> These services basically don't work with Western level wages. The economics are just not there.
Only because the service is disrupting the business model for those wages.
It worked well(ish) in 2019, it failed by 2022. It's not some kind of mystery around wages or inflation, the introduction of these services (and their popularity and growth, due to COVID closing in-person restaurants for a while) is the thing that killed the economics around delivery, for much of the US.
But it worked 20 years ago. That's the issue. We didn't get worse at driving and (apparently...) we didn't get poorer over the last few decades to pay for stuff.
Cost of living from the fallout of '08 simply skyrocketed and most of the country didn't not increase compensation to make up for that. Despite that company simply charged more while cutting costs at the same time. So the driver and the customer lost out.
And they're saying: Why couldn't Doordash work when pizza delivery worked 20 years ago? Doordash is just pizza delivery scaled up, right? If pizza delivery had continued, it should work the same way as doordash for the same price as doordash but limited to pizza restaurants (by definition), right?
It is odd.. It's such an easy middlemen to apply and should theoretically be operated on modest margims. Instead it sounds like they for this stupid extortion of a cut behind the scenes which ruins it for everyon. Based on Cowto's operations, few would complain about a 14% uptick on delivery (and the tip was already culturally accepted. No more work to do there). Instead, you can double your meal price nowadays.
I know much of the answer is a mix of private equityb and an overload of debt taken from insane evaluations.
3. Wages (and costs of transportation) were lower 20 years ago.
More generally, delivery as a model can work, but not when you have an organisation of really expensive engineers/salespeople working on a frontend to it.
DoorDash is just a means to extract revenue from users, contractors, and restaurants and give it to the owners of DoorDash. It's not a sustainable business and I'm not convinced it was ever intended to be. COVID was a fluke that made it hang around a lot longer than it otherwise would have.
The killer feature of doordash/ubereats/grubhub/whatever is the ability to shop for food from a ton of different restaurants in one place with one payment button.
Back when I was doing food delivery before the pandemic, we would actively promote placing orders with our restaurant directly. I would tell repeat doordash customers that they can save 15% if they just call or use the website.
None of them converted. The convenience of the app is just too strong for people to care.
The only time I've seen people care is if you lay out an identical order and show the percentage increase over ordering delivery through the restaurant, or picking it up yourself.
DoorDash adds upwards of a couple dollars to every item. They charge a 5-10% service fee depending on if you pay them monthly. The default tip options are pretty egregiously high - it's not uncommon to see double-digit tips in all three options. I once saw a $22 tip in the top option for a single bag of food with no drinks less than a 10 minute drive away but that's likely an outlier.
All in if you don't have DashPass you're easily looking at a 30-40% increase if you get cheaper items which are more likely to be marked up only $.5-1 but represent a larger percentage of the total.
Nobody in their right mind would tip a delivery driver 40% of their entire meal, why are you happy to give most of that to a corporation that is doing very little for the transactions?
Edit: I just did this for an example order for a nearby restaurant - 1 appetizer and 1 entree so probably good for two people not super hungry to share or one hungry person to eat.
$31.59 in food, $2 delivery fee and $5.50 in fees (I subtracted sales taxes manually). This restaurant is 5 miles away and it's 11:30 local time. Tip suggestions are $9.50 (30%), $11.50, and $13.50 (42%). So at the lowest suggested tip amount, which is offensively high, you're looking at $49 before sales tax.
The exact same order is $26.36 including an online order service fee but before sales tax. Even if you were going to get it delivered and tip the driver 30% you're still saving a ton of money and this is on one meal with enough food for 1-2 people.
The appetizer alone is $10 on their website and $14 on DoorDash. It's a crazy system and I can't believe how much money people burn on this every year.
The killer feature of this and like 90% of apps in this market capture model is laziness. They realize if you can make something easy for someone they will do it even if it’s not quite what they want.
Users want good fresh food delivered at a reasonable price. But they are willing to tolerate shitty cold food at an expensive price because it’s a tiny bit easier to do than picking up the phone.
We are lazy by nature to preserve energy and many many companies have just perfected finding the right ratio of how fucked we will allow our selves to be to tickle that lazy button.
Yes but having one payment button doesn't mean the service needs to manage its own delivery.
Consider the example of Amazon marketplace. You still have one payment button and you can still shop for things from different vendors. Yet the order fulfillment can be done by Amazon or the seller directly.
If such an arrangement is possible on Amazon, it must mean that there are shops that trust their own fulfillment more than they do Amazon's. It is entirely possible that some restaurants will want to own that delivery experience as well.
Yeah, but this convenience goes well beyond the "one payment button".
If you order food directly, you won't have the delivery tracking on the map. Even within the app, if the restaurant provides their own couriers, you lose the visibility and arrival ETA info.
And 15% might look impressive, but if you are getting your food from a delivery app, you probably don't care that much about food price in the first place.
These services basically don't work with Western level wages. The economics are just not there.