For the former, I wish there was an app that notified me when a neighbor orders from a restaurant I’ve frequented, near a time of day I’ve ordered. They could offer a discount for piggyback orders, since the cost to the driver is negligible and they can convince the restaurant that they provided the value-add of the additional revenue.
That’s a privacy nightmare.
Let's be clear, this will happen regardless if you get the notification or not. Your purchases are going to be analyzed down to the second you made the purchase.
> ... when a neighbor orders from a restaurant ...
More to the point, it stays "safe" until (let's be real) there is a data breach. That's less of a privacy nightmare when you consider there's a much smaller range of actors that will use the data from a breach. Contrariwise, the ability to just query their API for some of that data gets turned into an app that someone's stalker ex downloads so they can proceed with stalking.
Privacy nightmare indeed.
"Neighbors" is a loose term. It doesn't literally mean only the people you live immediately next to. Aside from the fact that the person receiving the notification has no information about the radius this notification was triggered by, there would also not be identifying information in the notification. You're not being told "That person across the hall, John Smith, bought a large pizza from ABC pizza ten minutes ago and is on his way to pick it up now".
A stalker would get no actionable information from "Someone in your area ordered sushi from XYZ".
There is also no indication that this would be available in any sort of publicly scrapable API, I really don't know where you pulled that from. Push notifications, by definition, are not queried for.
If a platform created this feature I imagine they would also prime the pump with dishonest notifications about “a neighbor ordered from X restaurant”, with the expectation that they could parlay a single fake order into many real ones.
If you think delivery is unsustainable because cars cost money, I got news for you: You live in a bubble, and it's the cars that are unsustainable.
Outside of the car-centric world of US suburbia, most of the western world is actually doing deliveries on scooters and ebikes, which are very quick to navigate medium-to-high-density cities and can do several deliveries per trip.
I've ordered a lot on Takeaway, at least once a week on average. The last time I saw somebody pull up in a car was during the COVID lockdowns, and I suspect it's because there was basically nobody on the streets.
The business model is broken, because car-centrism is broken. In the civilized world, things are ok.
Either way, fuck Uber. There's better alternatives.
Just because you might have a different experience doesn't mean this is US centric. The same happens across Canada and in several big cities in South America.
Many big US cities really aren't densely populated. e,g, including 2 of the 4 largest: LA & Houston.
I ... think I'm calling NYC part of the "civilized world" and I'm not sure how to feel.
I remember seeing a map of the US denoting whether the majority of commute was done by personal car vs public transport. The entirety of the US was by personal car… except for NYC. It had a bit of an Astérix feel to it.
I used UberEats once (in Sydney) because I had one of those coupons. UberEats was garbage. Cost too much and I could have gone to the place myself and returned in half the time.
I can’t advice beyond that but Uber is awful awful awful. Every time I give them a chance I regret it, be it on price, support, ethics, quality …
This is the weirdest straw man. Scooters are cheaper to operate and faster if there’s any traffic.
Scooters are very limited in cargo capacity are not particularly viable in rainy or winter weather, not to mention just statistically increased injuries and danger for riders, which eventually translates into liability with scale. If you have to make multiple trips when one car trip would have sufficed, that completely undermines the cheap & fast argument. If you have to have cars around for bad weather days or bad weather seasons anyway…
> Scooters are very limited in cargo capacity
Only Americans would be regularly ordering so much takeout as to worry about scooters not being able to transport it. You really need to reconsider your dietary choices if this is a serious concern.
> Scooters […] are not particularly viable in rainy or winter weather
Scooters are perfectly viable in rainy weather. Nobody does food deliveries with a car in London.
I’m sorry you felt the need to get snarky. Making assumptions undermines your argument. It’s not hard for the orders for 2 families of light eaters to not fit in a single scooter.
This, again, is the norm in Europe.
Why should the average delivery guy be driving a car to be able to accept big orders that probably make up less than 1% of all deliveries?
Now I still dislike the services and it's really annoying that they caused this revival of motorscooters who are now driving recklessly on the bike paths, but transport volume is really not an issue.
