Uber is laying off 3,700, as rides plummet due to Covid-19

Re:Uber is laying off 3,700, as rides plummet due to Covid-19 by fock on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @12:17PM (#23092758)

I guess, you can operate a very good and featureful food delivery SaaS for a lot less if you skip GoogleAds, ridiculous mid 6 figure salaries (for a similar job in every place except SV) and building an exploratory machine learning arm to compete with the adtech companies you're anyway spending money on in this scenario. If you then host your servers in some coloc (because you'll have what: a 4 times surge capacity on holidays compared to a regular friday?) you can even reduce your computing bill (given that without needless data collection for your analytics and ML efforts your computing power needs will shrink fast...).

Around here most restaurants still use this kind of service (often hosted by some lowly webdev).

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Re:Uber is laying off 3,700, as rides plummet due to Covid-19 by harryVic on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @12:28PM (#23092951)

That sounds like a great idea. Why don't you do it?

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Re:Uber is laying off 3,700, as rides plummet due to Covid-19 by gamblor956 on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @01:06PM (#23093514)

You missed his sarcasm. It's what most restaurants are already doing: putting up a webpage and having customers call them.

Any restaurant worth its salt is already tracking what its customers order (on an aggregate basis) because that's how they now what supplies to reorder and when.

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Re:Uber is laying off 3,700, as rides plummet due to Covid-19 by freeone3000 on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @01:47PM (#23094065)

He says most restaurants are. There's no money in one-off webdev consulting for low-margin businesses, which is why you won't hear it as a pitch - it's solved with a single webpage with a phone number, or maybe a Google Sheets frontend. There's so much human in the backend there's not a ton of point automating the frontend.

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Re:Uber is laying off 3,700, as rides plummet due to Covid-19 by munk-a on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @02:39PM (#23094699)

There might be some space in trying to tailor an out-of-the-box frontend framework to restaurant ordering. But honestly you might get out-competed by wix/wordpress/whatever if they ever invested a pretty trivial amount of effort into targeting you - it'd be a thin thin margin to walk.

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Re:Uber is laying off 3,700, as rides plummet due to Covid-19 by fock on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @01:08PM (#23093540)

because it's not interesting too me currently. Also, the market is saturated and competing on such a market (especially if it's invaded by cash-burning startups) isn't fun for sure.

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