This is tangential, but I worked for a food delivery startup (a conscientious one) for a couple of years and food delivery is a terribly extractive business that kills restaurants. Either order from the restaurant directly or just go there yourself, Doordash et. al. will kill your favorite restaurant with your help. The numbers don't add up in the kitchen's favor.
Could you explain further? The restaurant gets the order at the same price, Uber adds delivery fees and a 25% markup on the cost of food. Why would these numbers not work out in the kitchen's favor? Maybe I'm missing something. Genuinely curious.
While you pay a markup on the application, UberEats and others keeps 25/30% of the price based on the marked up price. If you make the calculation they usually have to cut into the kitchen margin while the price for the customer stays more expensive.
That's mixing up different concerns. If they make an unauthorized site for a restaurant, with no agreements, then the restaurant is getting full menu price.
These stories are horrible, but that doesn't prove restaurants lose money on Doordash. One of my clients bootstraps online ordering for restaurants. About 80% of those restaurants request to be on Doordash, and have been on there for many years. I assume they're not all dumbasses losing money on every order.
Doesn't excuse Doordash taking advantage of anyone.
Not every restaurant can handle the deferred payout either. Their business is based on receiving payment at the time of service. The restaurant model operates on razor thin margins, and they don’t buy their food on net 30 terms, but they have to absorb costs as if they do.
There are other issues, but this setup looks a lot like paying the mafia due to the imbalance of power.
Unless something has changed over the last couple years, restaurants opt in to being available on those apps. Uber Eats and the others are generally integrated into the restaurant's point of sales system.
Ok, but if they're doing it without the restaurant's buy in, then they're presumably just acting as a middleman and ordering from the restaurant themselves, at which point I'm not sure how they're stiffing the restaurant 20-30%. If I were running a restaurant and Doordash kept calling me trying to submit an order for cheaper than the food costs I would simply decline to take their business...?
Doordash puts up a listing for a restaurant and siphons off take-out traffic. Once Doordash gets a critical mass they can turn around and "negotiate" with the restaurant.
If I were a restaurateur and caught a glimpse of a Doordash driver in my finest establishment, the first thing I would do is put together a simple online order form and start advertising it in every order. If you just disappear from the app one day, your customers trying to reorder would probably go somewhere else – but if they know they can order on your site instead, they probably will (if your food is good enough and your ordering experience is top-notch, or vice versa).
If restaurants didn't put themselves on the platform, wouldn't that mean the restaurant is getting full price? Its equivalent of paying someone to call in your order and picking it up. What are the negatives?
This is all, of course very fuzzy, but "I will spend 30 dollars on food tonight" can turn into "I call the restaurant and order 30 dollars of takeout" vs "I use door dash to get 30 dollars of food from that restaurant", and in the latter the restaurant sees less sales. But if I'm already like "I will have food from this place I like" and it's not on doordash or w/e, I might still be motivated enough to head over there!
There's a lot of dynamic variables here (including of course the "the person doesn't order from the restaurant"), but the few times I've used those delivery apps I end up ordering very little food for a lot of money.
That would explain why they sell less or cheaper food, which appear too high on the app due to the markup they have to add to the price to handle the fees. This would be an alternate explanation to why things seem inflated. Even with inflated ingredients prices, it actually still doesn’t add up how the volume dropped so much such that each unit would need to cost that much more (I’m arguing it can’t just be the ingredient prices being high). The fees adding to the perceptual inflation make sense.
It’s more expensive volume or less cheaper volume they can make due to higher ingredient prices PLUS the fees they have to add to cover the delivery service cut. That’s how you get a $20 burger for delivery.
This all gets worse when the prices become sticky at the retail place itself (app prices enter the real world). These delivery service are a serious agitator, true disrupter.
That's my understanding. Uber takes 25%, but by default that's offset by increasing the on-app price 25% relative to the in-store price, and the owner has to explicitly opt out of that behavior. So at the end of the day, they should be getting the same amount as in store orders unless they opted out of the markup, right?
I have seen Doordash statements where commission + fees added up to 60% of the price. I asked the person who mostly worked with restaurant owners why they do it. He said:
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.
When I worked at a restaurant b2b company that helped pay invoices I learned how razor thin margins most operate on. We even ended up giving out effectively a payday loan to one when they asked for assistance but jeeze those businesses struggle sometimes.
It can work, pizza delivery has been able to be profitable for example. But they are set up from the concept to be delivery businesses, and they have that accounted for in their pricing. Doordash trying to extract profit and pay a driver and put that all on the restaurant? No that's not going to work. As a restaurant I'd refuse Doordash orders at any less than full menu price, and paid on pickup not maybe three months later. If the customer wants the convenience of delivery to their door they need to pay for it.
Middlemen are often a good idea, yes. Can you imagine if for every single item you wanted to buy you had to go to the original manufacturer? And now suddenly every manufacturer needs to also become a seller and distributor?
Without middlemen every restaurant would have to be farm to table, which is a significant burden from many angles and would probably result in more shutting down than delivery services could.
Cutting out the middleman is great... but only when you run the numbers and it makes sense, not as a universal truth.
But they can deliver without being a middleman. E.g. they can work as contractors for the restaurant.
But now, instead, they are the ones taking the customer's orders, and hence they become the portal for the business (and thus, middlemen). Which is a bad situation for the restaurant owners.
Honestly, food delivery from restaurants is one of these things that is a big economic mismatch. The restaurant is spending tons of money on their nice dining room and part of the price of the food is supposed to be the experience of eating there. Yet, when you are ordering delivery, you are getting a subpar dining experience, plus you have to cover the additional cost of transporting the food. This means that someone is getting squeezed --- the restaurant is not getting paid enough, the delivery person is getting paid peanuts, or the buyer is having to pay a ludicrous price for the food.
If half the business is delivery, then the dining room can be half the size and there can be fewer servers. That saves a good fraction of the cost. Apply those savings to a delivery driver, add a $5 delivery fee, and the math can work out fine.
I worked for a food delivery company (Uber Eats / Doordash / Deliveroo / Just Eats / GrubHub — one of them), and while I can't argue with what you are saying, the company wasn't making any money either. I think after 5-10 years of working there they finally managed to make like 20 pence per order. No one is winning with food delivery, not the restaurant, not the rider, not the company.
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.
Most people I know who lampoon delivery services were around for the days before they came upon the scene, and they think that was better. Restaurant owners I've heard on the subject, tend to agree.
The economics should not work out, delivery services should allow for economies of scale, but greed and anti competitive pressure eat it all.
We're still moving thousands of pounds of vehicle around a public highway to carry a 1lb burrito, obviously lightweight aerial drones are the future for food and grocery delivery.
That's short sighted. A burrito is a perfect candidate for ballistic trajectory. They can easily absorb the high g-force associated with traditional mortar-style launch system, even up to exotic "space gun" capable of intercontinental delivery.
Still not thinking big enough, say it with me: "Fully Automated Space Kitchen constellations". Cryogenically frozen burritos. dropped from orbit, and reheated by connecting combinations of copper heatpipes to the fiery heatshield at precise times during re-entry. Global delivery in 30 minutes or less*.
* 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.
Why have installations or stores at all? Just have a self driving and self making burrito trucks. You order one up, and on the way to you, it's being made in the back. Little hatch on the side, shoots out onto your doorstep or through your window.
Then, of course, you've now got an arms race of self making burrito trucks roaming about. Chipotle has one, Taco bell too. And, of course, if a Taco Bell truck knows that a Chipotle truck is next to it on the freeway, well, I mean, there's no one inside it of course. How could you prove that those nails came out of the bottom of the truck anyways?
Pretty soon, we've got burrito trucks duking it out, battle bots style, on the freeways and streets. And then you gotta deploy countermeasures, armor, etc. Just to get your burrito to you. Order up two from different companies and you've got dinner and a show.
And, honestly, is this not the future we all really want? Giant junk food filled mech-cars blasting each other at high speeds from the comfort of our couches.
Still too inefficient. We can replace our stomachs with small modular nuclear reactors and instead of wasting money on inefficiently produced burritos, we’d only have to swallow one uranium pellet every 10 years.
But they're more like taquitos than burritos for aerodynamic reasons, also they get flame grilled as they re-enter. The secret sauce IP is getting the ablative tortilla just right so it doesn't totally burn off during reentry but also isn't to thick once it gets in the hand.
Unless you're cooking at home, you'd still move thousands of pounds of vehicle to drive to the restaurant, so I'm not sure that food delivery is really any worse.
It could be a lot better if multiple deliveries are handled per trip.
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.
I think it’s first order the rent (commercial) and second order the wages needed to pay rents (residential). Having seen the rents in the major cities I don’t know how people manage - it’s insanity.
A different analysis of the same situation could be that there were actually too many restaurants that were not profitable and thus couldn't pay their workers a living wage thus needing to close down.
And maybe also that people don't have the means (anymore) to go to the restaurant every other day.
It is not the (not actually high) minimum wages. Stores I've known that had problems staying open were having to pay more than the minimum wage because housing is so expensive.
Yeah, the ice cream parlor in my neighborhood in Seattle was at one point advertising $27/hr to scoop ice cream because the housing shortage and worker shortage was so tough. That’s well above minimum.
At least in Seattle, I believe the high minimum wage is due to CoL in the city, which is very high due to rent cost, which is high because of geography and not building a lot. If there was a building boom which led to a surplus of rental units, and rents went down, you wouldn't need such a high minimum wage.
I thought Seattle has started addressing the housing shortage? At some point though for a rapidly growing city you can’t really lower housing prices below the cost of building housing, and construction labor and cost of materials becomes a constraining factor (5 story housing projects can’t be built super cheaply).
I'm sure it'd be better to find graphs about King County or the greater Seattle area, but I found these graphs from the City of Seattle [1]. What I get from the graph is that there is growth in housing units, but there's also growth in population, so there's probably a lot of years at the current trends, before the housing shortage is 'satisfied'.
WA state added a law to override local zoning regulations in order to encourage density.
I have seen new multi apartment construction in Ballard, Cap Hill, and some other places, but there is a construction backlog going on for years.
Also, the problem in Seattle, same as SF, is that there are too many SFHs vs multi apartment buildings/townhomes.
It will take several years until offer surpasses demand.
Seattle will always have high real estate prices due to its relatively high desirability in the world. What it doesn't have is a large supply of immigrants and/or illegal immigrants willing to work for low wages in restaurants, like NYC and California.
It's not just wages, it's every single avenue on which the government is forcing them to incur some cost and in every case it favors the big chain that has more locations, more meals, more everything to amortize the costs over. It was ignorable with some mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance when times were good but now that they aren't it's more obvious. Normally it's worth blaming rent to some extent but commercial RE is crap right now so that ain't it
Wild take. If you can’t pay a living wage your business shouldn’t exist.
Restaurants closing due to wage increases means workers were being exploited to cover unsustainable costs. Rents have to come down or wages need to go up across the board to cover the higher prices.
The billionaire class can’t eat enough food to keep restaurants open. They need to outsource it to the middle class.
You probably won't like not having employees. Those employees can start their own small cafeterias where the are owners who manage and work their business.
> High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants
The federal minimum wage in the US is pitiful and yes some cities and states do higher ones, but frankly if you’re operating on such small margins then you need to increase your prices. I’ve seen a trend of new restaurants opening with fixed menus/prices per head. They aren’t cheap, but they aren’t unreasonable, and it’s looking like at least here they are finding real footing. We’ll see in 5-10 years what the survival rate is I suppose.
During Covid I did a lot of interviews with very high-level restauranteurs (mostly chefs) in my city, several of which had James Beard awards and beyond. This is not a flex, it’s purely for context. These are considered some of the best in the city.
They all said the exact same thing: Everyone is pushing their prices too low and promising high-quality, fresh ingredients that are all locally sourced and yada yada. That’s great, but it can’t be done in a sustainable way. Not if you want to actually pay a living wage or offer even the most modest benefits to your employees. The larger population needs to accept the fact that if we want restaurants to actually survive at all, we have to pay more for it and treat it as more of a luxury.
Yes I acknowledged they exist but no it’s not a “large majority.” Roughly 20 IIRC are at the federal minimum. Of those that aren’t many of them are not much above, generally $8-10. I don’t think this is worth nitpicking.
When the number is 50 no, it isn’t. This feels somewhat disingenuous and clearly this doesn’t disprove the larger point. Not to mention, again, several states are barely north of that.
If you want me to acknowledge “some” isn’t enough then fine: “most states are at the minimum wage or up to $10, which is pitiful.” $1600 or less a month is pitiful. Not to mention the states with the lowest minimum wages are by and large the ones with the weakest social safety nets, so the problem is compounded. Can we move on and get back to the real point here?
> High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants.
Not as much as one would think.
Rent (literal) and rent seeking (lending in this case) are the biggest drivers in food costs today.
The family restaurant in an owned building is a distant memory.
The wholesale price of food is very low at the point of production (farming) and absolutely bonkers at the retail and wholesale levels. Mostly because at every step of the chain there is debt, and massive interest payments that need to be made.
The HN set is on one side of the K shaped economy and the other half is looking very much like late stage capitalism.
Case in point: Fritos. 4.50 a bag, while the Walmart generic version is under 2 bucks. Why? Because Pepsi (owner of Fritos) is competing with apple for customers, aka SHAREHOLDERS, and has a massive amount of debt compared to Walmart. The primary input in Fritos is corn, whos price is close to 2019 levels.
I don’t think that story illustrates the point you think it does. Prices aren’t based on cost, they’re based on perceived value on the part of the buyer, and the marketing and brand recognition behind Fritos raises its perceived value much higher than the generic brand.
To put it another way: all generic brands are cheaper than their name-brand counterparts, and that fact has nothing to do with debt or cost structures.
The lower bound of a price is the cost (or ability and willingness of a seller to sell), the higher bound of a price is the ability and willingness of a buyer to pay.
> best case scenario is walkable neighborhoods with lots of little tasty restaurants at affordable prices around the corner from everybody.
