There are absolutely a bunch of acquisitions/ consolidation in that food distribution space, but there are still hundreds of different distributors just in the US. However, most volume does flow through the largest distributors.
For example, I had to build a specific feature to merge distributors after an acquisition happens in the industry, to make the product work properly because that's such a common occurrence. Had the same type of feature for manufacturers (my customers) also, because they kept buying each other.
A quick search will lead to quotes like "Four companies now control more than half of the market in chicken processing (Tyson, JBS, Perdue, and Sanderson), close to 70 percent in pork (Smithfield, JBS, Tyson, and Hormel), and nearly three quarters in beef (JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef)"
Supermarket margins are also very low.
Wow - I didn't realise bidfood.co.nz was a US chain bidfood.com (Bidcorp).
Food markets keep closing down.
The consolidation of restaurant suppliers really affects the quality of taste a restaurant can get. My ex was a cook and the worse restaurants wouldn't even make their own sauces like Hollandaise - she would tell me what brand it was (often a restaurant supplier brand). It is noticeable when the chef has hand-selected their supplies e.g. tomatoes that have flavour.
The root cause is that consumers tend to optimise for cost.
Quality is harder to give a number to.
We're not completely screwed yet - with time/effort (and moderate means) you can find some amazing places at normal prices.
And there are people willing-enough to spend time/effort plus wealthy-enough but that market is much smaller (more exclusive). And unfortunately there are a lot of expensive places that don't optimise for food quality (because people desire other things for their money e.g. obsequiousness, rent-a-vibe cuisine, gastroflex, mealfluencing, yadayada). Aside: Roget's gets spanked by AI when looking for modern words.
This is the article's claim, but I'm fairly certain it's of the food delivery aggregator market. There's still plenty of independents.
I have kids, and can see McDonalds from my bedroom window, so I have more McDonalds points than I care to admit. Wolt is pissing me off every time. The amount of time the McDonalds staff needs to dedicate to Wolt staff is insane. They could easily serve twice the customer in resturante/drive-through if they didn't have to help a borderline incompetent Wolt staffer on a moped. It's actually rude to priorities deliveries over in restaurant customers. For that alone I will never use Wolt. Fortunately every single good pizza place nearby have their own drivers, who are actually polite and competent.
the food arrives lukewarm, in a smaller portions and costs more
in addition their widespread use hurts the restaurants you like
and drives down wages for society, because the only people who can live on what they pay out to the drivers are illegal immigrants paying zero tax (with the state paying for room and board)
it's all negatives
This is one reason that I see most tech companies as essentially a net negative for society at large, as the goal is nearly always to control a large monopoly (and this is fully admitted by many tech leaders, e.g. Thiel) which the Internet makes possible. Pre-Internet you would see the same dynamics, but usually on a much smaller regional scale. I think that many of the growing problems in society today are fundamentally attributable to the extreme concentration of wealth and power that modern tech enables.
It is the only possible result of consumptive transactional organizations.
Conquest in all forms is accretion and consumption based, until the organization gets to large to sustain a consistent direction, then it collapses and the people get pulled into many smaller companies.
Those companies get accreted into a new superset monopolist/duoploist etc... and the bubble grows again and then explodes.
Wash rinse repeat forever at different abstraction levels.
The expected result of a monopoly are rising prices and at best indifferent service and quality.
By improving the consumer experience. Better optimizations of which couriers go where and by what routes, faster delivery times (and hence warmer food), menus and restaurant directories optimized to show you what you actually want, better delivery time estimation, no need to talk to a human or re-enter your details for each new restaurant, that sort of thing.
At Uber scale, you have people working on improving metrics, and those improvements translate across all the restaurants that exist across the world. "John's Chicken" won't hire their own guys to do A/B testing on which pictures of their food generate more sales.
Google (search) is an example of the former. Search is a very expensive business to be in, but most of the costs are in scraping, indexing and software development, not actual query execution. The more users you have, the more you can spend while still keeping margins constant, and the more you spend, the better your engine is, which gives you more users.
