DoorDash and Waymo launch autonomous delivery service in Phoenix
about.doordash.com
about.doordash.com
Some interest in reducing evasive maneuvers or counter-attacks triggered by noise.
It could be a lot better if multiple deliveries are handled per trip.
We've got a long way to go on actually building out our own country in a desirable way.
And that's the point. These places are less than affordable because there's a much higher demand of people who want to live in these kinds of areas than the supply of them. We should build more!
If you live in a very walkable place, you're less likely to use delivery and when you do it's more likely to be someone on a bike or scooter. Waymo's probably don't apply there. The comparison would be walking vs delivery, and that would obviously come out bad for delivery.
If you don't live in a walkable place then the comparison is you driving vs the delivery driving, and that's a wash or even positive for delivery. The induced demand of delivery vs cooking at home (assuming you grocery shop for the week) would be very bad for delivery though.
This makes sense as a theory but it doesn't match my observed reality at all. Everyone I know who frequently orders food on delivery apps live in dense, walkable cities.
According to the written history, pre-1906 San Francisco had basically that.
It seems that the normal middle-class could afford high-quality, delicious food at restaurants, multiple times per week, due to the abundance of local ingredients and overall economic conditions.
So, how to get that quality and relative pricing today?
Excerpts from "The City That Was: A Requiem of Old San Francisco" by Will Irwin (free eBook, [0], free audiobook [1], HTML version at [2]):
> San Francisco was famous for its restaurants and cafes.
> they gave the best fare on earth, for the price, at a dollar, seventy-five cents, a half a dollar, or even fifteen cents.
> a public restaurant where there was served the best dollar dinner on earth
> The eating was usually better than the surroundings. Meals that were marvels were served in tumbledown little hotels.
> A number of causes contributed to this. The country all about produced everything that a cook needs and that in abundance—the bay was an almost untapped fishing pound, the fruit farms came up to the very edge of the town, and the surrounding country produced in abundance fine meats, game, all cereals and all vegetables.
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3314
[1] https://librivox.org/san-francisco-before-and-after-the-earthquake-by-william-henry-irwin/
[2] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3314/pg3314-images.htmlThat's what I thought at first, after trying one inflation calculator: $30 for a decent meal, sure, and double that maybe for a pretty tasty meal, is pretty available. (Even then, I think ingredient purity and true preparation aptitude could be pretty suspect, especially at the lower end.)
BUT, TRYING AGAIN: Some inflation calculators do not go back to 1900. But looking further, $0.15 to $1.00 in 1900 would be $5.67 to $38.57 in 2025 dollars, according to https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/
I do wonder if there are discontinuities in inflation calculators for the times before the great fires in each city. Setting that aside, and assuming https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1900?amount=0.15 is accurate, 15 cents in 1900 would be $5.64 in 2025 AFAICT at the moment.
It would be very hard to find a decent sandwich for $5.67 just about anywhere in the USA, much less a multi-course, local, fresh, gourmet meal.
I think it's the general availability of these kinds of pure foods, and their accessibility all about town, prepared to near perfection, even accessible to the poor, that stands out in the Old San Francisco description. To wit:
> ...Hotel de France. This restaurant stood on California street...a big ramshackle house, which had been a mansion of the gold days. Louis, the proprietor, was a Frenchman...his accent was as thick as his peasant soups. The patrons were Frenchmen of the poorer class, or young and poor clerks and journalists who had discovered the delights...
> First ...was the soup mentioned before—thick and clean and good. Next, ...a course of fish—sole, rock cod, flounders or smelt—with a good French sauce. The third course was meat. This came on en bloc; the waiter dropped in the centre of each table a big roast or boiled joint together with a mustard pot and two big dishes of vegetables. Each guest manned the carving knife in turn and helped himself to his satisfaction. After that, ...a big bowl of excellent salad.... For beverage, there stood by each plate a perfectly cylindrical pint glass filled with new, watered claret. The meal closed with "fruit in season"—all that the guest cared to eat....the price was fifteen cents!
> If one wanted black coffee he paid five cents extra...a beer glass full of it. ...he threw in wine and charged extra for after-dinner coffee...
> Adulterated food at that price? Not a bit of it! The olive oil in the salad was pure, California product—why adulterate when he could get it so cheaply? The wine, too, was above reproach.... Every autumn, he brought tons and tons of cheap Mission grapes, ...The fruit was small, and inferior, but fresh...wished his guests would eat nothing but fruit, it came so cheap...The 2025 equivalent seems to be about $1330 per week. So in [very] round numbers it looks like about 100x.
[0] https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/03421399v4...
It looks like a normal salary for a Baker in 1900 was $2/day for a 13 hour day, or $0.15/hour[1]. a $1 meal would be about 6 hours of work in 1900.
Today, the median SF income is 100k, or $50/hr. 6 hours buys you a $300 meal.
Taxes are a whole different story you dont want me to start on. In 1900, state, local, and federal taxes were about 7% of GDP. Today they are >30%.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.li1gx2&seq=263
Anecdotally, this is consistent with what I have personally observed in dozens of countries, where the low end cost of eating out is about the same as and hour of work.
The Pima and Maricopa tribes were able to create massive agricultural surpluses from pre-Columbian times to the early 19th century thanks to the Salt River. Phoenix is not a rainforest, but it's also not a bone-dry location.
Phoenix today has plenty of water for residential and light industrial use, the problem is the persistence of agriculture. A farm in Phoenix uses something like 100x the amount of water compared to an equal amount of residential use. It was fine when there wasn't a global supply chain that could provide oranges or cotton at acceptable prices, but today the land and water have uses with much higher economic value.
What we're doing to the land and the realities of how much water the area receives today is vastly different from what was done in the early 19th century. It seems meaningless to me to point out that the area managed to easily sustain some population of people in the early 1800s when so many other fundamental things are different.
High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants. We're seeing restaurant apocalypse happening in places like Seattle and Denver, because high wages result in high prices which causes lower customer volume which causes higher fixed costs per unit, which causes a death spiral. Denver, for example, has 30% fewer restaurants now, because it's so hard to run one profitably.
Lots of little tasty restaurants and high wages for service staff are basically incompatible. Many people in the city don't realize this and advocate for both.
Of course, high wages are desirable if they can be accomplished without tradeoffs, but the tradeoffs are there.
High minimum wages favor high-volume, fast service chain restaurants that are more labor efficient.
Perhaps eventually automation will relax this tradeoff, but I would expect automation to primarily benefit corporate restaurant chains over small local eateries, unless the automation is so general that any restaurant can start using it without technical expertise or R&D.
Not as much as one would think.
Rent (literal) and rent seeking (lending in this case) are the biggest drivers in food costs today.
The family restaurant in an owned building is a distant memory.
The wholesale price of food is very low at the point of production (farming) and absolutely bonkers at the retail and wholesale levels. Mostly because at every step of the chain there is debt, and massive interest payments that need to be made.
The HN set is on one side of the K shaped economy and the other half is looking very much like late stage capitalism.
Case in point: Fritos. 4.50 a bag, while the Walmart generic version is under 2 bucks. Why? Because Pepsi (owner of Fritos) is competing with apple for customers, aka SHAREHOLDERS, and has a massive amount of debt compared to Walmart. The primary input in Fritos is corn, whos price is close to 2019 levels.
To put it another way: all generic brands are cheaper than their name-brand counterparts, and that fact has nothing to do with debt or cost structures.
The real problem is affordable housing.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/anti-capit...
[1] https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/c8cfcb827e564623a6fa3...
The relative growth in housing units since 2010 has been higher than the relative growth in population and jobs, so housing price growth since 2010 can't be explained by a shortage of supply.
The issue is that the rapid pace of growth means there isn't much old stock housing on the market to provide cheaper options to homebuyers -- most of the housing on the market will be new stock for which the minimum price will be driven by the cost of construction.
I've watched one of my favorite cities housing go crazy because of many factors including investors buying up properties for airbnb, developers focusing on catering to the coming influx of higher paid amazon / oracle people, and so many betting on those future increases that everything else goes up.
