you have the financial resources to get on HN and pay for restaurant food and delivery service then you can afford some kind of used car and/or bike. The vast majority of people with mobility issues are still capable of driving and/or cycling with some appropriate vehicle modifications. My neighbor uses a motorized wheelchair and drives a modified minivan with a lift. I've seen elderly people with balance issues riding adult tricycles around town.

If you're drunk then maybe you should have planned ahead. Or just heat up a frozen pizza.

I don't have a car - and I don't like riding a bike at night. Perhaps step out of your bubble?

Make food at home? Leftovers? No one owes you food delivery.

Buy a car. Install lights on your bike. Pick up your food before it gets dark.

Perhaps stop making excuses for being hapless.

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