DoorDash to acquire Deliveroo
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Singapore hawker center.
Turn up to somewhere ~10 mins or less from your location. Have a great meal for $5 (US) or less.
Continue
No delivery fees, delivery emissions or waste. Talk to people... The list goes on.
Most smaller places it is “bring your food” or they get food in from a caterer to set up in the break room.
I had a job through a temp agency back in 2019, and we were occupying a rather spacious and well-equipped office building belonging to our client. One of the perks was free sodas and well-appointed break rooms, with fridge, microwave oven and all. However, there was no cafeteria nor canteen. Worse yet, there was no restaurant or deli within any reasonable walking distance to the site. It was a vast and dedicated office park with very large corporations as tenants, and evidently most of them did typically have cafeterias, or their actual employees had other arrangements.
Therefore I found myself preparing something at home to bring as "lunch" every day, and it was difficult because I am not good at preparing food at all. We were only alotted 30 minutes total to eat, and I found that barely enough time to put it together, heat something, and wolf it down. It was the most distasteful aspect of working there, having no other choice for breaks. We were working "swing shift" into the night (off at 10pm or so) and so the choices for meals after work were quite slim, and I was riding the bus anyway.
There are many office parks and corporate centers around here that feature at least one little deli or sandwich shop on the corner, that is walking distance for employees. I really don't think I'd accept work on-site at a place that lacked a cafeteria or a nearby restaurant.
Really bad for health, especially for people working into the night and presumably don’t get enough exercise.
Why don’t you make food at home and bring it?
I'm not saying it's necessarily all bad, just that it's not something we can replicate in western countries.
Now having enough small food stands to create a hawker center is even more difficult. But having a hawker center 10 minutes from anywhere, ran exclusively by immigrants but somehow still properly regulated?
I mean, that's how Deliveroo and other delivery services (Uber eats and equivalents) works (at least here in Europe).
Singapore is effectively a big city, just the difference in geometry between it and pretty much any country you're thinking of makes it impossible to have a "hawker center 10 minutes of walk away from anybody".
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/hawker-stalls-can-...
Whenever I try them my food usually arrives cold and more than once has apparently gotten stolen and then I have to spend a bunch of time with delivery people messaging me saying the food is not there, and then have to talk to customer service to get a refund.
On top of that they practically double the cost of the already expensive food it seems to me.
- one when I had the flu recently and was literally, non-hyperbolically barely well enough to operate the app enough to get food (for my family, too - not for me)
- once when i was out of town on business, and my previously-arranged food for my family back home fell through one day.
All your points are why I don't use it: it's already barely food (fast food), arrives cold, delivery issues, and EXTREMELY expensive. And in an era where, despite multiple raises, due to inflation I am STILL not making more CPI-adjusted income than I was in 2019, I'm not about to be lifestyle creeping for shitty cold wendy's.
We probably order delivery at least once a week. Usually a big batch of indian, chinese, a ton of tacos/rice/beans, etc. Stuff that keeps well. Then we'll have it for at least 2 meals each. I don't feel like it's that ridiculous honestly.
I'd also add that I've almost never needed to interact with the driver in the app. In the case there's a missing item or issue, support sorts it out quick enough.
However, since I live in an urban area I have been just doing takeout and picking it up myself. The cost of these delivery apps went up radically over the last few years.
It’s so much cheaper to do takeout. I just do delivery when I have a huge time crunch.
I wish DoorDash would sell their drivers some kit to keep hot stuff hot and cold stuff cold. When I bring stuff home on the bike I'll bring two insulated bags. One for hot and one for cold.
Yeah, the food and delivery fees are expensive... but we can afford it.
Same with the rent. Yeah, it's high but we can also easily afford it...
People just don't understand how wealthy people are in these 3 cities.
There is already a tipping UI in the app, but it is not intrusive, nothing as aggressive as what you'd experience in the US where you're inclined to pre-tip even before the delivery happens.
As for the capitals, yes it is becoming a thing but from my personal experience it is limited to touristy places
That being said, it is cultural norm here to tip by rounding up the order(say total is 2.59/ you tip by asking to make it 3.00/) when you are ordering in person and the service is/was good and the food is/was also good quality. Alternatively, in some restaurant, it is not usual to tip as order is collected by someone near the cash register while served by someone else entirely and someone else is preparing it. Once you are done eating, you return the dishes and go home, so there is no option to tip as you simply don’t tip at the prepayment step because you don’t know the food and service yet, you don’t tip the server as they simply bring the food and walk away.
Back when I used Deliveroo, tipping always led to worse delivery success rates so I gave up.
They suddenly became really bad recently, which is unfortunate as they generally had the edge on Uber Eats (total charlatans!)
What does this mean? If you don't tip on doordash in the US, your order just arrives a few minutes later than usual since the auction starts at a lower price and drivers will reject the lowest prices
That’s an understatement. Your order sits on the shelf for while before someone picks up if you don’t tip, sometimes more than 30 mins, until DoorDash forces some poor underpaid driver to pick it up sometimes with incentives, but mostly threats on their livelihood. In some cases, drivers do pick it up, don’t deliver, eat your stuff, or drive in other directions to focus on other orders. Orders without tips do extremely poorly these days.
For the record, I never use food delivery services because the upcharge is absurd. If I want food delivery it'll be pizza and that's it. At least that's an honest transaction and I don't have to wonder when my food will arrive or how cold it might be.
It's difficult to conflate the moral high ground with maximal participation in a weird auction format when people are just trying to buy a burrito.
In most other countries (like mine Australia) the price of the good is the advertised price. There is no extra weird moral based financial game played on top.
Then they should have whatever that is be the actual displayed cost.
As it stands now, there’s an often delivery fee which apparently does not guarantee and reasonable delivery time. How does that make any sense?