This leads to the situation where you only have two competing search engines[1], one of which sucks and only exists because it's propped up by Microsoft. However, this is only true as long as Google keeps their quality up. If Bing suddenly became significantly better than Google, people would gradually start switching.
20th century AT&T is an example of the latter phenomenon. It was a monopoly because of US regulations, which made the barriers to entry insanely high. This meant AT&T could set almost whatever prices they wanted, as consumers didn't have a choice anyway.
[1] Engines like Kagi or DDG don't count, as they still fundamentally rely on Google's or Bing's indexes.
What I am asking is what incentive those monopolies have to continue being great. Even if Google did not use Chrome to steer people to Google Search, Google Search is an established habit for most people, and it would have to become significantly worse than any competitor in order for people to consider switching.
You pointing out that a competitor to Google can only exist because Microsoft is pumping huge amounts of money into it, is not the great argument you seem to think it is. If Microsoft does not have a good chance of making money with Bing, what chances does a startup search company have?
When well regulated one can have most of the benefits without many of the downsides. Sadly, even the regulators become captured.
This can effectively create a barrier to entry high enough that no small company has a chance to beat them. Since insolvency before overcoming the barrier is foreseeable, no one even tries, and the monopoly gets to keep high prices (compared to a competitive market if they weren't there).
Depends how good their moat is. Or how deep their pockets are, because they can often bribe to keep their competitors out (Intel vs AMD). Or just buy their competitor outright.
1. How much room for innovation is there?
2. How hard is it to substitute the good / service provided by the monopoly?
In the case of food delivery apps there isn't much room for service improvement. A monopoly here probably isn't preventing much innovation. How much better can you get at delivering food from a restaurant?
And there is an easy substitute in terms of driving to the restaurant yourself, so if the monopoly tries to jack up prices too much they will steadily lose customers. The prices now are so high that they have already lost me. I use those apps < 5 times a year.
There are probably areas where these companies operate as effective monopolies or two-company oligopolies.
In a given are there is competition but the local competition is likely to be pushed out by Uber Eats who could undercut them out of business for a while. Or just have better tech / customer experience due to scale (looking at you Menulog)
Edit: ‘this’ in the original parent comment was along the lines of ‘five out of potential thousands of actors’
Politicians are people just like everyone else, they're just responding to incentives created by a majority vote. Tech companies are just like any other company, except a lot more people are willing to pay for their goods and services. If Carlin were alive, he'd say that the problem isn't the tech companies, it's their customers.
I'm actually far from convinced that tech companies are a net negative for society. Amazon makes billions because everyone wants competitively priced goods delivered to their doorsteps. Google makes billions because they provide free access to a large portion of humanity's information.
My theory is that if you're extremely pessimistic about technology or politics, you probably won't like anything that happens when large groups of humans make collective decisions. There's an air of let's go back to the good old days when we were hunter gatherers to the whole thing. Personally, I've accepted that it's always going to be messy and chaotic, but a lot of good things are going to come out of it as well.
Edit: I wasn't accusing everyone who is critical of tech of being a Luddite. The attitude that nearly every tech company is a net negative for society goes quite a bit beyond criticism.
This is the definition of competition according to Wikipedia: "Competition is a scenario where different economic firms are in contention to obtain goods that are limited by varying the elements of the marketing mix: price, product, promotion and place."
Yes, sounds like competition to me. Network effects are not anti-competitive.
China (basically) only has didi. Not much the USA can say here.
Southeast has Grab, and within each country there are at least 2 local competitors (Be, GoJek, Bolt, Line Man, Bluebird, etc). I believe Doordash just bought Deliveroo, making it the only American competitor in SEA.
In Europe, the main players are local food panda / Delivery hero and Just Eat.
India's winning food delivery is Swiggy.
What countries have both the talent to build a food delivery app and the USA is the dominant player?
But I agree with your conclusion. I don't think there are many truly net negative companies/sectors/ideas that aren't either dead or on their way out -- but I'm sure you'd agree we should still hold tech accountable and optimize for our own benefit.
