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A comment on America is stuck at home, but food-delivery companies still struggle to profit. Parent comment

Re:America is stuck at home, but food-delivery companies sti... by Melting_Harps on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @04:54PM (#23171728)
> I know that there are other companies trying to be a middle man in this way. It’s going to get rid of even more of Door Dash’s profits

And this is the unwritten prelude to how Snowcrash happened and the mob got involved in food delivery. I can already envision Uncle Enzo capitalizing on his new venture.

But seriously. has anyone actually seen or know anyone who has used Caviar? Dorsey sold it to Doordash a while back for nearly half a billion in cash. Aloha is still the standard for POS systems in restaurants, and something called toast has become more an more popular from the restaurants I frequent that are still open and want to be mobile as they can't allow people to come in. It looked like an old Square thing with a card swiper on top. This is there website [1] apparently they've been around since 2012.

1: https://pos.toasttab.com/

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Re:America is stuck at home, but food-delivery companies sti... by taude on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @06:02PM (#23172342)
Toast recently laid off half their workforce...obviously restaurants doing poorly in the covid-economy.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/07/restaurant-management-plat...

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Re:America is stuck at home, but food-delivery companies sti... by Melting_Harps on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @06:39PM (#23172664)
> Toast recently laid off half their workforce...obviously restaurants doing poorly in the covid-economy.

Ouch. It says they're affiliated with Grubhub, so hopefully that's their support line in all of this.

This is interesting and suggests they're more a fee generation business model than a traditional fintech POS supplier and management/tech support one:

> As a result, fintech companies that help restaurants work better and depend on foot traffic are seeing less transaction volume.

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Re:America is stuck at home, but food-delivery companies sti... by gbear605 on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @07:02PM (#23172890)
Their model is primarily taking a share of credit card transaction fees plus a monthly fee for physical devices. While they’re doing poorly right now without restaurants open, they have a large war chest (raised their series F in February).
[ Parent | on HN ]