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Comment by johnnyanmac | Hacker News Reader

But it worked 20 years ago. That's the issue. We didn't get worse at driving and (apparently...) we didn't get poorer over the last few decades to pay for stuff.

Cost of living from the fallout of '08 simply skyrocketed and most of the country didn't not increase compensation to make up for that. Despite that company simply charged more while cutting costs at the same time. So the driver and the customer lost out.

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I think by "these services" they mean apps like Doordash, not delivery as a concept

And they're saying: Why couldn't Doordash work when pizza delivery worked 20 years ago? Doordash is just pizza delivery scaled up, right? If pizza delivery had continued, it should work the same way as doordash for the same price as doordash but limited to pizza restaurants (by definition), right?

It is odd.. It's such an easy middlemen to apply and should theoretically be operated on modest margims. Instead it sounds like they for this stupid extortion of a cut behind the scenes which ruins it for everyon. Based on Cowto's operations, few would complain about a 14% uptick on delivery (and the tip was already culturally accepted. No more work to do there). Instead, you can double your meal price nowadays.

I know much of the answer is a mix of private equityb and an overload of debt taken from insane evaluations.

For a few reasons:

1. Pizza travels very very very well

2. Pizza is pretty cheap to make

3. Wages (and costs of transportation) were lower 20 years ago.

More generally, delivery as a model can work, but not when you have an organisation of really expensive engineers/salespeople working on a frontend to it.

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