Adding to that, becoming a popular place for people to buy a second (or third / fourth home) - whether it's for a temporary move, to shelter their kids going to college who have chosen here instead of Chicago, trying a lower tax place to move with remote work being easier post 2020, etc..
Good point about new construction costing more, and that in itself has many factors. and depending on exactly when things were purchased making big differences.
With the limited supply of builders, most are choosing to build more expensive places.
Sadly even if we made this place less attractive for people to move to, many of the properties wouldn't go on the market, many would just hold on to the property as a stable investment.
So population numbers are not the primary weight in the supply / demand equation in many places is something I have been learning.
The federal minimum wage in the US is pitiful and yes some cities and states do higher ones, but frankly if you’re operating on such small margins then you need to increase your prices. I’ve seen a trend of new restaurants opening with fixed menus/prices per head. They aren’t cheap, but they aren’t unreasonable, and it’s looking like at least here they are finding real footing. We’ll see in 5-10 years what the survival rate is I suppose.
During Covid I did a lot of interviews with very high-level restauranteurs (mostly chefs) in my city, several of which had James Beard awards and beyond. This is not a flex, it’s purely for context. These are considered some of the best in the city.
They all said the exact same thing: Everyone is pushing their prices too low and promising high-quality, fresh ingredients that are all locally sourced and yada yada. That’s great, but it can’t be done in a sustainable way. Not if you want to actually pay a living wage or offer even the most modest benefits to your employees. The larger population needs to accept the fact that if we want restaurants to actually survive at all, we have to pay more for it and treat it as more of a luxury.
Good, ethical, cheap. Pick two.
If you want me to acknowledge “some” isn’t enough then fine: “most states are at the minimum wage or up to $10, which is pitiful.” $1600 or less a month is pitiful. Not to mention the states with the lowest minimum wages are by and large the ones with the weakest social safety nets, so the problem is compounded. Can we move on and get back to the real point here?
Obviously, this suggestion is extremely tongue-in-cheek and would probably be absolutely awful in practice for a million reasons.
It is not the (not actually high) minimum wages. Stores I've known that had problems staying open were having to pay more than the minimum wage because housing is so expensive.
Literal landlords are just where ordinary people notice they're getting squeezed.
Too bad advances in data science has made the margin so tight that people are feeling squeezed.
Progress and Poverty (modern edition)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0058JG5TI
It was edited, abridged, and translated to modern language by Bob Drake of the Henry George School of Chicago.
As always, I recommend downloading the free Kindle sample or reading the free preview on the website before buying.
Here's an example, the first two paragraphs of the Preface in the original language:
---
THE views herein set forth were in the main briefly stated in a pamphlet entitled “Our Land and Land Policy,” published in San Francisco in 1871. I then intended, as soon as I could, to present them more fully, but the opportunity did not for a long time occur. In the meanwhile I became even more firmly convinced of their truth, and saw more completely and clearly their relations; and I also saw how many false ideas and erroneous habits of thought stood in the way of their recognition, and how necessary it was to go over the whole ground.
This I have here tried to do, as thoroughly as space would permit. It has been necessary for me to clear away before I could build up, and to write at once for those who have made no previous study of such subjects, and for those who are familiar with economic reasoning; and, so great is the scope of the argument that it has been impossible to treat with the fullness they deserve many of the questions raised. What I have most endeavored to do is to establish general principles, trusting to my readers to carry further their applications where this is needed.
---
And in the modern edition:
---
In 1871, I first published these ideas in a pamphlet entitled Our Land and Land Policy. Over time, I became even more convinced of their truth. Seeing that many misconceptions blocked their recognition, a fuller explanation seemed necessary. Still, it was impossible to answer all the questions as fully as they deserve. I have tried to establish general principles, trusting readers to extend their application.
While this book may be best appreciated by those familiar with economics, no previous study is needed to understand its argument or to judge its conclusions. I have relied upon facts of common knowledge and common observation, which readers can verify for themselves. They can also decide whether the reasoning is valid.
---
And maybe also that people don't have the means (anymore) to go to the restaurant every other day.
Restaurants closing due to wage increases means workers were being exploited to cover unsustainable costs. Rents have to come down or wages need to go up across the board to cover the higher prices.
The billionaire class can’t eat enough food to keep restaurants open. They need to outsource it to the middle class.
The main solution is to increase economic freedom and reduce regulatory burdens. Allow people to build. Too often they are prevented by restrictive zoning laws, absurd environmental reviews, everything-bagel mandates for diverse contractors, etc. Ironically, big corporations and billionaires often love regulation because it raises the barrier to entry and reduces competition.
I don't believe that any human being is "only worth" $10/hr, or whatever arbitrary level you set.
Every human being deserves to have the resources to live. And to a first approximation, every human being is capable of doing enough work to be worth that. (The exceptions are people with various kinds of disabilities, whom we should be caring for, without question or reservation, and providing accommodations for those who can work, if they aren't just expected to Not Be Disabled.)
If a job wants to create a position to do [thing], but [thing] will only bring in, say, $5/hr worth of profit...then the job simply shouldn't create that position as-is. Either the owner needs to do it themselves, or they need to find a way to change what the job does so that it makes them enough money to cover labor costs.
One potential solution is for government to subsidize their wages through mechanisms like the Earned Income Tax Credit. That helps low-skill workers to gain some experience and move up the ladder without artificially distorting the labor market.
The only ones that I believe this can genuinely be true of are people with various types of disabilities. Which I addressed in my post.
The idea that there's this large percentage of fully able-bodied workers who are completely incapable of ever being trained to do any kind of skilled work doesn't pass the smell test. At best, it reeks of various racist/eugenicist ideas.
Some of those workers can be trained to be more valuable. But employers generally aren't going to hire them based on hope.
>Every human being deserves to have the resources to live.
That's true.
>I don't believe that any human being is "only worth" $10/hr, or whatever arbitrary level you set.
Then you haven't seen much of the world
I absolutely agree that some of the regulations are bad, and in general building more is the main solution to these problems. Zoning and parking space requirements are especially egregious in the USA.
The example in this thread, of "co-locating" everyday commercial with residential, is another part of the solution. I can move further away from the city if the daily necessities are easier to reach. This would also help with traffic, which would then help people needing to commute.
Another way of putting this:
"Small restaurants can only operate at a profit if they're allowed to pay people so little they can't afford to live off of it."
Any business that can only survive by exploiting its workers does not deserve to exist.
The fact that there were many small restaurants that were operating just fine when the minimum wage was, relatively speaking, much higher (ie, you could work full-time waiting tables at minimum wage and still afford a house and kids) strongly suggests that this claim does not hold water.
In most cases if you attach 50 grand worth of stuff to a building and can't pay your rent one month you may be legally required to leave most of your equipment with the landlord, and could be required to pay for additional construction.
Many landlords require certain insurances you can bypass with your truck. The public can't sue the building owner for things.
Inspections are also easier to handle with smaller places to tidy up, and everyone in your restaurant can see an inspector coming before they get inside.
Also if you get a bad inspection or bad reviews, just put a new wrap on your truck and it's not like a bad reputation for a specific building is set in.
The cheapest way to eat is to buy ingredients and cook it yourself.
Restaurants buy ingredients, and cook, but also have to add costs like rent and labor. Thus as money supply constricts businesses like restaurants see a slow down in customers.
The current economic policies in the US are explicitly designed to raise the prices of goods and services like health care. This will, as a first order effect, reduce the disposable cash available.
Restaurants will suffer first, they are a luxury easily and quickly discarded. But they are the canary. Expect to see all kinds of businesses, especially small businesses suffer, as these policies play out.
And just remember, you voted for this, and many people explicitly support these policies and their effects. These are not bugs, they are explicit design goals.
No...definitely did not vote for this, maybe you did? I voted against this in every way, and see how that worked out. Democracy is grand.
So sure, I'm not saying 100% of people voted for this. The "you" in this context is 2nd person plural; the collective "you".
As you note, democracy is the will of the majority imposed on the minority. Personally I'm not convinced that's a great approach, but I'm also not a fan of minority rule either. Ultimately I guess, whenever there are choices to be made, someone's not going to like the outcomes.
