Comment by zucked | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zucked | Hacker News Reader

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After the pandemic is more or less over, consumers will return to restaurants for the experience. These ghost kitchens will continue to shovel mediocre garbage at scale for those Friday nights when you just don't feel like cooking, but Sunday brunch on a patio is an experience you cannot get from delivery.

I think there is room for both the physical and digital experience. Any restaurant who hopes to survive will need to make a choice about who they are, though - are you commodity or an experience? I doubt any can do both well.

The sad reality is that most people just don't give a shit - look at how much whitelabel junk is sold on Amazon to people who don't care. Those same people are the perfect demographic for commodity food delivery - they want some abstracted version of what they think Chinese food is for a reasonable price, delivered to their door.

The real scale of the problem will be when DoorDash et. al merge/acquire themselves a monopoly and push orders to their own entities.

So I see that this comment and a few others make the point that a great number of people are too lazy/poor/busy to make the distinction between good food and ghost kitchen drivel. I think this is an interesting argument, but in food the cheap end of the spectrum is not some unclaimed territory. There are fast food chains and cheap eats galore. These fast food chains survive by franchising and rabid supply chain optimization. But just because something is cheap and easy does not make it a winner. To build an audience, ghost kitchens have to become trustworthy brands, which they can never do by definition.

In your comment on Amazon, I think the difference is that often times, the white label goods are actually pretty good. So while it’s not branded, the reputation is overall positive, and sometimes these goods come from the exact same factories as the branded goods. While some ghost kitchens are derived from real, high quality restaurants, most of the time it is a distressed business that needs to rebrand or a new entrant of questionable quality.

> So while it’s not branded, the reputation is overall positive.

I agree. Trader Joes has a lot of white label stuff, I'd say I usually have a higher impression of their white labeled products than branded products at the same price range.

There are food services that are commoditized and physical, they just don't necessarily look like restaurants. Food trucks, the popup at a food hall, hot dog carts, the NY deli, etc. These various forms are commonplace all over the world, they're just less common in parts of America because they were largely made illegal. Here's cops in Texas shutting down a lemonade stand run by two girls: https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/11/politics/lemonade-stand-shut-...

Food delivery, even with all the complaints about how much they skim off the top, how much they underpay drivers, etc. still makes pretty meager margins. And consumers aren't blind to it; I know a lot of people who have grumbled about how much there is in fees.

The sad reality is that most people are too poor to afford to give a shit.

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