I don't think they have a choice. UberEats is fundamentally unprofitable. If it was run profitably, the high(er) prices would drive a large portion of their customers away and into the arms of other "startups" willing to run at a loss or towards picking up the food themselves. Plus Uber can't pretend to be an early-stage startup anymore and their constant quarterly losses are starting to add up.

I'm still not convinced this new food delivery industry is viable without constant cash injections.

If I'm at home I'll look at the menu of my favourite indian/chineese/whatever place, phone them up, and they deliver it as they have done for decades.

I've spent two nights in a hotel since March, normally it's 70 a year. One night I ordered a dominos as I got back to the hotel just before 2300. The other night I ate out with a supplier.

Likewise with Uber, if I'm at home and not flying off somewhere, I'm not going to be ordering a taxi, either to get to the airport, or when I'm in a strange city on the other side of the planet.

I can see this is the golden age of takeaways and home-delivery (which basically means amazon or groceries), but I don't see it for takeaways.

So many times, I will be super busy with the kids, or work, or housework, and I will just pull up DoorDash with one hand (while the other is feeding a hangry 1 year old) and hit ‘reorder’ on one of my past meals. Literally 15 seconds and food is on the way.

Compare this to having to call someone, wait on hold, give my phone number/address, tell them my order, correct the mistakes, find my wallet, get out my credit card, give them the number, confirm the number and expiration and security code, then sign a paper copy with the tip when the driver drops it off.

Can I do the old style of delivery? Sure, but man it is a lot easier now.

Most fast food place either use JustEat or Hungry to accept your order and take your credit card information, if they don't have their own website or app. They will have their own drivers, employed and paid directly by the restaurant and they don't expect a tip.

That's what I compare any "startup" food delivery service to. So they will always be worse and more expensive, because a third party is now involved.

Tastier the food, stronger the accent.

Several places we flat out can’t communicate with.

The worse is a local pizza joint with the thickest Indian accent I’ve every heard. I work with Indians, and I still can’t understand them. Really good pizza.

Ask the whole kid angle. Kids screaming, work screaming, wife screaming...

Why isn't this a thing? Is it that few/no restaurants have delivery drivers?

I can't imagine many restaurants benefit that much from the discovery features in UE/DD/etc.

As for discovery, I don’t have data, but I know personally that about half of my regular order spots are places I found by scrolling through door dash.

Your argument (that it is not much of a barrier to use the old way) can be made for so many of the quality of life improvements we have made over the course of human history. Not every advancement is an entire new category of things we can accomplish; so much is just slight improvements that save time and make things a bit easier.

I feel like there has been a backlash against time saving tech, where people wax nostalgic about how much better the older/slower systems were. I don't understand it. I am so happy for all the timesaving advancements we have made over the years. Now, if we don't use that saved time wisely, that is a whole other issue. However, I don't think going back to slower systems is the solution to not using our free time well.

It isn't a luddite backlash. It's just that in many cases the value-add for customers doesn't justify the price difference.

There are certain benefits to apps that exist, don't get me wrong. Discoverability, flexible pricing, direct-to-consumer-marketing, etc. But most of those don't apply to me at the consumer level. Do I want to pay 20% more for the convenience of browsing menus? Not really. I'm on the app to buy food and get it delivered. Insofar as some places now offer delivery where before they didn't, I benefit. Insofar as the same places I used to frequent now apply a markup to cover the cut the app gets, I lose out.

The UX improvement of being able to press 'reorder' has never eclipsed calling into my favourite local spot, asking for the regular, wishing the owner well, then discovering he put extra dumplings in the bag for me.

Hold on, why does your opinion about the value-add get to determine whether I should be allowed to pay for that convenience?

Let the market decide that.

I view it as an unstable equilibrium -- something's gotta give sooner or later, these businesses are barely sustainable. Is the convenience ultimately worth it in the aggregate, if Uber needs to embrace tactics like these just to survive?

(I admit I have a bias here, I think the gig economy sucks.)

You're also enabling a parasitic corporation to generate more revenue, when it should be shuttered with nearly a billion in losses every quarter.

Some restaurants in Australia have higher menu prices for delivery services.

I would happily pay more for this service. I don’t want to take advantage of anyone, so please charge me enough to get me this kind of service and pay everyone a fair wage.

I can also try a ton of new restaurants without having to re-enter my details, and there is a consistent interface. In addition, I get some sort of guarantee that the place is legit... if I don’t get my food, I can get a refund.