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.html
Adjusted for income, those prices would be $15-$100 today. That seems in the right ballpark to me. I can get a pretty great dinner for $100/plate, especially if I don't need it to be in a fancy restaurant atmosphere.
That's what I thought at first, after trying one inflation calculator: $30 for a decent meal, sure, and double that maybe for a pretty tasty meal, is pretty available. (Even then, I think ingredient purity and true preparation aptitude could be pretty suspect, especially at the lower end.)
BUT, TRYING AGAIN: Some inflation calculators do not go back to 1900. But looking further, $0.15 to $1.00 in 1900 would be $5.67 to $38.57 in 2025 dollars, according to https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/
I do wonder if there are discontinuities in inflation calculators for the times before the great fires in each city. Setting that aside, and assuming https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1900?amount=0.15 is accurate, 15 cents in 1900 would be $5.64 in 2025 AFAICT at the moment.
It would be very hard to find a decent sandwich for $5.67 just about anywhere in the USA, much less a multi-course, local, fresh, gourmet meal.
I think it's the general availability of these kinds of pure foods, and their accessibility all about town, prepared to near perfection, even accessible to the poor, that stands out in the Old San Francisco description. To wit:
> ...Hotel de France. This restaurant stood on California street...a big ramshackle house, which had been a mansion of the gold days. Louis, the proprietor, was a Frenchman...his accent was as thick as his peasant soups. The patrons were Frenchmen of the poorer class, or young and poor clerks and journalists who had discovered the delights...
> First ...was the soup mentioned before—thick and clean and good. Next, ...a course of fish—sole, rock cod, flounders or smelt—with a good French sauce. The third course was meat. This came on en bloc; the waiter dropped in the centre of each table a big roast or boiled joint together with a mustard pot and two big dishes of vegetables. Each guest manned the carving knife in turn and helped himself to his satisfaction. After that, ...a big bowl of excellent salad.... For beverage, there stood by each plate a perfectly cylindrical pint glass filled with new, watered claret. The meal closed with "fruit in season"—all that the guest cared to eat....the price was fifteen cents!
> If one wanted black coffee he paid five cents extra...a beer glass full of it. ...he threw in wine and charged extra for after-dinner coffee...
> Adulterated food at that price? Not a bit of it! The olive oil in the salad was pure, California product—why adulterate when he could get it so cheaply? The wine, too, was above reproach.... Every autumn, he brought tons and tons of cheap Mission grapes, ...The fruit was small, and inferior, but fresh...wished his guests would eat nothing but fruit, it came so cheap...
I used census data to come up with my guesstimate [0]. In 1905, the largest share of men were making $10-15 per week. Women and children less, of course.
The 2025 equivalent seems to be about $1330 per week. So in [very] round numbers it looks like about 100x.
Anecdotally, this is consistent with what I have personally observed in dozens of countries, where the low end cost of eating out is about the same as and hour of work.
A starting point would be actually having enough housing, so workers don't automatically need wages that can absorb the overhead of commuting an hour both ways just to make burgers.
Yes, and I completely agree with this, but the comparison for this type of food delivery should be apples-to-apples.
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.
>If you live in a very walkable place, you're less likely to use delivery
This makes sense as a theory but it doesn't match my observed reality at all. Everyone I know who frequently orders food on delivery apps live in dense, walkable cities.
This is the correct answer. There are a few pockets in the USA where this is the case like parts of the Boston and New York metro area, but you have be flexible with your definition of "affordable".
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!
Phoenix as a city doesn't make sense. It's entire existence is due to Arizona getting wayyyy too much in the way of water rights for the amount of economic activity that should be happening in it.
The Pima and Maricopa tribes were able to create massive agricultural surpluses from pre-Columbian times to the early 19th century thanks to the Salt River. Phoenix is not a rainforest, but it's also not a bone-dry location.
Phoenix today has plenty of water for residential and light industrial use, the problem is the persistence of agriculture. A farm in Phoenix uses something like 100x the amount of water compared to an equal amount of residential use. It was fine when there wasn't a global supply chain that could provide oranges or cotton at acceptable prices, but today the land and water have uses with much higher economic value.
How many millions of people lived in the area in the early 19th century? What did their golf courses look like? Did they also ship those agricultural surpluses the Bani Khalid? Is the climate still the same?
What we're doing to the land and the realities of how much water the area receives today is vastly different from what was done in the early 19th century. It seems meaningless to me to point out that the area managed to easily sustain some population of people in the early 1800s when so many other fundamental things are different.
Many cities or towns don’t make sense, top of mountains, isolated islands, extreme weather. Yet they exist and people live there. They also need services.
A major factor in my choice of house location here in the silicon valley 'burbs was to be near "stuff".
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.
Or people learning to cook instead of being lazy slobs. Knowing to cook is like knowing to read and write and to ride a bicycle. A grown up person who can't do it has been stunted in her development, and needs to fix this urgently. There are no excuses, except for severe physical handicaps.
Plus it is cheaper, faster, healthier and tastier than eating out.
But eating out is of course a nice social activity. Ordering DoorDash isn't.
Tell us your lifestyle and we will definitely be able to point out a lot of crazy things, but I’m sure they do make sense for you for whatever reason. Perhaps someone ordering DoorDash so that their family can spend more time together. Any blanket statement is short shortsighted.
Yes, and to be honest if you know how to read, you can also cook. Just google a recipe with good reviews and follow it to the letter, the outcome will most likely be good enough.
You'd think this, but google results for recipes are full of slop (AI and otherwise) and what I assume are fake reviews.
I know people whose cooking is "good enough" for themselves, but suspect enough from my point of view that I now decline any invitations for dinner where they're cooking.
> Or people learning to cook instead of being lazy slobs.
There are many reasons people eat out beside lack of cooking knowledge or desire to be social. You seem like you value feeling superior to these people. Perhaps you can find a way to value yourself without looking down on everyone who makes different choices?
> Plus it is cheaper, faster, healthier and tastier than eating out.
You can get some of those 4 but in my experience, getting all 4 at the same time doesn't happen often.
Yeah those places are super tiny and run by one or two people. Or they are running them under an awning and the whole restaurant is built on a bicycle. Try setting up a bicycle restaurant anywhere in the US and see what happens. You can barely set up a taco truck here. Unfortunately to run a restaurant here you need really expensive restaurant real estate.
We have a ton of these food trucks all over Austin. Most of them ... just aren't very good. So, apparently, regulations aren't too onerous.
And a food truck isn't exempt from the fact that ridiculous commercial real estate prices cause people to be too spread out to be able to service in walking range.
And the regulations got tighter because these trucks were blowing up and killing people. I haven't heard about one exploding in a while, so apparently the regulations had an effect.
Absolutely. I think either learning to cook or moving to another place or country, is a whole lot easier than forcing an entirely new urban structure where you currently live.
In general, that won't pass environmental review. So at least in most of California that's a non-starter. If you want these things you can't have environmental review, and you can't have community planning, and so on. And we (as a society) would much rather have design-by-committee than what you want.
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 what way do walkable neighborhoods not pass environmental review?
> but if you're against the disenfranchisement of people.
Nobody is taking away their right to vote, so it isn't "disenfranchising" someone to put in a second icecream shop in their neighborhood when they only wanted one.
> San Francisco, local neighbourhoods discussed whether or not two ice-cream stores in the neighbourhood were too many ice-cream stores
SF seems to have a public feedback and planning problem that dysfunctionally favors nimbyism over regional needs and they end up shooting themselves in the foot with it over and over.
The delivery option is more convenient and takes less time out of your day than driving to a restaurant. My suspicion is that most frequent delivery app users are ordering food more frequently and from further away than they would drive to if the delivery apps were not an option.
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.
Yeah, induced demand is a real thing, and a huge reason to invest in public transit and walkable neighborhoods in the first place, since they benefit from induced demand as well.
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.
Single occupancy vehicles make up most of the traffic on the road. For most people, the most significant cost of being on the road is their time. With self driving cars, our roads will be full of zero occupancy vehicles.
What about small wheeled robots like this moving by sidewalks? [1] Unlike drones, they don't fall on people's head. And kids love to play with them by blocking their way and seeing how they try to find another way.
Drones don't just "fall on people's head[s]". Zipline, the only US-approved BVLOS drone operator I know of besides maybe Google's Wing, had to show the FAA millions of accident-free flight miles they did overseas in other countries, in order to get regulatory approval.
these things are such a nuisance on sidewalks. i wish cities would prevent the rollout of new commercial automated vehicles that make it harder for real people to make use of existing pedestrian infrastructure.
Maybe the sidewalks should be wider? I agree that in historical part of the city they can be pretty narrow (can be fixed by narrowing or removing the car lanes though), but in 20th century (Soviet) developed areas the sidewalks are pretty wide, they can be like 10 meters (30 feet) wide on large streets or more.
They could also use bicycle lanes, but cyclists won't like it.
Have you ever seen one? Because the ones I have seen IRL doing deliveries where especially lost in open spaces. They do not make sense how they are moving and its not that obvious where its going. Like a goose on the side-walk: you need to be vary because you cannot really determine what it will do next. But in theory, they should work great ...
Everything boils down to terrible (USA?) "city" planning - instead of having anything relatively close-by so you can walk to to get the groceries or the "burrito" can be delivered on bike it has to involved absurdly heavy car...
It is expensive like London is expensive. There are rich people and there are not rich people like other expensive places around the world. Median income in la county is only $38k however.
Oh I tried at one point to get paid while I'm spending time biking anyhow. Doordash wasnt taking new dashers. Ubereats let me sign up but 3 days of having the app open I got no orders so I gave up. I guess they deprioritize bike delivery that heavily. Little do they know I am faster than cars on surface streets.
If one keeps going down the rabbit hole, one might infer that the way our cities are designed is entirely wrong but probably with 60-70 year of invested capital difficult to change fast enough
It's already happening -- Zipline partnered with Walmart and has been actively performing deliveries in TX and I think a few other places. Google's Wing may also be doing commercial deliveries but I don't know as much about their current status.
Mark Rober showed a version that was very quiet. Somebody figured out how to make a different propeller design that greatly minimized the noise. I'm interested to see if this could actually be feasible and make for very quiet services.
FPV missiles have little interest in keeping the area around them a pleasant environment to live in, and are disposable one time use items. I suspect drone delivery places a higher premium on lowering noise pollution.
Then it's time for cities to not be cowards, and go all in on the food bus hyperloop model. It needs to be like those conveyor sushi places, except on the scale of a city. Places like mcdonalds should have fleets of busses with hot-and-ready food just doing loops around town, only returning when they re stock.
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
Most fast food is largely cooked to order and pretty rapidly degrades once you try to hold it for more any real amount of time before consumption. /Maybe/ partially assembled burgers could have patties cooked right before serving or for pizza do a model like the pizza vending machines where it's baked right before it's dispensed but I don't see the version becoming popular where it's a lot of food fully precooked and assembled being predictively shuttled around town.
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.
Small delivery robots are in several (walkable) cities since a few years now. Starship was the first brand (they say in 270 cities, campuses etc.): https://www.starship.xyz/
(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.)
I think we should go back to Pneumatic tubes. I wonder if justifiable size could be made. But still after infra is build we could move lot of food and package delivery to the system.
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?)
What's the KWh/mile of a drone versus an EV? Should factor in that the small drone can only deliver a single small package, but the EV can carry more and make multiple stops.
In China, they use E-bikes, I'm not sure why that wouldn't work here? Autonomous E-bikes shouldn't be that hard to manage, ya, they would need to balance themselves like segways, but I'm sure the tech is already there for it. There is no need for them to be full sized cars, even for crash safety...since it is just food that would get damaged in an accident.
Ebikes and small scooters make up the vast majority of deliveries in major cities. Can't remember the last time a delivery driver came in a car in NYC.
Some anecdata; E-bikes are definitely used in other major cities. I lived up against the Hudson in Jersey City and worked out of Manhattan and that was the primary means by which Doordash/Ubereats was moved around.
I guess phoenix is good for them since they're in the area already, but you'd think it'd be more helpful to run this in a market where they're actively trialing. At least then they'd be doing some useful work while ramping up.
We're also still moving thousands of pounds of vehicle around a public highway to carry a 150lb human... so? I don't think it's a big deal. But yes drone delivery would be much nicer...for burritos.
Society really does not need food delivery at all. It would greatly benefit everyone involved if they went to get their food, either from the supermarket or some restaurant, by themselves.
> everyone involved if they went to get their food
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
Food delivery is how walking to the supermarket every day for the remaining items is viable for us. If delivery wasn't an option I'd be far more likely to get a car.
I live in one of the biggest cities in the world, and we get a big grocery delivery to our door bi-weekly. It's a huge help to buy in bulk vs going to get a few things daily.
Millions of years of selection have given you a body designed to walk 10+ miles a day for your daily resources. Use it or lose it as they say. Foraging is good for you.
why there aren't autonomous bicycles or the autonomous things in that class? I remember those "cockroaches" on Castro in the mid-201x, saw recently another significantly larger "cockroach" around Palo Alto, yet they slow, and cumbersome in their presence on the sidewalk, and don't seem to be made for the road.
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.
... and then we have millions of drones up in the sky to carry a 1lb burrito, obviously a robot that can make the burrito for you at home is the future.
Around me there are small robots that follow sidewalks and bike paths to deliver foods. They're essentially the size of a medium or large cooler with six wheels that can climb some stairs and curbs.
DoorDash appears very inexpensive when you have their DashPass product, however ive notice that basically every food service business will raise their menu prices, and grocery stores will restrict which items that allow you to buy.
This is really interesting because if you have autonmous drivers, DoorDash doesnt really have a lever to lower prices except removing tipping.
Doordash itself appears to add at least $1 to all menu items. Which is horrible for certain restaurants that do à la carte. Eg. My local indian place ends up with doubled/tripled prices on Doordash.
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.
I work for a POS company, I can assure you it's the restaurants doing this. They often have different menus with different prices for UberEats/Doordash/etc. One abstraction company I've worked with (You push your menu to them and they push it out to multiple providers then route the orders back to you), even provides tools to be able to increase all your menu items by a set % rounding to the nearest 5/10/25-cents.
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.
