DoorDash and Waymo launch autonomous delivery service in Phoenix
about.doordash.com
about.doordash.com
It could be a lot better if multiple deliveries are handled per trip.
We've got a long way to go on actually building out our own country in a desirable way.
High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants. We're seeing restaurant apocalypse happening in places like Seattle and Denver, because high wages result in high prices which causes lower customer volume which causes higher fixed costs per unit, which causes a death spiral. Denver, for example, has 30% fewer restaurants now, because it's so hard to run one profitably.
Lots of little tasty restaurants and high wages for service staff are basically incompatible. Many people in the city don't realize this and advocate for both.
Of course, high wages are desirable if they can be accomplished without tradeoffs, but the tradeoffs are there.
High minimum wages favor high-volume, fast service chain restaurants that are more labor efficient.
Perhaps eventually automation will relax this tradeoff, but I would expect automation to primarily benefit corporate restaurant chains over small local eateries, unless the automation is so general that any restaurant can start using it without technical expertise or R&D.
According to the written history, pre-1906 San Francisco had basically that.
It seems that the normal middle-class could afford high-quality, delicious food at restaurants, multiple times per week, due to the abundance of local ingredients and overall economic conditions.
So, how to get that quality and relative pricing today?
Excerpts from "The City That Was: A Requiem of Old San Francisco" by Will Irwin (free eBook, [0], free audiobook [1], HTML version at [2]):
> San Francisco was famous for its restaurants and cafes.
> they gave the best fare on earth, for the price, at a dollar, seventy-five cents, a half a dollar, or even fifteen cents.
> a public restaurant where there was served the best dollar dinner on earth
> The eating was usually better than the surroundings. Meals that were marvels were served in tumbledown little hotels.
> A number of causes contributed to this. The country all about produced everything that a cook needs and that in abundance—the bay was an almost untapped fishing pound, the fruit farms came up to the very edge of the town, and the surrounding country produced in abundance fine meats, game, all cereals and all vegetables.
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3314
[1] https://librivox.org/san-francisco-before-and-after-the-earthquake-by-william-henry-irwin/
[2] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3314/pg3314-images.htmlThere's a certain minimum number of foods you need to sell each day which directly controls how many restaurants you can have in a given area.
The real solution is burrito tubes: https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
If you live in a very walkable place, you're less likely to use delivery and when you do it's more likely to be someone on a bike or scooter. Waymo's probably don't apply there. The comparison would be walking vs delivery, and that would obviously come out bad for delivery.
If you don't live in a walkable place then the comparison is you driving vs the delivery driving, and that's a wash or even positive for delivery. The induced demand of delivery vs cooking at home (assuming you grocery shop for the week) would be very bad for delivery though.
And that's the point. These places are less than affordable because there's a much higher demand of people who want to live in these kinds of areas than the supply of them. We should build more!
I have a small strip mall type shopping center with a grocery store a 2 block walk away. Brewpub, taqueria, pizza joint, grocery store, starbucks, UPS store, wine bar, fitness studio, yoga place, etc. Plus there's a post office another block away. Hell, yesterday I walked the 2mi roundtrip to the local Stanford medical outpost to have my blood draw done.
In San Francisco, local neighbourhoods discussed whether or not two ice-cream stores in the neighbourhood were too many ice-cream stores or not. If you don't want these people to have a voice you can have what you want, but if you're against the disenfranchisement of people then you have to accept that others have different tastes from you.
In a similar vein, widespread full-autonomous driving cars will likely lead to more people taking longer commutes by commoditizing the cost of a ride and freeing up the time that would otherwise be spent driving.
I personally really support autonomous cars for safety reasons, and to hopefully reduce car ownership, but the definitely didn't solve traffic or the external costs of cars. I hope there's an indirect path from then towards increased public transit.
What convinces you that it weren't the case?
its more effecient and its not even question
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/Ya...
They could also use bicycle lanes, but cyclists won't like it.