But it's a little odd to turn this into a moral issue when the app actually does give you the means to pay the driver what you believe is actually fair, above the base amount being charged.
So what this really tells me is that you just think the true cost is more than you want to pay. Which is totally fine.
However, you should still tip, because not tipping isn't a protest. You're not hurting doordash by not tipping, you're just hurting the driver and yourself. The driver who, as we've all rightfully pointed out, is already exploited.
It’s not a tip. A tip is an additional sign of appreciation for the quality of service. When this becomes a compulsory addition (as it seems to be in US culture) it’s simply a hidden tax, paying it in advance of receiving said service is even more ridiculous. In this case - as we seem to have established - it’s a model that hurts both worker and consumer, allowing exploitative employers to externalise costs by presenting a false moral dilemma.
No such wide spread culture or requirement in 50% of the counties considered to be in the Anglosphere.
Whilst it might exist in some capacity, a capacity that is far more limited, not applied in the same manner and easily avoided. It’s not even remotely the same as the situation in the US where it’s effectively mandatory across the board.
> it’s a model that hurts both worker and consumer
Yes, it is. But by not tipping, you're objectively hurting the worker more. Notice my choice of words here - objectively. That means don't bother trying to argue against it.
Why?
You haven't even begun to further explain nor explore the wider economic and social implications of what you claim to be the one true way, nor potential alternatives (and why they are impossible or insufficient). You're making increasingly bold claims, therefore you should perhaps back them up. Simply declaring what you think to be true as objectively so, doesn't make it such.
> That means don't bother trying to argue against it.
Thanks, wasn't sure if this was meant to be humorous but it did give me a chuckle.
Maybe the hope is that if you kick people already down they’ll “learn a lesson” and then change their behavior? Which, I don’t know, maybe. But it seems to me it’s more likely they just continue doing what they’re doing but now worse.
And, by the way, I’m using objectively correctly.
If you don’t tip them, the worker makes less money on that order. Is less money for workers a better or worse outcome? It’s an incredibly simply line of logic. And, for the record, you haven’t even attempted to refute it. You haven’t said why not tipping is good. So… I’m inclined to believe I’m right and you know it. Maybe there’s some cognitive dissonance there where you want to simultaneously be pro-labor and pay labor less.
Tipping isn’t a culture. Well, it is, but because we allow it to be via legislation. Of course companies enforce and employ tipping - it’s a win for them. You can’t dismantle the culture without addressing the root cause. It’s like proclaiming you’re gonna solve a poverty culture by driving around in a Range Rover. Yeah… that doesn’t fix anything.
You want to believe you’re doing your part by doing nothing at all. It’s a nice thought and I’m sure comforting, but it’s not real. If you want tips to stop, then force employers to pay living wages and prevent them from gathering tips. There, problem solved.
It’s a moral and social contract decision. In particular if you want to incentive the world to provide good service.
They're also treated badly because they don't know how much they'll get paid in practice, which makes financial planning even more difficult, including comparing job offers. Instead of just getting the higher-paid job, you get lured into accepting a low-paying one with promises of tips that may or may not materialize. My salary is basically the main thing that's legally enforceable when I sign an employment contract, but I wouldn't even get that if I relied on tips.
> Just pay what it really costs.
How much is that exactly? Is that +5/10/20% of the initial price?
Tipping when it becomes non-negligible completely breaks transparency (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(market)) which makes everything less efficient.
Honestly only Americans could come up with this BS justification about "lowest bidder" for a service I'm fully paying for
Obviously nobody wants to order food on ebay, and if you're going to argue that an auction is the only possible outcome why wouldn't that apply to the restaurant itself too? The restaurant could aggressively underpay/understaff chefs, then you go to pick up the order and restaurant says "Oh someone else offered to buy food at a higher price, but feel free to order again and offer more, and sit here for 30m while we prepare it!"
So I really don’t see the point of tipping beforehand. You can tip the driver when he delivers the meal if that’s what you want.
Anything before the service have been delivered sounds like a fee and, if I understand other comments here, a mean to pay for your position in the queue which imho sounds pretty disgusting.
Then what's the delivery fee?
In the US, many food-related jobs are paid rates predicated on the workers being tipped. Sure there are some laws requiring the business to make up the difference to minimum wage if not met (over an average), but that’s still only up to minimum wage which is criminally low in many states.
Some states have started requiring the companies running app-based gig jobs to also ensure a minimum wage is paid, but not many yet.
US tipping culture is crazy.
Note the implications: If every driver in your area accepts orders at the same price, doordash will absorb the entire tip from every order. I dunno why people make up FUD instead of just doing an image search for what the driver's UI looks like.
Edit: while it is true that base pay does go up if an order gets declined, it doesn’t ALWAYS go up and if it does, it takes a while to get it to a reasonable rate. That is when your order just sits there.
It’s my understanding that it may be different in some markets, but generally while drivers may not know exactly how much you tip above a certain amount venue accepting the order, they do seem to generally know if you haven’t tipped or have tipped a tiny amount.
https://www.reddit.com/r/doordash/comments/12d8p18/do_driver...
Customers will not correlate poor tipping with poor service, because tipping is considered so culturally different. If that behaviour starts to happen, customers will just use it once or twice, have a poor experience and decide "nope, that doesn't work for me, I'll not use that any more".
In the UK Deliveroo offers me a chance to tip when making an order but only really "pushes" it after delivery, conforming to the UK sense of a tip being in response to great service. I've only been minded to do it once when a driver genuinely did something exceptional when I messed up an order - so he got a £5 tip on a £2.50 delivery fee from a restaurant about a mile away from me.
DoorDash could actually try something innovative here - they could eradicate tips, and push service fees up a little, and make a big deal of it in their marketing that their gig economy riders are getting a great deal. If it catches on, you could find this ripple out into other services like Uber, and perhaps change the tone on tipping in general in other scenarios, too.
