To be fair, in the case of Uber, at least in London there's always someone paid to stand near the metro stations distributing Uber Eats vouchers.

Of course, Uber's objective is to acquire you as a customer and not give you free food, so it's limited to new accounts only and presumably they check credit card and phone numbers to prevent multiple accounts being created.

However, if you try hard enough, you can indeed take advantage of it and automate the process assuming you have a good source of phone numbers and non-fraudulent credit card numbers.

My only theory on what the VCs are thinking is something like: "eventually, efficiencies in delivery costs will occur, perhaps due to the number of participants shrinking allowing better driver routing or new technology coming available (drones, automated delivery vehicles, who knows) - at that time, the dominant players will become massively profitable".

But I don't really get it.

To be clear, the people doing well out of this are the delivery customers who are receiving a subsidy from all other participants.