Very much treating the symptoms rather than the root problems.
There's a lot of empirical evidence that people will chose bikes over cars if the infrastructure made it safe and convenient, even with terrible weather. Paris, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam come to mind, but there are many more examples.
(City center properties don't have drone drop/landing areas.)
(The couriers here use e-bikes and similar light vehicles as they can navigate quicker in the traffic.)
Companies could even share busses. Or delivery companies like door dash could switch to the collective bus model and turn thier drivers into bus drivers.
I need to be able to just walk outside and flag down the burrito man, just like you would for an ice creme truck
Beyond quality issues it'd just lead to a massive amount of food waste too. In order to always have the order available you'd have to stock everything in excess of demand and food only holds for so long before it has to be disposed of for safety reasons.
People should be given enough time to make and eat healthy food, or dine-in at a restaurant if they want to eat restaurant food.
Boxed up food tastes bad, and is largely a solution for overworking people.
you've overlooked the trebuchet !
Use a catapult/trebuchet/cannon to launch the drone as close as possible to the target area - maybe use a discardable biodegradable sheath to improve aerodynamics. At the optimal distance and height, switch the drone from ballistic to powered mode and complete the delivery. Maybe increases payload (the drone doesn’t have to take off carrying the payload). And definitely increases range, as we are not having to use onboard power for flight for part of the laden delivery, so there is more energy available for the unladen return trip.
Personally I would love to see cannon launches but most localities are unlikely to approve (maybe Texas?)
Remember, food ingredients and people move around in large multi-ton vehicles as well. If you think people going from A-B is OK, then food going from B-A should be similarly OK.
Infact, once you can pool together food, then the equation flips and favors food moving from B-A, rather than many people taking different paths from A-B
Seems she would be better off in a care facility...
https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
Of course my drone is for FPV fun, delivery drone would be far less efficient.
Either way cost of power negligible here.
[0] https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?s=11f6090a0c478...
make the {approved, licensed} burrito for you at home
High tech is not the answer to everything.
Looking at the bicyclists "texting while biking" i think the delivery wouldn't be the only market for an autonomous bicycles.
Sidenote: heard that Tesla added an "aggressive mode" to its FSD in which it would drive at higher speeds and would make more aggressive maneuvers. I suppose it isn't just Tesla as after more than decade of docile behavior of Waymo cars i've been recently aggressively cut by a Waymo, and few weeks before that a Waymo car asserted it's well out-of-normal left turn trajectory forcing us to give it way to avoid being barreled by it. Interesting whether such an aggressive autonomous driving would shorten the burrito delivery time.
cheap enough to deployed in the thousands. small enough to take up less than 1 sq / ft of sidewalk space.
Meanwhile, driverless taxis should normally be lightweight two seaters.
* No refunds on orders damaged en route by SAM, or delivery mechanism malfunction. Customer waives their right to any claims for compensation for property damage, injury or loss of life due to elevated delivery velocity.
Postmates - How we built a Burrito Cannon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br_KqzLWunM
Burrito Cannon Demo
I can’t wait to get a push alert and then go over, open the window, and open my mouth.
This is the true long term.
https://www.core77.com/posts/137981/The-Amazon-Delivery-Miss...
This is really interesting because if you have autonmous drivers, DoorDash doesnt really have a lever to lower prices except removing tipping.
Eg. Papad = $0.49 each directly from my local Indian restaurants site (they sell by the single), Doordash gives a price of $1.50 per papad.
Likewise with Naans, dips, etc. All have $1 added. Which can make a $10 lunch ~ $25.
I believe it's Doordash doing this. What gets really weird is Uber Eats and Grubhub seem to match prices and charge exactly the same as Doordash.
For anyone to repeat this. Look up your local indian places actual menu. You'll likely need to use Google images for the name of the restaurant to find an actual picture of a physical menu. Now look up any of the online services, they all seem to price match each other and they'll all have doubled prices for things like naan or roti.