I sympathize with your current plight. Welcome to the minority. My only approach at this point is to keep reminding people that they chose this, that their vote matters. Perhaps when people understand that causal link then they'll make better choices in their own interest. (Whom I kidding right?)
Drone deliveries are a lot more like social media, hotels or flights, and a lot less like traditional deliveries. Once you build out the infrastructure, your cost-per-delivery (OpEx) rounds to zero. You want to spread out your infrastructure costs across as many deliveries as possible, so it makes sense to increase utilization, even at extremely low delivery prices. This is the "Ryanair model."
Because drone deliveries are so cheap (and so fast, there's no traffic after all), long-range deliveries make much more sense. If you can do long-range, you care a lot less about where your restaurant is located and how many customers you have passing by. This makes your rent go down.
Long range also increases how many customers you can realistically serve. You can exploit this in two ways, either by hyperspecializing in some particular kind of food, or by introducing standardization and automation.
A large part of the reason why restaurants aren't automated is that they just don't have that many customers. It doesn't make sense to pay for expensive machines (or even design them) if you are constrained by both rent and range. If neither are a constraint, you can go wild.
No air traffic until their are drone deliveries. What will the sky look like when you take every _individual_ package from Door Dash, Uber Eats, Postmates, Instacart, Amazon, UPS, Fedex, DHL, etc etc etc and put them on _individual_ drones? Even if the logistics could be sorted out, I worry about the quality of life issues it poses for communities, especially with the amount of noise drones make.
NYC handles 3,000 flights a day; it handles 2,300,000 package deliveries a day.
The idea that costs should be "what the market will bear" is a cancer in economic thinking, as it encourages testing the waters to see how high one can raise their prices, without increasing wages in tandem to ensure there are still the maximum number of potential customers (if you price me out of purchasing your product, I am no longer a potential customer, and the size of non-customers is rising in almost all fields that aren't B2B)
There's a certain minimum number of foods you need to sell each day which directly controls how many restaurants you can have in a given area.
The real solution is burrito tubes: https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
We have a ton of these food trucks all over Austin. Most of them ... just aren't very good. So, apparently, regulations aren't too onerous.
And a food truck isn't exempt from the fact that ridiculous commercial real estate prices cause people to be too spread out to be able to service in walking range.
And the regulations got tighter because these trucks were blowing up and killing people. I haven't heard about one exploding in a while, so apparently the regulations had an effect.
I see taco trucks everywhere and there are dozens of food carts within a mile of me.
This sounds more like issue that is specific to your area and local government.
I know people whose cooking is "good enough" for themselves, but suspect enough from my point of view that I now decline any invitations for dinner where they're cooking.
If not, what makes cooking special?
There are many reasons people eat out beside lack of cooking knowledge or desire to be social. You seem like you value feeling superior to these people. Perhaps you can find a way to value yourself without looking down on everyone who makes different choices?
> Plus it is cheaper, faster, healthier and tastier than eating out.
You can get some of those 4 but in my experience, getting all 4 at the same time doesn't happen often.
Eehhh.. I'm a decent cook, I can adjust things for my taste but there's no way I can compete with people who do this for 40h/week over multiple years with kitchen appliances worth as much as a decent second hand car. Hell, good restaurants have access to produce I can't really get since I'm not going to tour 4 farms to make 1-4 portions of food.
I have a small strip mall type shopping center with a grocery store a 2 block walk away. Brewpub, taqueria, pizza joint, grocery store, starbucks, UPS store, wine bar, fitness studio, yoga place, etc. Plus there's a post office another block away. Hell, yesterday I walked the 2mi roundtrip to the local Stanford medical outpost to have my blood draw done.
In San Francisco, local neighbourhoods discussed whether or not two ice-cream stores in the neighbourhood were too many ice-cream stores or not. If you don't want these people to have a voice you can have what you want, but if you're against the disenfranchisement of people then you have to accept that others have different tastes from you.
In what way do walkable neighborhoods not pass environmental review?
> but if you're against the disenfranchisement of people.
Nobody is taking away their right to vote, so it isn't "disenfranchising" someone to put in a second icecream shop in their neighborhood when they only wanted one.
> San Francisco, local neighbourhoods discussed whether or not two ice-cream stores in the neighbourhood were too many ice-cream stores
SF seems to have a public feedback and planning problem that dysfunctionally favors nimbyism over regional needs and they end up shooting themselves in the foot with it over and over.
> In what way do walkable neighborhoods not pass environmental review?
Try it and you’ll find out.
In another comment you claim that environmentalists are usually pro sprawl. That...very much does not match my experience. How did you form this opinion?
Most serious environmentalists I know support urban densification, not sprawl because densification increases efficiency, decreases polution and decreases habitat destruction.
So yes, mostly the NIMBY shit you refer to. Though apparently the other chap lives in a place where they managed to solve that so we will see soon enough how they did when he says where.
In a similar vein, widespread full-autonomous driving cars will likely lead to more people taking longer commutes by commoditizing the cost of a ride and freeing up the time that would otherwise be spent driving.
I personally really support autonomous cars for safety reasons, and to hopefully reduce car ownership, but the definitely didn't solve traffic or the external costs of cars. I hope there's an indirect path from then towards increased public transit.
its more effecient and its not even question
What convinces you that it weren't the case?
Meanwhile, driverless taxis should normally be lightweight two seaters.
make the {approved, licensed} burrito for you at home
https://www.costco.ca/wike-premium-suspension-bike-trailer--...
It's because everything is really far and we design our cities to burn as much land as humanly possible.
One side effect of that is that bikes are inconvenient. Another is that nobody can afford housing and starving homeless people are harassing you for money.
Remember, food ingredients and people move around in large multi-ton vehicles as well. If you think people going from A-B is OK, then food going from B-A should be similarly OK.
Infact, once you can pool together food, then the equation flips and favors food moving from B-A, rather than many people taking different paths from A-B
It's honestly a miracle onto God that everyone isn't just constantly trying to kill themselves.
Seems she would be better off in a care facility...
Companies could even share busses. Or delivery companies like door dash could switch to the collective bus model and turn thier drivers into bus drivers.
I need to be able to just walk outside and flag down the burrito man, just like you would for an ice creme truck
Beyond quality issues it'd just lead to a massive amount of food waste too. In order to always have the order available you'd have to stock everything in excess of demand and food only holds for so long before it has to be disposed of for safety reasons.
you've overlooked the trebuchet !
Use a catapult/trebuchet/cannon to launch the drone as close as possible to the target area - maybe use a discardable biodegradable sheath to improve aerodynamics. At the optimal distance and height, switch the drone from ballistic to powered mode and complete the delivery. Maybe increases payload (the drone doesn’t have to take off carrying the payload). And definitely increases range, as we are not having to use onboard power for flight for part of the laden delivery, so there is more energy available for the unladen return trip.
Personally I would love to see cannon launches but most localities are unlikely to approve (maybe Texas?)
There's a lot of empirical evidence that people will chose bikes over cars if the infrastructure made it safe and convenient, even with terrible weather. Paris, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam come to mind, but there are many more examples.
Very much treating the symptoms rather than the root problems.
High tech is not the answer to everything.
Looking at the bicyclists "texting while biking" i think the delivery wouldn't be the only market for an autonomous bicycles.
Sidenote: heard that Tesla added an "aggressive mode" to its FSD in which it would drive at higher speeds and would make more aggressive maneuvers. I suppose it isn't just Tesla as after more than decade of docile behavior of Waymo cars i've been recently aggressively cut by a Waymo, and few weeks before that a Waymo car asserted it's well out-of-normal left turn trajectory forcing us to give it way to avoid being barreled by it. Interesting whether such an aggressive autonomous driving would shorten the burrito delivery time.
(City center properties don't have drone drop/landing areas.)
(The couriers here use e-bikes and similar light vehicles as they can navigate quicker in the traffic.)
Postmates - How we built a Burrito Cannon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br_KqzLWunM
Burrito Cannon Demo
[0] https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
* No refunds on orders damaged en route by SAM, or delivery mechanism malfunction. Customer waives their right to any claims for compensation for property damage, injury or loss of life due to elevated delivery velocity.
