Instacart, on the other hand, likely doesn't have any margins to play with at all, considering the fact that they are paying people to shop and check out at grocery stores. And the stores already have low margins (~1%) which means they likely don't have much in the way of sweetheart deals with the stores. They are likely in the red before the goods even leave the store.
Some restaurant foods might come close to breaking even, but few restaurants approach the margins of pizza-making at high volumes.
But don't worry. There isn't any indication that VC's have figured out math yet, so we aren't in any danger of these services going away.
I guess I'm getting old or something, because I don't understand why you would need anything more detailed than "order received", "order on it's way", and maybe "order delivered" (although you should assumably be aware of this event without an app or website informing you).
If you have the time to watch second-by-second updates of where your food delivery is, why didn't you just go save the $5 delivery fee + tip and pick it up yourself? When I order delivery, it's because I'm doing something that needs my attention and I don't have time to cook or pickup...
For the next 20 minutes you work extremely hard and finish your task, and you are now suddenly EXTREMELY hungry. Your brain being a normal brain makes the logical jump "my task took 30 minutes, food must be here soon" checking your position re-assures your brain that you just worked quickly.
There are other reasons [ie: I have a 10 minute task, check to see if that can be finished before delivery] but I agree they don't add anything
Also, the additional info has been occasionally useful to me. Like when a driver gets obviously lost. Or "Oh, the food is cold because this place is just too far away from me for reasonable delivery"
I live in the mountains but GPS knows where I am; drivers (parcels/food/etc) can choose upfront if 'this place is just too far away', not after they did the drive.
With the map, I know why. So, for example, I don't short tip the driver. Unfortunately, with Uber Eats, I don't see the problem until after I pay.
With most things, HN overestimates the ability of most organizations to overcome inertia. FB, AMZN, GOOG, etc are anomalies when it comes to managing change at large organizations.
Those are something like some local high school kids who work mostly for tips and a telephone.
Edit: A little more detail...
For their current use of the networks, the apps aren't at all competitive with Uber Eats, Doordash, etc. See http://blog.pizzahut.com/featured/track-your-pizza-with-our-... , for example. It tracks only 3 states. The UI also doesn't do a good job of highlighting state changes...the current state is just a slightly larger circle, of the same color, and no "ping" when it changes.
Then, it seems like they could leverage their networks to do something beyond just delivering their own products. I get that there are potential issues with that, but it's surprising that we've not seen at least some local trial run of that.