My read of the comment wasn't that he was "blaming" either, but explaining where the fees come from.
It sounds like the direct increase to the consumer's prices is done by the restaurant itself, but the reason the restaurant is charging higher prices are to make up for the fees they're charged by UE/DD.
In other words, UE/DD restaurant-side service fees eat into the restaurant's profit margins, so the restaurant passes on the cost increases to the consumer to get them back.
To be clear, no idea about how closely these statements correspond to the world, just that this seems to be OP's claim.
Funny enough, in another top level thread, there's a chain of people claiming it's Uber Eats that adds the 25% and that the restaurant needs to opt out to stop adding the cost.
I’m not “blaming” anyone really. I don’t fault the restaurants for raising prices to cover the costs. I don’t love how opaque the whole thing is but I understand both sides.
It’s all a shell games so that they can say “free delivery” and/or not have to call out “this item is $5 but you will pay a 20% more to get it delivered through DoorDash”. They just hide that “fee” in the item price.
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.
Unfortunately, you're not gonna successfully nail a BigCo with a legal team using an "inferred from conduct" clause. That's the kind of thing your municipal or state enforcers use to threaten a peasant into settling.
I'm surprised that's not illegal, and I think states will pass laws to fix this.
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.
Why would it be illegal? If you think of it as Doordash buying the pizza and then reselling it to you, there'd be no reason not to expect a mark up. You're allowed to price discriminate between different market segments, so even if we pitch Doordash as merely a third party delivery offering, restaurants could still charge Doordash customers more than those that come into their storefront.
It should be illegal because these services market a subscription to you claiming the benefit of zero fees and free delivery, which is a lie. You are being secretly charged through a higher menu price, none of which is shown to you as a customer.
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.
Also, Doordash does not have "zero fees" for orders when you pay for DashPass, they have "reduced" fees. I do absolutely hate the practice of "Taxes & Fees" being a line item and only when you click into it do you see that the taxes are minimal and most of that is the platform fees.
I'm not sure how UberEats/etc handle it but it's absolutely crazy how much of a markup there is to order through Doordash vs going to pick it up when you factor in Restaurant Upcharge + Doordash Fees + Tip. It's easy to have an $8 item suddenly cost $20 or more total out-of-pocket when all is said and done.
> If you think of it as Doordash buying the pizza and then reselling it to you
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?
It's the opposite — you're legally protected to resell anything you buy and the seller can't stop you. I'm not sure if food has any caveats, but in general, IP law cannot stop you from reselling an item.
IP law, no, for the same reason nothing stops me from reselling the Ralph Lauren shirt I bought as a Ralph Lauren shirt, so long as I make no pretenses of being Ralph Lauren, and I make no modifications to it. The good is the same, IP protected good. I'm just re-selling it.
Food safety? There might be some restrictions related to food handling, but to my understanding they're mostly pretty rote food handling safety training stuff that I'd hope delivery companies provide anyway.
This has been happening for a good while. There are loads of instances of food delivery companies creating unauthorized websites for restaurants with a phone number and url owned by the delivery company. They are literally buying the food and reselling it to you at a markup.
I don't know that it should be illegal. I think the argument would be that it's deceptive. DoorDash, for some customers, claims there is no service fee - it's "free." What they're really saying is: the service of our delivery may be free, but the overall service we will provide is hidden or obfuscated in menu items, and without doing some research at the restaurant, you'll likely not notice.
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.
I think most reasonable would be to mandate that these food delivery services can not take cut from payment going to restaurants, but instead must charge it fully to customer. So restaurant has menu price of 10 and when someone orders delivery from payment 10 goes to restaurant. And delivery service is free to add their margin on top be it 30 or 50%.
What I personally dislike about this is that it hides the cost of Doordash. It's not intuitive that the prices of items is silently higher on Doordash: it's not like online retailers having different prices for the same SKU, it's the same restaurant. I'd prefer the overhead to show up as its own line item, rather than obscuring the actual cost of the service. I have a feeling less people would choose to Doordash as often if they realized just how much more things cost through it. (Not everyone, but, there are a lot people who really do just do it for convenience, and they could just drive and go pick up their own takeout.)
You have a point, but I just think it's less intuitive for consumers. Manufacturers often don't even do direct sales, so the only "canonical" price is the MSRP, which is just that, a suggestion. Consumers go shopping at Walmart or Amazon, they don't go "shopping" at Doordash: the menu they're seeing on Doordash is the restaurant menu. In some cases, it is the only online menu that some restaurants even have. To me it is not terribly intuitive that these prices differ.
There is another analog for this, too, though: some retailers indeed would have more or less expensive prices for the same thing when ordering online versus in-store. I think the argument that it isn't unprecedented is pretty solid.
Despite not being entirely unprecedented, I'd still prefer to see this practice ended for food delivery services so it is easier to see the actual true overhead of food delivery services. It really does feel a bit manipulative the way it is right now.
Without regulation, "the market" wouldn't care about a lot of things. It's actually a good thing that a small minority of people hold the line for people who don't have time to care about issues like this kind of manipulation!
I’m pretty sure DoorDash is the one who increases the price on their end, not the business. And what’s more, they don’t separate the addition out. It’s rolled in to the cost of the item.
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
> I’m pretty sure DoorDash is the one who increases the price on their end, not the business
That is not correct. Doordash takes a 20-30% commission on each sale, so businesses preemptively increase the prices to offset that. They're not forced to and doordash isn't doing it for them. But, you know, they're still effectively "forced" to if their in-store prices don't have great margins to begin with...
Most of that money goes towards the driver, last I checked in on unit economics. It costs quite a bit of money to pay a person to go to the restaurant, wait around, and then bring it to you — far more than the "delivery fee" that you see and that customers would pay.
Customers are cheap and they're (partly) to blame. My theory is that Amazon conditioned people to view delivery as a free commodity and pizza places who had delivery baked into their model cemented it.
So if Doordash listed a delivery fee that covered their true cost of delivery, customers would balk. So they instead have to find creative ways to get enough. Maybe it's changed and Doordash cracked the secret, but when I'd looked into it years ago these companies barely got by — many of them actually losing money.
With pizza delivery you typically (should) tip the driver $5+ ($10+ for larger orders) so idk if that really tracks specifically, but I do largely agree that part of is people being cheap for one reason or another.
Doordash and other companies like it take a good chunk of the margins of those stores for the privilege of delivering the items. 15% is not unheard of.
It appears inexpensive because raising prices is the only visibility you have into what the restaurant is paying these services for their order flows (~10-30%).
Are you sure about that? I thought the restaurant does. On DoorDash's Help page (https://help.doordash.com/merchants/s/article/How-to-Maximiz...) There's a quote: "To provide a high-quality experience for all of our customers, we set prices on DoorDash the same as our in-store prices. DoorDash even enables operators to set different pricing for delivery and pickup, but a core part of us providing high-quality customer service is accomplished through our consistent menu pricing." - Manuel Bucio, Owner, Razpachos" That seems to indicate the restaurant sets the prices.
You really think Doordash sets individual prices for each dish for the half million restaurants that it lists on its service? It is a simple platform. The restaurant sets up and manages its own menu, and Doordash takes a cut of the final sale.
Interesting that there's no mention in TFA or the comments about DoorDash's ground-based delivery "drones": https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/doordash-unveils-dot -- I've seen them testing these things in parts of the Bay Area for more than a year now.
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.
They have deployed some of these in LA by other companies e.g. Coco robotics. Really ridiculous offering imo. It moves slower than walking speed. Even slower when you factor in all the unnavigable obstacles they run into like upturned sidewalks, debris in the sidewalk, homeless encampments, etc. There are of course videos online of them being vandalized or broken into. Videos of them crossing the road like a game of Frogger. What is more is that they are actually controlled by a person vs actually being some automated solution. And then they have to wait there on the sidewalk until the customer comes and picks up the food. They can't manage going into buildings of course.
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
How do they prevent food from being stolen out of the drones? When I delivered pizza that was a real problem, you had to be sure you never left your car unlocked with pizzas inside and never be away from it any longer than necessary.
These are all over the place in Tempe, AZ. I see them cruising through my neighborhood all the time.
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.
I wonder if there's just not enough money in that, because it sounds like a brilliant idea.
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.
I imagine a non-trivial percentage of the city can't be navigated by sidewalks alone, and a lot of the sidewalks are in bad enough condition that they couldn't be navigated unless the wheels and clearance are quite large, but who knows.
Who takes the food from the restaurant to the Waymo? The restaurant employees? Or is this more akin to the drone model where a Dasher is still involved and transports the food from the restaurant to the autonomous vehicle?
Yes, most likely the restaurant employees. That's probably why they are starting with orders that are fulfilled by DoorDash employees.
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.
Sorry, I'm confused. I think it's totally reasonable to expect the customer to pick-up the food from the Waymo by walking to it. I feel that's what you were responding to, but I'm interested in the dynamic between the restaurant and the vehicle.
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.
Sidewalk pickup from stores & restaurants is also a thing. You place an order, drive your car up to the restaurant, and someone brings the order up to your car. Infinitely easier than finding a parking spot and walking into the store, especially in a busy neighborhood. This is the same thing.
Hummm. Okay. I guess I'm aware of this for like, grocery pickup or calling ahead for something like a BestBuy order, but I always envisioned those things being situations where the customer parks in a parking lot out in front of the store.
When I take Waymos around SF, a really common part of the process is, upon reaching the drop-off location, the Waymo realizes there's no space, the road is too busy to comfortably double-park, and it shifts into "Looking for a spot to pull-over..." mode. It's not uncommon for it to drive a full block away from my drop-off location in order to find a safe spot.
I was applying that mindset to this situation. I agree that if they can guarantee that a Waymo is just parking/double-parking right in front of the store and all the employee has to do is take a step outside, drop it in the trunk, and shut the trunk - that that is sustainable.
But you understand that cars are made to transport people, and hamburgers are much smaller than people, hence it would be a tiny bit wasteful to drive hamburgers in "people cars", right?
But then a single car can carry multiple hamburgers to multiple people! Maybe that is still a better situation than multiple people driving multiple cars to each get a single hamburger :-)
So we need a car that drives around and makes hamburgers on-demand, drives to your home while it's being prepared, and delivers it hot and fresh to your door with a smaller bot.
To be clear, we do not need this, and I am being sarcastic. However, if a VC wants to fund me to do this, I'll try my best in the hours between my use of the startup's office sim-rig and the office wood workshop.
If only someone invented some sort of 25lb vehicle that one can use their own human power to travel upon. Maybe something with a chain and gearing? No, that would be fantasy, back to my 5000lb steel block I go.
The point of comparison here would be a human delivery driver, who (as I understand) can be carrying multiple deliveries at a time. I think with Waymo's service, it's one delivery at a time, which results in more cars on the road for the same demand? (Or are there potentially several orders in the trunk when you go to get yours out?)
> Delivery, however, has increased the number of times people buy a meal made by somebody else.
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.
You mean the emissions from the EV doing the delivery? Or the emissions from the hydro or solar or wind (or even natural gas) used to generate the electricity that was stored in the battery?
The absurd waste of energy in moving a 4000lb object to deliver a 1lb object. You can attribute that to whatever source you want. It's still wasted energy.
It also implies that the restaurant has to walk out to the car and place it in the car too. They aint gonna like that. Although to be fair most restaurants already hate the drivers that physically come into their restaurants and don't obey the rules.
Use stolen CC on App, pick up somewhere seedy far away from where you live. OP is right, this will be abused. What is keeping people from dumping weird things into the truck after picking up their $15 cheeseburger?
People will love that when it’s raining or in snow. What about in cities where you can’t even find parking? Or you live on the 30th floor of an apartment complex? Lol these companies are so stupid.
> What about in cities where you can’t even find parking? Or you live on the 30th floor of an apartment complex? Lol these companies are so stupid
Do you think these drivers currently run around with two to a car, one to keep the engine running while they go around the block while the other goes upstairs?
Huh? Why would I think that? My comment is regarding the customer. With an automated delivery the customer receives the goods at the location where the delivery vehicle can park near the destination. Without automated delivery, the human receives the goods at their front door.
> Without automated delivery, the human receives the goods at their front door
Fair enough. Not really an issue in Phoenix. Plenty of buildings (in San Francisco and Atlanta, to memory) require delivery to be dropped off at a centralized location. And there aren’t many high rises, or months of monsoon, in Phoenix.
Phoenix would be a city where this will be less of an issue for sure, but you still have two and three story apartment buildings that require customers to go downstairs for their food.
Having to go outside significantly reduces the benefit of delivery. Now customers have to interrupt what they’re doing, make sure they look OK so the neighbors don’t see their underwear and bed hair, put on a jacket or raincoat in bad weather, possibly wait on 2 elevators, and pick up their food right next to their own car in the parking lot. In some cases, this could take five minutes. Customer realizes that they could just get in their car and drive to the restaurant at this point, so why order for delivery?
> but you still have two and three story apartment buildings that require customers to go downstairs for their food.
Everyone keeps ignoring you on this part, but they aren't thinking about people with disabilities or mobility issues that rely on delivery services to get their groceries because alternative or public welfare programs don't exist for this.
What happens when DoorDash, UberEats, Instacart, etc. all go autonomous? People with disabilities get screwed in the name of profit. They are already getting screwed with higher prices as is.
These customers can't simply "go downstairs and meet the car" the point of delivery specifically in this case is to have it brought right to your door. Automated cars miss this usecase entirely.
> In some cases, this could take five minutes. Customer realizes that they could just get in their car and drive to the restaurant at this point, so why order for delivery?
What? They’d stumble down in pyjamas. If they’re in a building that probably means exiting and re-entering a parking garage. Also, it’s Phoenix. Nothing is five minutes away—the urban plan is one of sprawl.
I agree it’s less convenient than door delivery. But against that is the cost of tipping and humans getting lost. For it is the fact that in many major cities, people routinely order food delivery despite being required by building policy to pick it up downstairs.
I think we’ve exhausted this discussion. It’s reduced down to simple individual opinions about whether it’s worth it to drive to a restaurant or not.