DoorDash (at least in some markets in the US) has a message indicating the correlation between no tip and slow delivery time.
Low fee slower less likely to get a driver. High fee faster drivers will take your order over others.
On demand food delivery is a premium luxury service (though the platforms have done their best to market it as otherwise). Please tip accordingly. These people work their asses off and are generally from a very low income background. If you have problems with that, go to the grocery store.
I stopped automatically tipping in New York City and the Bay Area. They earn a minimum wage now [1]. If they go above and beyond, sure, I'll tip. But if they just do their job, there are now regulations that have them get paid.
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/news/018-24/mayor-adams-first-a...
It's more that they're regulated, the price of the delivered food is already high, and I'm not putting a premium on their labour above e.g. the folks who prepared the food.
Different contexts. Even though restaurants are meant to make up the gap between the tipped and actual minimums, they often don't. And delivery drivers in New York and California are making well above the federal minimumw wage. Most importantly: a restaurant tip is split between skilled servers and kitchen staff. It's going to multiple people, each of whom have developed a specialised skill that adds value to my experience. None of that is true for someone carting my food to my home.
Absent regulation, I think tipping drivers and delivery staff is good. With regulation, the tradeoff has sort of been made for me.
This is the one thing that really irks me. This is a known thing. But everyone seems to think the solution to that is "well, the customer should fix that". Any attempt to try to fix that through Departments of Labor is met with reasons why not. Servers don't want to report their employer, etc.
And then that leads to tropes like "If you don't tip well, I am being taxed to serve you". No, you're not. The IRS taxes you on an estimate of your tipped income - if you can show that it was less than that, then that's what you get taxed on. The reality is that the IRS's estimate assumes that you get 8% tips (when was the last time you ever saw that?), so most servers are undertaxed on tipped income, and don't want to rock that boat.
Last time I mentioned this here, a few people piped up that this "didn't matter", because there is "no way to document cash tips for the IRS"...
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f4070--2005.pdf - fill this out, once a month. It takes a good three to four minutes.
I live in Oregon and employees here make a minimum of $14.70/hour and $15.95 in the Portland Metro area before tips. California and Washington have slightly higher minimums, seemingly state-wide. There are other states listed that are not as generous.
I tip but am sympathetic to my relatives who don't. Many places expect you to pay and tip, then take your drinks and food to the table, bus your tables, etc.
Absolutely with a roommate.
As HN frequently points out "your business model is not my problem".
It is problem with business taking advantage of low income groups and business should be guilt into doing the right thing. Not people for not tipping.
If a company can't exist/ will be bankrupt ( or whatever the greedy business owners complain) if they can't provide livable( not minimum wage that was set 10 years ago and never account for inflation) wage to workers they should not exist in first place.
Tipping just enables this exploitation and at the same time paying billion of dollars to shareholders . I have read news about companies, owners taking share of the tip.
delivery drivers should protest and make sure government to pass bills to stop this exploitation.
these business are taking advantage of situation of vulnerable people who either have to sleep hungry and not exploited or be exploited but have a meal. No idea how we can as a society make it better.
Either don't tip, or don't use the service. If you do tip, you're contributing to workers being exploited.
The Deliveroo app already asks if you want to tip.
Yes people are lazy. But lazy to the point of paying an additionnal fee to be waiting twice the time it gets to fetch the same food yourself and receive dishes that are cold instead of hot? What is the incentive really? If only those delivery services would use devices that keep food warm and deliver from somewhere far from home, I would maybe understand, but they aren't even available in a wider than a small radius around your house, so it is always more convenient to walk/cycle/drive to wherever you would order that food anyway.
The only ones that do it relatively well are pizza joints and they usually have their own delivery service so you don't even have to use these apps.
You dont seem to understand just how lazy people are.
Have some friends over and want to get a couple pizzas that everyone is happy with? Sure I get that rather than someone having to go out and pick them up. But, as a routine thing, I've never gotten the attraction of delivery.
That doesn't mean I begrudge them their use of these services. If that's what they want to spend their income on, that's their business. I just think it's foolish and based on misconceptions.
For you, and your circumstances. For other people, it’s exactly as hard as they think it is.
I can’t use a knife, or look down to prepare food without risking the inability to use large parts of my body for the rest of the day and potentially the next.
Though my answer to this is shakes, not food service to be fair.
> based on misconceptions
You don’t say?
I don't. That was eggs for me, but alas. At best I have oatmeal ready.
Even cheaper than eggs and much longer shelf life
I do in fact have pasta but I wouldn't call it much of a meal by itself. I usually cook it with some ground beef or turkey and try to keep some leftovers, but that leaves the realm of "quick 10 minute meals".
I'll keep the shrimp in mind when going for groceries next time as well. I'm all ears for some quick and tasty sources of protein.
Someone nailed it in the thread above related to the -time/+money, but after a couple of years working on it, I realized that the people that use those services are not the public that would go to a restaurant for a gastronomic experience, and that's ok.
At least for me, the biggest 3rd or maybe 4th order effect of the food delivery industry and their dark/gray kitchens is that the concept of having a nice cooked meal locally is almost over, with some exceptions.
Due to the over-optimization of the kitchens and the offset in terms of revenue that restaurants can have (i.e., orders without increasing the real estate), we have a bunch of pre-set mounted meals in almost all restaurants, and the probability of eating something tasty and unique is very low due to that.
The irony is that, at least in my experience, the best non-chain and/or fine restaurants that I found were the ones in some shopping centers in the Nordics for a simple accidental association: none of those has any possibility to have food delivery due to hard physical constraints, and my assumption is that, since they do not have this possibility, they have to deliver the best meal possible to have people return and build a positive reputation.