What about a new restuarant?

.... from somewhere new

There's a maximum amount of time someone will wait (1 hour) and the product degrades after it's created (cools off)

It's very hard to do that when you're aggregating restaurants and drivers.

Uber can just write off the loss as more and more money is shoveled into it like coal was shoveled into an engine on a trail.

It's not hard to imagine them choosing to pursue Amazon-style vertical integration where they own the "restaurants" themselves. I put "restaurants" in quotes, because it'll almost certainly just be warehouse-style kitchens, where drivers skid up out front and grab food from heated tables, and you won't be able to dine-in at all. It would fill the same role for aspiring restaurateurs as food trucks do today: a startup cost, low-barrier to entry way to build out a brand, rapidly iterate menu-items, and begin building revenue to eventually secure a business loan to open a proper restaurant.

If UberEats can really squeeze both the drivers AND the restaurants, there's no fundamental reason that food delivery can't be done profitably - pizza companies have been doing it in almost all markets for decades.

Brick and mortar retail stores got eaten by Amazon warehouses, and it seems inevitable that many brick and mortar restaurants will eventually get eaten by a massive tech company as well.

Pizza delivery is profitable because they sell cardboard and depend on teenager drivers relying on their parent's auto insurance.

Anyone who's actually looked at the person delivering their food would have thought twice about the margins in food delivery. To spell it out: food delivery is often performed by immigrants with few choices for under-the-table work. The margins are thin-to-none. The current system has worked because no one's investigating the thousands of independent restaurants.

Now tech companies are trying to do the same thing, but multimillion dollar corporations have a harder time hiding their labor exploitation from the public.

Going back to ryan's point, I agree that with full vertical integration (dirt cheap ingredients and centralised factory kitchens), food delivery could be profitable, but at what point is one just selling frozen food from a microwave/oven in the back of a car?

The term for this is dark kitchens.

I always wondered something about those meals that are available on airplanes:

in the past I liked quite a lot most of them (e.g. a small piece of meat/fish/other, some vegetables and/or rice, a slice of bread, a small dessert) => wouldn't it be quite profitable to have a similar delivery service for "kits/menus" like those ones (just e.g. ~4 different "kits" available to be ordered daily), cold (but pre-cooked if needed) that only need to be warmed up at home? (if 3 stewards/esses, on a moving tube, managed to warm that up for 300 people then I guess that I'll manage to do the same for myself at home)?

I admit that on one hand the "delivery"-part of the service would be related only to getting fresh (uncooked or "freshly pre-cooked") stuff (not ready for consumption), but on the other hand that way the delivery could be spread over a longer timespan (multiple deliveries per trip, better delivery organization, therefore less costs) and could be left in the mailbox (assuming at least a mediocre insulation of the package).

Here in Switzerland/Zurich I am aware of some similar services, but they deliver only the ingredients (then I would still have to actively cook). Supermarkets do have some similar pre-cooked stuff, but most (not all, but most) is quite terrible (probably because there the stuff has to be able to lie there for days/weeks - definitely not similar to what I used to eat on airplanes) and especially it never changes.

(I used to fly only in Europe using "Swiss", "Air Berlin", "Lufthansa", maybe as well "KLM"/"Air France", always to/from Zurich - your experience with other airlines / in other location might be different)

Woudln't it be nice to get back home and find in the mailbox a ready-to-be-warmed-up (maybe actually "cooked", but in an extremely simple way) menu?

The delivery, being all sourced from the same place and being spread over many hours would not be as expensive as it is currently done for hot stuff coming from multiple restaurants, and the small amount of different menus (4 as mentioned above or slightly more) would allow to buy more source material for less $.

EDIT: I admit of not having any clue how the companies that prepare meals/menus for airlines operate => there might therefore be some important details that make the whole concept crumble... :)

There are meal-delivery services here that are basically what you describe, but they usually deliver food weekly and they're kind of pricey. They're mainly targeting time-strapped single people who are trying to eat healthier and don't want to do all the mental work that goes into grocery shopping, meal prepping, cooking, etc.

In any of the major urban areas in the states, a $5 budget would limit you to various street foods (a couple of tacos, a banh mi, maybe a slice of pizza) or a couple of items from the dollar menu at the various fast food chains. Frankly, your typical airline meal is more filling and nutritious (but not as tasty, unless you're flying a middle eastern or flagship asian airline, of course).

A decent McDonald's meal for example, would blow up your $5 budget pretty easily.