I only wanted to point out that The customers are getting less not more. And the companies will make less money because the automated cars are more expensive than drivers that are willing to take food for 2 to 3 dollars a delivery. If you fail to see that or recognize it, I’ll leave it at that.
I think plenty of Phoenicians will tip themselves to walk to the curb.
> the companies will make less money because the automated cars are more expensive than drivers
Disagree. The marginal cost for a late-night Waymo is probably already comparable to that of a driver, and that’s before we get to California’s Prop 22.
When I order food delivery I try to limit myself to locations nearby because I don't want to be a hassle and make a driver drive 10 miles out and 10 miles in. I also factor in a tip for the delivery itself.
If it's a robot delivering to me I don't care if I make the robot drive 30 miles out to get me food (as long as the food is something that won't taste notably worse after such a long drive of course). Plus I'm not going to tip the machine.
You clearly have never used these services or are out of touch. Having a human deliver kind of sucks, lots of risk of tampering with food and it’s overall a terrible experience especially for women.
This is a brilliant fix, for the case of folks wanting it physically delivered, I am sure you can or will be able to pay for that.
Well they did mention one specific, and that is the fact that this service is only for DashMart orders i.e. the first part of any autonomous delivery order is at a DoorDash -controlled and -staffed facility. Where they can babysit the process.
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?
I live in a big city. DoorDash always delivers to an address 10 minutes away walking from my building. It is quite inconvenient in the winter. With human drivers, you can at least try to convince them to use Google Maps, but with an AI?
On second thought, prompt injection via delivery instructions?
Don't get me wrong, the gig economy is really bad, but unfortunately covers a big chunk of jobs. When this scales up (and it will), what would happen to these people and the economy in general? There won't be an UBI reasonable enough to deal with the aftermath of this reality (basic law of supply and demand).
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.
I guess I'm not quite as doom and gloom about this as you.
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.
> "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."
Here's the thing: This is good for the economy and human development overall.
What we're witnessing right now is the opposite: Mega corps trying to control almost every industry, and shifting the economic and social landscape from a capitalistic society to a neo-feudalistic one.
The socioeconomic implications of this shift will be something humanity has never experienced before, since the endgame is to automate everything. If we get to that point, either the government seizes the means of production (I don't agree with that since this is communism) and distributes wealth, or the government charges nearly a 97% on taxes (capital gains, etc but taxation is basically theft, hehe) and we start living in a "Jetsons"-like society, or we get a feudalistic society (hopefully I'm dead wrong).
Spent last week in Phoenix, rode Waymo a dozen times. Autonomous taxis are the future. Don't have to tip, don't have to worry about pissing off the driver if I'm only going a few blocks. Price is reasonable, seems less than Uber or a standard taxi.
Question is how many humans will forgo owning a car altogether once autonomous vehicles are ubiquitous.
I don't like the wait time though. I don't want to wait 5 minutes for my Waymo to arrive for a 10 minute trip down to the grocery store when I can wait 0 minutes and hop in my own car and just drive there myself.
I do like autonomous cars though, but they won't completely remove car ownership.
Wow, that FTC case gets worse and worse the farther into it you read. What a scumbag company. It's like they opened the "Dark Patterns Unleashed" book and followed every example.
It isn't when it is cultural. There is nothing forcing people to tip, except not wanting to feel shame or be shamed by others. For example, while out on a date.
in some towns (like SF) folks have used Waymo thousands of times - its everywhere, for a good reason - while its not always faster, it's more consistent, pleasant and safe.
> The prices will be set as high as the supply and demand curve allows. Considering that they're the only autonomous car provider in operation, that curve will not be consumer-friendly.
Or go from being an N car household to an N-1 car household.
I had to carry a couple of gallons of dairy for a trade show. Too heavy for the 15 minute walk. First world problem, I suppose, but Waymo was a convenient point-to-piont option.
A lot of bus routes suck and people don't like to plan ahead for how they'll get someplace, so they often default to the most general transportation available (personal vehicles) if the transit network isn't good enough for everyday tasks.
As an example, my wife's 15m car commute would take 45m by bus transfer to the nearest stop, which is a couple miles from the destination on a freeway onramp. The transit system is fixing it, but that date is 3 years away. That's still better than the routes some people have.
And lest you think the local transit agency sucks (by American standards), they don't. They just prioritize office workers heading to/from downtown instead of people moving radially through the metro area.
I know a lot of people who live by like 10 min frequency routes or better and usually its me revealing their existence to them when I use it to show up to their house. Could it work for all trips? Of course not. But plenty could be done on busses as it is. People are blind to them though. No one bothers to look at transit system maps. They see the couple rail lines listed on google maps and assume there is no other transit offering.
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).
In house delivery has existed for a lot of business for a long time. For instance, nearly every pizza store would do delivery themselves. Many still do. However those services didn't introduce a middleman between you, the store, and the driver who extracted money from all 3.
When you operate a delivery service for your restaurant, there's A lot of overhead. You have to strike a balance between paying deliverers their wages, and timely service for your customers. If you mismatch your number of deliverers to the business you have for the day, then you're either throwing away money, or making your customers wait a very long time for their food, which also may have knock-on effects in the kitchen, if you don't want the food to be cold, you might need to wait to start preparing it until your delivery guy is on the way back from his route. Outsourcing delivery to a delivery company seems like a win from restaurants, which is probably why so many have signed up for it.
Problems with the current companies aside, asserting that we just shouldn't have general food delivery services at any price is strange. You could make the same argument against take-out too - anyone aside from the sick and the old is capable of cooking their own meals too, restaurant kitchen work is a notoriously poor work environment at low wages, etc...
> with a limited understanding of labour laws, rights, and protections
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.
I personally have never ordered food from any delivery service and only a few times a year from any restaurant at all, because I know how to cook and worse case, make a peanut butter sandwich.
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?
People using these services know how to cook, they're usually trying to save time. Especially if they don't want to interrupt their work to ready a meal.
You can pre-order lunch to arrive for your lunchtime meetings in about a minute in the app. Probably less convenient if you have an apartment, compared to a house, though.
lol this is capitalism buddy. food delivery exists because people want it and pay for it, you actually don't get a say at all on if it needs to 'go away'.
Just for a bit of comparison... I'm in the UK and don't drive. It is a 10-min walk to a big Tesco superstore, which is really convenient. It is on my commute too (which I also walk, Uber if its raining heavily).
It's not inherently an American thing, it's the result of several mid-century zoning and urban design decisions.
I used to live in a 1920s era "streetcar suburb" neighbourhood. I lived on the third floor, and the ground level was a full (but small) grocery store. I never spent more than ~$50 at a time on groceries because I only bought for a couple days at a time.
The same decisions and laws that created the current system can be changed to take us back to the "norm" in the rest of the world.
People have a lot of hyperbole about grocery store density. Pull up a random city and see how they are actually distributed. Even in flyover state metros grocery stores are basically evenly distributed 1-3 miles apart from the next across the entire urbanized/suburbanized area.
> If people were legally allowed to live near grocery stores
What are you talking about? What backwaters country is this? In many places in the world, people live literally on top of grocery stores, such law would be ridiculed until the law makers have to socially isolate themselves if they tried to come up with something so stupid.
The great majority of development in American cities over the last 75 years has been single-use, with neighborhoods of exclusively single-family houses separated from nearby commercial strips with big parking lots along wide roads.
The downtown/center of older cities may still have mixed use, and there have been changes happening in recent years to allow/build more apartments and mixed use areas, but, generally outside of the densest parts of the largest cities commercial and residential areas are required to be separate, with personal cars as the primary/only way to get between them.
This has been a bit of a self-reinforcing phenomenon, IMO, as car-first infrastructure puts people at the mercy of traffic congestion, and means that any apartment building or business in their vicinity will result in more cars passing through, more congestion, more competition for parking, as well as the presence of the large parking lots that cities mandate for any new construction, which themselves make it unpleasant to get around in any other way.
> the median distance to the nearest food store for the overall U.S. population was 0.9 miles, with 40 percent of the U.S. population living more than 1 mile from a food store. The median distance to the third-nearest food store for the overall population was 1.7 miles. When the ERS researchers looked at rural food store access, they found that the median distance to the nearest and the third-nearest food store was 3.1 miles and 6.1 miles, respectively.
In older areas, some. But practically anything after WW2, not nearly as much.
It's somewhat misleading to talk about distance-to-X in a lot of American places. I live less than a mile from the nearest grocery as the crow flies, but if I wanted to walk there I have to traverse my entire street to get to an exit road (as opposed to walking out my back gate; the whole back is fenced because the exit road is directly behind my house). Then I have to walk down a fairly busy one-lane-each-way road with no sidewalks or shoulders present (i.e., you're going to be walking in a shallow drainage ditch - hope it's not raining!) for a few hundred meters, cross two busy multilane roads, and walk across an unshaded parking lot.
The US, which is where Phoenix is. And yes, my point is that we (in the US) should have walkable (and bikeable) cities, like much of the rest of the world.
I wouldn't want any elderly person I knew walking that distance in any of the 3 weeks Phoenix typically spends over 100 degrees (even hotter over pavement).
They are talking about US suburbs. For example, the house I grew up in is over a mile to the nearest grocery and you have to cross two large intersections on the way.
The intersection stuff sucks, but "over a mile" seems to be between 1.5 to 2km, is that considered far to walk in the US? Measuring where I go to have my morning coffee at a cafe each day, it seems to be 1.3km away, and I walk there and back every morning...
Are you carrying your groceries to the coffee shop? Also, walking places in US suburbs is a miserable experience, especially in the Southwest where it gets hot. Everything is spread out with large parking lots, sidewalks are a maybe, the roads are busy and there is no shade or sound dampening.
> Are you carrying your groceries to the coffee shop?
Obviously no. But where I lived ~20 years ago the nearest grocery was a 20 minute walk there and then 20 minute walk back with two or four shopping bags with stuff, and I wasn't the only one walking there when needing to do shopping.
I think it's more common than not out in the world that things are far away so you need to spend awful amount of time on just getting places. Unless you live in a city of course.
My grocery store is 3 miles (~5km) away with nearly zero sidewalks, and I live in the capital city of my state. America is a hellscape in that respect.
Counterpoint: my family in New Delhi regularly gets groceries (and booze and cigarettes and pet food) delivered. Convenience comes in many forms, and not everyone values the same elements similarly.
You don't need to get everyone to coordinate. You need politicians to not listen to the lobby of home owners and real estate companies worried about their investments (in other words, ignore the NIMBYs). Change the zoning laws, incentivize developing mixed use, prioritize pedestrian and cycling infrastructure and stop prioritizing cars and parking.
Walkable cities are actually illegal in much of the US due to zoning laws right now. The reason you don't see shops in residential suburban developments is not because there is no demand, it's because it's literally illegal.
Having walkable and bikeable destinations is compatible with back yards. It just needs to be legal to build it.
Grocery delivery services are already ruining the regular supermarkets. My local grocery store used to always have fresh stock and full shelves. For the past year or two I've noticed a rapid increase in delivery shoppers who typically have 2-3 hand baskets or 2 full carts with them in aisles and clearing out shelves of food.
Grocery shopping done by task rabbits / etc leaves things to be desired. Quality of choices on things. Maybe its good for staples and saving you time there.
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.
Don’t forget depreciation of the vehicle and the risk of an accident as well.
Why would DoorDash want to assume all that responsibility when they have such a good legal scam against all their drivers right now? I call it a scam because DoorDash claims to not be taking the tips of drivers, but given the puny payouts per delivery the drivers lose money and time without the tips, so how can they claim they’re not taking the tips.
Should presumably get cheaper now that there’s fewer humans in the loop. But from looking at their prices I’m always assuming it’s meant for affluent people paying a premium to save time and effort so maybe it doesn’t need to be cheaper.
The prices will be set as high as the supply and demand curve allows. Considering that they're the only autonomous car provider in operation, that curve will not be consumer-friendly.
What could "the curve will not be consumer-friendly" mean in this context?
The whole point of creating a robot taxi service is to sell to consumers. If it's not consumer-friendly, then consumers won't buy it, which defeats the point?
Robot taxis are hardly a staple one needs to exist, people have been easily living without robot taxis, and if the price is consumer-unfriendly, they will simply not use them.
I mean waymo is the same price as ordering a human driver. Charging less is leaving money on the table now that this pricing has been established in the consumer mindshare.
I live in a city that has had Waymo's (via Uber) for a while now and I have done a complete 180 on them. Not only are they usually cheaper than a traditional Uber, but they drive far more defensively, and don't come with the social baggage associated with a traditional Uber either (tipping, small talk).
> Not only are they usually cheaper than a traditional Uber
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.
I took a ride home two nights ago for under $7. On the other hand, I tend to avoid Ubers in New York (versus taxis), but that’s one part local demand and one part local regulation.
That's been my attitude as well. I'm not convinced they'll stay cheaper for long, and when I say "cheaper" its marginal. Cost of the ride is the similar, but it seems there is no tip built into the price yet.
Its funny because when ride sharing first came out -- everyone had a great experience for the most part (early adopters/risk takers). Then the long tail (and VC growth money disappeared) came around and the pay got worse, job was a grind and the quality tanked.
I don't doubt that we will have the same thing with all these new options. Maybe the social baggage won't be there but there will be weird new things that pop up...
There is nothing natural about driving a car. Nothing democratic about a driver in front ferrying one or two in the back, both knowing each will rate the other, one knowing they are working for a tip, all while managing a fleet of apps whose owners run datacenters to rip them off.
Human-driven cars were a deadly necessity. But like lead pipes and child labour, we’re better off past it.
A central planner probably would've built mass transit back in the 50s. And most people wouldn't have cars. And the ones that did would be driving trabants.
> It relates to economics. Do you think a central planner would swear off robotics because it feels dehumanizing?
This is a straw man. There are many shades of grey between big companies, fueled by cheap VC money, that wipe out taxi drivers associated in small companies by operating at loss for many years and a centrally planned economy.
