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Comment by jchoong | Hacker News Reader

I'ld add that drone delivery for takeout would be a nice win, given that most restaurants that deliver are already limited to nearby locations and speed is desired.

With a proviso that it might be easier in a suburban situation to begin (given a lawn to drop off the goods).

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The thing is that quick, low-price takeout delivery to a limited radius of households is pretty much a solved problem. I suppose one could imagine more industrialized takeout-only restaurants in suburban locations but, again,one could create such a chain today and indeed we have them for say pizza. They're not very good but they're big businesses.

If you could solve the problem of needing to directly interact with the customer to collect payment, I'd think food delivery would love the idea of drones. The biggest cost of a pizza delivery shop is paying the drivers. They normally get an hourly wage, plus mileage if they are using their own cars.

They'd need to solve payment collection; a lot of people still pay cash for things like food delivery.

I don't use any of them because I don't live in an urban area, but my understanding is that apps like GrubHub can handle the payment process.

This "They'd need to solve payment collection;" is an intriguing problem if it is still present. The spate of startups (doordash/postmates/et.al) solves the problem (and more) but I certainly wonder if there's a more focused solution to the specific problem. Would there happen to be more specific details/datapoints?

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