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Comment by _verandaguy | Hacker News Reader

Love it.

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).

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In house delivery has existed for a lot of business for a long time. For instance, nearly every pizza store would do delivery themselves. Many still do. However those services didn't introduce a middleman between you, the store, and the driver who extracted money from all 3.

When you operate a delivery service for your restaurant, there's A lot of overhead. You have to strike a balance between paying deliverers their wages, and timely service for your customers. If you mismatch your number of deliverers to the business you have for the day, then you're either throwing away money, or making your customers wait a very long time for their food, which also may have knock-on effects in the kitchen, if you don't want the food to be cold, you might need to wait to start preparing it until your delivery guy is on the way back from his route. Outsourcing delivery to a delivery company seems like a win from restaurants, which is probably why so many have signed up for it.

And yet despite all the supposed barriers the most hole in the wall pizza joints had decent delivery service.

And the pizza arrived hot because they had an insulated pizza carrier. The good old days.

And also pizza places were very fickle with where they'd deliver to preserve that level of service.

True, there was a smaller service area. Luckily I lived in NJ so you could throw a rock and hit 3 pizza shops.

What do you mean 'costs more for everyone'? You're not forced to use any of it.

Problems with the current companies aside, asserting that we just shouldn't have general food delivery services at any price is strange. You could make the same argument against take-out too - anyone aside from the sick and the old is capable of cooking their own meals too, restaurant kitchen work is a notoriously poor work environment at low wages, etc...

> with a limited understanding of labour laws, rights, and protections

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.

I personally have never ordered food from any delivery service and only a few times a year from any restaurant at all, because I know how to cook and worse case, make a peanut butter sandwich.

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?

People using these services know how to cook, they're usually trying to save time. Especially if they don't want to interrupt their work to ready a meal.

I don't know about other people, but I can cook almost as fast as dealing with a delivery service. Most meals I eat take about 15 minutes to make.

You can pre-order lunch to arrive for your lunchtime meetings in about a minute in the app. Probably less convenient if you have an apartment, compared to a house, though.

Yeah this just reeks of 'old man yelling at cloud' with nothing practical or realistic

lol this is capitalism buddy. food delivery exists because people want it and pay for it, you actually don't get a say at all on if it needs to 'go away'.

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