Yeah our humanity relies on worrying about if your uber driver might be a reckless driver or harass you. Driving is a means to an end, self driving cars will one day be cheaper better and safer which is a boon to all consumers at the expense of the comparatively few drivers
It's really complicated. Because even though there might be a bit of friction between you and that rideshare driver, ride-sharing keeps a lot of people off the streets.
If this technology really takes off in the next 5 to 10 years, we're going to see a lot of people without the employer of last resort. Eventually gig work might disappear completely. In a lot of cities you'll see people on electric bikes or scooters delivering food. If that's completely automated, sure it'll be a lot quicker and faster, but what's going to happen to people who depend on these jobs.
I don't think our economic system is ready for this. And I'm not talking about any particular country either, it's going to be a worldwide issue.
Humans are quite bad at a lot of primarily human tasks... I'm grateful every time I don't have to deal with a secretary behind the phone, bank teller, travel agent, etc thanks to all these functionalities having become automated. One exception was ordering food in Japan at some restaurants which was done on iPads and food was being delivered by robots, because I actually really enjoyed interacting with the delightful and polite people over there. I cannot say the same about people in where I live.
The reason it's illegal to build a small grocery store near where people live (so they don't have to spent so much time and money acquiring groceries) has the complete opposite to do with capitalism.
I've noticed these little wheeled drones running around in the bicycle lanes in the east valley, usually with a biker following it not too far behind. I kind of figured they were going to be using them to roll out an autonomous delivery service at some point.
This is a great step in increasing the utilization of Waymo vehicles. Ideally Waymo's would be operating continuously doing useful work and reducing the number of dead-head legs.
It would be interesting to see if this could be combined with those little sidewalk bots to do the last mile, effectively having the Waymos act like buses for the bots.
Currently it cost DoorDash an Ubereats 2 to 3 dollars to send food to the front door of someone’s house. It takes about 20 to 30 minutes for that driver to form all the steps to do the delivery. This works out to $6 dollars per hour of driver time. The driver is paying insurance, gas, time, depreciation insurance, accident repairs, maintenance, and everything. DoorDash pays $144 per day for approximately 48 deliveries with a human driver.
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.”
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).
I think this assumption is incorrect "Most cars are useful for 100,000 miles so the vehicle should be able to deliver for about 416 days."
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.
The company does it not because they think it will be cheaper but because if they DON'T do it, and something changes, someone else will eat their (delivered) lunch.
Even when it doesn’t accomplish the task and cost three times more than the current method? Seems like we’re far away from this working.
Don’t do what? They’re just buying Waymo cars and building a plug-in to send waypoints to the car from their delivery software system. Waymo did all the hard work.
Ballistic food , not so great.
Years ago we went to an ice hockey game with our children.subway sandwich was there with their sandwich gun. They can shoot 6 inch sandwiches into the crowd. They got carried away and some sandwiches hit the ceiling of the arena, some disassembled on route to the crowd but most made to happy sports fans. My oldest son was quite young still and he was so distraught/ disgusted by the bits of sandwich flying around he has never entered a subway sandwich shop since then.
Not surprised. Phoenix is one of those rare and contrived physical locations that doesn't get weather or seasons. No snow, little rain. The road surface and road edges are always visible and never change. People always stay in the clearly visible lanes. It's the perfect place to field semi-autonomous vehicles that can't hack it in normal regions so it looks like they're more capable than they are.
If Waymo were launching in Minneapolis I'd be surprised and delighted. But this is just more of the same.
This post seems to imply this is a trick or false progress. Why not start where it’s feasible/easier as you prove the business model and work out unforeseen issues?
Because they've been doing it SF and Phoenix over and over for the last decade with no progress while saying they were fully autonomous. I guess it's not so much about the companies but the technology itself not actually being capable yet. So they stick to the cheat regions rather than attempting to actually make autonomous vehicles (because that's too difficult, they'd have crash/failures making news).
Your argument would definitely apply in 2015. Not so much in 2025.
I think that you don't understand snow (real winter) and how it effects vehicles. A dusting of snow that stays on the ground for a day before melting is not an issue. The issue is when the snow keeps the road markings covered for literally weeks or months at a time. When the lanes are not visible to human drivers and they form new flocking based emergent lanes which all humans follow instead of the actual lanes. When the snow piles on the edge of the road change the width from week to week and force parked cars out into the middle of the old lane.
Snow is not a problem. Snow that stays is a problem. Atlanta doesn't get snow that stays. Waymo is noticbly absent from Buffalo after their one prior attempt.
> you don't understand snow and how it effects vehicles
Tell me more about how the 92” of snow my town got last winter leaves me ignorant.
> Snow is not a problem. Snow that stays is a problem
Snow used to be a problem! It isn’t anymore because it’s solved. My Subaru can keep lane using radar alone, following the car in front of me, in a blizzard.
> Waymo is noticbly absent from Buffalo after their one prior attempt
They’re also noticeably absent from Chula Vista [1].
Also, I know I don’t understand snow, but maybe the folks in Denver do [2].
> want to know where I should be steering clear of Subarus in the winter ;)
We’re actually pretty good! The fuckwits are in the FWD rental cars that can’t brake, ever, and souped-up F-million fifties driven by rich 17-year olds who predictably flip them on flat straightaways despite infinite farmland run-off, at grade, on both sides.
And to be clear, I’m never leaving the Subaru alone. The Subaru isn’t letting me leave it alone. But the notion that Waymo couldn’t figure out snowstorms is one I’ll readily challenge given the Subaru’s radar frequently sees white cars in a white out before I make them out visually (at 15 mph with hazards on). In the snow, an autonomous vehicle’s radar (note: not lidar and certainly not cameras) have an advantage over humans.
It's definitely easier to drive than in many places, but "doesn't get weather" is not quite right when there are significant dust storms every year. But few people even know what haboob means, so I guess they don't know how bad the loss of visibility is during one.
That was the original business model of Zume Pizza. Didn't work out because the acceleration in turns caused melted cheese to fly off the pizzas, among other issues.
Interesting trade-offs for a customer. No more expectation to tip or dealing with drivers potentially running scams. On the other side, I assume you now need to go unload the delivery from the car yourself, a much worse experience for apartment dwellers or the disabled.
Either way, we're going to see a lot more of this. More and more of the gig economy being automated away.
Waymo, a company with an operating loss of $1.23 billion in the first quarter and revenues declining by 9% in that quarter launches subsidized food delivery in Phoenix, undercutting humans who need the money.
When you buy a car, do you stop to think of the taxi drivers who lost money because of that choice? Or when you grow vegetables, the potential loss of income to farmers?
The right way to think about is in aggregate. Does this improve the productivity of the _society_, and if the answer is yes - then we (especially folks on HN) should be supportive of technological progress.
If Waymo ever raises prices drivers can easily re-join the market and compete, the cost of doing so is basically free, so how is this a monopoly? There is no barrier to entry for their competition in the food delivery market
It is right to be skeptical, but I dont see how monopoly plays into this at all. Even if we assume Google is a monopoly company with Search or Ads, how Waymo delivers has got nothing to do with Search and Ads.
Perhaps you were trying to Google is a big tech company and they have gobs of cash, and that's why they are doing it. Precisely, and it is a public market company - so if it isnt a good use of their money, people will vote with their wallet.
Also, there are other richer companies (Apple etc) who can do exactly this thing. Nobody is stopping or unfairly being affected due to Waymo delivering food.
The Waymo people are so ruthless with eliminating dissent. It is understandable given that no one but nerds wants to ride in a surveilled dorky car and children can disable it with a traffic cone.
Enjoy your operating loss!
EDIT (in reply to the attacks below):
"The reason you look like a dork riding a Segway is that you look smug."
This is an example of the online species "dirtbag leftist who posts like a bully from an 80s teen movie for some reason" [0].
Nobody cares that much if they're in a "dorky" car or not. Women don't want Uber drivers sexually harassing them, other people don't want Uber drivers trying to convert them to a new religion or lecturing them about their weird opinions on every imaginable topic, and almost every other culture is more twee than Americans and not obsessed with looking cool.
[0] Their origin story is thinking "nerds" were bad because they were gutless centrists or something, so they started replying to them on Twitter with stuff about "shoving them in lockers". They've evolved into people whose main policy is that petty crimes like transit fare evasion are actually good because they make cities into a kind of dive bar where being there makes you cool and gets you laid.
Scott Bessent worked with Soros (who was previously the devil for Republicans, but I digress). His buddy Mr. Citrone (also Soros) was betting heavily on Argentine. Turns out that Chainsaw-Milei wasn't so competent after all and Argentine needs a bailout. So, in the best socialist manner, Citrone is bailed out under the condition that Milei is reelected.
Or should we talk about DARPA socialism for companies or socialism for the Silicon Valley bank?
> each according to his needs, each according to his abilities
That is called the Peter Principle in "capitalism".
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.
Ok? So you've never lived anywhere that isn't relatively central and walkable. Many people do (even in Europe!). I am one of them. And on a night when I am working late being able to order a hot pizza to my front door is a godsend.
So you do understand food delivery. Is it a stretch then to imagine why a service that expands the delivery market from a handful of pizza and chinese restaurants to ~every restaurant in the city (that wants to opt in without hiring its own fleet of drivers) is successful?
Yes. The quality of a delivered pizza is higher than the quality of other delivered foods relative to the quality of getting them for dine in at the restaurant.
This is tangential, but I worked for a food delivery startup (a conscientious one) for a couple of years and food delivery is a terribly extractive business that kills restaurants. Either order from the restaurant directly or just go there yourself, Doordash et. al. will kill your favorite restaurant with your help. The numbers don't add up in the kitchen's favor.
Could you explain further? The restaurant gets the order at the same price, Uber adds delivery fees and a 25% markup on the cost of food. Why would these numbers not work out in the kitchen's favor? Maybe I'm missing something. Genuinely curious.
While you pay a markup on the application, UberEats and others keeps 25/30% of the price based on the marked up price. If you make the calculation they usually have to cut into the kitchen margin while the price for the customer stays more expensive.
Can't the restaurant just say no?
Not always
- https://www.eater.com/2020/1/29/21113416/grubhub-seamless-ki...
- https://www.knoxnews.com/story/entertainment/dining/2018/10/...
- https://lawstreetmedia.com/featured/restaurant-sues-doordash...
- https://www.golocalprov.com/news/legal-but-unethical-ri-rest...
- https://www.wctv.tv/2023/12/19/phony-restaurant-listing-door...
That's mixing up different concerns. If they make an unauthorized site for a restaurant, with no agreements, then the restaurant is getting full menu price.
These stories are horrible, but that doesn't prove restaurants lose money on Doordash. One of my clients bootstraps online ordering for restaurants. About 80% of those restaurants request to be on Doordash, and have been on there for many years. I assume they're not all dumbasses losing money on every order.
Doesn't excuse Doordash taking advantage of anyone.
Not every restaurant can handle the deferred payout either. Their business is based on receiving payment at the time of service. The restaurant model operates on razor thin margins, and they don’t buy their food on net 30 terms, but they have to absorb costs as if they do.
There are other issues, but this setup looks a lot like paying the mafia due to the imbalance of power.
[dead]
Unless something has changed over the last couple years, restaurants opt in to being available on those apps. Uber Eats and the others are generally integrated into the restaurant's point of sales system.
Nah. Those delivery services were opt-out until California passed a law in 2021 prohibiting that kind of behavior.
Ok, but if they're doing it without the restaurant's buy in, then they're presumably just acting as a middleman and ordering from the restaurant themselves, at which point I'm not sure how they're stiffing the restaurant 20-30%. If I were running a restaurant and Doordash kept calling me trying to submit an order for cheaper than the food costs I would simply decline to take their business...?
Doordash puts up a listing for a restaurant and siphons off take-out traffic. Once Doordash gets a critical mass they can turn around and "negotiate" with the restaurant.
And the restaurant can say “no.”
If I were a restaurateur and caught a glimpse of a Doordash driver in my finest establishment, the first thing I would do is put together a simple online order form and start advertising it in every order. If you just disappear from the app one day, your customers trying to reorder would probably go somewhere else – but if they know they can order on your site instead, they probably will (if your food is good enough and your ordering experience is top-notch, or vice versa).
If restaurants didn't put themselves on the platform, wouldn't that mean the restaurant is getting full price? Its equivalent of paying someone to call in your order and picking it up. What are the negatives?
This is all, of course very fuzzy, but "I will spend 30 dollars on food tonight" can turn into "I call the restaurant and order 30 dollars of takeout" vs "I use door dash to get 30 dollars of food from that restaurant", and in the latter the restaurant sees less sales. But if I'm already like "I will have food from this place I like" and it's not on doordash or w/e, I might still be motivated enough to head over there!
There's a lot of dynamic variables here (including of course the "the person doesn't order from the restaurant"), but the few times I've used those delivery apps I end up ordering very little food for a lot of money.
I try to just do takeout instead.
That would explain why they sell less or cheaper food, which appear too high on the app due to the markup they have to add to the price to handle the fees. This would be an alternate explanation to why things seem inflated. Even with inflated ingredients prices, it actually still doesn’t add up how the volume dropped so much such that each unit would need to cost that much more (I’m arguing it can’t just be the ingredient prices being high). The fees adding to the perceptual inflation make sense.
It’s more expensive volume or less cheaper volume they can make due to higher ingredient prices PLUS the fees they have to add to cover the delivery service cut. That’s how you get a $20 burger for delivery.
This all gets worse when the prices become sticky at the retail place itself (app prices enter the real world). These delivery service are a serious agitator, true disrupter.
That's my understanding. Uber takes 25%, but by default that's offset by increasing the on-app price 25% relative to the in-store price, and the owner has to explicitly opt out of that behavior. So at the end of the day, they should be getting the same amount as in store orders unless they opted out of the markup, right?
I have seen Doordash statements where commission + fees added up to 60% of the price. I asked the person who mostly worked with restaurant owners why they do it. He said:
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.
When I worked at a restaurant b2b company that helped pay invoices I learned how razor thin margins most operate on. We even ended up giving out effectively a payday loan to one when they asked for assistance but jeeze those businesses struggle sometimes.
