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Comment by aagha | Hacker News Reader

This is right on the money.

I'm visiting Southeast Asia right now and Grab is a popular service.

It seems to me you can order anything (reasonable) from Grab, but it seems 95%+ of the orders are for food

I think the other thing that makes delivery here simple (and I'm guessing, profitable) is the proliferation of scooters. They're everywhere and everyone has one. I suspect decent gas mileage and simple to park convenience makes them the obvious vehicle for instant delivery.

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It also helps to have a lower wage and higher unemployment rate.

In the US when you have Taco Bell paying $15/hr, you would need to pay a fair bit more for someone with a clean driving record and a car. And at that point, is it really worth $20 to get a single toy from the store?

>It also helps to have a lower wage and higher unemployment rate.

In a lot of Southeast Asia, personal service generally (drivers, full-time home help) is a lot more common generally for middle class-ish people than it is in the US or Western Europe.

Right, because there isn't a minimum wage in a lot of those places. I found out that the lady who took out the trash in my office made about $2 per hour when I lived in Singapore (one of the most expensive cities in the world).

All these Silicon valley start ups are trying really desperately to argue that they are not actually employing people.

While the same startup refers to their employees as "headcount" and "resources"...

I'm also in southeast Asia at the moment. Grab got big during the lockdowns and over the past few years of the pandemic. You would see the Grab-branded motorbike riders everywhere. But now it seems like I don't see them on the street as much anymore because they've hit a big speed bump: fuel costs for the motorbikes. As long as fuel was relatively cheap they could get employees here, especially since there's high unemployment, wages are low, and there are not a lot of jobs in provincial towns. But now they're struggling to scale.

I think it's because everyone in SEA has a scooter, so using Grab Taxi isn't super important. Although, I do see it used more often at night, for going out.

But Grab Food, Grab Mart and so on are spectacular services, and I find them way better and faster than Uber Eats in many places.

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