On one hand you are absolutely correct stating that swiss restaurants are in general more expensive than anywhere (subjective - e.g. a 30$ small menu might be ok here, but we do have as well a higher income and going to the restaurant is not something that people do often), but on the other hand I did like airline food (which you basically describe as being "the worst" while for me was on par with one offered by restaurants), therefore we have a mismatch of our experiences.

(talking about restaurants, I must mention that Stockholm was for me a lot more expensive than Zurich)

Personally, I would have all kind of doubts about a $5 meal (in most parts of the world, if it's not something extremely simple).

> There are meal-delivery services here that are basically what you describe, but they usually deliver food weekly and they're kind of pricey. They're mainly targeting time-strapped single people who are trying to eat healthier and don't want to do all the mental work that goes into grocery shopping, meal prepping, cooking, etc.

I'm not currently aware of something like that in my area , but my profile is very similar (and I did try to cook different stuff, but the failure rate is quite high and the overall quality quite low). Still, I think that the concept that I described was a bit different than that?

I'm from southern California. I worked in Wellington, New Zealand for a stint, and I found that restaurants were priced about the same as back home. That is to say, an average sit-down restaurant meal of equivalent quality was roughly the same price in USD.

However, in America, there's an entirely different class of much cheaper food (takeout food), and younger people in metropolitan areas eat this food very often. These were usually powered by cheap immigrant labor, often paid under the table to skirt taxes and mandatory benefits.

Labor protections in New Zealand are much higher, of course, and without an easily exploitable underclass, this food simply can't exist there. There weren't really regular kiwis who ate out 1 - 2x per day - virtually all of them cooked most of their meals at home themselves.

This is the environment in which these food delivery companies are operating. These restaurants already have extremely thin margins, consumers are price-sensitive, and as long as the delivery company is just a middle-man, they'll struggle to do this thing profitably. If they lose access to their cheap labor by having to re-classify drivers as actual employees, it might be impossible.

The food tastes pretty good. It's better than frozen food, but still a far cry from a freshly cooked meal. It's not terribly cheap either. If I did all 3 meals from them 5 days week, it cost somewhere around $8 a meal. I ended up quitting because of the price. It's too expensive to use for many meals, and has to short of a shelf life to keep around as a backup if I don't want to cook.

Uber's burned 10s of billions in the hopes of becoming a few hundred billion dollar company. Would Uber 2.0 need to burn hundreds of billions in the hope of becoming a hundred billion dollar company?

So I think the difficulty is less around investors being more savvy to the economics of ride sharing and delivery services, but that they're more savvy to the realities of how far off those technologies are. And that the entrenched firms like Waymo will be far, far better positioned to offer an autonomous taxi service on day 1 than some plucky startup will be.

Pizza chains and others who own their delivery process can at least set where they will deliver and tend to encourage bigger purchases to avoid delivery charges and hopes of fresher food.

I am going to assume the only type of agreement would be tighter integration with restaurants to the point the service name is hidden, as in contracting out drivers to particular restaurants but the difficulty there is guaranteeing a driver is always available. Basically an outsourcing for drivers. Restaurants get some filtering of drivers and drivers have a set number of stores with instant familiarity.

at Uber scale, they can get VC funding for $500-800 million, to hire the thousands of chefs that were laid off during the covid shutdowns. You can also imagine going international, so Uber Chef is actually thousands of chefs around the world. (hiring chefs without the overhead of restaurants - that's the play)

The scenario proposed by the grandparent poster adds so much waste and slack and overhead in the system that the family-owned-and-operated Thai kitchen on Main St. will eat Uber's lunch, and the Dominos franchise two doors down from it will pick through its bones.

Uber Chef ignores all of that and bypasses all overhead - you don't need a restaurant or even the physical location of a building to employ chefs to cook food. No need for health inspections or expensive fire suppression equipment. (you use people who want to rent their home kitchens out for cooking)

That's Uber's raison-d'etre - to bypass all legal restrictions and externalize all overhead in the way of getting the items to you.

This isn't a joke, this is what Uber did with their taxi service at the beginning as MVP so why not do it to food services as well?

They allowed individuals to sell food / operate as a pop-up restaurant.

IIRC, it got closed down because of health and food-safety related regulations.

A more sustainable version of this business model is basically a food truck / cart.

It’s also a high liability business, especially when dealing with animal products.