When I want "an experience" I travel to a high-end restaurant. A local restaurant does not deliver that experience, whether I order home or go eat there. When I feel like that quality food, I order it because I don't want to spend my time for that quality food.
That is very generic.
There are people who travel to restaurants that are a walking distance from my place because they are known from afar to be very good. And they are not necessarily "high end" in the sense that they don't serve plates dressed according to a chief desire nor do they have sommelier, they just happen to make very good dishes anyway.
Not all good restaurants are the ones where you are greeted by some people in a tuxedo. And the good ones aren't necessarily far away from you.
And I did not say there aren't good ones closer, but that they don't offer enough of an experience for me to value wasting time traveling there, and eating somewhere where I don't have the comfort of being in my own home.
When I go out to eat, the experience needs to have sufficient redeeming qualities to overcome what to me is the substantial detriment of not being at home.
And you’d be wrong with your assumption (because that’s what it is.)
Also I’m ordering Deliveroo specifically so I can get the time back, that’s the price you’re really paying - I had a long day at work and I want the time to relax and not spend it sourcing and making dinner.
However, we did draw some lines as some foods are not enjoyable in case one of those long wait times happens (e.g. pizza, burger, cooked meat dishes, etc).
This is a truly wild suggestion.
I know that you mentioned the incentive from the customer perspective, but since I've worked in 2 of the top 5 world food delivery companies, I can have some insights about it beyond people's laziness.
1) Availability of different cuisines regardless of distance: If you're talking about a bikeable, small-sized European capital or city with a limited number of restaurants, yes—you can place your order in person without any issue. But if you're in a mid-sized city with a high variety of restaurants, like Berlin, that’s not feasible. Most of the time, people don't use the app to order from the local pizza place; they use it to get a nice Indian, Japanese, Nepalese, or Thai dish from a restaurant 6 to 10 km away, especially on a rainy Friday.
2) It’s hard for restaurants to coordinate table bookings with walk-ins: Many restaurants join the platform because, while they can manage bookings and some fixed demand, they also risk losing walk-in customers (dynamic demand) when there's no space available. What restaurants do now is manage both bookings and walk-ins without worrying about losing revenue—because delivery can make up for no-shows or frustrated walk-ins.
3) Food delivery removes waiting logistics: If you walk, cycle, or drive, you incur the full logistics cost plus the opportunity cost (e.g., if you're organizing an event and need to set aside an hour for food). With delivery platforms, you can "actively wait"—you place the order through the app and do other things while waiting. You’re paying for both the logistics and the saved opportunity cost.
4) Restaurants can optimize menus and kitchen efficiency instead of real estate: This relates to point 2. In my experience, restaurants are becoming more like a front-end experience for dine-in customers, but many are transforming into what could be called "kitchens as a service." Customers order remotely, and a highly optimized kitchen, in terms of logistics and execution, prepares a specific dish. One thing I've noticed—and personally feel conflicted about—is that restaurants are betting on hyper-optimization by selling more of what I call "pre-mounted standardized dishes." In other words, instead of restaurants thinking about increasing their space to accommodate potential walk-ins, they will move towards maximizing kitchen efficiency.
Example: In Brazilian food restaurants, they have preset portions of rice, beans, French fries, and salad, and just reheat pre-cooked steak. For Thai food, they keep cold dressings in containers, and all noodles are pre-cooked and stored in warmers, and so on.
That is my main problem, it doesn't work that well in my place. Food delivery apps here only propose me stuff that is in a 3 km radius or so and not the 6 to 10km ones away. So in the end if I want something different than what is in a walking/cycling distance in my neighborhood I need to move myself.
And you know... if food is cold, you probably have a microwave?
Whether this is a good use of money is debatable but I think it's pretty easy to imagine scenarios in which this would be used.
Order $40 of mediocre food and pop it in the microwave when it gets to you, cold. No surprise this is the community that brought us Soylent.
Do these people even like food? Fine if not, but in that case stock up on broccoli, rice and chicken and eat it every day; you'll save money and be healthier.
They don't.
Basically they _consume_ food like they _consume_ shows on Netflix.
They want tons of choice, they want something constantly new, but they never actually enjoy what they consume. Ask them what they ate last week and they can't tell you. Ask them what they thought about what they just ate, same result.
It would be fine if it wasn't for the tons of trash that creates and the cooks/delivery people that are exploited by this system.
They want you scared alone and staring at a screen. These services allow people to withdraw from the social interaction of ordering food in person- they feed off of and encourage social anxiety.
I think the DoorDash culture is promoted because it means you can now work an hour more of (often unpaid) overtime, without worrying for your dinner. Or that you won't resist the extra time commuting to a far office location, so that your employer can save on their office space rent. Or won't complain for being forced to live out of the city because funds have bought up all the housing for "investment" and you can no longer afford a place in it.
Can you elaborate?
I have little kids. We buy food at the grocery store and cook it. What game is being changed? You're talking about ordering takeout.
First you have to have frozen chicken nuggets on hand at home. That means that you've already been to the grocery store, picked some up, and brought them home somehow to be stored.
Now you've also got a working and clean air fryer, sink, utensils, and other kitchen accoutrements that can be used on the nuggets. You may also find it necessary to have, on-hand, some condiments or side dishes to make a complete meal of the nuggets you're trying to make.
Then you put them onto a plate -- hope you got a plate -- and eat them with clean utensils, and then you clean that stuff up, wipe the counter, wash and put away dishes. Then you make a note on your shopping list or inventory, to replenish what you just ate.
It's not a simple proposition, all of these steps, especially when someone is a bachelor, mentally ill, isolated, etc. You feel it's easier for you, that is great, you've got some life skills, but other people struggle mightily with just the cleanup bits, for example.
Your whole comment is just infantilization, plain and simple.