Why have installations or stores at all? Just have a self driving and self making burrito trucks. You order one up, and on the way to you, it's being made in the back. Little hatch on the side, shoots out onto your doorstep or through your window.
Then, of course, you've now got an arms race of self making burrito trucks roaming about. Chipotle has one, Taco bell too. And, of course, if a Taco Bell truck knows that a Chipotle truck is next to it on the freeway, well, I mean, there's no one inside it of course. How could you prove that those nails came out of the bottom of the truck anyways?
Pretty soon, we've got burrito trucks duking it out, battle bots style, on the freeways and streets. And then you gotta deploy countermeasures, armor, etc. Just to get your burrito to you. Order up two from different companies and you've got dinner and a show.
And, honestly, is this not the future we all really want? Giant junk food filled mech-cars blasting each other at high speeds from the comfort of our couches.
Didn't work out, last I checked.
(Edited a bunch of times for doofusness.)
They have not implemented the Mad Max style of vehicular combat you described, yet.
What's better than a Factory?
A FactoryFactory!
Why order a burrito that is made in a truck, when you can order a BurritoFactory that is constructed en route to you, to your exact specifications, and from then on, will make you endless burritos from the comfort of your own home?!?
https://www.core77.com/posts/137981/The-Amazon-Delivery-Miss...
I can’t wait to get a push alert and then go over, open the window, and open my mouth.
This is the true long term.
Of course my drone is for FPV fun, delivery drone would be far less efficient.
Either way cost of power negligible here.
[0] https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?s=11f6090a0c478...
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/Ya...
They could also use bicycle lanes, but cyclists won't like it.
But you can't make things obscenely large in the beginning since then if the area doesn't take off you have a huge amount of infrastructure that still needs maintenance and it also feels like a ghost town with less usage.
It was all a lot easier in the 20th century because there wasn't this mix of speed/capability. The cars were shit, horse carriages aren't exactly fast, bicycles were shit... You had | 20hp trabantesque cars - 5hp horse carriage - bicycle - pedestrian |. Now you have | 400 hp cars - faster (e)bicycles - pedestrians | combined with increased safety culture so you need more splittage and more barriers (be it trees, an actual barrier, curvy roads built to slow people down, etc)
Maybe they won't ever become a "big thing", but Zipline is already delivering food directly to consumers in TX and elsewhere.
https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
People should be given enough time to make and eat healthy food, or dine-in at a restaurant if they want to eat restaurant food.
Boxed up food tastes bad, and is largely a solution for overworking people.
cheap enough to deployed in the thousands. small enough to take up less than 1 sq / ft of sidewalk space.
This is really interesting because if you have autonmous drivers, DoorDash doesnt really have a lever to lower prices except removing tipping.
In my area, an &Pizza is $12 on their App, $19 on Doordash (delivery or pickup). A Chipotle burrito is $9.50 vs $12.35 on doordash delivery (plus every addon is a $1 more expensive).
You can easily pay an extra $4/$5 (30%) per item you order on there.
While that’s what you prefer, the market (most other users, including whale spenders) doesn’t care to know the actual cost.
That is what large corporations want and in the US especially they are the ones that write the laws.
But those online retailers are supplied by the same distributor who is supplied by the same manufacturer.
- ManufacturerA -> (Amazon|Walmart) -> Customer
- RestaurantA -> (Pickup|Doordash|Uber) -> Customer
> I'd prefer the overhead to show up as its own line item, rather than obscuring the actual cost of the service.
Me too. Especially that they already ALSO add a service fee in many (most?) locales, in addition to the delivery fee and the tip.
- Item priced 30% higher
- Delivery fee
- Service fee
- Tip
There is another analog for this, too, though: some retailers indeed would have more or less expensive prices for the same thing when ordering online versus in-store. I think the argument that it isn't unprecedented is pretty solid.
Despite not being entirely unprecedented, I'd still prefer to see this practice ended for food delivery services so it is easier to see the actual true overhead of food delivery services. It really does feel a bit manipulative the way it is right now.
I’d be very curious what the conversation is between them. I highly doubt DoorDash negotiates with every restaurant on their platform and wouldn’t be surprised to discover they just tack it on independently. I could see that raising some interesting questions.
All of this is predicated on “ifs” and assumptions, so feel free to throw it out. Just kind of musing here lol
That is not correct. Doordash takes a 20-30% commission on each sale, so businesses preemptively increase the prices to offset that. They're not forced to and doordash isn't doing it for them. But, you know, they're still effectively "forced" to if their in-store prices don't have great margins to begin with...
Customers are cheap and they're (partly) to blame. My theory is that Amazon conditioned people to view delivery as a free commodity and pizza places who had delivery baked into their model cemented it.
So if Doordash listed a delivery fee that covered their true cost of delivery, customers would balk. So they instead have to find creative ways to get enough. Maybe it's changed and Doordash cracked the secret, but when I'd looked into it years ago these companies barely got by — many of them actually losing money.
One could argue it's best for the consumer to very clearly understand how much more they're paying. If not a service fee, here is our aggregate food markup, in plain sight. Transparency, in other words. Let's not borrow any ideas from the healthcare system.
Isn't this basically impossible to do legally in the U.S.? Wouldn't you run into trouble both with IP law and food safety laws around reselling prepared foods?
If it's illegal nobody cares.
Food safety? There might be some restrictions related to food handling, but to my understanding they're mostly pretty rote food handling safety training stuff that I'd hope delivery companies provide anyway.
It's called the First-Sale Doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
I can't count how many friends I have had to explain this to who don't understand they are paying 20-30% more even after getting "free delivery" than if they just ordered directly through the restaurant.
I'm not sure how UberEats/etc handle it but it's absolutely crazy how much of a markup there is to order through Doordash vs going to pick it up when you factor in Restaurant Upcharge + Doordash Fees + Tip. It's easy to have an $8 item suddenly cost $20 or more total out-of-pocket when all is said and done.
Eg. Papad = $0.49 each directly from my local Indian restaurants site (they sell by the single), Doordash gives a price of $1.50 per papad.
Likewise with Naans, dips, etc. All have $1 added. Which can make a $10 lunch ~ $25.
I believe it's Doordash doing this. What gets really weird is Uber Eats and Grubhub seem to match prices and charge exactly the same as Doordash.
For anyone to repeat this. Look up your local indian places actual menu. You'll likely need to use Google images for the name of the restaurant to find an actual picture of a physical menu. Now look up any of the online services, they all seem to price match each other and they'll all have doubled prices for things like naan or roti.
Restaurants set the menu prices higher on delivery platforms to recoup the money lost in fees. They also pay fees to DoorDash, Uber, etc...
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Price fixing is an agreement (written, verbal, or inferred from conduct) among competitors to raise, lower, maintain, or stabilize prices or price levels. Generally, the antitrust laws require that each company establish prices and other competitive terms on its own, without agreeing with a competitor.
When purchasers make choices about what products and services to buy, they expect that the price has been determined on the basis of supply and demand, not by an agreement among competitors. When competitors agree to restrict competition, the result is often higher prices.The UberEats/Doordashes/etc of the world all charge pretty high fees so this is one way the restaurants can recoup some of that.
Also, I spend way too much time pricing out Doordash vs Official App (normally using Doordash for delivery) vs Pickup just to see what the spread is.
> The UberEats/Doordashes/etc of the world all charge pretty high fees so this is one way the restaurants can recoup some of that.
Are you blaming the restaurants or the ride share services? I can't tell...
It’s all a shell games so that they can say “free delivery” and/or not have to call out “this item is $5 but you will pay a 20% more to get it delivered through DoorDash”. They just hide that “fee” in the item price.
It sounds like the direct increase to the consumer's prices is done by the restaurant itself, but the reason the restaurant is charging higher prices are to make up for the fees they're charged by UE/DD.
In other words, UE/DD restaurant-side service fees eat into the restaurant's profit margins, so the restaurant passes on the cost increases to the consumer to get them back.
To be clear, no idea about how closely these statements correspond to the world, just that this seems to be OP's claim.
