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Comment by ngngngng | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why doordash, uber eats, deliveroo, and similar business are starting to exist. Restaurants have been running successful delivery operations independently for ages. And there are many software offerings to help businesses get set up with delivering food.

Why do we need a centralized on? Is it just the benefit of being able to browse in one app/website everything available for be delivered to you?

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I've spent many thousands of dollars on app-delivered food over the last few years (Foodpanda, Uber Eats, Grab Food, Lineman, and Deliveroo). I use the apps because:

- GPS tracking of the driver, and helpful notifications

- Discovery of new restaurants

- Detailed menu (and occasionally useful suggestions of menu items)

- I don't have to create a new account or fuck around with giving some restaurant my credit card

- I don't have to speak to a human

I'm hungry right now. I can pick up my phone, and in 30s, without needing to do anything other than click on the food I want to eat, in 25m I will have a human with food at my building's lobby.

> - I don't have to create a new account or fuck around with giving some restaurant my credit card

In case you need to in the future, i'd recommend privacy.com for merchant-locked cards.

How has your experience been with privacy.com?

Usually gets your Uber account terminated or not able to sign up in the first place with a prepaid.

Hopefully not a problem with small businesses?

It does become a problem depending on their POS vendor deciding to flag prepaids, I've seen several dislike this because of the ability to modify transactions afterward / tip or something of the sort, for the restaurant industry.

Mine has been excellent apart from the daily limit and merchants that don't accept their cards like cloud providers. Takes a bit of regular activity before support will raise the limit but the fact that Privacy.com cards show up as prepaid (try it out with the Stripe api, for example) is a show stopper for some narrow use cases - which overlap almost perfectly with spammers so who can blame the merchants.

That last bit only applies in dense downtowns. In the Bay Area, if I'm hungry right now and that happens to be roughly dinner time, I'm waiting 50-70 minutes for a food delivery.

My guess is that your app of choice can show you estimated delivery times for different restaurants based on distance and avg preparation, adding yet another reason for using

Yes. I'm just saying that the majority of restaurants in the greater bay area will have lengthy delivery times during weekday dinner hours... the exception being if you order from a place physically close to your delivery point.

One reason I haven't seen mentioned, maybe because it's not the case in America, but in Australia before Uber Eats your options for takeaway were somewhat limited. You could have all the Italian/Chinese/Indian you wanted delivered, but if you wanted a burger, or Mexican, or French food it was probably 50/50 there'd be anyone around who delivered.

Uber Eats vastly expanded the range of cuisines available, if they simultaneously lowered the quality (since these restaurants had no experience preparing food for delivery, and the delivery was usually slower since they didn't have in-house drivers).

It’s why I do order on DoorDash too. My local Indian place doesn’t do delivery, neither does my local deli, and my favorite pizza place won’t deliver to my address.

I’m more than happy to cut out the middleman and order direct but they turned me down when I offered to pay more to deliver to my address. I’m literally 50 ft outside their posted delivery area.

Is it just the benefit of being able to browse in one app/website everything available for be delivered to you?

It's not just that, it's also a centralized payment system. You set up your account and you can order from any restaurant on the app without having to give them your address+payment info. Couple that with very simple, centralized dispute resolution and refunds as well as notifications of special offers. It's very, very convenient.

The economy of scale for the drivers is also much better with a centralized model. Instead of every mom and pop restaurant having to hire their own delivery staff there is one centralized pool of drivers available to everyone. A lot of restaurants just don't get consistent enough demand to hire a full-time driver.

In the UK before Deliveroo you could only order food from traditional take-away restaurants (Chinese, Indian, Pizza, etc). Delivery time could easily take north of 1.5 hours. Deliveroo takes 20-30 minutes. And you can order from really good restaurants.

> Is it just the benefit of being able to browse in one app/website everything available for be delivered to you?

Yes I think that’s a big part of it.

That’s a big part of Uber as well - I can fly into a city not knowing anything about how they do taxi and get an Uber.

