Food delivery existed before platforms, but only where it made sense. You could order something like a pizza, where the marginal cost and effort required to make another meal was low, and the sales volume was high enough to justify using paid employees for delivery. Service area was also chosen by the restaurant itself to ensure that they would not spend too much time on a single delivery.

In the end, it's pretty simple. How many deliveries does a single person make in an hour, including idle time? Is someone paying enough for that? And does the kitchen have enough spare capacity for that?

There were also 3rd party services that would deliver from most anywhere, but they were expensive (they made actual net profit on each delivery).

> Food delivery existed before platforms, but only where it made sense.

This article is about NYC, where food delivery was ubiquitous long before DoorDash. In fact, Seamless in 2010 was a better experience than Doordash is in 2023, when you consider the absurd markup on Doordash.

Doordash struggled to enter the NYC market for a while because it was trying to compete with an established product, yet using a higher price point. It was only with massive amounts of VC funding that they were able to get a foothold.

>The basic concept of food delivery existed long before tech and VC and was viable.

In limited markets, for specific types of food, and for pretty crappy wages for the delivery people. (And, yes, for mostly pretty low tech approaches.)

These companies have spent a ton of money to convince lawmakers and consumers that they are not in the food delivery (or taxi) business. The whole plan was to not have to deal with these pesky regulations.

> The only reason these companies can't turn a profit is because

is because their business model is unviable and unsustainable

In NYC, before Seamless and the like, restaurants just offered free delivery when you called over the phone. It was just part of the deal; didn't have to be profitable on its own (the business it brought was enough). Restaurants evidently did fine back then.

Seamless et al are really just siphoning money out of restaurants’ pockets because you cannot, these days, be the only restaurant who still makes people call over the phone.