The UberEats/Doordashes/etc of the world all charge pretty high fees so this is one way the restaurants can recoup some of that.
Also, I spend way too much time pricing out Doordash vs Official App (normally using Doordash for delivery) vs Pickup just to see what the spread is.
> The UberEats/Doordashes/etc of the world all charge pretty high fees so this is one way the restaurants can recoup some of that.
Are you blaming the restaurants or the ride share services? I can't tell...
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Price fixing is an agreement (written, verbal, or inferred from conduct) among competitors to raise, lower, maintain, or stabilize prices or price levels. Generally, the antitrust laws require that each company establish prices and other competitive terms on its own, without agreeing with a competitor.
When purchasers make choices about what products and services to buy, they expect that the price has been determined on the basis of supply and demand, not by an agreement among competitors. When competitors agree to restrict competition, the result is often higher prices.Restaurants set the menu prices higher on delivery platforms to recoup the money lost in fees. They also pay fees to DoorDash, Uber, etc...
In my area, an &Pizza is $12 on their App, $19 on Doordash (delivery or pickup). A Chipotle burrito is $9.50 vs $12.35 on doordash delivery (plus every addon is a $1 more expensive).
You can easily pay an extra $4/$5 (30%) per item you order on there.
I can't count how many friends I have had to explain this to who don't understand they are paying 20-30% more even after getting "free delivery" than if they just ordered directly through the restaurant.
One could argue it's best for the consumer to very clearly understand how much more they're paying. If not a service fee, here is our aggregate food markup, in plain sight. Transparency, in other words. Let's not borrow any ideas from the healthcare system.
Isn't this basically impossible to do legally in the U.S.? Wouldn't you run into trouble both with IP law and food safety laws around reselling prepared foods?
I’d be very curious what the conversation is between them. I highly doubt DoorDash negotiates with every restaurant on their platform and wouldn’t be surprised to discover they just tack it on independently. I could see that raising some interesting questions.
All of this is predicated on “ifs” and assumptions, so feel free to throw it out. Just kind of musing here lol
For example, making a pizza is what, 10 minutes, or less, when adding up all the labor involved in a restaurant setting.
In comparison, taking said pizza, even around the block, with the courier having to arrive take it somewhere, is I'd estimate at least 15 mins.
Someone has to pay for that human labor, and considering how expensive it is, and not only that, VC funded food delivery startups want to take a huge markup on that. Something has to give. Crap wages for couriers, restaurant staff, skimping on raw materials etc.
It's much better for everyone involved to cut out the middle man, have restaurants on every corner (considering in most apartment blocks, nobody wants to live on the ground floors anyways), with the upper floors used for apartments or offices.
This is hardly an original thought, tons of European cities I've been in do this.
A better solution would have been some mandatory grease/odor filters.
Just to point out that "restaurants in every corner" is not always easy to do, especially in residential blocks. I honestly think that "cooking your own food" (with the help of modern kitchen utensils, time-saving equipment, and the exception being collective canteens/cafeterias for specific groups such as students) is economically advantageous. Because even today in many European cities, many of those tending to restaurants are immigrant labor or somewhat disadvantaged groups who are implicitly pushed towards such jobs due to lack of alternatives.
Pitting restaurants against each other on who can cut corners the best. You often get worse meals at higher prices.
This business model essentially makes sure all the surviving ones are those who can get by on the lowest profits.
And what’s wrong with “lowest profit”?
If that equates to lower quality, you as a customer are free to select the more expensive restaurant on DoorDash.
Airlines have tiny profit (single digit $ per passenger) yet there’s no sympathy for them.
So “big greedy corporation” vs “mom and pop shop” is the core reason, yeah?
1. A lot of restaurants are passion businesses and they don't realize how much money they are losing.
2. Morale in the kitchen is important, orders coming in keeps morale up.
From myself I would also add that they get a FOMO, cause it's hard to sit and watch others get business, however unprofitable. The most stable and profitable businesses in towns where we operated only worked with us, cause we offered cooperative ownership and small commission. It made no financial sense for them to work with anybody else.