Delvier food often comes in layers of bags, tons of extra stuff, there is often sauce overflow and so on. Tons of trash you have to deal with and so on.
> especially when someone is a bachelor,
I'm a bachelor and I can easily make food as good at home. Cooking for 1 person is easy.
And I'm not just heating up forzen chicken nuggets. I know in the US most people go shopping every 2 weeks, driving to some big box store getting tons of stuff.
I just walk to a store, or pick some stuff up on my way home. Fresh meat and fresh vegis always.
> mentally ill
Doing something yourself is better for your mental health then getting delivery.
Otherwise I would also prefer to eat in the restaurant, cheaper and easier as well.
And because I'm a software developer with a flexible work schedule paid hourly, the act of going to grab the food myself and not working for 30 minutes would cost me way more than delivery costs (even cooking my own meals can be more expensive when time is factored in, compared to food price at restaurant + delivery cost (for ~2 portions prepared in 30 minutes. Proper meal-prepping would be cheaper of course, but yeah I'm too lazy to do that)).
Also the food delivery services often offer discounts and with them it's sometimes cheaper to order the food than going to the restaurant and eat there. Yesterday I ordered with a 30% discount - I got a dish which would cost 10.80€ at the restaurant for 7.50€ including delivery.
In Europe it’s an electric kickbike or scooter at most, and they can pick up the food without parking. Still, not perfect, but a lot more efficient and the margins can be lower. They don’t have to hit you with those deceptive fees and tip shaming - often it’s the same consumer price.
To me, in the US it would make much more sense to chain deliveries similar to Amazon packages. A set daily menu, heaters in the truck, and multiple stops with TSM style route. Maybe that’s too much communism but it would at least make sense logistically.
The one operating in my building these days is Lunchdrop, but I've also seen Foodsby offered at other buildings. On the days I go into the office I look at the menu for the week and pick what meals I might want or I'll just plan on bringing in food. I get the email with the menu for the week either Saturday night or Sunday and can then order days ahead of time.
Off topic but I quit consulting because I had this exact realization. Sure making $1000 to fix a production outage in 15 minutes on a Saturday was amazing but it made me always think about life in billable hours to the point where I was not hanging out with friends or going to the gym anymore
In fact, I'm the exact opposite - I value this kind of job arrangement, because I can earn enough money to live comfortably (and save some money) just by working 100-120 hours monthly, which gives me much more free time than working a normal full time job + I have the flexibility to take a day off (or even a week or two of vacations) anytime I want, but I still can work some weekends if I want some extra money...
That doesn't make sense. Quite the opposite being flexible + paid hourly means that you are free to take a decent break.
Not taking proper time for a pause in the middle of a shift is both incredibly unhealthy and extremly unefficient as we can't be at 100% for long hours at a time.
Having said that anyone can prepare a decent meal in just a few minutes, there are literally tons of recipes where you just have to crudely cut stuff and throw them in a baking dish and in the oven or cook in a wok. + when you are working at home you can always eat some dinner leftovers + a bit of pan.
Your prices seems fine but I guess that is only because your delivery services are still in the pre-enshittification phase where they are competing for monopoly and actually losing money.
how is this hard to understand lol
But going out to eat is a big cost compared to eating at home!
But I guess a fraction of the population just want food to stay alive (at least the next day) and don't really care about the experience and enjoyment of actually eating it. Same reason some people buy and eat junk food on a regular basis.
It is crazy because some societies manage to make fast food quick and easy to get while still being an enjoyable experience. Like going down the street to eat Tacos or Esquites in Mexico. The food itself may not be the healthiest one but at least it is always warm and ready when you want it and tasty and there is always a place to go close to wherever you happen to be. So you just happily fetch it in the street, have a laugh with the owners or other customers and then resume your business without having to order stuff on a smartphone and wait forever to get something crappy.
At least in my area, the pizza joints also use DoorDash now. They're not just available on DoorDash. It is delivered by DoorDash also when ordering directly from the pizza joint.
That is the problem. After some failed attempts, I just make sure I always have stuff to pick and eat at home and if I am not feeling it, I just walk to a food place next door as it won't be worse than what is deliverable AND will be ready when I am actually hungry.
But seriously, people without transportation (or whose family has a single vehicle and it’s at work with someone), people with disabilities …
In any case, it’s seriously overpriced. Uber Eats offered me “$30 off” and the final bill would still have been twice the restaurant prices - and Uber likely has a markup on that as well.
As someone on Twitter aptly put, "you're ordering a taxi for your burrito"
What do you expect the price to be?
Just like most companies from ZIRP era it was held together by unlimited investor money that let it grow through price dumping.
It does make me curious what the costs are on the app side, though. We keep saying tech is scalable but many such apps have this same story. Is there a cost center I'm missing for such an app that makes it so hard to profit off of, or is it just reckless abandon of spending?
You introduce a middleman, and it eats into the already thin margin. And it's not just one middleman. It's two: the app and the delivery guy.
The average profit margin for a restaurant is 3-5%. Then you add the app that needs money. Then you add the delivery which needs money. The only way to keep the original restaurant price is to heavily subsidize the app and the delivery.
I haven't used DD or ordered pizza since 2022 at the latest, but I usually got enough food that it didn't get cold. Since it was so expensive I'd load up on appetizers and extras so I could get at least 2 meals out of it.
I don't get it today because I heard how expensive it got, and my apartment complex is huge and I don't trust them to find my unit.
Still? Around me almost all the pizza places have stopped offering their own delivery services and moved to apps.
And it's convenient when you have friends over and want to spend your time talking to them not getting food.
The only time its okay to order food its when people came for something else in the first place (moving, doing some handywork...)
Otherwise just set a meetup at a restaurant and split the bill.
The idea is to spend the most time with your friends, not in the kitchen. But I know in France food is a bigger thing.
