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A comment on Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?. Parent comment

Re:Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery app... by nerfhammer on Saturday May 16, 2020 @08:36PM (#23208384)
That would surprise me. It's unlikely a dozen apps would be able to coordinate like that. The thing about cartels is the first defector can cut prices and capture marketshare, which is what we're supposed to believe evil VC funded cutthroat startups are inclined to do. Raising prices to increase profit but reduce revenue growth is the exact opposite of that.

The other hypothesis is that delivery is simply expensive. The driver has to drive to the pickup place, find parking, stand in line potentially for awhile, drive to the delivery, park again, walk to the delivery location to drop off the item. Most of those things an ordinary uber fare would not have to deal with.

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Re:Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery app... by heavyset_go on Saturday May 16, 2020 @11:23PM (#23209301)
This is naive. Cartels are a market failure, and your argument against cartels existing is that market forces in an ideal world would prevent them.

Reminder that Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay all colluded to keep engineer compensation below market value[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

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Re:Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery app... by Jommi on Sunday May 17, 2020 @12:09AM (#23209492)
Well that's also just a naive view. Industrial Economics takes a deeper look at this for example.
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Re:Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery app... by ethbro on Saturday May 16, 2020 @09:22PM (#23208634)
Or, this is more like TicketMaster and less like a free market.
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Re:Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery app... by esyir on Saturday May 16, 2020 @11:04PM (#23209193)
The concert case single monopoly that controls both part of the source as well as basically all sales is now comparable to the pile of separate delivery services that compete against each other.

A claim that all of these have formed a cartel requires strong evidence.

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Re:Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery app... by ethbro on Sunday May 17, 2020 @12:10AM (#23209498)
The pile of delivery services is effectively 3, right?

And 2 of those are potentially combining.

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Re:Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery app... by esyir on Sunday May 17, 2020 @11:29PM (#23218020)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1080860/market-share-us-...

Looks like a split amongst 4 right now, as far as the big ones go. This doesn't include the smaller startups as well.

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