Btw, as a lifelong Carlin fan, I find myself asking what he would think pretty often :)
Hunter gatherer is the only alternative to a society under total dominance by mega-corps? This reminds me of individual stories from life under communism and brutal dictatorships where the dystopia is so omnipresent you don’t even remember what was before, nor could imagine anything meaningfully different. Instead, you take joy in the little things, like (today) the scraps left over after another market war – ”at least now we have a search engine”, ”I can order a taxi from an app”. I understand it, because it has been such a dominant force in the kind of second reincarnation of neoliberalism since ~80s in the US in particular. This apathy is the perfect wet blanket to prevent systemic change and perpetuate the status quo – no suppression of dissent is needed if there is no imagination or expectation of a better society. A lot of powerful interests are spending a lot of effort trying to convince us that any meaningful change would make things even worse, not better.
In my opinion, the best way to break these cycles is to study the past, other countries and many times smaller local communities. There are countless examples of well functioning systems if you pay attention. And new ones being established all the time. I’ve seen local markets completely flourish in just a decade, because of good policy. Once you see these things, and know in your heart it’s possible, there’s no going back.
I’m intentionally a bit vague here, because what’s meaningful to one person can be inconsequential to another. Which is why it’s so important to discover these things on your own. That’s the way to turn complacency into hope, and hope into organized action.
This is the right conclusion, and I love sharing that video for that reason.
As of 2025 everyone globally has everything they need to make the world a great place for everyone. Instead, people continue to take the lowest energy route for their personal actions, which means they do not even think about the externalities of that purchase from Amazon, the Latte from Starbucks, continuing living in (insert your broken system here), working for some billionaire etc...They just shrug and think "its out of my control, besides I don't have any impact and why should I suffer unnecessarily"
There are millions of examples of individual people who had no education, being actively oppressed and violently attacked changing their situation by either moving or overthrowing their oppressors. Harriet Tubman comes to mind.
It's never been easier to do that, but people would rather not.
The entire "illegal immigrant" concept proves it, people literally spending their entire life savings ($5000) to pay coyotes to smuggle them in horrific conditions so they can be slaves picking strawberries. I know a Houston restaurant owner who did that trek twice from Guatemala, getting deported the first time and he just saved up and did it again. While speaking no english. Tell me again about how it's not possible to do something. Meanwhile the citizens can't be bothered to learn about their own history or you know, do anything.
I've tried to start multiple non-heirarchical anarchist cooperative organizations and the number one challenge is finding people who will put the group ahead of the individual. It just doesn't happen. There are no organizations where that's true. No church, no government, no state, no charity, nothing, nowhere actually meets the test of holistic globally aligned "good."
I read the Medicins Sans Frotiers book long ago, even they were terrible and continue to fight internally [1]. Unions now make most of their money from capital investments [2], which is directly in opposition to their anticapitalist philosophical roots. All of this is because the members don't care and don't have any desire to have less, they all want more forever.
At this point in history, everyone has access to the information they need to make globally holistic decisions. It's not possible to claim ignorance, ignorance is strictly a choice and ultimately a existential personal limitation.
There are no organizations that exist for the benefit of society and they cannot exist because humans fundamentally lack the cognitive ability to think beyond Dunbar's number but their actions have global consequences.
Self elimination is the only possible arc for humanity.
[1] https://healthpolicy-watch.news/inward-technocratic-msf-lead...
[2] https://jacobin.com/2023/02/finance-unionism-union-density-d...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin...
Hey man, at least add a spoiler alert.
We eradicated smallpox and recovered the ozone layer through global coordination, not even a century after murdering each other by the tens of millions in two world wars. We're capable of both.
The ozone layer won't be "recovered" for about a century, assuming everyone plays nicely[1]. It is still diminished from CFCs, and we're still being bombarded with more UV than previously.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2367525-ozone-destroyin...
I could have saved you the trouble if you'd just asked me!
Over 20,000 communes have been started in the US. None have survived. What baffles me is why people keep believing they can work.
