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Comment by jellicle | Hacker News Reader

When I read stories like this, my only thought is how little San Francisco resembles any other city in the world. If you are designing your [next big thing] to be successful in SF, it won't be successful anywhere else. If you are designing it to be successful in the real world, it won't be successful in SF.

No, people outside SF are not going to pay $15 delivery on an $18 salad in order to receive it an hour late. No amount of venture capital thrown away will change this.

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As a Greek, it's very odd to me why many other cultures don't seem to have the food delivery element. Here, you can get virtually every type of food, from fast food, to street food, to restaurant food, delivered, free of charge, in around ten minutes, from 9 am to 2 am.

No other country I've traveled to really had this, you could, at most, get pizza delivered until 10pm or so. Can anyone shed some light?

Big cities and college towns in the US have delivery of everything. Same hours you mentioned. Some delivery til 4am.

Hmm, I haven't seen that in SF, LA or NY, but it's possible I just didn't know places delivered.

It's certainly only a subset of eating establishments in the US that offer delivery, but it is widely available.

My experience is that in NY you can basically get any food at any time you want. SF and LA, not so much.

Sorry, but almost every restaurant in NY delivers ... When I lived there we used to have a giant basket of menus on the kitchen counter, everything from sushi to Argentinian arepas to Cajun.

Here in Montevideo, Uruguay, delivery is huge, and the biggest startup exit in the country was PedidosYa (sold to DeliveryHero), works in Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo

https://www.deliveryhero.com/delivery-hero-conquers-latin-am...

I see alot of startups, in different forums ie: reddit, producthunt, etc; that have a model like Uber. For instance, Uber for breakfast, etc. It's quite shocking that some people providing X as a service forget into account the demographics of where they are starting. Imagine if there was a startup exactly like Uber and started in Alaska, would it really be successful?

So, in addition to what you said, a startup may also not work if it doesn't start (or become successful) in a city like San Francisco/ New York

Except Postmates is already operating in over 100 cities other than San Francisco.

Very cogent point! Living in North Texas, I recently saw a map highlight thing that showed this region is about the same size as Connecticut. Sure, there are some population density centers to make urban stuff work, but the 'inconvenience' factor of getting around, parking, etc, etc aren't parallels.

In the article it wasn't even in at a later hour!

A 33 dollar salad approaches the profligacy of Sodom and Gomorrah :-)

Is the customer actually paying $33 or is that $15 in VC juice to grease the system?

You forgot to include New York in the list. Totally agree with you.

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