It can work, pizza delivery has been able to be profitable for example. But they are set up from the concept to be delivery businesses, and they have that accounted for in their pricing. Doordash trying to extract profit and pay a driver and put that all on the restaurant? No that's not going to work. As a restaurant I'd refuse Doordash orders at any less than full menu price, and paid on pickup not maybe three months later. If the customer wants the convenience of delivery to their door they need to pay for it.
Of course it can work, the delivery companies need to restaurants to stay alive. But they will be barely alive.
Are middlemen ever a good idea? What about middlemen that become the gatekeepers of your business.
Middlemen are often a good idea, yes. Can you imagine if for every single item you wanted to buy you had to go to the original manufacturer? And now suddenly every manufacturer needs to also become a seller and distributor?
Without middlemen every restaurant would have to be farm to table, which is a significant burden from many angles and would probably result in more shutting down than delivery services could.
Cutting out the middleman is great... but only when you run the numbers and it makes sense, not as a universal truth.
Middlemen are good when they add value. Like offering delivery when restaurants don’t normally deliver.
But they can deliver without being a middleman. E.g. they can work as contractors for the restaurant.
But now, instead, they are the ones taking the customer's orders, and hence they become the portal for the business (and thus, middlemen). Which is a bad situation for the restaurant owners.
Second this, it also allows you to build a real relationship with the other folks in your community
For the handful we checked near us, ordering via the restaurant site (for delivery) is cheaper the via uber, even with Uber one
Honestly, food delivery from restaurants is one of these things that is a big economic mismatch. The restaurant is spending tons of money on their nice dining room and part of the price of the food is supposed to be the experience of eating there. Yet, when you are ordering delivery, you are getting a subpar dining experience, plus you have to cover the additional cost of transporting the food. This means that someone is getting squeezed --- the restaurant is not getting paid enough, the delivery person is getting paid peanuts, or the buyer is having to pay a ludicrous price for the food.
If half the business is delivery, then the dining room can be half the size and there can be fewer servers. That saves a good fraction of the cost. Apply those savings to a delivery driver, add a $5 delivery fee, and the math can work out fine.
The dining experience depends on your feelings and home, and you have to pay for transportation for the entire party to the restaurant.
That really depends on the place and the person. I don't get much value from eating inside a Chipotle or a pizza parlor.
I worked for a food delivery company (Uber Eats / Doordash / Deliveroo / Just Eats / GrubHub — one of them), and while I can't argue with what you are saying, the company wasn't making any money either. I think after 5-10 years of working there they finally managed to make like 20 pence per order. No one is winning with food delivery, not the restaurant, not the rider, not the company.
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.
Most people I know who lampoon delivery services were around for the days before they came upon the scene, and they think that was better. Restaurant owners I've heard on the subject, tend to agree.
The economics should not work out, delivery services should allow for economies of scale, but greed and anti competitive pressure eat it all.
We're still moving thousands of pounds of vehicle around a public highway to carry a 1lb burrito, obviously lightweight aerial drones are the future for food and grocery delivery.
That's short sighted. A burrito is a perfect candidate for ballistic trajectory. They can easily absorb the high g-force associated with traditional mortar-style launch system, even up to exotic "space gun" capable of intercontinental delivery.
Still not thinking big enough, say it with me: "Fully Automated Space Kitchen constellations". Cryogenically frozen burritos. dropped from orbit, and reheated by connecting combinations of copper heatpipes to the fiery heatshield at precise times during re-entry. Global delivery in 30 minutes or less*.
* 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.
Flip the script!
Why have installations or stores at all? Just have a self driving and self making burrito trucks. You order one up, and on the way to you, it's being made in the back. Little hatch on the side, shoots out onto your doorstep or through your window.
Then, of course, you've now got an arms race of self making burrito trucks roaming about. Chipotle has one, Taco bell too. And, of course, if a Taco Bell truck knows that a Chipotle truck is next to it on the freeway, well, I mean, there's no one inside it of course. How could you prove that those nails came out of the bottom of the truck anyways?
Pretty soon, we've got burrito trucks duking it out, battle bots style, on the freeways and streets. And then you gotta deploy countermeasures, armor, etc. Just to get your burrito to you. Order up two from different companies and you've got dinner and a show.
And, honestly, is this not the future we all really want? Giant junk food filled mech-cars blasting each other at high speeds from the comfort of our couches.
Other people mentioned Zume pizza tried this in the past. Currently there is a company doing this San Mateo call Olhso:
https://www.olhsotruck.com/
They have not implemented the Mad Max style of vehicular combat you described, yet.
Maybe you don't order one up? Instead it's like an ice-cream truck but for grownups and it's burritos. The music could be mariachi chiptunes
Zume already tried with pizza in the Bay Area (though the trucks weren't self driving), IIRC.
Didn't work out, last I checked.
(Edited a bunch of times for doofusness.)
Is this how the fast food wars of Demolition Man started?
Finally a vision of the future I can get behind
This is one of the better comment threads I've read here in a while. Thank you!
Take off and nacho them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
And one wonders why 70% of US population is obese!!
We just need to tweak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment#2003_Unite...
Still too inefficient. We can replace our stomachs with small modular nuclear reactors and instead of wasting money on inefficiently produced burritos, we’d only have to swallow one uranium pellet every 10 years.
Rods from God Burritos. The second one is free, if you survive.
But they're more like taquitos than burritos for aerodynamic reasons, also they get flame grilled as they re-enter. The secret sauce IP is getting the ablative tortilla just right so it doesn't totally burn off during reentry but also isn't to thick once it gets in the hand.
Getting the mass into orbit for those heatshields sounds expensive
Might work with burritos, but it doesn't work with steak:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/28/
Speak for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UX7NJLYyb4
The burrito ballistic tech seems like it could probably handle the last 10 yards problem and enable drive by delivery.
Postmates - How we built a Burrito Cannon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br_KqzLWunM
Burrito Cannon Demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDdKYmStcIc
A good sabot system could turn many other meals effectively into burritos.
Optimally delivered directly into my mouth.
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.
Prior art from 2012: https://www.darwinaerospace.com/burritobomber
That's really a derivative work of the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel [0].
[0] https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_compan...
Someone made an art project along these lines
https://www.core77.com/posts/137981/The-Amazon-Delivery-Miss...
The answer is clearly pneumatic tubes.
https://youtu.be/H8uHUc0zFQQ?si=yccbG_WPoQLehHD8&t=48
https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
Uber Yeets.
AI can help us so that it gets assembled and re-heated by the equilibrium process associated with landing.
Coming soon to a Chipotle near you: burrito railgun
trebuchet is the solution
Unless you're cooking at home, you'd still move thousands of pounds of vehicle to drive to the restaurant, so I'm not sure that food delivery is really any worse.
It could be a lot better if multiple deliveries are handled per trip.
best case scenario is walkable neighborhoods with lots of little tasty restaurants at affordable prices around the corner from everybody.
We've got a long way to go on actually building out our own country in a desirable way.
We're going in the opposite direction.
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.
I think it’s first order the rent (commercial) and second order the wages needed to pay rents (residential). Having seen the rents in the major cities I don’t know how people manage - it’s insanity.
Virtually nobody's mad at commercial landlords for being the only people actually making money in the (non-chain) restaurant industry though.
And chain restaurants are often a large part real-estate plays: https://qz.com/965779/mcdonalds-isnt-really-a-fast-food-chai...
The profit margin for commercial real estate (in a highly developed country) is probably similar to a non-chain restaurant.
I'd love to see a law that ties the minimum wage to the average rent in the nearby area. Make the business owners and the landlords battle it out.
Obviously, this suggestion is extremely tongue-in-cheek and would probably be absolutely awful in practice for a million reasons.
A different analysis of the same situation could be that there were actually too many restaurants that were not profitable and thus couldn't pay their workers a living wage thus needing to close down.
And maybe also that people don't have the means (anymore) to go to the restaurant every other day.
> High minimum wages
It is not the (not actually high) minimum wages. Stores I've known that had problems staying open were having to pay more than the minimum wage because housing is so expensive.
Yeah, the ice cream parlor in my neighborhood in Seattle was at one point advertising $27/hr to scoop ice cream because the housing shortage and worker shortage was so tough. That’s well above minimum.
At least in Seattle, I believe the high minimum wage is due to CoL in the city, which is very high due to rent cost, which is high because of geography and not building a lot. If there was a building boom which led to a surplus of rental units, and rents went down, you wouldn't need such a high minimum wage.
I thought Seattle has started addressing the housing shortage? At some point though for a rapidly growing city you can’t really lower housing prices below the cost of building housing, and construction labor and cost of materials becomes a constraining factor (5 story housing projects can’t be built super cheaply).
I'm sure it'd be better to find graphs about King County or the greater Seattle area, but I found these graphs from the City of Seattle [1]. What I get from the graph is that there is growth in housing units, but there's also growth in population, so there's probably a lot of years at the current trends, before the housing shortage is 'satisfied'.
[1] https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/c8cfcb827e564623a6fa3...
WA state added a law to override local zoning regulations in order to encourage density. I have seen new multi apartment construction in Ballard, Cap Hill, and some other places, but there is a construction backlog going on for years. Also, the problem in Seattle, same as SF, is that there are too many SFHs vs multi apartment buildings/townhomes. It will take several years until offer surpasses demand.
Seattle will always have high real estate prices due to its relatively high desirability in the world. What it doesn't have is a large supply of immigrants and/or illegal immigrants willing to work for low wages in restaurants, like NYC and California.
It's not just wages, it's every single avenue on which the government is forcing them to incur some cost and in every case it favors the big chain that has more locations, more meals, more everything to amortize the costs over. It was ignorable with some mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance when times were good but now that they aren't it's more obvious. Normally it's worth blaming rent to some extent but commercial RE is crap right now so that ain't it
It’s not the wages, it’s the (commercial) rent. Guaranteed.
Wild take. If you can’t pay a living wage your business shouldn’t exist.
Restaurants closing due to wage increases means workers were being exploited to cover unsustainable costs. Rents have to come down or wages need to go up across the board to cover the higher prices.
The billionaire class can’t eat enough food to keep restaurants open. They need to outsource it to the middle class.
You probably won't like not having employees. Those employees can start their own small cafeterias where the are owners who manage and work their business.
The real problem is affordable housing.
Ha! Those little anarchist cafes are full of drama and never last.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/anti-capit...
Worker Owned != Anarchist
> High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants
The federal minimum wage in the US is pitiful and yes some cities and states do higher ones, but frankly if you’re operating on such small margins then you need to increase your prices. I’ve seen a trend of new restaurants opening with fixed menus/prices per head. They aren’t cheap, but they aren’t unreasonable, and it’s looking like at least here they are finding real footing. We’ll see in 5-10 years what the survival rate is I suppose.
During Covid I did a lot of interviews with very high-level restauranteurs (mostly chefs) in my city, several of which had James Beard awards and beyond. This is not a flex, it’s purely for context. These are considered some of the best in the city.
They all said the exact same thing: Everyone is pushing their prices too low and promising high-quality, fresh ingredients that are all locally sourced and yada yada. That’s great, but it can’t be done in a sustainable way. Not if you want to actually pay a living wage or offer even the most modest benefits to your employees. The larger population needs to accept the fact that if we want restaurants to actually survive at all, we have to pay more for it and treat it as more of a luxury.
Good, ethical, cheap. Pick two.
A large majority of states specify a minimum other than federal.
Yes I acknowledged they exist but no it’s not a “large majority.” Roughly 20 IIRC are at the federal minimum. Of those that aren’t many of them are not much above, generally $8-10. I don’t think this is worth nitpicking.
3/5 would be an overwhelming majority in literally any other policy context.
When the number is 50 no, it isn’t. This feels somewhat disingenuous and clearly this doesn’t disprove the larger point. Not to mention, again, several states are barely north of that.
If you want me to acknowledge “some” isn’t enough then fine: “most states are at the minimum wage or up to $10, which is pitiful.” $1600 or less a month is pitiful. Not to mention the states with the lowest minimum wages are by and large the ones with the weakest social safety nets, so the problem is compounded. Can we move on and get back to the real point here?
> High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants.
Not as much as one would think.
Rent (literal) and rent seeking (lending in this case) are the biggest drivers in food costs today.
The family restaurant in an owned building is a distant memory.
The wholesale price of food is very low at the point of production (farming) and absolutely bonkers at the retail and wholesale levels. Mostly because at every step of the chain there is debt, and massive interest payments that need to be made.
The HN set is on one side of the K shaped economy and the other half is looking very much like late stage capitalism.
Case in point: Fritos. 4.50 a bag, while the Walmart generic version is under 2 bucks. Why? Because Pepsi (owner of Fritos) is competing with apple for customers, aka SHAREHOLDERS, and has a massive amount of debt compared to Walmart. The primary input in Fritos is corn, whos price is close to 2019 levels.
I don’t think that story illustrates the point you think it does. Prices aren’t based on cost, they’re based on perceived value on the part of the buyer, and the marketing and brand recognition behind Fritos raises its perceived value much higher than the generic brand.
To put it another way: all generic brands are cheaper than their name-brand counterparts, and that fact has nothing to do with debt or cost structures.
The lower bound of a price is the cost (or ability and willingness of a seller to sell), the higher bound of a price is the ability and willingness of a buyer to pay.
We have little restaurants built into every single dwelling unit! They're called kitchens.
There'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_...
So we should be talking about autonomous delivery of mealkits: HelloFresh, Marley Spoon, Dinnerly, Blue Apron, etc?
well if you redefine the word "restaurant", sure...
I put my money into the toaster but no food came out. Please send help.
Try your credit card in the microwave ;)
> best case scenario is walkable neighborhoods with lots of little tasty restaurants at affordable prices around the corner from everybody.
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]):
Adjusted for income, those prices would be $15-$100 today. That seems in the right ballpark to me. I can get a pretty great dinner for $100/plate, especially if I don't need it to be in a fancy restaurant atmosphere.
Not really, though?
That's what I thought at first, after trying one inflation calculator: $30 for a decent meal, sure, and double that maybe for a pretty tasty meal, is pretty available. (Even then, I think ingredient purity and true preparation aptitude could be pretty suspect, especially at the lower end.)
