For food delivery, I imagine going back to pre-apps and have restaurant employed couriers for local takeout could be beneficial for both parties.
The food delivery app business works like the insurance business: the aggregate drivers form a risk pool [1] to protect restaurants from the variability of demand. This allows a single restaurant to be able to accept 10 food delivery orders in a matter of minutes just as easily as they would for orders coming in from the tables in their dining room. The app would dispatch up to 10 drivers to handle those orders and even automatically batch them according to proximity of destination.
Of course the app can also handle multiple restaurants in a similar area in the same way so that drivers can be dispatched most efficiently to handle all the demand for an entire city. The more drivers, restaurants, and customers centralize on a single delivery app, the more efficient the system can be (assuming the app developers know how to optimize the transshipment problem [2]).
Unfortunately it’s management is opaque and manipulative, in the hands of a one self-interested actor.
If anything, this sort of market would be well served by a publicly funded (not necessarily by a Government, let’s throw blockchains into the mix) neutral and transparent platform
If the business has a delivery driver, that driver should get priority on the app. But that'll never happen, because that's a slippery slope to just being an ordering platform - a much smaller moat.
I was a driver. When not delivering, we waited, checked out, cooked food, got ahead on end-of-night cleaning, etc.
If the orders piled in, we made them ourselves then delivered them. If it was a slow night, they let a line cook go and we took over, while the manager filled in while we were out on delivery.
We were the ones who stayed late to clean the kitchen, because we delivered right up until close. On slow nights, we got out the door right at close. On busy nights, it might be two hours later as we handled the backlog of cleanup / closeout.
Delivery drivers are efficient flexible resources with less overhead than the apps.
We handled all the breakfast and fruit trays until the kitchen staff came it at 7am. We got there at 5:30.
And yet somehow we had restaurant delivery for 50 years before the invention of the cell phone. And grocery delivery for a hundred years before that.
Both pizza joints, and the Chinese place I order from employ their own people.
The only thing that's changed is that a certain cohort of people are terrified to pick up a phone and speak to another human being, and so delegate that most basic of human functions to a computer program.
The only actual utility of these apps is the ability to track and obsess over the precise location of my food, as if I'm going to die of starvation if I don't know exactly where it is.
This is the crux of the matter. We're not living in the "2 pizza joints and a Chinese place" world anymore. In my city there are hundreds of restaurants serving cuisines from half the countries on the planet. Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, British, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Mexican, Salvadoran, Peruvian, Brazilian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (including Cantonese, Sichuanese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, and Hakka), Indian (too many to count, likely from every province in the country), Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Thai, Vietnamese, ...
We also have movie theatres selling popcorn, Dairy Queen selling Blizzards, StarBucks selling frappuccinos, and McDonald's selling McFlurries, doughnut shops selling Boston creams, dessert shops selling matcha roll cakes, ... I didn't even mention pizza joints!
In other words, the delivery apps bring customers an explosion of options they never had before. That is their highest utility for customers (while offering the risk pool solution to restaurants).
In my city, too. But I don't presume that I have the right to have every single cuisine that exists delivered to me at near-zero cost. Sometimes you have to make an effort in life.
If we go back to the way things were 30 years ago then we have fewer restaurants, less economic activity, less diversity, and a less interesting life for everyone!
No, we don't. People still have to eat. If anything, we have fewer restaurants today because of consolidation in the industry and the way massive-scale delivery enables ghost kitchens that take customers away from actual restaurants.
less economic activity
Uber Eats barely generates any "economic activity." It doesn't rate against the economic activity generated when people go outside.
less diversity
Now you're just making things up. People don't become Ethiopian because they sat on their couch to eat at Ethiopian delivery compared with actually going to an Ethiopian restaurant.
a less interesting life for everyone!
Leaving your house is more interesting than being inside. It's pretty much the definition of "living."
Sure someone is. The Uber Eats guy. Because of you. Not considering other people to be equal human beings is the root of the problem.
Part of being an adult is to be prepared. Surely you knew it was going to be -15 more than an hour before you got hungry. You DO have a smart phone, after all. It comes with a weather app built in.
What do you think people did before we had smartphones? They didn't sit around and whine about the temperature and not eat lunch. They bought stuff ahead of time, including egg salad sandwiches.
Oh, the horror of having to pack a lunch like a caveman, and not a self-entitled knowledge worker!
I hope you somehow manage to recover. Perhaps clutching your emotional support water bottle will help.
Yes, my father is an Uber Eats guy. He depends on people ordering their lunch for his income.
I have nothing else to say to you.
It is sadly too small market nowadays...
There's arguably been some efficiency lost, as some restaurants had the drivers cross trained to help with making the food.
You cannot pre-deliver, so there's no solution.
Sounds like a problem that solves itself.
Or at least a wake-up call that you're doing something wrong. Unless you're safeguarding nuclear launch codes, there's no such thing as "too busy to eat." It's just people trying to make themselves and others think they're important. Guess what? You're not. The actually important people do eat. It's their lackies who pretend they're too busy to do the same.
Yes, I've owned my own company. Yes, it required extensive complicated international travel. It's still true. If you can't plan meal breaks, you can't plan.
And even the nuclear launch people get lunch.
Ofcourse in the US with tens of millions of illegal immigrants who will do anything to survive the situation must be very different.