Doordashes filings as a public company have stated that the average revenue share with restaurants is 18% and maximum is 30%
Now I wonder what conscientious delivery app you've worked for, and if they are still around
Are middlemen ever a good idea? What about middlemen that become the gatekeepers of your business.
Profit for services? Dastardly.
> If the customer wants the convenience of delivery to their door they need to pay for it.
They do.
We would have loved to have reduced the % taken and pay our riders more, but customers wouldn't pay it — they'd just go to Uber instead.
Oh the hypocrisy of people picketing in the streets against gig work but not willing to pay more than 3 or 4 bucks for their food to be delivered... I found it incredibly frustrating because we truly weren't the bad guys. Sigh.
The economics should not work out, delivery services should allow for economies of scale, but greed and anti competitive pressure eat it all.
It makes no sense to me for these "scalable" companies to pick up my food, drive in the wrong direction, wait at another restaurant, then continue to drive in the wrong direction to drop off that order, and then get me my cold food that I still paid more for than menu price with an expected tip the driver can see before they even pick up my order. I gave up on the whole concept once I moved somewhere with more than two places that are walking distance. Not all of them are great but it's still a better deal than a terrible delivery from an amazing place at a huge mark up.
The worst time line is the cheap places that used to offer free delivery growing up having their delivery handled by a lightly skinned version of DoorDash.
If you think you can use a coupon for a discount you actually are just paying the full price of their delivery fee without the delivery service discount you get directly from DoorDash.
good times
We live in a very dumb era.
Delivery, however, has increased the number of times people buy a meal made by somebody else.
I doubt this is good for anybody's health, and it's certainly not good for the planet's health.
No, I'd say it's work expectations that have increased the number.
I took a several-month career gap and didn't order delivery even once. Delivered food tastes bad and as long as I have time I either make food (most of the time) or dine-in. But when "everything is on fire" and deadlines are tonight, delivery it is.
I think they're intended to use sidewalks and bike lanes, so should address concerns about cars clogging up streets.
My hunch is that just because they're smaller and lighter does not mean it's an easier problem to solve than a self-driving car. A more interesting partnership between Waymo and DoorDash would be licensing a scaled-down version of the Waymo tech for these things.
I can't imagine getting food delivered from only a half mile away in 30+ mins but that's the offering I guess. Not sure why so many people these days are tolerating soggy cold food sold to them at a markup.
This video was pretty ironic: waymo crashing into one of these crossing the sidewalk
If I walked or biked in these places, I'd be worried. Sharing the sidewalk with robotic wheelie-bins seems like a bad idea.
The funny thing is that there is usually a guy on an ebike following right behind, and he's usually just decked out in sortof tactical-ish gear. Full mask, head to toe in all black. I feel bad for whoever it is in the summer, because it gets really hot here.
Very interesting to see.
The Waymo driver could get a lot of experience working in a different but adjacent environment with much lower stakes. It still has to navigate and look out for pedestrians, cars, signals, construction and obstructions, and possibly human traffic directors.
Obviously the cars can drive themselves on public streets, but how do you go up to someone's house and put a burger on their doorstep?
"When Waymo arrives, open the trunk with your DoorDash app and grab your items."
To me that pickup part seems almost more difficult than the delivery end of the journey. If you think about a busy restaurant with app-delivery orders piling up on the counter, how is that order going to get into the autonomous vehicle outside or down the road? Maybe a new service will spring up called mini-Dash where a human has a job running the orders down to the waiting vehicles?
From the article
> The service will begin with deliveries from DashMart, DoorDash’s owned and operated convenience, grocery, and retail store that also powers DashMart Fulfillment Services, with plans to expand over time.