I don’t need to present any evidence to the contrary because I didn’t make any claims to the contrary. I’m not claiming scooter usage isn’t high, I didn’t say it’s not more than cars or bikes. I was more careful than that.
You made a strong claim that you can’t back up, and you’ve already admitted that you’re just making up. That’s on you, not me. I’m simply sensitive to people making assumptions and insisting on calling them facts, and that is what you did.
Just like your unfortunate and unnecessary anti-American comments that got you downvoted, you could have ended this by simply acknowledging gracefully that it’s your opinion, and you believe it’s most, rather than continuing to add hyperbole after hyperbole, exaggeration after exaggeration on top. Claiming scooter usage of scooters for food delivery is the same as the sky being blue is a pretty bad analogy, and weakens your point.
Adding an ad-hominem on top accusing me of trolling just becuase you can’t answer my question also reflects poorly on you and tends to undermine what you’re trying to say. It would be so much stronger if you simply qualified your claim as your own belief and left it at that, or did some Googling to find stats. I’m sorry that asking for evidence of what you said upset you so much.
anti-American? Seek help buddy.
> It would be so much stronger if you simply qualified your claim as your own belief and left it at that, or did some Googling to find stats.
Look, my claim is obvious to anyone who isn’t completely out of touch with the world outside of North America.
“Googling to find stats”? There obviously isn’t going to be any meaningful numbers to be found on Google wrt this.
Using cars for food deliveries is a completely ridiculous idea in most cities of the world. There’s no parking! How are you going to deliver food with a car when there’s no free parking?
Shit, what do you think are the odds that a food delivery guy can even afford a car in most of the world? There’s something like 1 billion passenger cars in the world, that leaves you with something like 1 8th of a car per person.
This really is as obvious as “the sky is blue”.
To suggest that you’re trolling is simply the most charitable way to interpret your comment.
Even in Dubai scooters are the norm, despite the city embracing a very American take on urban design.
No, I don't have data to back this up. I don't need to, this is obvious to anyone who has traveled the world. If you read this thread, you will only see Americans talking about food delivered by car.
The exception was riding a standard bicycle.
Sure, I live in mainland Europe, but you talk as if you talk for everywhere.
Scooter deliveries are the norm even in the warmest areas of Europe.
Same goes for places like Tehran, in fact almost all of Asia.
Depending on geographic location, no doubt. Can you imagine risking your life on a scooter weaving through idiots in their lifted pickups in any American metro?
Last I lived in Calgary, trucks were absolutely the norm.
>That's especially true in Alberta, where 89 per cent of spending on new vehicles this year has gone to trucks, vans and SUVs. That compares to about 80 per cent, nationwide.
>"We're basically a truck market," said Denis Ducharme, president of the Motor Dealers Association of Alberta.
Having been to both (but not having driven a scooter in Atlanta) I'd suggest scooting around Paris is very different than scooting around Atlanta.
For example, the Wagoneer is the SUV version of the RAM.
The Suburban and Tahoe are the SUV versions of GM trucks.
The Land Cruiser, Sequoia, and Lexus LX are the same platform as the Tundra.
Etc.
Automakers don’t do one-off light trucks. They are all shared platforms.
And, I mean... I lived there. Saw many more trucks than anything else on the road.
Traffic camera feeds suggest this is not the case by a long shot? I don't have a particular stake in this race though.
Sure, in the winter the proportion of couriers driving cars increases. You also see tons of people on fatbikes and similar.
My town has just under 120k people and the majority of deliveries are done by car.
Truly, a shocking new development.
You said "americans avoid two wheeled vehicles for no reason".
They have cars anyway so they use them.
The reason they need cars is because it gets cold, there are highways that go fast and it's dangerous and illegal to take young kids or more than one kid on a scooter. This is not complicated.
Also the honda scoopy and yamaha scooters are 115cc and can't get up to american highway speeds. In Thailand it isn't even legal to drive scooters or even motorcycles on their highways.
Maybe you should go on holiday to Vietnam in the winter, you might realize there is no snow in Vietnam.
Americans usually need a car anyway so they already have one.
It has everything to do with your refutation of that claim, however.
