Having lived in NYC, Hong Kong and Singapore, the best system around all of this is ..<p>Singapore hawker center.<p>Turn up to somewhere ~10 mins or less from your location. Have a great meal for $5 (US) or less.<p>Continue<p>No delivery fees, delivery emissions or waste. Talk to people... The list goes on.
I don't really understand the appeal of these delivery services.<p>Whenever I try them my food usually arrives cold and more than once has apparently gotten stolen and then I have to spend a bunch of time with delivery people messaging me saying the food is not there, and then have to talk to customer service to get a refund.<p>On top of that they practically double the cost of the already expensive food it seems to me.
It is inevitable for DoorDash to make tipping an even more annoying and intrusive part of Deliveroo. I can't wait to see how europeen users react to that.
I never understood why these delivery services are popular.<p>Yes people are lazy. But lazy to the point of paying an additionnal fee to be waiting twice the time it gets to fetch the same food yourself and receive dishes that are cold instead of hot? What is the incentive really? If only those delivery services would use devices that keep food warm and deliver from somewhere far from home, I would maybe understand, but they aren't even available in a wider than a small radius around your house, so it is always more convenient to walk/cycle/drive to wherever you would order that food anyway.<p>The only ones that do it relatively well are pizza joints and they usually have their own delivery service so you don't even have to use these apps.
Doordash and the Pizza arbitrage is a mandatory read on the economics of the delivery apps.<p><a href="https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage" rel="nofollow">https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage</a>
Most startups in the UK have either:<p>1. Sold to a foreign buyer<p>2. Shut down<p>3. Relocated to the US<p>4. Are stagnant<p>The UK is up for sale (at a discount)
Interested to see how this plays out.<p>Deliveroo has been on a downslope for a while; exiting international markets and losing home market share. And despite DoorDash's US dominance, they still haven't made significant growth with their international operations.
I've never understood why no delivery app driver can find my flat, despite me clearly marking its location with a pin, making a note of where I am, and making sure that when you put my address into google maps, it points directly at my flat. Every single delivery driver has to phone me and ask where I am while they stand on the other side of the road, looking at a house I don't live in. Are they seriously all this incompetent??<p></rant>
These purchases only goal is to reduce competition and create monopolies. And the some people will defend the companies with "but if they are the best why should not be a monopoly?". The easy answer is that they are bad but just purchased their monopoly with investor money.<p>Capitalism is dying.
My neighbor has delivery (sometimes two separate drivers/services at a time when him and his wife want different types of food) at least 3 times a week. To each their own with their finances, but I just can’t bring myself to pay all of the extra fees. Also, the food is usually listed at a higher price to make up for the cut the various apps take.<p>I’d rather just call the restaurant directly and get it myself. For some of these restaurants, the savings is 20-35% by just grabbing it rather than using a delivery app.
I rode for deliveroo for about a month and a half before they got out of Dodge in Europe due to breaking employment rules.
The good riders who joined early were making ridiculous amounts of money in the beginning. When I came on the rider pool was diluted and it just got worse.
Why is anti-trust not kicking in? Come on Britain, why not keep your companies locally-owned.<p>We do not need all these rent-seeking companies buying one another. Enter the market as a competitor or fuck off
Last time I used deliveroo I got a spam/scam phone call 20 minutes later. I presume the drivers sell customer names, addresses, and phone numbers.
Ugh. Deliveroo is a pretty borderline proposition as is already. Can’t imagine this will improve it<p>If it wasn’t for Amex discounts I wouldn’t use it at all
This is disappointing from an innovation perspective. I know Deliveroo are just there to make money but they were uniquely positioned to do something transformative with their apps over the past ten years. Instead, we’ve basically seen little to no innovation on the consumer product other than an expansion from restaurants to now including grocery deliveries and group ordering.<p>What about including a human, social element? Deliveroo could have been a channel for building a relationship between customers and Frankie’s Pizza where I could hear about upcoming specials, promotions, news about their expansion to a second location etc.<p>There could be an integration with power users (superhosts, sort of, but the analogy isn’t exact) where consensus can form around who really <i>is</i> the best Chinese food in town. Let’s get the hygiene rating of the kitchen front and centre too (perhaps they do this in some markets?)<p>For the riders, why has there never been a successful internal commitment to building a positive human workforce on the city streets? I feel like the brand started that way with their iconic jerseys and oversized food boxes but devolved into freelancers of the lowest common denominator. When my orders started arriving 50/50 in a just eat thermal bag, it really drove home the point that these services are never about long term value for the human workforce. We are now haggling on price in an auction against everyone else in the same way airline flights compete solely on price. When that happens, just as with airlines, any notion of a quality product or differentiation on service goes down the drain. It’s as if the major component of service differentiation <i>is</i> the lower price which is such a shame when there’s so much opportunity to shine as a food service app.<p>If these companies truly do want to race to the bottom as generic low latency courier services then perhaps we will hopefully see them exit the app layer and solely occupy the transport layer, leaving space at the app level for someone who cares about the state of restaurants, food, and quality, leaving the delivery part to the auction apps. I’d much rather have a high quality integrated service but if we’re obviously not going to get that then the sooner they stop trying the better.
Probably a needed move (and timely with the recent upsurge in Reform UK wins). Deliveroo has been running on a regulatory arbitrage -- it got to decent size in the UK due to lax laws on low quality/illegal immigration. If that has an expiry date approaching (it looks like it does), to maintain its scale it has to plan for a technological shift in the way it operates -- it is too small to do that by itself. DoorDash isn't.
Here in London, we've already boycotted all the services except Dominoes. Poor practices, delivery to wrong addresses, cold food, worse quality compared to eat-out, and items often missing. It's quicker and better for me to hike up the hill and eat the same food than to deal with all the nonsense. Deliveroo was particularly bad. On top of that, it's restaurant prices for take away food. There's no advantage for me.
> We’ll cover more than 40 countries with a combined population of more than 1 billion people, enabling us to provide more local businesses with the tools and technology they need to thrive,” said Tony Xu, CEO and Co-founder of DoorDash.<p>This makes zero sense to me for a logistics company specializing in local to local deliveries. Being bigger in a given geographic area grants some benefits of scale and efficiency but being in Seattle and Bangkok there's really no difference than two separate apps. Just with the nature of the business you probably want this to be as local as possible so the profits aren't siphoned out of your community.