Are middlemen ever a good idea? What about middlemen that become the gatekeepers of your business.
Cutting out the middleman is great... but only when you run the numbers and it makes sense, not as a universal truth.
But now, instead, they are the ones taking the customer's orders, and hence they become the portal for the business (and thus, middlemen). Which is a bad situation for the restaurant owners.
You need some toothpaste, some eggs, and some toilet paper. Would you rather go to the supermarket, or to the factory, the farm and the mill?
Profit for services? Dastardly.
> If the customer wants the convenience of delivery to their door they need to pay for it.
They do.
It’s more expensive volume or less cheaper volume they can make due to higher ingredient prices PLUS the fees they have to add to cover the delivery service cut. That’s how you get a $20 burger for delivery.
This all gets worse when the prices become sticky at the retail place itself (app prices enter the real world). These delivery service are a serious agitator, true disrupter.
If I were a restaurateur and caught a glimpse of a Doordash driver in my finest establishment, the first thing I would do is put together a simple online order form and start advertising it in every order. If you just disappear from the app one day, your customers trying to reorder would probably go somewhere else – but if they know they can order on your site instead, they probably will (if your food is good enough and your ordering experience is top-notch, or vice versa).
And the restaurant can say “no.”
If I were a restaurateur and caught a glimpse of a Doordash driver in my
finest establishment, the first thing I would do is put together a simple
online order form and start advertising it in every order.
e.g. https://boston.eater.com/2016/3/4/11160924/legal-sea-foods-s...
The claim isn't that your saying no to fulfilling orders,
it's that your saying no to giving them a discount.
Unless something has changed over the last couple years,
restaurants opt in to being available on those apps.
Everything is possible. And every choice has its own set of tradeoffs. But no, there’s no time machine to the pre-Doordash world now.
There's a lot of dynamic variables here (including of course the "the person doesn't order from the restaurant"), but the few times I've used those delivery apps I end up ordering very little food for a lot of money.
I try to just do takeout instead.
Of course delivery has a cost, was even typical for pizza delivery before the apps. If you're that price conscience, takeout always exists.
Remember, delivery apps take the costs and then their cut. That cut theoretically has some pressure from markets or whatever, but ... well.....
I'm splitting hairs here, granted
- https://www.eater.com/2020/1/29/21113416/grubhub-seamless-ki...
- https://www.knoxnews.com/story/entertainment/dining/2018/10/...
- https://lawstreetmedia.com/featured/restaurant-sues-doordash...
- https://www.golocalprov.com/news/legal-but-unethical-ri-rest...
- https://www.wctv.tv/2023/12/19/phony-restaurant-listing-door...
Doesn't excuse Doordash taking advantage of anyone.
There are other issues, but this setup looks a lot like paying the mafia due to the imbalance of power.
Price shouldn't be the only thing the restaurants care about.
Did I imply otherwise?
"Different concerns" means there is more than one concern...
1. A lot of restaurants are passion businesses and they don't realize how much money they are losing.
2. Morale in the kitchen is important, orders coming in keeps morale up.
From myself I would also add that they get a FOMO, cause it's hard to sit and watch others get business, however unprofitable. The most stable and profitable businesses in towns where we operated only worked with us, cause we offered cooperative ownership and small commission. It made no financial sense for them to work with anybody else.
Doordashes filings as a public company have stated that the average revenue share with restaurants is 18% and maximum is 30%
Pitting restaurants against each other on who can cut corners the best. You often get worse meals at higher prices.
This business model essentially makes sure all the surviving ones are those who can get by on the lowest profits.
And what’s wrong with “lowest profit”?
If that equates to lower quality, you as a customer are free to select the more expensive restaurant on DoorDash.
Airlines have tiny profit (single digit $ per passenger) yet there’s no sympathy for them.
So “big greedy corporation” vs “mom and pop shop” is the core reason, yeah?
China has drone food delivery. Lower profits than American delivery.
China ain’t obese.
Try again.
> Obesity in China is a major health concern according to the WHO, with overall rates of obesity between 5% and 6% for the country,[2] but greater than 20% in some cities where fast food is popular.
> Rapid motorization has drastically reduced levels of cycling and walking in China. Reports in 2002 and 2012 have revealed a direct correlation between ownership of motorized transport by households in China and increasing obesity related problems in children and adults.
> A leading child-health researcher, Ji Chengye, has stated that, "China has entered the era of obesity. The speed of growth is shocking."
You're sooooo clever.
Edit: extra LOL at creating the account to criticize and then downvote facts in the reply.
Not me, I made this account 7 days ago. Check my history.
> And then you wonder about the obesity crisis.
And for the record:
I don’t give a shit about the obesity crisis.
Or any other drug, mental health, crime, or demographic problem facing any country.
I only care about the number on my bank statement.
Well, my private equity partner accounts, but you get my point.
> Well, my private equity partner accounts, but you get my point.
When they bury us, the money won't matter.
Soviet-style command economies aren’t a better alternative, but it’s an incentive problem with market economies without an obvious solution; market fundamentalists get around it by just insisting that if consumers really cared, they’d seek out alternatives, but this doesn’t solve the problem until after it happens.
This problem is mirrored by an incentive structure observed in government where a concerted interest group can expend more time and effort lobbying for a budget allocation than an individual can expend resisting it.
We would have loved to have reduced the % taken and pay our riders more, but customers wouldn't pay it — they'd just go to Uber instead.
Oh the hypocrisy of people picketing in the streets against gig work but not willing to pay more than 3 or 4 bucks for their food to be delivered... I found it incredibly frustrating because we truly weren't the bad guys. Sigh.
The economics should not work out, delivery services should allow for economies of scale, but greed and anti competitive pressure eat it all.
It makes no sense to me for these "scalable" companies to pick up my food, drive in the wrong direction, wait at another restaurant, then continue to drive in the wrong direction to drop off that order, and then get me my cold food that I still paid more for than menu price with an expected tip the driver can see before they even pick up my order. I gave up on the whole concept once I moved somewhere with more than two places that are walking distance. Not all of them are great but it's still a better deal than a terrible delivery from an amazing place at a huge mark up.
The worst time line is the cheap places that used to offer free delivery growing up having their delivery handled by a lightly skinned version of DoorDash.
If you think you can use a coupon for a discount you actually are just paying the full price of their delivery fee without the delivery service discount you get directly from DoorDash.
Its not even a vague old memory. Until COVID, free delivery with low minimal order € and regular prices were the norm, Now it's €3-5 for delivery, €20 minimum and 25% markup on item prices.
Pooling together delivery drivers should make things better for the customer, instead of significantly worse.
Pooling together delivery drivers should make things better for the
customer, instead of significantly worse.
If your reduce your client's costs by $3000 and you charge $2000 to do it, everyone is happy and you can make a nice profit.
And remember the "efficiency" is relative to tons of restaurant-specific delivery drivers. It's possible.
It's a fake business where the only play is to be a middle man that causes prices to go up so they can deliver cold food.
It's possible.
The Domino's model was cheaper for the customer because it's inherently more efficient than Doordash. There were no angry restaurants suing to get off of your platform. Drivers were either making deliveries or at a specific restaurant ready to make a delivery. Customers didn't have to pay two separate merchant fees or ensure profit for two separate companies. Plus Domino's incentivized fast deliveries (there were external costs to this however), ensuring that the restaurant could efficiently utilize their delivery drivers.
Plus you're also likely underestimating the return that the vulture capitalists are demanding.
good times
Now I wonder what conscientious delivery app you've worked for, and if they are still around
For example, making a pizza is what, 10 minutes, or less, when adding up all the labor involved in a restaurant setting.
In comparison, taking said pizza, even around the block, with the courier having to arrive take it somewhere, is I'd estimate at least 15 mins.
Someone has to pay for that human labor, and considering how expensive it is, and not only that, VC funded food delivery startups want to take a huge markup on that. Something has to give. Crap wages for couriers, restaurant staff, skimping on raw materials etc.
It's much better for everyone involved to cut out the middle man, have restaurants on every corner (considering in most apartment blocks, nobody wants to live on the ground floors anyways), with the upper floors used for apartments or offices.