The thing is also that here dinner is usually an afternoon thing.
But maybe that is a particularity of my area where houses / appartments are small, food is relatively inexpensive outside and weather is almost always good enough to go out.
Also preparing dinner doesn't mean you can't spend time with friends. As a French if I am invited to dinner and someone is cooking, I usually offer my help in the preparation. It is a nice occupation alongside a beer or a glass of wine and a great way to share an activity while having a chat with your host. Actually there are some other cultures where preparing the food is an integral part of the whole "spending time together thing". For example in latin america women would chat for hours preparing stuff in the kitchen while men would typically doing the same around the BBQ.
And the menu deals during lunchtime are amazing. 12 euro for 3 courses. Add some drinks and you have passed hours for cheap.
And yeah I have seen that latin thing, my ex was a latina and I saw them often socialising while making food. But in that culture preparing food seems to be very much a "women-only" thing where the men hang on the couch with a beer :P Whereas our roles here in europe are much less traditional. So it's not quite as mixed for them in terms of the pre-dinner socialisation. I tried to go into the kitchen to help/chat at one point but I didn't think I was very welcome there.
However I only know that one latino family well. Perhaps they are an outlier.
When I invite friends over it is always for something else other than food, by which I mean it's for hanging out together. Food just needs to be there because if we're going to be hanging out for 4-8 hours we'll need to eat.
Grabbing a bag crisps and a pizza ready to go to the oven beats having to fire up an app and decide/argue for minutes wether we want sushi, poké, noodles, pastas or a pizza.
Agreed! Though I think ordering is also perfectly fine, as are the other options you mentioned.
But what prompted me to respond in the first place was:
> but here in France if you invite some friends over, you are expected to cook. The only time its okay to order food its when people came for something else in the first place (moving, doing some handywork...)
Which is just silly.
I wouldn't "invite" people to help me move or do some handywork, it would rather be called "asking for help". And I know there are other kinds of invitations: playing board games, video games or music, making arts, group sex or whatever other activities one can think of that can be done in groups and yes in that case you might not expect the host to cook necessarily. My experience is that in France people would generally bring something anyway or at the very least ask what they should bring, even if it is just a bag of crisps and a few beers when meeting someone at their place.
And vast majority of time food is entirely fine and warm enough.
One of the groups of people using these apps are the disabled. Those aren't people who can just hop in a car. And they aren't always able to walk. But they absolutely are people who feel run ragged and too tired to cook some nights.
Australia's NDIS even partners with some of them to perform that service.
No they aren't, certainly not on a large scale.
I know and have known a LOT of disabled people (as well as "disabled" people) in my life.
I think there is very little overlap between
a) the population of disabled people and
b) the population of people who have enough money they can afford the cost of restaurant food + delivery fees + tip on more than a very occasional basis.
It's exactly the opposite from what I've seen. I've seen the disabled people in my life get grocery delivery (with informal arrangements before apps existed). I've seen them get bulk frozen food delivery. I've literally never seen someone who is homebound order delivery food. They can't afford it.
b) I am disabled. Please don't presume to tell me what people in my situation do or do not do.
Maybe Australia is different but here in the US people on disability only have a few hundred bucks to spend on food a month aT MOST. A single delivery meal is a quarter of that.
I wasn't saying anything about you, I was talking about people I know. Disabled people, as a group, simply don't usually have nearly enough money for food delivery.
That said, I am not a fan of ordering often - food quality is generally bad in my area, those extra fees are just nuts and the drivers get screwed the most, followed by restaurants.
Cold food has never been a problem for me with these services.
I'd pick Deliveroo over a restaurants own delivery service any day because it means not having to keep track of numbers, having tracking, and trusting their customer service. In fact, to the point that while Deliveroo allows restaurants to do their own delivery, because you lose the tracking I tend to avoid ordering from restaurants that do.
And I will just wait 10 minutes, hop on my bicycle and 2 minutes later I get my pizza right out of the oven and head home directly much faster than any delivery rider would because they mutualize orders and let the first pizzas lose most of their heat while waiting to have sufficient orders.
Google Maps seems to me like an awful hassle vs. searching for the dish I want and picking a restaurant based on what they serve rather than where they are based.
Also, Deliveroo rarely combines orders, but if you have a problem with that (can happen for very popular locations) you can pay for priority, so that part isn't an issue with them in my experience.
The time argument is also weird. I find that I have a maximum of 6 hours highly productive work in me a day, perhaps an additional few hours of less productive work. A stroll or cooking recharges my mind. I envy all the people here who are working a productive 12 hour day.
in an urban area it makes less sense. Friend's house is across the street from a plaza consisting of a grocery store, corner store, starbucks, froyo joint, and a few other eateries.
Heck, when I became parent and decided for a couple of years to work at 80% I realized I was doing the same amount of work as before and as much or more than any other colleague working at 100%. I only came back at 100% because I realized businesses are willing to subsidize procrastination over efficiency and I didn't find normal to be paid less if all I was asked in return was spending 1/5 of my work time time doing nothing productive for the company.
I could understand getting delivery as the emergency resort but doing that on a regular basis does not make sense to me. I think of preparing food as a form of self care.
Also, consider if you can order from a restaurant with in house delivery instead of using Door Dash.
Some people don't want a car. Some can't afford a car. Some can't drive. Some simply don't want to pay to maintain, insure, fuel and park it. Some simply don't want to take the time to leave the house, get their car, drive to some place, pick up their food and then drive home
There is absolutely both a need and a desire for delivery. Yes, you can get a bad delivery experience. I've had more than one pizza delivered where the boxes were clearly on their side, possibly because they fell off the car seat. Some drivers had hot bags. Most did not. The dedicated drivers for Dominos do, which is why that works.
Where delivery works particularly well (IME) is NYC and there they most often are on bikes, sometimes scooters. It tends to be an incredibly efficient operation.
