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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

> None of those are revolutionary companies.

Not only Uber/Grab (or delivery app) were revolutionary, they are still revolutionary. I could live without LLMs and my life will be slightly impacted when coding. If delivery apps are not available, my life is severely degraded. The other day I was sick. I got medicine and dinner with Grab. Delivered to the condo lobby which is as far as I can get. That is revolutionary.

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FWIW, local Yellow Cab et al, in the U.S., has been doing that for /decades/ in the areas I've lived.

Rx medicine delivery used to be quite standard for taxis.

Is it revolutionary to order from a screen rather than calling a restaurant for delivery? I don’t think so.

Honestly, yes. Calling in an order can result in the restaurant botching the order and you have no way to challenge it unless you recorded the call. Also, as someone who’s been on both sides of the transaction, some people have poor audio quality or speak accented English, which is difficult to understand. Ordering from a screen saves everyone valuable time and reduces confusion.

I’ve had app delivery orders get botched, drivers get lost on their way to my apartment, food show up cold or ruined, etc.

The worst part is that when DoorDash fucks up an order, the standard remediation process every other business respects—either a full refund or come back, pick up the wrong order, and bring you the correct order—is just not something they ever do. And if you want to avoid DoorDash, you can’t because if you order from the restaurant directly it often turns out to be white label DoorDash.

Some days I wish there was a corporate death penalty and that it could be applied to DoorDash.

Practically or functionally? Airbnb was invented by people posting on craigslist message boards, and even existed before the Internet, if you had rich friends with spare apartments. But by packaging it up into an online platform it became a company with 2.5 billion in revenue last year. So you can dismiss ordering from a screen instead of looking at a piece of paper and using the phone as not being revolutionary, because of you squint, they're the same thing, but I can now order take out for restaurants I previously would never have ordered from, and Uber Eats generated $13.7 billion in revenue last year, up from 12.2.

Again, the "revolutionary" aspect that made Uber and AirBnB big names, as opposed to any of the plethora of competitors who were doing the same thing at the same time or before, is that these two gained "innovative" competitive advantage by breaking the law around the world.

Obviously you can get ahead if you ignore the rules everyone else plays by.

If we throw away the laws, there's a lot more unrealized "innovation" waiting.

The taxi cab companies were free to innovate and create their own app. And we could continue to have drivers who's credit card machine didn't work until suddenly it does because you don't have any cash. Regulatory capture is anti-capitalism.

Yes, let's throw away the bad laws that are only there to prop up ossified power structures that exist for no good reason, and innovate!

Some laws are good, some laws are bad. we don't have to agree on which ones are which, but it's an oversimplification to frame it as merely that.

Were you not able to order food before Uber/Grab?

I am not in the US and yes, it is not a thing (though there was a pizza place that had phone order, but that's rather an exception).

Before the proliferation of Uber Eats, Doordash, GrubHub, etc, most of the places I've lived had 2 choices for delivered food: pizza and Chinese.

It has absolutely massively expanded the kinds of food I can get delivered living in a suburban bordering on rural area. It might be a different experience in cities where the population size made delivery reasonable for many restaurants to offer on their own.

Now if anyone solves the problem that for most cuisines ordered food is vastly inferior to freshly served meals. That would be revolutionary. Crisp fries and pizza. Noodles perfectly Al dente and risotto that has not started to thicken.

It's far from a perfect solution, but I applaud businesses that have tried to improve the situation through packaging changes. IHOP is a stand-out here, in my experience. Their packaging is very sturdy and isolates each component in its own space. I've occasionally been surprised at how hot the food is.

Hah. I went to find a picture and apparently they gave an award to the company that designed the packaging: https://www.directpackinc.com/2018-ihop-vendor-partner-year/

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