Free markets work because it harnesses the inherent selfishness of everybody, rather than trying to override selfishness.
I was a devotee of Mr Rogers growing up and I’ve seen really successful people start from nothing and help others
40 years of hope in humanity is hard to kill but it finally died so that’s that
It took proving it mathematically to get me there
Never been harder with ubiquitous surveillance.
>As of 2025 everyone globally has everything they need to make the world a great place for everyone.
Disagree. Even if theres enough food being produced, its not produced evenly, and the extra labor and resources to distribute it evenly would screw a lot of this up. Then theres the idea that a bureaucracy large enough to distribute it worldwide would be efficient.
>I've tried to start multiple non-heirarchical anarchist cooperative organizations and the number one challenge is finding people who will put the group ahead of the individual.
The group is made of individuals. Ultimately eventually they will need some reward for their participation. Whenever I have involved myself in these groups theres ultimately some unsavoury character who has positioned himself as leader and siphon off the glory for themselves. Or in one case, it was just an avenue for the "leader" to gain access to vulnerable women. These groups dont work because they get hijacked, not because the people doing the work dont want to work.
>Unions now make most of their money from capital investments [2], which is directly in opposition to their anticapitalist philosophical roots.
Unions are about protecting workers. They dont have to be socialist paragons as long as they meet that directive.
>At this point in history, everyone has access to the information they need to make globally holistic decisions.
Lmao, where to start with that doozy. Local knowledge still trumps the disinfo hose.
>lack the cognitive ability to think beyond Dunbar's number
People just dont trust beyond that number, and with good reason.
>Self elimination is the only possible arc for humanity.
Lmao, there's no reason why we cant keep going like this. An engine built on brutal exploitation. Predicting humanities doom seems greatly premature.
With that in mind: in what way should we terraform the latent terrain of human psychology to fix this problem? Because breaking up the tech companies seems like a way, but you seem to have a different one in mind.
Plus the market is artificially defined to be small. It excluded companies that do their own delivery (pizza places and others), home food delivery that isn't from restaurants, and the old option of just driving yourself to a restaurant.
There's thriving competition in the industry of getting people food, and lots of options that didn't even exist a decade ago. Crazy that it's being spun as the exact opposite.
Human nature involves the ability to let different dimensions of our cognitive apparatus cover one another's weak spots. In my view, a lot of what many would consider wise decisions throughout human history have been instances of this, many of them in the form of law, from child-labor restrictions to drunk-driving laws to birth control to incest taboos.
There just seems to be a certain segment of society that for some reason insists that "what the consumer wants" has to be construed in this narrow way as what is in the person's mind at the instant of a decision, and that any attempt to broaden that person's decision-making is somehow unnatural. Well, no. It's good to make changes that create immediate costs if doing so can save us from future costs that we're not good at foreseeing at the moment. It's good for Ulysses to ask his men to tie him to the mast. It's good in many cases for people to deliberately, explicitly, not do things they feel like doing because they will regret those things later. I believe this is often true even from a perspective of self-interest (e.g., people will not like it if a monopoly emerges and raises prices later), but it's even more true if you incorporate a bit of consideration for the well-being of others, and I think plenty of people are willing to do that to some extent.
That's not completely true since there are too many mechanisms built in to limit those incentives
At least in the US we had national monopolies that took serious regulation to solve. That regulation, strangely enough, is still in place. Perhaps early on there's fear to regulate a nascent industry and by the time regulators realize the problem they're too afraid of the power wielded by the monopolists.
In any case, it's never too late to break up these monopolies. The problem is that the Robber Barons are too far in the past to serve as a lesson for current generations. And some folks might remember AT&T but not understand why it was such a big deal.
And that is the story of humanity, not any particular classification of society and governance.
However, sometimes there are unpriced externalities like the competitive advantage of removing your own manufacturing waste by dumping it into a stream. That is where governance (whether self or the state) comes in.
> extreme concentration of wealth
Big business does not concentrate wealth. What you're seeing is the creation of wealth. This created wealth then flows out into the rest of the economy, via paying the workers and buying plant&equipment, etc.
