Re:DoorDash and pizza arbitrage (2020)
by kelnos on Wednesday July 13, 2022 @05:01PM
(#32088700)
> In general, how did we get to this point that it is more expensive to order takeaway food from a restaurant than if you cooked the food by yourself ?*
Because it costs more for the restaurant to make it. I'm not sure where you are getting "how did we get to this point" -- this has always been the case. The restaurant not only has to pay for the cost of the ingredients, they have to pay to store those ingredients, pay for someone to assemble and cook the final dish, someone to take orders, payment processing, real estate, electricity/gas, insurance, business fees, accounting, and all that. And that's just for takeout; add dine-in or delivery and costs go up even further.
When you cook yourself, you only pay for the ingredients. We don't think about the electricity/gas costs for refrigeration or cooking, or that the space in our home for our kitchen and pantry costs us money in home purchase price or rent. The main place the restaurant "wins" here is that their cost of ingredients is probably lower because of their scale.
> By logic it should be considerably cheaper to produce 10'000 pizza (this is 30 per day) using professional ingredients and optimised processes than baking your own pizza at home.
If you only consider the cost of ingredients, then yes, that's true.
Because it costs more for the restaurant to make it. I'm not sure where you are getting "how did we get to this point" -- this has always been the case. The restaurant not only has to pay for the cost of the ingredients, they have to pay to store those ingredients, pay for someone to assemble and cook the final dish, someone to take orders, payment processing, real estate, electricity/gas, insurance, business fees, accounting, and all that. And that's just for takeout; add dine-in or delivery and costs go up even further.
When you cook yourself, you only pay for the ingredients. We don't think about the electricity/gas costs for refrigeration or cooking, or that the space in our home for our kitchen and pantry costs us money in home purchase price or rent. The main place the restaurant "wins" here is that their cost of ingredients is probably lower because of their scale.
> By logic it should be considerably cheaper to produce 10'000 pizza (this is 30 per day) using professional ingredients and optimised processes than baking your own pizza at home.
If you only consider the cost of ingredients, then yes, that's true.