This is hardly an original thought, tons of European cities I've been in do this.
A better solution would have been some mandatory grease/odor filters.
Just to point out that "restaurants in every corner" is not always easy to do, especially in residential blocks. I honestly think that "cooking your own food" (with the help of modern kitchen utensils, time-saving equipment, and the exception being collective canteens/cafeterias for specific groups such as students) is economically advantageous. Because even today in many European cities, many of those tending to restaurants are immigrant labor or somewhat disadvantaged groups who are implicitly pushed towards such jobs due to lack of alternatives.
We live in a very dumb era.
Delivery, however, has increased the number of times people buy a meal made by somebody else.
I doubt this is good for anybody's health, and it's certainly not good for the planet's health.
No, I'd say it's work expectations that have increased the number.
I took a several-month career gap and didn't order delivery even once. Delivered food tastes bad and as long as I have time I either make food (most of the time) or dine-in. But when "everything is on fire" and deadlines are tonight, delivery it is.
To be clear, we do not need this, and I am being sarcastic. However, if a VC wants to fund me to do this, I'll try my best in the hours between my use of the startup's office sim-rig and the office wood workshop.
I think it is dumb to use Waymo cars, but E-bikes would work really well here. I'm sure whoever breaks through this market will come with some sort of light vehicle solution. Waymo seems to be doing this as a side project to use their vehicles when ride share demand is low.
I think they're intended to use sidewalks and bike lanes, so should address concerns about cars clogging up streets.
My hunch is that just because they're smaller and lighter does not mean it's an easier problem to solve than a self-driving car. A more interesting partnership between Waymo and DoorDash would be licensing a scaled-down version of the Waymo tech for these things.
The Waymo driver could get a lot of experience working in a different but adjacent environment with much lower stakes. It still has to navigate and look out for pedestrians, cars, signals, construction and obstructions, and possibly human traffic directors.
I can't imagine getting food delivered from only a half mile away in 30+ mins but that's the offering I guess. Not sure why so many people these days are tolerating soggy cold food sold to them at a markup.
This video was pretty ironic: waymo crashing into one of these crossing the sidewalk
The funny thing is that there is usually a guy on an ebike following right behind, and he's usually just decked out in sortof tactical-ish gear. Full mask, head to toe in all black. I feel bad for whoever it is in the summer, because it gets really hot here.
Very interesting to see.
If I walked or biked in these places, I'd be worried. Sharing the sidewalk with robotic wheelie-bins seems like a bad idea.
Obviously the cars can drive themselves on public streets, but how do you go up to someone's house and put a burger on their doorstep?
Do you think these drivers currently run around with two to a car, one to keep the engine running while they go around the block while the other goes upstairs?
Fair enough. Not really an issue in Phoenix. Plenty of buildings (in San Francisco and Atlanta, to memory) require delivery to be dropped off at a centralized location. And there aren’t many high rises, or months of monsoon, in Phoenix.
Having to go outside significantly reduces the benefit of delivery. Now customers have to interrupt what they’re doing, make sure they look OK so the neighbors don’t see their underwear and bed hair, put on a jacket or raincoat in bad weather, possibly wait on 2 elevators, and pick up their food right next to their own car in the parking lot. In some cases, this could take five minutes. Customer realizes that they could just get in their car and drive to the restaurant at this point, so why order for delivery?
Makes no sense.
What? They’d stumble down in pyjamas. If they’re in a building that probably means exiting and re-entering a parking garage. Also, it’s Phoenix. Nothing is five minutes away—the urban plan is one of sprawl.
I agree it’s less convenient than door delivery. But against that is the cost of tipping and humans getting lost. For it is the fact that in many major cities, people routinely order food delivery despite being required by building policy to pick it up downstairs.
I only wanted to point out that The customers are getting less not more. And the companies will make less money because the automated cars are more expensive than drivers that are willing to take food for 2 to 3 dollars a delivery. If you fail to see that or recognize it, I’ll leave it at that.
I think plenty of Phoenicians will tip themselves to walk to the curb.
> the companies will make less money because the automated cars are more expensive than drivers
Disagree. The marginal cost for a late-night Waymo is probably already comparable to that of a driver, and that’s before we get to California’s Prop 22.
If it's a robot delivering to me I don't care if I make the robot drive 30 miles out to get me food (as long as the food is something that won't taste notably worse after such a long drive of course). Plus I'm not going to tip the machine.
Everyone keeps ignoring you on this part, but they aren't thinking about people with disabilities or mobility issues that rely on delivery services to get their groceries because alternative or public welfare programs don't exist for this.
What happens when DoorDash, UberEats, Instacart, etc. all go autonomous? People with disabilities get screwed in the name of profit. They are already getting screwed with higher prices as is.
These customers can't simply "go downstairs and meet the car" the point of delivery specifically in this case is to have it brought right to your door. Automated cars miss this usecase entirely.
They get special accommodation. Food delivery via rideshare didn’t exist 20 years ago…
This is a brilliant fix, for the case of folks wanting it physically delivered, I am sure you can or will be able to pay for that.
Outside of the late summer monsoon, there is rarely serious rain in Phoenix, and virtually never snow.
Probably at least part of why the pilot program is there.
There also aren’t many 30-floor residential buildings. Phoenix is basically the quintessential American West suburban sprawl town: outside of a proportionally very small downtown it’s entirely dominated by houses and occasional 2-3 story apartment complexes.
To me that pickup part seems almost more difficult than the delivery end of the journey. If you think about a busy restaurant with app-delivery orders piling up on the counter, how is that order going to get into the autonomous vehicle outside or down the road? Maybe a new service will spring up called mini-Dash where a human has a job running the orders down to the waiting vehicles?
"When Waymo arrives, open the trunk with your DoorDash app and grab your items."
It just doesn't seem like it's guaranteed that the Waymo will even have parking availability adjacent to the restaurant. It seems wholly unreasonable to expect a restaurant employee to walk an order down a block to put it in a vehicle. Imagine it's rush hour, you've got a line of customers out the door, and one of your employees is constantly having to stop working the line to shuttle orders. You'd likely have to staff with that in mind in order to support that dynamic. The current model is one where dashers wait in the restaurant and grab the bag from the "to go" counter. It would seem like the restaurant's expectation would be for that model to continue with the introduction of Waymos.
What am I missing?
When I take Waymos around SF, a really common part of the process is, upon reaching the drop-off location, the Waymo realizes there's no space, the road is too busy to comfortably double-park, and it shifts into "Looking for a spot to pull-over..." mode. It's not uncommon for it to drive a full block away from my drop-off location in order to find a safe spot.
I was applying that mindset to this situation. I agree that if they can guarantee that a Waymo is just parking/double-parking right in front of the store and all the employee has to do is take a step outside, drop it in the trunk, and shut the trunk - that that is sustainable.
From the article
> The service will begin with deliveries from DashMart, DoorDash’s owned and operated convenience, grocery, and retail store that also powers DashMart Fulfillment Services, with plans to expand over time.
Create a market segment where everything costs more for everyone, "employ" countless people -- usually on restrictive work visas and with a limited understanding of labour laws, rights, and protections -- to be the boots on the ground of the operation, pay those people so little that they drive and ride dangerously in traffic, bike lanes, and on sidewalks to eke out more money out of the system, get people used to paying $40 for a burger, and then just... automate the whole thing away?
This is an ethical no-win scenario for companies like Doordash in my mind, but it's one of their own making. Food delivery as a business catering to the general public needs to go away (with exceptions for meals on wheels-type operations serving the sick and the old who may otherwise not be able to get food on their own).
Sweet summer child, they know very well what they're doing. The instances I've interacted with employees at those companies, they know exactly what kind of future they're building towards, and most of them seem very eager to get there, regardless of existing regulations.
> Food delivery as a business catering to the general public needs to go away
Why though? There is clearly demand for it in some way. We've been doing food delivery to the general public for decades, is it the amount of selection that you're against or food delivery as a whole?
I agree that VC-funded startups that aim to basically crash industries because they're flush with cash, so they then can jack up prices should go away, but I don't see that linked with "Food Delivery" as a concept, we should be able to regulate one of them without getting rid of the other.