Why do you think that people are simply capable of fetching the same food themselves?
What if they don't have transportation, what if they are too sick?
Some customers of these would fit this, but I suspect the vast majority of the valuation is from delivering food to people who could pick it up themselves if they had to.
People want to insert morality and virtue in every stupid thing. Cold showers, delivery or not, wake up times. Get a grip and sort your own shit while other people decide to use and pay for other services that you might not.
It's fine to criticize cost or experience but to pretend you're superior for your choices... Ridiculous.
> That's just bullshit. You don't know how far away the restaurants are and how many people don't own cars or if they do, the traffic back and forth and wait time would be more than a guy on a motorbike.
But they had to before deliveries were so widespread and common. Sure pizzas have been delivering for decades but I think a fraction of the population was simply better prepared and would always have something ready to heat / easy cook whenever they wanted.
I think the offering somewhat induced the lazyness.
See how ridiculous is to gatekeep these kind of things? There's never an end to it.
No wait, simply order early or hold off eating for 30 mins, while you for sure have other things to entertain yourself with. Or not, because you're busy doing work or whatever, and the exact time of the meal isn't the biggest concern. Neither is if food is hot. You eat 3 meals every day for an entire life time, not all of them needs to be amazing.
So I'm not sure why you're so confused by the popularity of a service where someone else picks up your takeout order and brings it to you. Other than valid concerns about the labor practices of these delivery companies, and of course the occasional botched delivery (this also happened every so often with traditional pizza delivery in my small town growing up in the 90s), there's nothing to be confused about. It's just paying a bit extra for convenience, a tale as old as time.
I don’t understand this lack of ability to think beyond your own circumstance.
None of what you wrote is applicable to my life or circumstances, plus I’m disabled to boot.
Next door in Mesa, there is a significant designated Asian Quarter. So there is a high concentration of Asian restaurants and grocery stores. On a few occasions when ordering DoorDash from one of the big Chinese places, someone from the Chinese service delivered it instead; all receipts were printed in Chinese and sometimes I apparently received someone else’s order entirely.
I believe they did this on purpose to promote use of that native service for this set of restaurants. Unfortunately I don’t feel like reaching out to them or installing their weird Chinese language app, so I decided to simply steer clear of those most authentic restaurants instead.
My Chinese-speaking friend told me that the business name translates to "rice balls". Fantuan appears to have a large presence in Anglophone countries such as AUS, CA, US.
And yes, any app that would be in the Chinese language is utterly weird and foreign to me. I can't even read or sound out the characters. I'd be more comfortable in a Hebrew or Arabic app, frankly. They would be "less weird" to me. Feel free to call me a racist bigot, but I'm an ordinary American.
Not sure if you're intending it, but this reads as really racist.
> weird Chinese language app
I can’t really defend that one though.
1. Sold to a foreign buyer
2. Shut down
3. Relocated to the US
4. Are stagnant
The UK is up for sale (at a discount)
The UK is up for sale.
British companies have bought plenty abroad too:
It is 1) a deliberate decision and 2) not unique to any one country.
You must be excluding China there, as it alone has multiple tech hubs that make London look meaningless.
When Manchester United is owned by US billionaires, everything else is up for grabs.
Deliveroo has been on a downslope for a while; exiting international markets and losing home market share. And despite DoorDash's US dominance, they still haven't made significant growth with their international operations.
DoorDash operates under the brand Wolt in Europe, and based just on how much I see their branding on delivery people around town, they seem to have grown quite a bit and the past couple of years.
They've been active outside of N.America for >5 years and aside from expanding their geo footprint, they're still far from winning in most/ all markets. Which is surely the aim.
</rant>
People who are considerate, pay attention to instructions, care about your food, etc, can't afford to continue working, because they don't deliver often enough to afford rent.
The point of an auction model like these apps use is to drive down labor prices to the lowest bidder. There's no force pushing quality up, because people cannot ban certain "known bad" drivers and the rating system is non-functional. You will only ever get laborers who don't have better choices to sell their labor to. Specifically, the apps don't care about bad service, because it empirically has not stopped people from ordering. People will literally have a delivery driver eat the meal they paid 2X for and still order again from that service, because the entire system provides plausible deniability that "surely that was a fluke and this time I will have a different, better driver, right?"
American consumers are insanely un-discerning. They are willing to pay huge markups and get radically bad service on a burger and fries for whatever reason.
Also consider how many of the people working this "job" literally cannot read english.
Capitalism is dying.
They have surprisingly survived the past few years by making drivers a priority. Basically, all drivers recommend delicity in my area because they pay more, and they tell restaurants to sign up.
Don't know how they are going to compete now.
The EU is a political entity which happens to be reconsidering its independence from the US. The UK very much is not and is kowtowing favours hoping to get a good deal.
"European" describes multiple political entities each of which has similar concerns.
The only one of those entities that has actually made any progress towards independence from the US is Russia.
The EU and UK have no good options at the merger level. If they block the sale, it trashes the start-up ecosystem. If they let it through, an American company buys a local one.
The fundamental problem is the paucity of new-firm formation in the EU and UK, the scaling barriers they face that American compeitors don't, and the increased culture of risk-taking in America that lets its firms pay more for acquisitions. The last can't be addressed. The first two probably can by the EU. (The UK is not a viable sovereign entity in these regards.)
Dude worked at a bank - respectable white collar job acc. to his Dutch friends and family. He picked up a passion for coffee and wanted to open his own shop. His loved ones all thought he was nuts to leave a stable job for a maybe.
I'm sure there's a degree of that in the US, but we have a lot more "just try stuff" in our cultural myths than the Europeans tend to. Guy felt like his options were keep a job he hates or be disowned by everyone he knows.
We're still on a startup board, correct?
