Restaurants would do it to increase sales, of course. There simply is demand for delivered food; there always has been, and in a world where more and more families are dual-income and have more money than time, there always will be.

During the pandemic, there was certainly more pressure on the restaurants. After it, the restaurants may get a better deal -- none of that is a particular reason not to comply with the service, it's just one to negotiate more of the costs onto the end user instead of the restaurant.

Right, but every additional sales channel is also work, and so the sales need to be large enough to actually justify doing this.

If they're not, in a world where some mix of users and restaurants get charged the true costs of delivery service, then you're left with a service that gets people to order things for you, which is basically just Postmates, and they're also not doing hot.

I think some of the actual value of delivery apps has been that they have low start-up costs for restaurants. They aggregate demand for that channel and some of the genius here is that it's pretty simple putting a restaurant's menu online.

It seems clear to me that there is plenty of demand to justify the service. Doordash's revenue was about $5B last year (I believe that's revenue and not GTV, which is probably 5x that). Doordash also only has about 50% of the market. Even if you believe that some of that demand is illusory, brought about by subsidized prices, that still seems like there's a pretty straightforward business there if you can charge a sort of "ordinary business profit."

And, again, there's been delivery food businesses since time immemorial, it would be weird if we thought that there was no kind of business here. Pizza companies used to be more or less the only ones because pizza delivered so well that pizza restaurants could absorb the fixed cost of entire delivery employees, but a food delivery app lets you pay for just part of a delivery-person.

It seems pretty straightforwardly the case to me that the problem in food delivery apps has never been that the fundamental business makes sense, the problem has been that from the very beginning there have been a large number of companies ferociously competing in the space, with nothing to differentiate them, which has squeezed margins to nothing.

The problem is inherent in paying for part of a delivery person.

Pizza delivery works because there is only one place you need to go to pick up the food that needs to be delivered, and there is a very high volume of food to be delivered. There's no additional traveling cost to flit between restaurants, most of which don't churn out food at high production rates like a pizzeria.

App delivery drivers spend a lot of their time not traveling directly to customers, or waiting around for food to be ready for them to deliver.

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> Even if you believe that some of that demand is illusory, brought about by subsidized prices, that still seems like there's a pretty straightforward business there if you can charge a sort of "ordinary business profit."

This remains to be seen. MoviePass was never able to successfully both retain customers and raise prices, streaming services are starting to see the same issues. The premium over pickup is often $10-20 already, if it increases anymore that probably starts having a negative exponential effect on market size. (How many people are willing to pay $30? $50? over pickup?)

I would guess that restaurants would get bigger checks on higher margin (less effort to cook) items in-person due to drinks and appetizers.

The simpler explanation is that there is no middle man demanding a 15%+ cut of the menu price. https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/technology/uber-eat...

Restaurant margins are already thin. So they hike the prices to pay UberEats and co. their share.

People definitely order appetizers and drinks, though. And lets not forget that while some of these take less effort to cook, they take a bit more effort in other ways. Cost in cleanup and wait staff that you don't have with takeout, for example.

Also, bigger margin doesn't always mean less effort to cook. It might depending on labor costs and the cost of goods (gravy mix is more expensive than the ingredients, but takes a bit more time to prepare) and you might also wind up needing consistency: Waffle House (a chain restaurant) probably wants its gravy to taste the same in two different cities, and it doesn't matter so much if it takes away a bit of margin.