   I can fly into a city not knowing anything about how they do taxi

What airports are you flying into where you could avoid signage/references to local taxis/buses/transit if you wanted to? Heck, most have taxi stands right outside baggage claim, if not all exits.

Not the where, the how.

How much do they cost? Do they know where my hotel is or do I need to provide a specific address for their GPS? Are specific taxis limited to specific jurisdictions? Can I get a van if I have 6 people or do I need two vehicles? Do they go out as far as the somewhat rural university? How about to the manufacturing plant 20 km outside the city?

The cost for a taxi is way less reliable, and harder to dispute. It's a common but unpleasant way to arrive to a new city to realise you've been shafted on the taxi fare.

100% my least favorite part of traveling in the pre-rideshare world. Has happened to me plenty of times.

If taxis just had upfront pricing and followed Google Maps it wouldn’t be a problem. I’d my happy to give them my business. I don’t really care too much about the app or whatever.

Like it could be super informal like $1/minute for whatever it says on Google Maps at the start and it would be fine.

It's the how that matters. Some countries have "interesting" taxi ecosystems.

I had a friend whose taxi would drop her off to a certain part of the city she was in in Malaysia. She liked him and wanted him to bring her back home later because she felt safe. He couldn't. Apparently there were taxi gangs controlling territory and he could only drop off and GTFO.

Or there's what I saw in Peru where a guy was selling TAXI signs at a traffic light. That's all it takes in some countries, whack that on top and you're good to go. Nice to get a tourist halfway down the freeway then "renegotiate".

> Or there's what I saw in Peru where a guy was selling TAXI signs at a traffic light.

This is literally what Uber/Lyft are doing. You don’t even need to leave the house.

I think that's an exaggeration. Uber/Lyft have some standards and questions before they let you join as a driver, not just a plastic sign you throw on the car. And if something goes wrong they have an audit trail. They at least know who picked you up before you went missing and where you were. You get none of that with a plastic sign.

It’s not where they pickup, it’s things like how much do they cost, do they take cards, are they even safe to use?

If you are a tourist you will get charged more if you hail a taxi from most Indian airports.

> Restaurants have been running successful delivery operations independently for ages

Have they? Because in my experience delivery from anything but major chains like dominos, mcdonalds etc. has always been awful everywhere in the world.

With delivery services I can get my favorite dish from my favorite small shop hassle and cash free.

A company focusing on delivery can do the job more efficiently and competently. Just the fact that they can route deliveries more effectively instead of going restaurant-customer-restaurant is a big win.

One selling point is ordering from places that don't offer deliveries, like McDonald's or Burger King. Essentially pay someone else to order and collect for you.

That can backfire, as with the article here...

McDonald's is now partnering with Uber Eats, but in the wild west days there were a few apps which let you order from pretty much anywhere.

One app in my area (Glovo) still lets you do a free-form request: just write whatever you want delivered from any shop within a certain radius of your house. I never tried it, though.

Majority of times I order from these centralized sites becauae of convenience. Id like to support my local restaurant by ordering via phoning the restaurant directly, but it is pain in the arse compared to the convenient web ordering process.

Given that, I wonder if there is an opportunity to provide the ordering service and leave the delivery up to the restaurant... It would be dramatically easier to start up, require far less capital, require almost no human resource challenges, etc, etc.

Edit: Just noticed lower in the comments that this is exactly what GrubHub was doing before Doordash showed up.

> leave the delivery up to the restaurant

Then you get an inconsistent experience.

> Restaurants have been running successful delivery operations independently for ages.

Crappy phone call driven ones with few checks for information accuracy.

> Is it just the benefit of being able to browse in one app/website everything available for be delivered to you?

Yes, that is a large part of it. I can be hungry and just pick up the DoorDash app and browse for food. I also have a single point of complaint for any issues with the food, can be confident that DoorDash got my address correct do not need to deal with a credit card at the door, and when I am in a new city, can instantly know what is available.

And still your order is wrong half the time.

Yeah, but now I click a button and in 30 seconds get a refund no questions asked.

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