BUT, TRYING AGAIN: Some inflation calculators do not go back to 1900. But looking further, $0.15 to $1.00 in 1900 would be $5.67 to $38.57 in 2025 dollars, according to https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/
I do wonder if there are discontinuities in inflation calculators for the times before the great fires in each city. Setting that aside, and assuming https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1900?amount=0.15 is accurate, 15 cents in 1900 would be $5.64 in 2025 AFAICT at the moment.
It would be very hard to find a decent sandwich for $5.67 just about anywhere in the USA, much less a multi-course, local, fresh, gourmet meal.
I think it's the general availability of these kinds of pure foods, and their accessibility all about town, prepared to near perfection, even accessible to the poor, that stands out in the Old San Francisco description. To wit:
I used census data to come up with my guesstimate [0]. In 1905, the largest share of men were making $10-15 per week. Women and children less, of course.
The 2025 equivalent seems to be about $1330 per week. So in [very] round numbers it looks like about 100x.
[0] https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/03421399v4...
I find it usually more helpful to look at median wages instead of inflation numbers. Inflation looks at many goods and adjusted in many strange ways.
It looks like a normal salary for a Baker in 1900 was $2/day for a 13 hour day, or $0.15/hour[1]. a $1 meal would be about 6 hours of work in 1900.
Today, the median SF income is 100k, or $50/hr. 6 hours buys you a $300 meal.
Taxes are a whole different story you dont want me to start on. In 1900, state, local, and federal taxes were about 7% of GDP. Today they are >30%.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.li1gx2&seq=263
Anecdotally, this is consistent with what I have personally observed in dozens of countries, where the low end cost of eating out is about the same as and hour of work.
Thanks, both
A starting point would be actually having enough housing, so workers don't automatically need wages that can absorb the overhead of commuting an hour both ways just to make burgers.
Yes, and I completely agree with this, but the comparison for this type of food delivery should be apples-to-apples.
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.
>If you live in a very walkable place, you're less likely to use delivery
This makes sense as a theory but it doesn't match my observed reality at all. Everyone I know who frequently orders food on delivery apps live in dense, walkable cities.
This is the correct answer. There are a few pockets in the USA where this is the case like parts of the Boston and New York metro area, but you have be flexible with your definition of "affordable".
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!
Walking doesn't make sense in some cities and it's only getting worse. In Phoenix you risk sun stroke just running from your house to the car.
Phoenix as a city doesn't make sense. It's entire existence is due to Arizona getting wayyyy too much in the way of water rights for the amount of economic activity that should be happening in it.
Getting onto my hobby horse:
The Pima and Maricopa tribes were able to create massive agricultural surpluses from pre-Columbian times to the early 19th century thanks to the Salt River. Phoenix is not a rainforest, but it's also not a bone-dry location.
Phoenix today has plenty of water for residential and light industrial use, the problem is the persistence of agriculture. A farm in Phoenix uses something like 100x the amount of water compared to an equal amount of residential use. It was fine when there wasn't a global supply chain that could provide oranges or cotton at acceptable prices, but today the land and water have uses with much higher economic value.
How many millions of people lived in the area in the early 19th century? What did their golf courses look like? Did they also ship those agricultural surpluses the Bani Khalid? Is the climate still the same?
What we're doing to the land and the realities of how much water the area receives today is vastly different from what was done in the early 19th century. It seems meaningless to me to point out that the area managed to easily sustain some population of people in the early 1800s when so many other fundamental things are different.
Many cities or towns don’t make sense, top of mountains, isolated islands, extreme weather. Yet they exist and people live there. They also need services.
A bit hyperbolic. I’d rather walk outside in Phoenix in July for 20 minutes instead of 10 minutes in Tampa.
Nice to see someone here with their head on straight.
A major factor in my choice of house location here in the silicon valley 'burbs was to be near "stuff".
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.
Somehow that's the hardest thing to implement
Or people learning to cook instead of being lazy slobs. Knowing to cook is like knowing to read and write and to ride a bicycle. A grown up person who can't do it has been stunted in her development, and needs to fix this urgently. There are no excuses, except for severe physical handicaps.
Plus it is cheaper, faster, healthier and tastier than eating out.
But eating out is of course a nice social activity. Ordering DoorDash isn't.
Tell us your lifestyle and we will definitely be able to point out a lot of crazy things, but I’m sure they do make sense for you for whatever reason. Perhaps someone ordering DoorDash so that their family can spend more time together. Any blanket statement is short shortsighted.
Yes, and to be honest if you know how to read, you can also cook. Just google a recipe with good reviews and follow it to the letter, the outcome will most likely be good enough.
You'd think this, but google results for recipes are full of slop (AI and otherwise) and what I assume are fake reviews.
I know people whose cooking is "good enough" for themselves, but suspect enough from my point of view that I now decline any invitations for dinner where they're cooking.
I take it you also sew your own clothing and get milk from your own cow?
If not, what makes cooking special?
> Or people learning to cook instead of being lazy slobs.
There are many reasons people eat out beside lack of cooking knowledge or desire to be social. You seem like you value feeling superior to these people. Perhaps you can find a way to value yourself without looking down on everyone who makes different choices?
> Plus it is cheaper, faster, healthier and tastier than eating out.
You can get some of those 4 but in my experience, getting all 4 at the same time doesn't happen often.
or go to any other country where grabbing tasty food around the corner with your friends is a regular and affordable social activity...
Yeah those places are super tiny and run by one or two people. Or they are running them under an awning and the whole restaurant is built on a bicycle. Try setting up a bicycle restaurant anywhere in the US and see what happens. You can barely set up a taco truck here. Unfortunately to run a restaurant here you need really expensive restaurant real estate.
> You can barely set up a taco truck here.
I see taco trucks everywhere and there are dozens of food carts within a mile of me.
This sounds more like issue that is specific to your area and local government.
> You can barely set up a taco truck here.
We have a ton of these food trucks all over Austin. Most of them ... just aren't very good. So, apparently, regulations aren't too onerous.
And a food truck isn't exempt from the fact that ridiculous commercial real estate prices cause people to be too spread out to be able to service in walking range.
And the regulations got tighter because these trucks were blowing up and killing people. I haven't heard about one exploding in a while, so apparently the regulations had an effect.
Absolutely. I think either learning to cook or moving to another place or country, is a whole lot easier than forcing an entirely new urban structure where you currently live.
In general, that won't pass environmental review. So at least in most of California that's a non-starter. If you want these things you can't have environmental review, and you can't have community planning, and so on. And we (as a society) would much rather have design-by-committee than what you want.
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.
> that won't pass environmental review
In what way do walkable neighborhoods not pass environmental review?
> but if you're against the disenfranchisement of people.
Nobody is taking away their right to vote, so it isn't "disenfranchising" someone to put in a second icecream shop in their neighborhood when they only wanted one.
> San Francisco, local neighbourhoods discussed whether or not two ice-cream stores in the neighbourhood were too many ice-cream stores
SF seems to have a public feedback and planning problem that dysfunctionally favors nimbyism over regional needs and they end up shooting themselves in the foot with it over and over.
The delivery option is more convenient and takes less time out of your day than driving to a restaurant. My suspicion is that most frequent delivery app users are ordering food more frequently and from further away than they would drive to if the delivery apps were not an option.
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.
Yeah, induced demand is a real thing, and a huge reason to invest in public transit and walkable neighborhoods in the first place, since they benefit from induced demand as well.
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.
Single occupancy vehicles make up most of the traffic on the road. For most people, the most significant cost of being on the road is their time. With self driving cars, our roads will be full of zero occupancy vehicles.
Yeah, but it feels less wasteful to move a 200lb person in a car than a 1lb burrito, even though the Burrito car uses less fuel.
What about small wheeled robots like this moving by sidewalks? [1] Unlike drones, they don't fall on people's head. And kids love to play with them by blocking their way and seeing how they try to find another way.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/Ya...
Drones don't just "fall on people's head[s]". Zipline, the only US-approved BVLOS drone operator I know of besides maybe Google's Wing, had to show the FAA millions of accident-free flight miles they did overseas in other countries, in order to get regulatory approval.
these things are such a nuisance on sidewalks. i wish cities would prevent the rollout of new commercial automated vehicles that make it harder for real people to make use of existing pedestrian infrastructure.
Maybe the sidewalks should be wider? I agree that in historical part of the city they can be pretty narrow (can be fixed by narrowing or removing the car lanes though), but in 20th century (Soviet) developed areas the sidewalks are pretty wide, they can be like 10 meters (30 feet) wide on large streets or more.
They could also use bicycle lanes, but cyclists won't like it.
Have you ever seen one? Because the ones I have seen IRL doing deliveries where especially lost in open spaces. They do not make sense how they are moving and its not that obvious where its going. Like a goose on the side-walk: you need to be vary because you cannot really determine what it will do next. But in theory, they should work great ...
I have seen one. They just seem to be careful and do not rush. And unlike goose they don't bite.
Everything boils down to terrible (USA?) "city" planning - instead of having anything relatively close-by so you can walk to to get the groceries or the "burrito" can be delivered on bike it has to involved absurdly heavy car...
Here in socal everything is in biking distance. Best weather in the country. People just refuse to do it.
Isn't socal famously extremely expensive to live? I don't live in America but that's my understanding.
It is expensive like London is expensive. There are rich people and there are not rich people like other expensive places around the world. Median income in la county is only $38k however.
Mostly because biking in socal is actually dangerous. Drivers see bikers as scum, not as bona fide road users.
Ehh, I take the full lane. I survive. They honk sometimes sure.
Sample size 1. May be an element of survival bias.
Imagine getting paid for riding bike in beautiful weather in a beautiful city.
Jobifying anything makes it a bit shit. There be deadlines. There be angry customers. There be rain and hale.
Oh I tried at one point to get paid while I'm spending time biking anyhow. Doordash wasnt taking new dashers. Ubereats let me sign up but 3 days of having the app open I got no orders so I gave up. I guess they deprioritize bike delivery that heavily. Little do they know I am faster than cars on surface streets.
If one keeps going down the rabbit hole, one might infer that the way our cities are designed is entirely wrong but probably with 60-70 year of invested capital difficult to change fast enough
It's already happening -- Zipline partnered with Walmart and has been actively performing deliveries in TX and I think a few other places. Google's Wing may also be doing commercial deliveries but I don't know as much about their current status.
Mark Rober showed a version that was very quiet. Somebody figured out how to make a different propeller design that greatly minimized the noise. I'm interested to see if this could actually be feasible and make for very quiet services.
If it is feasible, we'll see such propellers on FPV kamikaze drone first.
FPV missiles have little interest in keeping the area around them a pleasant environment to live in, and are disposable one time use items. I suspect drone delivery places a higher premium on lowering noise pollution.
> little interest in keeping the area around them a pleasant environment to live in
Some interest in reducing evasive maneuvers or counter-attacks triggered by noise.
You mean the toroidal propellers?
Then it's time for cities to not be cowards, and go all in on the food bus hyperloop model. It needs to be like those conveyor sushi places, except on the scale of a city. Places like mcdonalds should have fleets of busses with hot-and-ready food just doing loops around town, only returning when they re stock.
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
Most fast food is largely cooked to order and pretty rapidly degrades once you try to hold it for more any real amount of time before consumption. /Maybe/ partially assembled burgers could have patties cooked right before serving or for pizza do a model like the pizza vending machines where it's baked right before it's dispensed but I don't see the version becoming popular where it's a lot of food fully precooked and assembled being predictively shuttled around town.
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.
These people are trying, but I'm not very bullish on it, to be honest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuhI_-QBYAE
It takes more energy to stay in the air, so I imagine it depends what weight and distance you're carrying.
Small delivery robots are in several (walkable) cities since a few years now. Starship was the first brand (they say in 270 cities, campuses etc.): https://www.starship.xyz/
(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.)
I think we should go back to Pneumatic tubes. I wonder if justifiable size could be made. But still after infra is build we could move lot of food and package delivery to the system.
You wouldn't be the first to suggest pneumatic delivery of burritos
https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
> ... to carry a 1lb burrito, obviously lightweight aerial drones are the future ...
you've overlooked the trebuchet !
Yeas ago, I thought- why not both?
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?)
Burrito pipes are also an ongoing area of research led by many VC backed startups.
https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
Russians mastered glide bombs - dropping dumb old rockets with guiding systems bolted on.
What's the KWh/mile of a drone versus an EV? Should factor in that the small drone can only deliver a single small package, but the EV can carry more and make multiple stops.
I can do nearly 10km flight on 35Wh battery. Same in an EV is about 1.5KWh or about 40x more.
Of course my drone is for FPV fun, delivery drone would be far less efficient.
Either way cost of power negligible here.
I would use Arduplane figures for efficiency comparison, not anything from FPV quads. Mini Talon is about 1.4W*h/km [0]
[0] https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?s=11f6090a0c478...
In China, they use E-bikes, I'm not sure why that wouldn't work here? Autonomous E-bikes shouldn't be that hard to manage, ya, they would need to balance themselves like segways, but I'm sure the tech is already there for it. There is no need for them to be full sized cars, even for crash safety...since it is just food that would get damaged in an accident.
Ebikes and small scooters make up the vast majority of deliveries in major cities. Can't remember the last time a delivery driver came in a car in NYC.
Some anecdata; E-bikes are definitely used in other major cities. I lived up against the Hudson in Jersey City and worked out of Manhattan and that was the primary means by which Doordash/Ubereats was moved around.
In Switzerland E-bikes are very common for that purpose, especially in cities and towns.
I guess phoenix is good for them since they're in the area already, but you'd think it'd be more helpful to run this in a market where they're actively trialing. At least then they'd be doing some useful work while ramping up.
Ideally the real future for food delivery is not food delivery.
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.
I don’t think the weight is the issue — cargo cars could be built to be lightweight but you’ll still run into drag limitations based on cross section.
Being based on something like the Renault Twizy would have a smaller cross-section.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twizy
We're also still moving thousands of pounds of vehicle around a public highway to carry a 150lb human... so? I don't think it's a big deal. But yes drone delivery would be much nicer...for burritos.