Not to mention prepared food is barely affordable for the vast majority even with the tiny margins that exist today, so the only people who would be able to afford such an on demand personalized chef service surely could just afford their own chef?

I found most of clients fell into two categories.

  Poor and really should not be using the service.    

Middle of the day was to a lot of businesses/schools. Lunch tips were crap so I avoided that time frame.

How does this not stop this whole conversation in its tracks immediately? There's so much grandstanding about this, you and every other politician or upper middle class tech worker has their takes on how these poor drivers are being tricked into bad deals they can't understand and need the protection of full-time employment. But it's not a very good protection! There are a lot of downsides, and drivers simply don't want it, but for some reason a lot of people feel the need to force this change through anyway.

Our current labor system, and its default assumption that tying yourself to a full-time job with a large company is the only way you deserve to have stability, is just very clearly showing its flaws here. It's not compatible with gig economy work, why can't we look for solutions that drivers would actually want, and that would help every other independent contractor? Things like improving overall safety nets, so that everyone has health coverage and is covered in the case of things like disabilities even if they don't work for a large company.

Almost every take I read on the pro-AB5 side of this argument seems more focused on punishing Uber the corporation for some perceived moral failing, than on actually helping the drivers. It's quite bizarre.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2020/08/19/wil...

But that's the wrong question.

The better question is: What percentage would want to be either full-time or part-time employees?

I would imagine the percentage would be much higher.

When classified as part-time employees, they'd have much of the same flexibility they currently enjoy, but they would at least be covered under minimum-wage laws, same as part-time workers who work at McDonald's or the grocery store.

If Uber/Lyft don't think it's financially viable to offer its workers the same bare-minimum protections that a McDonald's worker gets, then I don't see how it can claim to be a non-exploitative business.

It was commissioned by Uber but conducted by an independent research firm, and the methodology is documented, so it's up to you how reliable of a source you find that.

Since these are major lawsuits and it's also becoming a pretty big story in California, I imagine if there are significant flaws here or if there are other reputable surveys that have found the opposite, that those will start to surface. So far I haven't seen anything to that effect.

[0] https://www.cadriversurvey.com/

Edit: I missed in the irony in your comment as well on first read. There's an entire side industry devoted to helping workers maximize their profit, and many seem to have success doing so. That seems like a good thing, at least for those who want it? Compare that to other industries like Amazon warehouse workers, where many are full-time employees. It doesn't seem to have helped their working conditions much as there are a lot of complaints about the job, and if certain employees are more productive the company pockets the savings rather than the employees being able to make more money.

Because that doesn't include the number of people who would want to be ride-share/delivery drivers but don't because they can't be employees.

That pool could have 99% people who want to be employees, but only a small number them (17% of current drivers) keep driving despite their preferences.

Too bad they didn't ask questions like "do you want to deal with independent contractor taxes" and "do you want to set your own hours" and so on, to drill down into why they liked the independent contractor status.

Maybe the solution is to force ride share companies to truly act as matchmakers, where they show passengers and drivers the book and collect a small fee for completed transactions rather than using opaque pricing to maximize their take from both sides of the transaction.

The main case here is about requiring employee status or employee-like basic standards of workers rights for the drivers, even if they don't work full time for a single company but (for example) five hours for Uber followed by three hours for Lyft on the same day.

Workforce moving to the 'gig economy' does not by itself justify abandoning the basic standards and protections from exploitation that our society has decided long ago to afford for even the poorest and most vulnerable workers. There currently are legal loopholes that enable the 'gig employers' to skip these standards. That's a bug, not a feature - it should be fixed.

I wouldn't say it's rare. Companies that do this are very open to lawsuits but also bad press, and that's the thing all companies hate - having to make public statements and ultimately fix the issue, isn't worth it to any business at scale. The DoorDash tipgate was hugely embarrassing for them, and Uber has also been very publicly ridiculed in the past that the the last thing Dara wants is anymore bad press.

I have gotten a check from the CA Treasurer on a few occasions because I didn’t check some box and take a tax deduction that I was entitled to. Not a company, and certainly if I underpaid the state would come after me to be made whole. But some organizations do work both ways.

Uber's argument that they are not employees is based on the concept that they only a platform facilitating a connection between drivers people who need rides or in this case deliveries. But if the contractors are truly separate entities, then Uber by controlling the cost of the ride/delivery, is fixing prices.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/legal-problem-could-crash-ube...

I am not aware what the current status of legal rulings for or against Uber in this regard, but I believe my point still stands.