Comment by jwagenet
1 year ago
For food delivery, I imagine going back to pre-apps and have restaurant employed couriers for local takeout could be beneficial for both parties.
1 year ago
For food delivery, I imagine going back to pre-apps and have restaurant employed couriers for local takeout could be beneficial for both parties.
The problem for restaurant-employed delivery staff is nearly the same as the customer-employed delivery staff mentioned above. The driver sits around in the restaurant parking lot twiddling his thumbs and then 10 lunch orders come in over the course of an hour, most of which while the driver’s out delivering the first order. The last order ends up taking 2 hours to get to the customer who is not at all pleased with cold, soggy food long after the lunch break ended.
The food delivery app business works like the insurance business: the aggregate drivers form a risk pool [1] to protect restaurants from the variability of demand. This allows a single restaurant to be able to accept 10 food delivery orders in a matter of minutes just as easily as they would for orders coming in from the tables in their dining room. The app would dispatch up to 10 drivers to handle those orders and even automatically batch them according to proximity of destination.
Of course the app can also handle multiple restaurants in a similar area in the same way so that drivers can be dispatched most efficiently to handle all the demand for an entire city. The more drivers, restaurants, and customers centralize on a single delivery app, the more efficient the system can be (assuming the app developers know how to optimize the transshipment problem [2]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_pool
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transshipment_problem
What businesses need is delivery drivers.
If the business has a delivery driver, that driver should get priority on the app. But that'll never happen, because that's a slippery slope to just being an ordering platform - a much smaller moat.
I was a driver. When not delivering, we waited, checked out, cooked food, got ahead on end-of-night cleaning, etc.
If the orders piled in, we made them ourselves then delivered them. If it was a slow night, they let a line cook go and we took over, while the manager filled in while we were out on delivery.
We were the ones who stayed late to clean the kitchen, because we delivered right up until close. On slow nights, we got out the door right at close. On busy nights, it might be two hours later as we handled the backlog of cleanup / closeout.
Delivery drivers are efficient flexible resources with less overhead than the apps.
I thank the lord I got to have a driver job as you describe in the 2000s before the gig economy. I would have ground myself to dust for an extra dollar under the current conditions.
This is how it worked for me catering breakfast and sandwiches. There’s not much down time unless it was in between lunch and dinner shifts.
We handled all the breakfast and fruit trays until the kitchen staff came it at 7am. We got there at 5:30.
You can't really fix the problem that everyone tends to order during lunch and dinner hours. No matter how you arrange the delivery staff, there will be too much demand during those times, and too little the rest of the day.
There's arguably been some efficiency lost, as some restaurants had the drivers cross trained to help with making the food.
But that's true of staffing across the whole restaurant, and yet, it seems to work.
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The problem for restaurant-employed delivery staff is nearly the same as the customer-employed delivery staff mentioned above.
And yet somehow we had restaurant delivery for 50 years before the invention of the cell phone. And grocery delivery for a hundred years before that.
Both pizza joints, and the Chinese place I order from employ their own people.
The only thing that's changed is that a certain cohort of people are terrified to pick up a phone and speak to another human being, and so delegate that most basic of human functions to a computer program.
The only actual utility of these apps is the ability to track and obsess over the precise location of my food, as if I'm going to die of starvation if I don't know exactly where it is.
Both pizza joints, and the Chinese place I order from employ their own people.
This is the crux of the matter. We're not living in the "2 pizza joints and a Chinese place" world anymore. In my city there are hundreds of restaurants serving cuisines from half the countries on the planet. Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, British, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Mexican, Salvadoran, Peruvian, Brazilian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (including Cantonese, Sichuanese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, and Hakka), Indian (too many to count, likely from every province in the country), Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Thai, Vietnamese, ...
We also have movie theatres selling popcorn, Dairy Queen selling Blizzards, StarBucks selling frappuccinos, and McDonald's selling McFlurries, doughnut shops selling Boston creams, dessert shops selling matcha roll cakes, ... I didn't even mention pizza joints!
In other words, the delivery apps bring customers an explosion of options they never had before. That is their highest utility for customers (while offering the risk pool solution to restaurants).
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And for that I am happy with simple web site. List of options I can have, basic modifications like remove or add. Some extras, and option to pay there and then.
It is sadly too small market nowadays...
Not only do a few of my local restaurants employ their own drivers, but they also use websites to allow for online ordering so I do not have to pick up the phone anyway.
Lovely, it’s really a useful tool.
Unfortunately it’s management is opaque and manipulative, in the hands of a one self-interested actor.
If anything, this sort of market would be well served by a publicly funded (not necessarily by a Government, let’s throw blockchains into the mix) neutral and transparent platform
Well, you can also - shock horror - drive (or bike, if possible) over to the restaurant and pick up your order yourself! That's of course assuming that the restaurant has another means of placing orders than through the delivery apps (e.g. a phone number)...
This is what I do. Dealing with the uncertainty of the delivery apps as a customer in my area is approaching the levels of nightmare it is as a driver in others. I didn't keep track when I was using them but let's just say it was a pleasant surprise when I received everything I ordered. Usually something was "forgotten".
While I personally make 95% of my food, I order delivery when I am so busy that if I don't, I will not eat.
While I personally make 95% of my food, I order delivery when I am so busy that if I don't, I will not eat.
Sounds like a problem that solves itself.
Or at least a wake-up call that you're doing something wrong. Unless you're safeguarding nuclear launch codes, there's no such thing as "too busy to eat." It's just people trying to make themselves and others think they're important. Guess what? You're not. The actually important people do eat. It's their lackies who pretend they're too busy to do the same.
Yes, I've owned my own company. Yes, it required extensive complicated international travel. It's still true. If you can't plan meal breaks, you can't plan.
And even the nuclear launch people get lunch.
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I like food delivered to me but I am willing to pay for it. The minimum wag applies to gig workers too- and with an aging society and shrinking workforce the pay is usually a lot better than that.
Ofcourse in the US with tens of millions of illegal immigrants who will do anything to survive the situation must be very different.
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