It just doesn't seem like it's guaranteed that the Waymo will even have parking availability adjacent to the restaurant. It seems wholly unreasonable to expect a restaurant employee to walk an order down a block to put it in a vehicle. Imagine it's rush hour, you've got a line of customers out the door, and one of your employees is constantly having to stop working the line to shuttle orders. You'd likely have to staff with that in mind in order to support that dynamic. The current model is one where dashers wait in the restaurant and grab the bag from the "to go" counter. It would seem like the restaurant's expectation would be for that model to continue with the introduction of Waymos.
What am I missing?
Create a market segment where everything costs more for everyone, "employ" countless people -- usually on restrictive work visas and with a limited understanding of labour laws, rights, and protections -- to be the boots on the ground of the operation, pay those people so little that they drive and ride dangerously in traffic, bike lanes, and on sidewalks to eke out more money out of the system, get people used to paying $40 for a burger, and then just... automate the whole thing away?
This is an ethical no-win scenario for companies like Doordash in my mind, but it's one of their own making. Food delivery as a business catering to the general public needs to go away (with exceptions for meals on wheels-type operations serving the sick and the old who may otherwise not be able to get food on their own).
Sweet summer child, they know very well what they're doing. The instances I've interacted with employees at those companies, they know exactly what kind of future they're building towards, and most of them seem very eager to get there, regardless of existing regulations.
> Food delivery as a business catering to the general public needs to go away
Why though? There is clearly demand for it in some way. We've been doing food delivery to the general public for decades, is it the amount of selection that you're against or food delivery as a whole?
I agree that VC-funded startups that aim to basically crash industries because they're flush with cash, so they then can jack up prices should go away, but I don't see that linked with "Food Delivery" as a concept, we should be able to regulate one of them without getting rid of the other.
But if people are going to order food to go, is it better to have everyone driving to pick it up or better to have one driver picking up and delivering multiple orders at once?
I mean, in a world of finite resources and pollution, which is better?
Question is how many humans will forgo owning a car altogether once autonomous vehicles are ubiquitous.
I do like autonomous cars though, but they won't completely remove car ownership.
Or go from being an N car household to an N-1 car household.
Not any time soon. There are WAY too many edge cases that autonomous vehicles are just scratching the surface on.
> Me, in 2015: [Uber's price] is reasonable, seems less than a standard taxi.
We already know how this story progresses.
On second thought, prompt injection via delivery instructions?
Obviously you can already get delivery from Whole Foods, FreshDirect, etc., but it's expensive due to the drivers.
And public transport and bikeshares are great for transporting you, but not for trying to carry four or six bags of groceries along with you.
Really? Drivers only get paid 2 to 3 dollars per delivery from DoorDash and UberEats. These companies are predatory and pay the drivers less than it cost the drivers to deliver. So now these companies will assume all the costs instead of passing the cost down to the drivers? How does that make them more profitable? Maybe there’s some DoorDash or Uber eaters here that can explain my confusion.
If Waymo were launching in Minneapolis I'd be surprised and delighted. But this is just more of the same.
Phoenix just broke rainfall records two days in a row and regularly gets dust storms. Those are both challenging conditions for drivers.
If things keep going the they are right now, in less than 50 years (give or take 10 years?), we could literally see the economic landscape migrating from a capitalist society to a neo feudalistic one, where companies will basically control everything (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, are basically investing in everything, from health to food) and people just work (if there are still any left), just to survive.
Interesting times we're living...
Population demographics are trending downward in advanced societies and the trend is worsening. Finding solutions for the reduction in low training required workforce is necessary unless you want to drastically ramp up immigration policies.
As the transition occurs, dials on immigration policy can be adjusted to help maintain a consistent/decent price floor on the jobs that remain.
Trade skills are flourishing and, to my understanding, are in exceptionally high demand. Some folks doing gig work will make that leap and will experience much higher quality of life.
These changes aren't happening overnight. Those who are unwilling to make adjustments will have their quality of life reduced. It's not sexy, but it is how the world has always worked.
