The Year Food-Delivery Prices Went Insane | Hacker News Reader

The Year Food-Delivery Prices Went Insane

nymag.com

8 pointsindigodaddy8 comments

New York just passed a law mandating ~$20/hr for food delivery people (excluding tips I believe), which I imagine will make the service more or less unviable to the customer.

The most recent experience actually compelled me to walk up and pick up the food vs getting it delivered, when the latter came with around 35% price premium.

Food delivery is a super-premium service for the well heeled, always has been.

> Maybe, though, this is all going to come to an end. Domino’s Pizza has blamed high third-party fees for its declining deliveries, and Uber’s revenue from food deliveries has fallen for three straight quarters. DoorDash has never been profitable. The Danish business that bought Grubhub in a $7.3 billion deal is now worth less than half of that and is trying to dump the company. It turns out that, even after bleeding everyone you can of their money, it’s still incredibly difficult to make a sustainable business out of delivering somebody’s pizza.

Is dominos using third party deliverers? I thought that the main takeaway we were going to get is that you can’t make money delivering someone else’s pizza but you can delivering your own ( because you have other things to do when not delivering and if people take the cheaper pickup you just make them).

It looks like they use their own drivers but do take orders through the apps (presumably because customers are there searching for pizza).

But it may also be that people have soured on delivery in general thanks to high fees charged by apps.

Domino's suffered noticeably during the pandemic lockdowns while the app-delivery services were eating their lunch, literally.

I live in a huge college town, so my delivery options nearby are nearly endless, with an amazing diversity of ethnic foods, mostly the type enjoyed by foreign students.

Domino's has always had a really good web interface and tracker. Unfortunately, since their business contracted, they actually closed their location nearest to campus (which was also nearest to me) and I'm not sure just how much consolidation that involved citywide, but their service was slow and bad after that. At least once, I never received a product after their tracker reported a successful delivery.

Refund requests are arduous and on the level of "don't even bother". Compare this to the way I could snap my fingers and get a GrubHub CSR to refund anything and everything.

There is another, independent pizza place with their own cadre of drivers, and they have fantastic service, they're open 24 hours, and they exhibit care and concern for my well-being. They always remark if they haven't seen/heard from me in a while. They never mess up my orders. Therefore I give them preference before I resort to any third-party app.

I'm surprised any of them are still in business. High fees, food delivered cold if at all, 0 hiring standards, very poor customer service.

Turns out that giving it away for free and making it up with volume isn’t scalable

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