But if people are going to order food to go, is it better to have everyone driving to pick it up or better to have one driver picking up and delivering multiple orders at once?
I mean, in a world of finite resources and pollution, which is better?
Question is how many humans will forgo owning a car altogether once autonomous vehicles are ubiquitous.
Fun fact about Dave App's tipping. If you bring the value to zero you saw an animation of a kid's food being taken away from them.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/11/...
Or go from being an N car household to an N-1 car household.
I do like autonomous cars though, but they won't completely remove car ownership.
I guess the parent is referencing this kind of study:
> The overall average cost to own and operate a new car in 2025 is $11,577 (decrease of $719 from 2024).
https://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/UPDATE-A...
As an example, my wife's 15m car commute would take 45m by bus transfer to the nearest stop, which is a couple miles from the destination on a freeway onramp. The transit system is fixing it, but that date is 3 years away. That's still better than the routes some people have.
And lest you think the local transit agency sucks (by American standards), they don't. They just prioritize office workers heading to/from downtown instead of people moving radially through the metro area.
In the mean time Waymo integrated with transit (timed transfers and unified payments) would make using the existing rail lines more appealing.
Not any time soon. There are WAY too many edge cases that autonomous vehicles are just scratching the surface on.
> Me, in 2015: [Uber's price] is reasonable, seems less than a standard taxi.
We already know how this story progresses.
On second thought, prompt injection via delivery instructions?
Obviously you can already get delivery from Whole Foods, FreshDirect, etc., but it's expensive due to the drivers.
And public transport and bikeshares are great for transporting you, but not for trying to carry four or six bags of groceries along with you.
What are you talking about? What backwaters country is this? In many places in the world, people live literally on top of grocery stores, such law would be ridiculed until the law makers have to socially isolate themselves if they tried to come up with something so stupid.
And yeah, walkable cities includes infrastructure that does not magnify the sun at pedestrians (see: shade, plants)
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/june/u-s-shoppers-...
The downtown/center of older cities may still have mixed use, and there have been changes happening in recent years to allow/build more apartments and mixed use areas, but, generally outside of the densest parts of the largest cities commercial and residential areas are required to be separate, with personal cars as the primary/only way to get between them.
This has been a bit of a self-reinforcing phenomenon, IMO, as car-first infrastructure puts people at the mercy of traffic congestion, and means that any apartment building or business in their vicinity will result in more cars passing through, more congestion, more competition for parking, as well as the presence of the large parking lots that cities mandate for any new construction, which themselves make it unpleasant to get around in any other way.
It's somewhat misleading to talk about distance-to-X in a lot of American places. I live less than a mile from the nearest grocery as the crow flies, but if I wanted to walk there I have to traverse my entire street to get to an exit road (as opposed to walking out my back gate; the whole back is fenced because the exit road is directly behind my house). Then I have to walk down a fairly busy one-lane-each-way road with no sidewalks or shoulders present (i.e., you're going to be walking in a shallow drainage ditch - hope it's not raining!) for a few hundred meters, cross two busy multilane roads, and walk across an unshaded parking lot.
Obviously no. But where I lived ~20 years ago the nearest grocery was a 20 minute walk there and then 20 minute walk back with two or four shopping bags with stuff, and I wasn't the only one walking there when needing to do shopping.
I think it's more common than not out in the world that things are far away so you need to spend awful amount of time on just getting places. Unless you live in a city of course.
I've been to the US many times and I'm still shocked when I need to drive from this parking lot to that parking lot across the street because it would be dangerous and possibly illegal to just walk there.
My rural grocery store is 1.9 mi away. I tend to shop a few times a week, and only for what I need.
Generally one bag, mostly produce. Maybe a meat I’ll cook that day.
House size ranges from one to five. The only time I wind up with a full fridge is around holidays or when I have houseguests with food anxiety.
As European it's hard to imagine a place where you cannot walk to a grocery store.
I used to live in a 1920s era "streetcar suburb" neighbourhood. I lived on the third floor, and the ground level was a full (but small) grocery store. I never spent more than ~$50 at a time on groceries because I only bought for a couple days at a time.
The same decisions and laws that created the current system can be changed to take us back to the "norm" in the rest of the world.
But the US also allows suburbs, and it turns out a ton of people prefer those, having backyards for their kids.
I love cities but I'm also well aware that tons of people don't want to be stuck in cities.
Having walkable and bikeable destinations is compatible with back yards. It just needs to be legal to build it.
You have to get pretty damn rural before you need anything more than a bike to access a convenience store.
Obviously the absolute overwhelming majority of Japanese live in cities anyway, so it's not really comparable to the US.
Really? Drivers only get paid 2 to 3 dollars per delivery from DoorDash and UberEats. These companies are predatory and pay the drivers less than it cost the drivers to deliver. So now these companies will assume all the costs instead of passing the cost down to the drivers? How does that make them more profitable? Maybe there’s some DoorDash or Uber eaters here that can explain my confusion.
Why would DoorDash want to assume all that responsibility when they have such a good legal scam against all their drivers right now? I call it a scam because DoorDash claims to not be taking the tips of drivers, but given the puny payouts per delivery the drivers lose money and time without the tips, so how can they claim they’re not taking the tips.
People aren't eating more food. Before they just had to go themselves.
And supermarkets restock constantly throughout the day from the back.
If Waymo were launching in Minneapolis I'd be surprised and delighted. But this is just more of the same.
Your argument would definitely apply in 2015. Not so much in 2025.
When were you last in a Waymo? I use them almost exclusively in Phoenix.
> they stick to the cheat regions
Do you think it doesn’t snow in Atlanta?
Snow is not a problem. Snow that stays is a problem. Atlanta doesn't get snow that stays. Waymo is noticbly absent from Buffalo after their one prior attempt.
Tell me more about how the 92” of snow my town got last winter leaves me ignorant.
> Snow is not a problem. Snow that stays is a problem
Snow used to be a problem! It isn’t anymore because it’s solved. My Subaru can keep lane using radar alone, following the car in front of me, in a blizzard.
> Waymo is noticbly absent from Buffalo after their one prior attempt
They’re also noticeably absent from Chula Vista [1].
Also, I know I don’t understand snow, but maybe the folks in Denver do [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
[2] https://denverite.com/2025/09/02/denver-waymo-pilot-project-...
We’re actually pretty good! The fuckwits are in the FWD rental cars that can’t brake, ever, and souped-up F-million fifties driven by rich 17-year olds who predictably flip them on flat straightaways despite infinite farmland run-off, at grade, on both sides.
And to be clear, I’m never leaving the Subaru alone. The Subaru isn’t letting me leave it alone. But the notion that Waymo couldn’t figure out snowstorms is one I’ll readily challenge given the Subaru’s radar frequently sees white cars in a white out before I make them out visually (at 15 mph with hazards on). In the snow, an autonomous vehicle’s radar (note: not lidar and certainly not cameras) have an advantage over humans.
A pre-AI regular computer vision algorithm could do that. Combined with the fact that Waymo maps out locations in high detail before offering rides in an area (which means the edges of what's drivable is already known to the AI, and, I mean, they don't drive there currently, so me pointing out it's basic math isn't, like, proof or anything, but it just doesn't seem insurmountable, given the other things computers can do these days. Computers can look at photos, tell you what it's a photo of, and then you can search for "car" and show you all of your pictures of cars! OCR works well enough that I can take a photo with text in it, and then just copy and paste the words, without having to wait for the computer to run a slow analyze process that I have to wait on first.
Computers are fallible, but the other part of that is, having driven in snowed out streets, sometimes you get stuck behind someone who's snow covered lane math you don't agree with, and you either pass them or get stuck behind them. Which is annoying, sure, but it's one of those things you just kind of live with during winter? Complain about to your friends and family maybe?
The other thing is that we all know that in dry sunny conditions, city streets aren't always well marked. So there's already capacity to put the vehicle somewhere that's not rigorously defined by painted lines on the street. Now, we don't know how much Waymo has their army of contractors manually add lines to the street data that the cars have, or if the computer calulates that, which would make it harder to drive when there are no visible lines because it's been snowed over.