I'm sure my comments can be perceived as callous. I'm truly not trying to be. I just find it odd that the framing isn't, "Wow, for a period of time we were able to get more jobs to a significantly large amount of the population due to innovation. How fortunate." since that seems as fair a take as one saying those jobs are being destroyed due to the same innovation.
Either way, we're going to see a lot more of this. More and more of the gig economy being automated away.
Enjoy it while it lasts. Uber/Lyft were far cheaper than other options when they launched until they put everything else out of business, then jacked up the price.
Now let’s try to assess the automated car situation. Assuming each delivery is about 5 miles that works out to 240 miles per day for 48 deliveries. Most cars are useful for 100,000 miles so the vehicle should be able to deliver for about 416 days. Assuming it gets gas mileage of 30 miles per gallon and gas costs $4 per gallon (using gas for simplicity though these are probably electric) for $13,333 in fuel over the life of the vehicle. Maintenance for these vehicles will vary of course, but a reasonable estimate is $1000 per year for brakes, oil changes, etc. adding up to $1140 total over the life of the vehicle. There are other costs that will be required as well like parking for the car when it’s not in use, cleaning of the car outside and inside, software maintenance, etc which I am unable to estimate, but it won’t matter as you’ll see below.
Automated cars are likely to cost at least 60k each (being really generous here … see below) given current prices on cars.
Cost of vehicle - $60,000 / $200,000 Vehicle Maintenance – $1140 Fuel – $13,333 Insurance - $1000 Other costs??? Total automated driver - $75,473 / $215,473
* Found article that states Waymo vehicles cost $200,000 as of June 2025, but included the scenario where the cost of the car is $60,000 and human drivers are still less expensive. So even if the Waymo vehicles dropped to 1/3 the current cost which is not likely, they are still more expensive than human drivers.
“Waymo vehicles are equipped with numerous expensive sensors and can cost roughly $200,000, enough to buy five or six regular cars. As of May, there were just 1,500 Waymos operating in all its markets.”
https://sherwood.news/tech/as-the-race-for-autonomy-heats-up...
Total Human driver - 416 days x $144 = $59,904
Rough napkin calculations show that it’s not cheaper for the company to buy some brand new, super high-tech automobile that is unproven and requires tons of research and development to refine it to the point that it can’t even complete the complete task (pick up food at counter and delivering food to the door of the customer).
There are several reports of the older version waymo cars lasting >200k miles, that would double the cost of your human driver and make the low end more profitable.
I'd assume that the insurance waymo has to pay per car is much lower as the removal of human drivers and proof of XXX miles driven without incident would drastically reduce the risk to insure. I also think the economies of scale and 24/7 always on + improvements on iterations will do nothing but drive those costs down.
Are you using delivery services regularly? How many times per week? Do you care about the cost?
I understand it’s popular, but I don’t use it and the people around me don’t really use it, so I feel out of touch with reality here.
Also, given my salary, if I'm working late, it's absolutely worth it to order doordash if I'm tired. I wouldn't do it every day because it's harder to eat healthy and only a subset of food doesn't degrade in quality when delivered.
Tech delivery services might be one of the rare ones where, we were really better served when each restaurant offered their own free delivery.
Food delivery is something I truly have never understood. I have very rarely been in a situation where I was thinking about food and couldn't think of any nearby restaurants within walking distance (~30 minutes on foot). Why would I order if I could just walk, which is also more healthy anyway? Even if I was extremely busy, if I have time to eat I also have the time to get the food.
Cool? I’ve never quite gotten bumblebees.
Meanwhile, they continue to fly and apparently burrow. And Europeans buy tens of billions of dollars of food delivery services [1].
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-online-food-delivery-m...
Absolutely untrue.
Assuming it's those little cooler-sized ones
Damn it's an entire car for a package? hmm maybe they combine people and food (points to head)
That'll be a new traveling salesman algorithm, the waymo doordash problem