My actual implicit claim is that there appears to be a degree of truth in the idea that US residents have a cultural aversion to two-wheeled transport that extends beyond the justifications you proffered to dismiss the claim.
No there isn't. People have jobs to go to and there isn't much public transportation, it gets cold, snows and people need to use the highways. People need to have a car so they already have a car and that's why scooters are usually something people buy for fun and not neccesity.
People in developed economies shouldn't be carrying around sofas on the backs of mopeds as they do in Vietnam, but it should be reasonable enough to deliver a pizza on one where the weather allows in the USA.
FWIW: I'm very much a car guy.
The 'sub' is a reference to the proximity to the (likely denser) city, not a step between urban and rural.
So for instance, the small town I live in is also considered urban (but is located in a rural county).
In any case, we’re discussing the sustainability of delivery services. Most of the world lives in cities, it really doesn’t matter if they’re unsustainable in rural areas.
While you’re at it, maybe also explain how this has anything to do with the subject at hand?
This was in 1990.
When I wasn't driving, I was grating cheese, or folding boxes, or cleaning. There were always slow times during the shift for this work.
I had a used car, and as a teenager, and later as an adult in college, the job paid quite well at the time.
Tips on busy nights would double or triple my wage.
Drivers can very much make a good wage delivering pizza! This is because a traditional pizza place only delivers within a certain range, has its own drivers, and each driver(when busy) can take 2 to 5 orders, and deliver them in an optimal route.
As a driver, you get very, very good at driving your neighborhood, knowing all the slow and fast spots, and the best route to deliver 4 orders in one trip optimally.
I'd often deliver 20 pizzas an hour on Friday nights, all hot, all fresh!
Yet an uber driver delivers for a dozen companies, each to different places, may drive miles to get to each company, then drive that single order to the customer. Uber drivers cannot optimize the same way.
Just the fact that when idle, I did work (so not a loss for the company), yet when a pizza popped out I was there, ready!.. is an optimization uber eats loses at. Idle for them is a loss.
Uber eats, all external delivery services are the worst. If your main business is delivery(pizza), you are nuts to even allow them to pick up at your establishment.
Grubhub, for example, will charge you an 18% service fee, a $1 "big/expensive city" fee, a tip (for the driver), and then also a delivery fee on top of that.
That's before the inflated menu prices and price gouging they do to the businesses.
Still, it's a lot more economical for reasonably busy delivery places to just employ their own drivers that can take care of a few deliveries in one shot.
It will be much cheaper once there are self-driving cars. You don't have to pay for the drive, just for somebody doing the final delivery from the car to the door.
It will be even cheaper, if customers are willing to leave their house and fetch the food from the car at the street. Then you don't have to pay anybody, just some cents per mile for the vehicle.
So if they have the skills and tenacity to consistently make slightly better than a living wage (probably for only a few hours a day) they probably have what it takes to get and keep a regular job paying notably better?
To see that 20/hr requires all kinds of strategies now — it’s a different world.
Let the poor rookie go get stiffed on a tip.
* Address changed, but 25 year later I actually still remember the real address.
I think that a solid portion of workers will accept significantly higher costs in exchange for slightly higher income, even if they come out worse. Lots of people will just look at the paycheck and won't think about their gas bill or how much time they actually spent.
Plus, one hour making $30 lets people rationalize 20 hours making $5/hr. That's how gambling works.
Add on the ability to "be your own boss," work when you want and start earning immediately, and I think people will keep doing delivery work even if the pay is shit.
You're going to have to pay a lot more. The model can't be sustained at this price. Once the driver pays for gas and (over time) wear and tear on the car, even with healthy tips this ends up being sub-minimum wage. We got used to that price when VC money was subsidizing it and gas was half the price it is now.
Yeah you can read someone's personal account on how they are able to clear $20 an hour regularly doing delivery, but they have to employ all kinds of strategies to do so, including taking multiple orders at once, purposely ignoring orders that are unlikely to have significant tips, and completely ignoring entire sections of the city that aren't "hotspots" with tons of restaurants cranking through orders. Not to mention they are still probably undercounting the cost of wear on their car, and most people touting their delivery driver profitability are probably exaggerating.