We should encourage more Fords and fewer Amazons.
They absolutely do. If for no other reason than each of their revenue goes to fewer entities.
> What you're seeing is the creation of wealth. This created wealth then flows out into the rest of the economy, via paying the workers and buying plant&equipment, etc.
This is the flawed reasoning behind "trickle-down economics"[0], which was called "horse and sparrow" in the 19th century. It didn't work in the 19th century when labelled as the latter nor in the 20th when reframed as the former.
Any company which has earnings beyond those of operating costs is a concentration of wealth by definition. Whether that wealth is distributed to shareholders, kept as retained earnings, or otherwise transferred to specific entities is irrelevant.
Let's say I buy $20 worth of art supplies, and I paint a landscape and sign it with my moniker, "bright". Since "bright" paintings are very rare and go for a million bucks each, I now have created a million bucks of value. Who did I transfer the wealth from? Nobody. I took nuttin from nobody. Yet I have become wealthy.
Let's say I sell it to you for a million bucks. Did I take your wealth? Nope. I traded a million dollar painting for a million bucks. You are exactly as wealthy as you were before.
Now, if you decide to use my painting as compost (sob!), you are dissipating the million dollar value. That's not me concentrating wealth, it's you destroying your wealth.
If you stole the painting from me, then you concentrated wealth. But we're not talking about theft here.
I don’t think this is limited to tech companies.
Most industries are controlled by a few companies in those sectors.
Such as Steel, railwood, pharma, grocery, etc.
I also disagree that it's a net negative. Technology adds convenience to these markets and as long as the government isn't price-fixing through strict regulations, we also end up with better prices.
We've seen some of the prices increase after the government decided to regulate the hotel markets. They forced many people to stop renting out their places through sites like Airbnb and now the hotels are free to increase prices accordingly.
If it weren't for Uber and Lyft, the Taxi cab unions would have gladly monopolized the industry charging workers $1,000,000+ for a medallion and not keeping up with technology (Taxis were still hailed in person or ordered on the phone before the tech companies decided to compete).
Doordash and Deliveroo do not operate in the same markets, so their merger would not reduce competition in any given market.
Prosus is a big conglomerate with its fingers in many different industries. But unless it starts buying multiple delivery companies that operate in the same markets, its acquisition of Just Eat also doesn’t appear to be reducing competition.
I've never not ordered from somewhere I was keen on based on their choice of delivery service.
If the consolidation results in price hikes and poor service, what's the lock-in? Why can't the takeaways just go rogue and offer independent deliveries?
AFAIK there’s no well-supported open source order/delivery management software. The companies that were ready during covid took all the extra, enormous demand for building delivery and order online systems built atop a typically antiquated order management system and have stuck around since
Sometimes i’ll get a cheaper delivery/food cost calling vs ordering online, but now some places are just raising their other prices to match online
In the 80s, I delivered pizza with no software. The place had a normal cash register, for pickups.
People would call, order, and we'd write it down. They it'd go on a wire with a clothes pin, until made. Then it went with the driver.
Each delivery was written down before leaving with it.
This worked for decades for everyone in the industry, flawlessly, perfectly, without issue.
Why is software required? Any given reasons are an unneccessary complication.
And here's the thing. Even in Palo Alto I order from companies still doing it this way.
The above system, paperwork wise .. again, is perfect. It's been done forever. It is faster and far less expensive than any unified payment and order system.
Seems to me, they're the smart ones.
I can imagine some type of open protocol that lets them self-host an order service though, or at least an open solution that’s hosted by many providers and many separate apps. That would be nice for everyone
Maybe making the world a better place, means human interaction and less automation.
And phones in particular suck when you involve real-world connection quality and accents.
the utility of the apps is to distribute the load from multiple restaurants across a shared pool of delivery drivers, so a restaurant who otherwise wouldn't be able to offer delivery can tap into that labour pool for infrequent delivery orders. food delivery apps have greatly expanded the number of places that offer delivery. most restaurants simply didn't offer it before the apps.
