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Comment by toohotatopic | Hacker News Reader

With taxis you don't share delivery routes. It is inherently more expensive.

Food delivery is not new. The new thing are the web interfaces. Now people don't need to visit shops to learn about new things. People can shop delivered goods all the time. This allows to drive down delivery costs with scale.

Additionally, online shops streamline the ordering process. No person is needed to note down orders.

Additionally, self-driving cars and robots will eliminate the cost of the last mile. Like Uber, whoever owns the market when the robots will go life will rake in huge profits.

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Food delivery doesn't necessarily let you share delivery routes, either. If you're paying for groceries, yes. If you're paying for two theoretically freshly-cooked dinners from a local restaurant, you want that food to come directly from the restaurant to you. The difference between ten minutes and forty minutes can substantially affect food quality and customer satisfaction.

As for food delivery robots, I mean, sure, but building a business that only succeeds if other people deliver world-changing technology at scale before you run out of capital seems a wee bit on the risky side.

>Food delivery doesn't necessarily let you share delivery routes, either.

Right, that's my thinking (and anyone is free to steal this idea with my encouragement): there should be a way for someone to commit to some dish, started at some time, and then others can "hook" onto the order for a discount. Then you get economies of scale: it costs a lot less than O(n) to batch it up to n orders.

That's a surplus that can be shared between the tech platform, the restaurant, and the end user.

Similar logic for delivering that same food to people who are close to each other.

Earlier post on the model:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093747

Ritual kind of does what you're describing without the delivery. They're targeting offices. One person orders and the rest of the office is alerted. The first person picks up orders for anyone else that puts an order in within a few minutes.

Uber eats used to do that with their own selected dishes.

I'm pretty sure I saw this at some point in the last few weeks, either in sf or LA

> there should be a way for someone to commit to some dish, started at some time, and then others can "hook" onto the order for a discount

This is how Uber Eats already works in Toronto.

There is a section in the app with restaurants that have orders already in progress and with a timer on each one and if you order within that limited time, the delivery fee is $0.

Oh nice! That's awesome!

> With taxis you don't share delivery routes. It is inherently more expensive.

For large parts over here in Germany I don't see route sharing in food delivery as well. Some delivery drivers I can observe via GPS (could be faked, but looks plausible) and many are delivering via bike (Pedelec etc.) or scooter and have limited space to transport also when observing restaurants they often pass a single order ober as well.

This of course can be different in areas with other order frequency and other amount of restaurants offering delivery and other distances. (Don't think many orders go further than 2km here)

It doesn't seem like self driving cars will be viable for the foreseeable future at Uber scale, the problem is just way too hard to generalize across the entire U.S. market and there are dozens of unsolved security and safety issues that I think will keep things cost prohibitive for a while. I think you'll definitely see it on a small scale in certain cities, but it's not coming to suburbia or the boonies any time soon.

> it's not coming to suburbia or the boonies any time soon.

Time is generally cheap outside of cities, and capital less so, so I think most big SDC companies are targeting cities.

Surely exclusivity/not sharing the route is a USP for the taxi service for this offering?

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