OTOH, if it fails, you just go back to banking, right? No big deal; hopefully you had fun.
Myth is the important word here for most people in the US. Unless you are already fairly wealthy or have wealthy parents your options are incredibly limited in the US because of the lack of a social safety net.
Net worth is a poor metric for this, it includes a lot of illiquid assets. You can't eat your car if you lose your job. On the other hand the median savings account balance is $8k which isn't going to last very long at all
No, but you can live in and save rent. Gotta be able to move it, at least every once in a while, though.
Just to give some counter-weight to this, the Netherlands has a self-employment rate that is significantly higher than the EU average [1], one of the higher EU rates of high-growth micro/small enterprises [2], a whole array of tax benefits for the self-employed and SMEs and a relatively fast moving law system that makes it increasingly easier for SMEs to be founded. And let's not forget a bunch of capitalist/financial scoops (first stock market, 1602; first investment banking, 1700s; first investment fund, 1774; etc.) some of which still have a presence today. Needless to say my experience is quite the opposite.
[1] https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/en/tools/skills-intelligence/s... [2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Unlikely, in the case of Deliveroo, but I went through this exact process and it took about a month or so to get sign off and to be allowed to sell my own company to a foreign buyer (health tech)
There’s also monopoly and competition regulation that could stop a sale.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/national-security-and-investment...
The general case is that no approval is needed in the UK to sell a company to anyone. This is a "free country".
This was especially a reply to the implied suggestion that there was some sort of political approval process.
I doubt the EU is going to block it since AFAIk they’re not competing in any country directly against each other.
My reply was rather to the suggestion that there was some sort of political approval.
I’d rather just call the restaurant directly and get it myself. For some of these restaurants, the savings is 20-35% by just grabbing it rather than using a delivery app.
Your car/other transport is completely free? I wonder what's the difference, but I've calculated for myself a while back and going to a restaurant just isn't worth it.
For me often even if I literally drive by a shopping centre when this restaurant is, I would just order on my phone instead and have it delivered to my home. It takes so much time to park in multi-story garage, then go like 200+m from my car to this restaurant (the only Burger King in my city) and back, wait for the order... Doesn't make sense for me, I hate this time wasting system.
But now Uber Eats announced the One will only cover half of the delivery fee, so looking at the trend of enshittification from now in it soon might be just worth it...
We do not need all these rent-seeking companies buying one another. Enter the market as a competitor or fuck off
They use a proxy system where the driver has to call a standard number provided by the app and then input a code to identify the specific customer.
That's typically only available while the order is in progress.
I have been called by a variety of restaurants and drivers 7 times since March 2023 while using Deliveroo - who all came through the same London phone number.
I don't even live in London.
A search online for the number (020 3871 3395) shows that others have been called by both drivers and restaurants on this number. [1]
From wikipedia.
If it wasn’t for Amex discounts I wouldn’t use it at all
I'm not sure why anyone would pay a 30% markup vs restaurant menu + fees to pick it up themself though
What about including a human, social element? Deliveroo could have been a channel for building a relationship between customers and Frankie’s Pizza where I could hear about upcoming specials, promotions, news about their expansion to a second location etc.
There could be an integration with power users (superhosts, sort of, but the analogy isn’t exact) where consensus can form around who really is the best Chinese food in town. Let’s get the hygiene rating of the kitchen front and centre too (perhaps they do this in some markets?)
For the riders, why has there never been a successful internal commitment to building a positive human workforce on the city streets? I feel like the brand started that way with their iconic jerseys and oversized food boxes but devolved into freelancers of the lowest common denominator. When my orders started arriving 50/50 in a just eat thermal bag, it really drove home the point that these services are never about long term value for the human workforce. We are now haggling on price in an auction against everyone else in the same way airline flights compete solely on price. When that happens, just as with airlines, any notion of a quality product or differentiation on service goes down the drain. It’s as if the major component of service differentiation is the lower price which is such a shame when there’s so much opportunity to shine as a food service app.
If these companies truly do want to race to the bottom as generic low latency courier services then perhaps we will hopefully see them exit the app layer and solely occupy the transport layer, leaving space at the app level for someone who cares about the state of restaurants, food, and quality, leaving the delivery part to the auction apps. I’d much rather have a high quality integrated service but if we’re obviously not going to get that then the sooner they stop trying the better.
An easy to follow starting point here for people interested:
https://archive.ph/2024.03.15-193026/https://inews.co.uk/new...
This makes zero sense to me for a logistics company specializing in local to local deliveries. Being bigger in a given geographic area grants some benefits of scale and efficiency but being in Seattle and Bangkok there's really no difference than two separate apps. Just with the nature of the business you probably want this to be as local as possible so the profits aren't siphoned out of your community.
And dictating terms to local restaurants and delivery workers, with the threat of shutting them out of the largest market.
If they changed to another platform then I'd simply move to that platform. Of course these companies did deliveries far before techbros decided to "disrupt" the industry.
I’d find it too depressing to run any kind of family business that involved food delivery.
I don't know anyone that regularly orders a takeaway by looking at some random website for some random crap, maybe it's a big city thing. I've tried to use things like ubereats in the past when away on business - last time in New York where everywhere was closed downtown at about 11pm, including the hotel room service. I was very disappointed, and vowed never again. I did something similar a couple of years earlier with the same vow though.
[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PizzaBoySpecialD...
It doesn't take great effort for a restaurant to do good without being on these apps. But some owners want to pay 15-20% of their gross revenue to a megacorp for the rest of their lives rather than invest a few hundreds or thousands in getting their own customers. We see the same thing in a ton of industries.
Likewise even though Uber in Japan is (almost) all taxis and not actual Uber drivers, most global tourists have Uber and not something like Go that’s specific to Japan. So they are profiting off almost all the taxi rides from Western visitors.