But there are so many independents. And they make very good food. And they still do it without apps, and do very well.
Because many of these delivery 'ad-hoc contractors'[0], sometimes even eating cost [1].
Pre-covid, you were often best off as a business either doing something that was 'known' to be delivery offered (i.e. pizza) or your next best option was to aggressively advertise it and have an extra staffer on hand willing to do the deed.
Then, you've also got the other form of arbitrage (or perhaps a cost thereof), of smaller independent restaurants/chains being unwilling or unable to handle the costs of properly covering drivers [2] and their pay when not driving [3].
Some restaurants started doing delivery during covid and kept it going. However most around here dropped because the volume wasn't worth it to them, on top of the 'streamlined flow' (don't need to give a route, the app the person picking up the 'pick-up' order is handling, does that for them.)
I'm not saying I like it but I get how it got here.
[0] - Remember that in the early days some of these companies would do all sorts of weird things like just have someone order on behalf.
[1] - There's an article about this involving 'pizza arbitrage' here https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage
[2] - To be clear, both the startups as well as locals have a checkered history when it comes to proper coverage...
[3] - One can argue that such a person can be made 'useful' during the waiting time, however it becomes a complicated equation between 'what can this person be paid to do' vs 'are they willing to do it for that base'.
DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40806356 - June 2024 (147 comments)
DoorDash and pizza arbitrage (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32086170 - July 2022 (230 comments)
Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216852 - May 2020 (518 comments)
Because delivery is really expensive. To do it well over a large area you have to have a lot of staff. You also want to keep them all busy, so it works better with a lot of resturants. Margins are thin, lots of risk in an area that is very different from the core activity of the resturant.
Its an almost textbook example of a situation where a specialist company makes sense.
'nonperishable food' or 'properly packed short travel' (i.e. dairy/frozen) IMO is a fairer niche of 'could be non-luxury with better societal outcomes', except for the 'as close to JIT as possible'. There's ways to optimize the process to where something on the scale of 10-20 homes could get their main groceries delivered two or 3 times a week and the overall cost would be lower than all of them doing so. Yeah you'd need a reefer van or an otherwise replenishable source of cold for dairy/frozen but at that scale the cost of such makes a lot more sense. Biggest problem is getting the right buy-in and mindset from consumers.
When you work from home and cant cook, delivery can happen right now. Or if you are having a small gathering with friends, delivery makes your life easier exactly when you need it.
Not all Gen Z, of course. Most of the younger people I’ve worked with have been generally smart about finances. It’s a subset who fall into the normalization of luxury services as a standard cost.
And the funny thing is I made about $20 an hour (unadjusted for inflation, ~4 deliveries per hour + $5 an hour). Today the drivers still around that amount, the restaurants pay more and the companies operating are often operating at a loss.
Something very strange happened in the last 20 years.
Restaurants get less than 50% of the order total. The only parties winning from this shift are the delivery companies.
Tech companies discovered that the most profitable position to be in was global middleman, at a scale previously impossible before everything was connected by the internet. They undercut a given market until all the alternatives become financially non-viable and then start hoovering up all the margins from both sides (producer and consumer) of the deal.
For example Slice is a popular one for pizza. I know a business owner who uses it.
They have an app and optionally an online menu on your custom domain to take online orders and physical hardware for taking orders in your store. Think POS system, register, terminal, printers, etc..
For a business owner that covers you for accepting online and offline orders, and you can deliver direct to your customers.
95% of his online delivery orders go through this system because DoorDash charges him (the business owner) 30% for each order so he raised his prices there to partially offset that. Slice on the other hand is 5% cheaper than his baseline price for online orders for customers so it's a no brainer most use that. With that said, way more people call in or come in person than using the app. Probably a 90% / 10% split.
