As an old person, I'd like to point out that my hometown of New York City had a dynamic, world class restaurant scene, including a cornucopia of home delivery, long before the tech platform companies found a way to siphon ~40% of consumer spend out of the local restaurant economy in exchange for some friction reduction. We were doing great. But you had a drawer full of paper menus and had to call the restaurant.
This was not very doable pretty much everywhere outside NYC. The lower density of restaurants made it harder for delivery to be a thing except all the pizza places that offered it.
That's a generalization with no supporting data. As an actual sample size of 1; I lived in a smaller city of only about 250k people and there was a huge selection of restaurants that offered delivery, not just pizza.
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.
That is not a generalization, that is actually a fact. Doordash and other delivery apps gradually added restaurants on their platforms and still add new ones regularly. The fact that this happened in itself is a proof that they didn’t have food delivery as an option before.
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.
Without commenting on this topic in general, you appear to have a flaw in your reasoning. That a restaurant was added to Doordash does not prove that it never had the ability to deliver before that.
It doesn’t guarantee that they never had the ability to deliver. But the fact that delivery apps grew (kept adding more restaurants so quickly) was in part that restaurants could do delivery when previously they didn’t. The parent‘s argument was that delivery was already a norm before, which clearly was not the case.
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.
It’s always dependent on wear you lived. I’ve always lived in my city of at least 1mil+ and growing up before DoorDash we could never get delivery because of zip code. Now with DoorDash it doesn’t matter. Delivery has always existed but that was mostly dependent on if the restaurant wanted to come to your area.
I've lived in a city of 50k people and smaller, and in various suburbs (of major cities) and ALWAYS had a collection of delivery menus in a bag next to the junk drawer. I don't think I've even lived anywhere that didn't have a reasonable amount of delivery. That's not to say such places aren't common... just that "unique to NYC" certainly doesn't describe it.
Doordash could just employ delivery drivers to solve this problem. No need for a 100% at will temp work force. They could just hire people part time or full time. And if work is really that surgy they could just have workers on call.
Why does “innovation” have to go hand in hand with fucked up labor practices?
Because we live in a capitalist society and profit is the only objective.
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.
At the end of the day this is all driven by market dynamics that affect everyone. Uber Eats doesn't have a secret sauce that makes it cheaper for drivers to deliver food in cities with lower restaurant density. Someone has to pay for gas, someone has to pay for drivers' time. Even in large cities Uber Eats is now more expensive than ordering directly from restaurants in the past, why would it be different for cities with fewer restaurants?
Oh I don't think anyone said they're making it cheaper. But a lot of restaurants now have expensive delivery instead of no delivery. Before, there were very few places where most restaurants would deliver.
And if you called the restaurant enough, you typically got on a first name basis with them and had incredible customer service. Now you're just another customer #47523 that created order #37324.
We had friends who got Domino's every Thursday. On days when they hadn't called by a certain time, Domino's would call them and ask if they wanted their usual.
I got a notification from my bank when my girlfriend used her debit card to order at the local Chinese on her way home from work. I was bored so I went to surprise her... she was then greeted there every time with "is your boyfriend coming?"
Ehh some restaurants still know you on a first name basis even with DoorDash. I used to order from this one Philippine spot like twice a week and after a month a decided to go there in person to sit down and when they asked for my name they immediately asked if I wanted my usual DoorDash order
The time savings of having a digital, interactive menu, where you don't have to worry that the person on the other end will interpret "no mayo" as "extra mayo" should not be underappreciated.
I love that you have posted this. I am also old and I think about this from time to time.
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.
Has the local restaurant scene recovered from the lockdowns? I live in a smaller city and we have recovered some but it's nothing like it was. I heard it was particularly rough in NYC.
In my experience, the more "corporate" restaurant groups are growing but the less well capitalized small businesses are in a world of hurt trying to balance the books with the leftovers after the rise in physical rent and advertising/platform company costs.
> the more "corporate" restaurant groups are growing but the less well capitalized small businesses are in a world of hurt
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.
Here in the city, it's not just the Applebees/Ruby Tuesdays who are growing; there's another emerging level of corporate food service.
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.
How would you even assess the profitability of a small recipe change? You'd only notice by the time a customer comes back and there are so many variables (and time) going into that I can't imagine you could really get some signal out of your a/b-test of a few drops of chili oil in the soup.
If you have 10 restaurants you could do A/B tests.
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.
I've also seen people test two ingredients, one cheap and one not. If their sample can't tell the difference, it flies. The problem is, we're each sensitive to different things. So while I may not notice the difference between a pricey and mid-range whisky, I will notice when you sub out the Chartreuse. Meanwhile, my neighbor will likely be the opposite. Rinse and repeat this process and you get the beige this process predictably produces.
> only change I saw was a growth of fine dining Korean food
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.
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.
There are still more amazing places to eat in NYC than you could comfortably visit in a lifetime. I can't even keep up with the new places that open in my own neighborhood.
