Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekr | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about Domino's but in many European cities, finding parking is a nightmare in the centers, and usually just walking from where you've parked to the customer takes so much time, that cycling usually is very competitive (sometimes faster).

View on HN

I live in one of those European cities where cars are just about banned from the city center. (They can access parts of the city center, but driving is limited to 30kmh and mostly one-way traffic. There's 3 dominos near me and they all use scooters. Bikes wouldn't cost them a lot of extra time.

The furtest one away from me is about 10-15 minutes by bike. And that's at a comfortable pace.

Deliveroo (delivery by bike) is already quite popular here.

Funnily enough, Deliveroo has just announced today they are exiting the German market. It's interesting how in so many places there's just one big player left (in Austria there's mjam, in Germany there's takeaway/lieferando). Maybe the market is not big enough for several competitors?

At least one player in each market is executing the "take investor money; earn huge losses in the first five years to kill competition and corner the market; then crank up rates to become profitable" strategy right now.

The thing with that strategy is, you can only do it once, using your initial capital. After you've set your new prices, new players are free to enter the market and compete with you on cost, driving you back out of profitability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com