The company that operates their ordering platform is mobihq.com (I have no affiliation with them)
You could have the slickest ordering experience in the world and it won’t help you if no one sees it.s
Ubereats and the like still dominated the orders even with the 15% upcharge and even after notifying repeat customers that they can save money ordering direct
The convenience of having one centralized app with one account that can summon any food from any restaurant in a 10 mile area is just way too strong.
But I only order food once or twice a month- it's a little indulgence for me.
The majority of people using these apps just want to scroll some restaurants and order something quickly. Saving 10% by going through extra steps, installing extra apps, going to a company’s website, and doing custom orders isn’t what most of their repeat customers want to do.
It’s a convenience thing.
There’s huge room for disruption in this model when a $12 chipotle order costs the consumer $30 after higher menu prices + delivery fees + tip.
We would tell repeat customers they could use our website/app/phone to order directly and save the 15%. Almost no one converted. Convenience really is king.
Actually when I ordered through it I paid $45 instead of $60 via DoorDash/Uber Eats but the order was delivered by Uber.
The reason why I think this version will work is because it’s the same level of convenience in a centralized mobile app so single payment method, single portal to browse restaurants etc.
(I have no association with this company I just was looking into this last week on the train)
The only exception was chinese and pizza. Nobody else offered delivery. The current delivery market is much more than that.
So as their is a ready supply of drivers, anyone who can raise an amount of money, and find a niche can enter the fray?
The suppliers (restaurants) are not happy with 30% or so being taken by the giants.
This is what our actual economic system is all about: a series of market oligopolies whose greed is unchecked by our political establishment and legal apparatus with the complicity of the voting masses. Any attempt to implement measures to palliate the social decay and corruption it breeds will be branded as chinese communism and opposed by the media and the public.
We have collectively decided that the economy shouldn't be in service of the people, canis canem edit.
If I spent more than 2 seconds I could probably think of others
But it's not at all clear that major deliverers are even a majority of the delivery market. There are no pizza chains on the list. There are certainly no individual restaurants on the list.
> Why is my $8 burger $23 after fees - An average reddit user
Delivery in China (through Alipay, which may or may not be backed by Meituan) is generally cheaper after fees than it would be if you just went and bought the food in person. This might explain why Meituan has so much more transaction value than Doordash and Uber Eats. But it's not something I'd imagine drives a lot of user complaints.
Made me laugh out loud. It's strictly the worst option. Only use it if my job wants to pay, or if very sick.
Cold food. Unpredictable delivery times. More expensive than eating out. Usually less nutritious than cooking yourself. And of course expensive as hell.
Food delivery starts out as this awesome new tech that allows delivery and its prices are cheap for early adoption, lots of small players come to the market to try and ride the hype. The service grows in popularity and becomes steady state, companies start to look to drive further profit, companies consolidate where possible to avoid shutting down altogether. Global markets impact fuel prices, food costs and sees the delivery services grow further in price for all those across the supply chain.
How we have a number of steady state food delivery companies that have the capital, and/or subsidy capacity to run across different markets globally.
Also fun fact, Deliveroo doesn't operate in Australia and had to close due to high costs. Australian Government has been looking to increase rights of gig-economy workers, a cost that smaller player wouldn't be able to handle.
tptacek•6h ago
mattmaroon•6h ago
I wish we had more than 3 cell phone networks, this could all be one and I’ll just drive to the restaurant.
tptacek•5h ago
morsch•5h ago
tpmoney•5h ago
asdff•5h ago
It kind of makes sense. App delivery is notorious for being pretty terrible service quality and having the food end up worse with more time spent between kitchen and you eating it. Pizza delivery on the other hand has been seen as quick with drivers interested in earning their tip, pizza places being conservative with delivery radius to not overextend their drivers, etc. Customers don't like getting an inferior product or service one day.
to11mtm•5h ago
Additionally, at least in my experience it's pretty easy to get to where just paying the delivery fee of a pizza place is cheaper than paying for inflated per-item rates.
TeaBrain•5h ago
They're saying that the space these companies are competing in literally did not exist. It didn't in the US, maybe not 15 years ago, but 20 years ago it was nonexistent.
toast0•4h ago
zoky•4h ago