Why does “innovation” have to go hand in hand with fucked up labor practices?
Not exploiting your workforce as much as you can is an almost guaranteed road to failure.
Imagine taking investor money and saying "I'll pay more to my workers so they can have decent lives". They'd oust you in a second. Same if you're in a publicly traded company.
The only possible way this doesn't happen is if you're running an already profitable private company, you're willing to grow at slower rates (which carries its own risks), your market allows it and you're not a sociopath.
That's a very rare combination.
While still losing a billion dollars a year, or more, for years.
Honestly DoorDash when it did come reduced restaurant profits, lowered quality of food delivered, and increased consumer costs. Zero advantage for anyone other than DoorDash unless you consider being able to search for the food in a single app and paying extra for it to be cold on arrival an advantage.
If you want more concrete data, you need to look at how McDonald’s did deliveries in Manhattan but not rest of the US until they partnered with food delivery apps. Most other fast food chains did not have their own delivery network either.
And I also point to restaurants that are newly added to delivery platforms, because you can easily verify if they previously could deliver or not.
Since when the capitalism seeks for advantage of Regular Joe?
Also Caller ID isn’t that new.
(This was in Tegucigalpa in the '90s, fwiw)
Nothing makes me feel so old as observing the phenomenon of people (mostly younger) habitually ordering food through these platforms, paying $5 to $10 in platform and delivery fees per meal. All this against the economic reality that wages have not kept up with the rising cost of, well, everything and it just looks a lot like rent-seeking on the part of these platforms. I do appreciate how the platforms have brought near-universal delivery to the suburbs, but I've lived in the suburbs my whole life and I simply do not use these services due to the cost. Same goes for ride-sharing. My only usage of these platforms is when I'm traveling.
Within the <$50/diner category, yes. It seems this is where the new Applebees/Ruby Tuesdays are forming. Above that, there is an explosion of creativity in the fine and pseudufine dining categories.
I can count half a dozen on my block in Flatiron alone. The only Korean fine-dining place to have opened near me is Nōksu, and I'm a few blocks from Koreatown.
For example, a friend of mine is a data scientist who reports up into the CFO of a company that owns around 10 restaurants in New York, California, and Las Vegas. The flagship of the brand is a Michelin-starred celebrity chef.
His entire job is presenting to executives the profitability impact of experiments in changing the formulation of espresso martinis and leek soup. He says that the company is entirely, quantitatively, incrementally profit driven and "joyless, from the executive team down to the dishwashers". It honestly sounds to me like the most miserable, furthest possible thing from the romantic old new york storytelling of Anthony Bordain that could still be legally called restauranteuring.
This is massively prevalent for food science and prepackaged goods (through panels and such; usually not to the end customer). Seems like restaurants are catching up.
COVID killed a number of restaurants, but some, thrived. A couple of local sit-down restaurants switched to take-out only, fired all their waitstaff, and probably got a lot of financial assistance. They made out well.
A couple, never went back to in-house dining. They are still take-out only.
Doordash became huge around here (Ubereats, too). Pretty much every restaurant does them.
The prices have gone way up, for many of these places. A few places have doubled their prices, in just a few months.
Not sure of all the causes, or the long-term effects, but I am not seeing too many "Help Wanted" signs.