Anyway, the other challenge about winter driving is the difference in traction. There's snow, ice, black ice, wet asphalt, salty asphalt, and sometimes even dry asphalt. 4wd is popular on cars in those areas to help deal with varying conditions. With 4wd, moreso AWD, and also ABS braking, we're already relying on a computer to sense how much the wheels are slipping, and then to transfer power to the wheels that have traction. I'd imagine a more advanced computer could help out those systems and preemptively tell them what's going on. (Black ice btw is why I don't believe in camera-only systems. It's not that cameras aren't capable in regular conditions, its that I think self-driving should be better at things, and if it's got data on where there's black ice because its advanced sensors just simply pick it up, we'll all be safer.)
Only time will tell. I'm just a random on the Internet who took some computer vision classes while I was getting my. degree back in the OpenCV days. Maybe it is that hard and self-driving cars never make it to snow prone areas. I just don't think it's as big a challenge as some people make it out to be. A system with LIDAR should be able to gauge distances in the dark better than I can with my human eyes that need headlights in order to make out anything after the sun goes down. Which in the dead of winter, the sun goes down at 3pm, which really messes with the human psyche.
Phoenix just broke rainfall records two days in a row and regularly gets dust storms. Those are both challenging conditions for drivers.
If things keep going the they are right now, in less than 50 years (give or take 10 years?), we could literally see the economic landscape migrating from a capitalist society to a neo feudalistic one, where companies will basically control everything (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, are basically investing in everything, from health to food) and people just work (if there are still any left), just to survive.
Interesting times we're living...
Population demographics are trending downward in advanced societies and the trend is worsening. Finding solutions for the reduction in low training required workforce is necessary unless you want to drastically ramp up immigration policies.
As the transition occurs, dials on immigration policy can be adjusted to help maintain a consistent/decent price floor on the jobs that remain.
Trade skills are flourishing and, to my understanding, are in exceptionally high demand. Some folks doing gig work will make that leap and will experience much higher quality of life.
These changes aren't happening overnight. Those who are unwilling to make adjustments will have their quality of life reduced. It's not sexy, but it is how the world has always worked.
I'm sure my comments can be perceived as callous. I'm truly not trying to be. I just find it odd that the framing isn't, "Wow, for a period of time we were able to get more jobs to a significantly large amount of the population due to innovation. How fortunate." since that seems as fair a take as one saying those jobs are being destroyed due to the same innovation.
Here's the thing: This is good for the economy and human development overall.
What we're witnessing right now is the opposite: Mega corps trying to control almost every industry, and shifting the economic and social landscape from a capitalistic society to a neo-feudalistic one.
The socioeconomic implications of this shift will be something humanity has never experienced before, since the endgame is to automate everything. If we get to that point, either the government seizes the means of production (I don't agree with that since this is communism) and distributes wealth, or the government charges nearly a 97% on taxes (capital gains, etc but taxation is basically theft, hehe) and we start living in a "Jetsons"-like society, or we get a feudalistic society (hopefully I'm dead wrong).
Is there an in-between?
They barely pay the humans in the loop now, apparently. I don't see them lowering costs because of this but I guess we'll see.
It seems more likely that they'll keep the prices as they are and make some excuse about "shareholder value."
They've already acclimated two entire generations to paying crazy amounts for food delivery. Why would they start charging less?
Until there is competition, they'll keep feeding off of the fatted calf. And completion is likely a decade or more away.
That's why drivers try to take you off the platform and pay in cash/venmo
Absolutely
> Considering that they're the only autonomous car provider in operation, that curve will not be consumer-friendly.
Waymo+Doordash also competes against non-autonomous delivery.
The whole point of creating a robot taxi service is to sell to consumers. If it's not consumer-friendly, then consumers won't buy it, which defeats the point?
Robot taxis are hardly a staple one needs to exist, people have been easily living without robot taxis, and if the price is consumer-unfriendly, they will simply not use them.
Either way, we're going to see a lot more of this. More and more of the gig economy being automated away.
I don't doubt that we will have the same thing with all these new options. Maybe the social baggage won't be there but there will be weird new things that pop up...
As well as the prices, wait times and ubiquity.
I’m not saying it’s a panacea. But I don’t think most people want to go back to when Uber was only black cars.
Enjoy it while it lasts. Uber/Lyft were far cheaper than other options when they launched until they put everything else out of business, then jacked up the price.
Source? Particularly inflation adjusted? Uber, specifically, started out as black cars only.
Now let’s try to assess the automated car situation. Assuming each delivery is about 5 miles that works out to 240 miles per day for 48 deliveries. Most cars are useful for 100,000 miles so the vehicle should be able to deliver for about 416 days. Assuming it gets gas mileage of 30 miles per gallon and gas costs $4 per gallon (using gas for simplicity though these are probably electric) for $13,333 in fuel over the life of the vehicle. Maintenance for these vehicles will vary of course, but a reasonable estimate is $1000 per year for brakes, oil changes, etc. adding up to $1140 total over the life of the vehicle. There are other costs that will be required as well like parking for the car when it’s not in use, cleaning of the car outside and inside, software maintenance, etc which I am unable to estimate, but it won’t matter as you’ll see below.
Automated cars are likely to cost at least 60k each (being really generous here … see below) given current prices on cars.
Cost of vehicle - $60,000 / $200,000 Vehicle Maintenance – $1140 Fuel – $13,333 Insurance - $1000 Other costs??? Total automated driver - $75,473 / $215,473
* Found article that states Waymo vehicles cost $200,000 as of June 2025, but included the scenario where the cost of the car is $60,000 and human drivers are still less expensive. So even if the Waymo vehicles dropped to 1/3 the current cost which is not likely, they are still more expensive than human drivers.
“Waymo vehicles are equipped with numerous expensive sensors and can cost roughly $200,000, enough to buy five or six regular cars. As of May, there were just 1,500 Waymos operating in all its markets.”
https://sherwood.news/tech/as-the-race-for-autonomy-heats-up...
Total Human driver - 416 days x $144 = $59,904
Rough napkin calculations show that it’s not cheaper for the company to buy some brand new, super high-tech automobile that is unproven and requires tons of research and development to refine it to the point that it can’t even complete the complete task (pick up food at counter and delivering food to the door of the customer).
Don’t do what? They’re just buying Waymo cars and building a plug-in to send waypoints to the car from their delivery software system. Waymo did all the hard work.
There are several reports of the older version waymo cars lasting >200k miles, that would double the cost of your human driver and make the low end more profitable.
I'd assume that the insurance waymo has to pay per car is much lower as the removal of human drivers and proof of XXX miles driven without incident would drastically reduce the risk to insure. I also think the economies of scale and 24/7 always on + improvements on iterations will do nothing but drive those costs down.
Are you using delivery services regularly? How many times per week? Do you care about the cost?
I understand it’s popular, but I don’t use it and the people around me don’t really use it, so I feel out of touch with reality here.
Also, given my salary, if I'm working late, it's absolutely worth it to order doordash if I'm tired. I wouldn't do it every day because it's harder to eat healthy and only a subset of food doesn't degrade in quality when delivered.
Tech delivery services might be one of the rare ones where, we were really better served when each restaurant offered their own free delivery.
Food delivery is something I truly have never understood. I have very rarely been in a situation where I was thinking about food and couldn't think of any nearby restaurants within walking distance (~30 minutes on foot). Why would I order if I could just walk, which is also more healthy anyway? Even if I was extremely busy, if I have time to eat I also have the time to get the food.
Cool? I’ve never quite gotten bumblebees.
Meanwhile, they continue to fly and apparently burrow. And Europeans buy tens of billions of dollars of food delivery services [1].
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-online-food-delivery-m...
Do /you/ understand food delivery?
And those same urban-dwellers are far less likely to own a car, and far more likely to have a tiny kitchen.
Absolutely untrue.
Assuming it's those little cooler-sized ones
Damn it's an entire car for a package? hmm maybe they combine people and food (points to head)
That'll be a new traveling salesman algorithm, the waymo doordash problem