That is also bad
Why? I like the ability to move around. Bicycles are not practical in many major US markets.
51% of car trips in the US are less than 6 miles long. Maybe reconsider if you need a multi ton vehicle with 300 mile range to get a loaf of bread.
https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10318
How will I buy my immense packages of processed food from Costco though?
If you're getting long lasting bulk packages then you're being energy-efficient despite the large vehicle.
With one of these
https://www.costco.ca/wike-premium-suspension-bike-trailer--...
Society really does not need food delivery at all. It would greatly benefit everyone involved if they went to get their food, either from the supermarket or some restaurant, by themselves.
> everyone involved if they went to get their food
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
Its amazing how you know what other people would benefit from better than they do.
Food delivery is how walking to the supermarket every day for the remaining items is viable for us. If delivery wasn't an option I'd be far more likely to get a car.
I live in one of the biggest cities in the world, and we get a big grocery delivery to our door bi-weekly. It's a huge help to buy in bulk vs going to get a few things daily.
Millions of years of selection have given you a body designed to walk 10+ miles a day for your daily resources. Use it or lose it as they say. Foraging is good for you.
You know that bicycles are a thing too, right? Low-tech, muscle powered, no gas required, repairable, fast, and flexible too.
High tech is not the answer to everything.
E-bikes etc. are very popular. The long shifts are probably quite tiring otherwise.
why there aren't autonomous bicycles or the autonomous things in that class? I remember those "cockroaches" on Castro in the mid-201x, saw recently another significantly larger "cockroach" around Palo Alto, yet they slow, and cumbersome in their presence on the sidewalk, and don't seem to be made for the road.
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.
That's the distant future. Many bureaucratic and technical dragons to slay.
Meanwhile, driverless taxis should normally be lightweight two seaters.
... and then we have millions of drones up in the sky to carry a 1lb burrito, obviously a robot that can make the burrito for you at home is the future.
> make the burrito for you at home
make the {approved, licensed} burrito for you at home
You wouldn't steal DRM burrito instruction firmware
Around me there are small robots that follow sidewalks and bike paths to deliver foods. They're essentially the size of a medium or large cooler with six wheels that can climb some stairs and curbs.
https://www.starship.xyz/
DoorDash appears very inexpensive when you have their DashPass product, however ive notice that basically every food service business will raise their menu prices, and grocery stores will restrict which items that allow you to buy.
This is really interesting because if you have autonmous drivers, DoorDash doesnt really have a lever to lower prices except removing tipping.
Doordash itself appears to add at least $1 to all menu items. Which is horrible for certain restaurants that do à la carte. Eg. My local indian place ends up with doubled/tripled prices on Doordash.
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.
I work for a POS company, I can assure you it's the restaurants doing this. They often have different menus with different prices for UberEats/Doordash/etc. One abstraction company I've worked with (You push your menu to them and they push it out to multiple providers then route the orders back to you), even provides tools to be able to increase all your menu items by a set % rounding to the nearest 5/10/25-cents.
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.
> I can assure you it's the restaurants doing this.
> 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...
My read of the comment wasn't that he was "blaming" either, but explaining where the fees come from.
It sounds like the direct increase to the consumer's prices is done by the restaurant itself, but the reason the restaurant is charging higher prices are to make up for the fees they're charged by UE/DD.
In other words, UE/DD restaurant-side service fees eat into the restaurant's profit margins, so the restaurant passes on the cost increases to the consumer to get them back.
To be clear, no idea about how closely these statements correspond to the world, just that this seems to be OP's claim.
Funny enough, in another top level thread, there's a chain of people claiming it's Uber Eats that adds the 25% and that the restaurant needs to opt out to stop adding the cost.
I’m not “blaming” anyone really. I don’t fault the restaurants for raising prices to cover the costs. I don’t love how opaque the whole thing is but I understand both sides.
It’s all a shell games so that they can say “free delivery” and/or not have to call out “this item is $5 but you will pay a 20% more to get it delivered through DoorDash”. They just hide that “fee” in the item price.
Just curious, is the company NCR?
Nope, I work for Touchpoint https://www.touchpoint.io/
> I believe it's Doordash doing this
Restaurants set the menu prices higher on delivery platforms to recoup the money lost in fees. They also pay fees to DoorDash, Uber, etc...
> Uber Eats and Grubhub seem to match prices and charge exactly the same as Doordash.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Unfortunately, you're not gonna successfully nail a BigCo with a legal team using an "inferred from conduct" clause. That's the kind of thing your municipal or state enforcers use to threaten a peasant into settling.
How about algorithmic collusion? https://consumerlaw.berkeley.edu/news/california-slams-door-...
I'm surprised that's not illegal, and I think states will pass laws to fix this.
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.
Why would it be illegal? If you think of it as Doordash buying the pizza and then reselling it to you, there'd be no reason not to expect a mark up. You're allowed to price discriminate between different market segments, so even if we pitch Doordash as merely a third party delivery offering, restaurants could still charge Doordash customers more than those that come into their storefront.
It should be illegal because these services market a subscription to you claiming the benefit of zero fees and free delivery, which is a lie. You are being secretly charged through a higher menu price, none of which is shown to you as a customer.
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.
Also, Doordash does not have "zero fees" for orders when you pay for DashPass, they have "reduced" fees. I do absolutely hate the practice of "Taxes & Fees" being a line item and only when you click into it do you see that the taxes are minimal and most of that is the platform fees.
I'm not sure how UberEats/etc handle it but it's absolutely crazy how much of a markup there is to order through Doordash vs going to pick it up when you factor in Restaurant Upcharge + Doordash Fees + Tip. It's easy to have an $8 item suddenly cost $20 or more total out-of-pocket when all is said and done.
so like, Amazon Prime?
> If you think of it as Doordash buying the pizza and then reselling it to you
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?
It's the opposite — you're legally protected to resell anything you buy and the seller can't stop you. I'm not sure if food has any caveats, but in general, IP law cannot stop you from reselling an item.
It's called the First-Sale Doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
This exact arbitrage, performed by Doordash, was exploited.
https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage
IP law, no, for the same reason nothing stops me from reselling the Ralph Lauren shirt I bought as a Ralph Lauren shirt, so long as I make no pretenses of being Ralph Lauren, and I make no modifications to it. The good is the same, IP protected good. I'm just re-selling it.
Food safety? There might be some restrictions related to food handling, but to my understanding they're mostly pretty rote food handling safety training stuff that I'd hope delivery companies provide anyway.
If you're in a jurisdiction that taxes prepare food, then the government is going to be unhappy about missing the tax on the second sale.
This has been happening for a good while. There are loads of instances of food delivery companies creating unauthorized websites for restaurants with a phone number and url owned by the delivery company. They are literally buying the food and reselling it to you at a markup.
If it's illegal nobody cares.
I don't know that it should be illegal. I think the argument would be that it's deceptive. DoorDash, for some customers, claims there is no service fee - it's "free." What they're really saying is: the service of our delivery may be free, but the overall service we will provide is hidden or obfuscated in menu items, and without doing some research at the restaurant, you'll likely not notice.
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.
I think most reasonable would be to mandate that these food delivery services can not take cut from payment going to restaurants, but instead must charge it fully to customer. So restaurant has menu price of 10 and when someone orders delivery from payment 10 goes to restaurant. And delivery service is free to add their margin on top be it 30 or 50%.
Why should it be illegal? Makes no sense to me. As long as the business is not discriminating based on class it should be ok.
What I personally dislike about this is that it hides the cost of Doordash. It's not intuitive that the prices of items is silently higher on Doordash: it's not like online retailers having different prices for the same SKU, it's the same restaurant. I'd prefer the overhead to show up as its own line item, rather than obscuring the actual cost of the service. I have a feeling less people would choose to Doordash as often if they realized just how much more things cost through it. (Not everyone, but, there are a lot people who really do just do it for convenience, and they could just drive and go pick up their own takeout.)
> it's not like online retailers having different prices for the same SKU, it's the same restaurant
But those online retailers are supplied by the same distributor who is supplied by the same manufacturer.
Isn't it exactly the same? Online retailers add their cost and profit requirements in their pricing, Doordash does the same.> I'd prefer the overhead to show up as its own line item, rather than obscuring the actual cost of the service.
Me too. Especially that they already ALSO add a service fee in many (most?) locales, in addition to the delivery fee and the tip.
The first three should be folded in a single line item so that customers realize how much price gouging Doordash is really doing.You have a point, but I just think it's less intuitive for consumers. Manufacturers often don't even do direct sales, so the only "canonical" price is the MSRP, which is just that, a suggestion. Consumers go shopping at Walmart or Amazon, they don't go "shopping" at Doordash: the menu they're seeing on Doordash is the restaurant menu. In some cases, it is the only online menu that some restaurants even have. To me it is not terribly intuitive that these prices differ.
There is another analog for this, too, though: some retailers indeed would have more or less expensive prices for the same thing when ordering online versus in-store. I think the argument that it isn't unprecedented is pretty solid.
Despite not being entirely unprecedented, I'd still prefer to see this practice ended for food delivery services so it is easier to see the actual true overhead of food delivery services. It really does feel a bit manipulative the way it is right now.
> I'd prefer the overhead to show up as its own line item, rather than obscuring the actual cost of the service.
While that’s what you prefer, the market (most other users, including whale spenders) doesn’t care to know the actual cost.
Without regulation, "the market" wouldn't care about a lot of things. It's actually a good thing that a small minority of people hold the line for people who don't have time to care about issues like this kind of manipulation!
I don't think that's true, however doordash surely know that some users might think twice if they saw that number separated out.
No.
That is what large corporations want and in the US especially they are the ones that write the laws.
I’m pretty sure DoorDash is the one who increases the price on their end, not the business. And what’s more, they don’t separate the addition out. It’s rolled in to the cost of the item.
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
> I’m pretty sure DoorDash is the one who increases the price on their end, not the business
That is not correct. Doordash takes a 20-30% commission on each sale, so businesses preemptively increase the prices to offset that. They're not forced to and doordash isn't doing it for them. But, you know, they're still effectively "forced" to if their in-store prices don't have great margins to begin with...
Ah my mistake then!
Correct it is advised by DD but eventually done by the merchant.
And they basically have no choice but to increase the price. Their margins are already razor thin.
Of course they do not. I still can’t believe that so called marketing that DD and Uber does commands a 30% rev share.
Most of that money goes towards the driver, last I checked in on unit economics. It costs quite a bit of money to pay a person to go to the restaurant, wait around, and then bring it to you — far more than the "delivery fee" that you see and that customers would pay.
Customers are cheap and they're (partly) to blame. My theory is that Amazon conditioned people to view delivery as a free commodity and pizza places who had delivery baked into their model cemented it.
So if Doordash listed a delivery fee that covered their true cost of delivery, customers would balk. So they instead have to find creative ways to get enough. Maybe it's changed and Doordash cracked the secret, but when I'd looked into it years ago these companies barely got by — many of them actually losing money.
With pizza delivery you typically (should) tip the driver $5+ ($10+ for larger orders) so idk if that really tracks specifically, but I do largely agree that part of is people being cheap for one reason or another.
Doordash and other companies like it take a good chunk of the margins of those stores for the privilege of delivering the items. 15% is not unheard of.
More like 25%+.
Instead of being illegal, we should just have price transparency. Require companies to show the markup directly in the app.
It appears inexpensive because raising prices is the only visibility you have into what the restaurant is paying these services for their order flows (~10-30%).
The restaurant doesn't choose the prices DoorDash displays, DoorDash does.
Are you sure about that? I thought the restaurant does. On DoorDash's Help page (https://help.doordash.com/merchants/s/article/How-to-Maximiz...) There's a quote: "To provide a high-quality experience for all of our customers, we set prices on DoorDash the same as our in-store prices. DoorDash even enables operators to set different pricing for delivery and pickup, but a core part of us providing high-quality customer service is accomplished through our consistent menu pricing." - Manuel Bucio, Owner, Razpachos" That seems to indicate the restaurant sets the prices.
You really think Doordash sets individual prices for each dish for the half million restaurants that it lists on its service? It is a simple platform. The restaurant sets up and manages its own menu, and Doordash takes a cut of the final sale.
Interesting that there's no mention in TFA or the comments about DoorDash's ground-based delivery "drones": https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/doordash-unveils-dot -- I've seen them testing these things in parts of the Bay Area for more than a year now.
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.
They have deployed some of these in LA by other companies e.g. Coco robotics. Really ridiculous offering imo. It moves slower than walking speed. Even slower when you factor in all the unnavigable obstacles they run into like upturned sidewalks, debris in the sidewalk, homeless encampments, etc. There are of course videos online of them being vandalized or broken into. Videos of them crossing the road like a game of Frogger. What is more is that they are actually controlled by a person vs actually being some automated solution. And then they have to wait there on the sidewalk until the customer comes and picks up the food. They can't manage going into buildings of course.
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bit1OjJBB0Y
How do they prevent food from being stolen out of the drones? When I delivered pizza that was a real problem, you had to be sure you never left your car unlocked with pizzas inside and never be away from it any longer than necessary.
I think they lock up until you show up and activate them on the app. That being said people do try and pry them open on occasion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3C_rpUTYuk
These are all over the place in Tempe, AZ. I see them cruising through my neighborhood all the time.
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.
I wonder if there's just not enough money in that, because it sounds like a brilliant idea.
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.
I imagine a non-trivial percentage of the city can't be navigated by sidewalks alone, and a lot of the sidewalks are in bad enough condition that they couldn't be navigated unless the wheels and clearance are quite large, but who knows.
> I think they're intended to use sidewalks and bike lanes, so should address concerns about cars clogging up streets.
If I walked or biked in these places, I'd be worried. Sharing the sidewalk with robotic wheelie-bins seems like a bad idea.
Who takes the food from the restaurant to the Waymo? The restaurant employees? Or is this more akin to the drone model where a Dasher is still involved and transports the food from the restaurant to the autonomous vehicle?
Yes, most likely the restaurant employees. That's probably why they are starting with orders that are fulfilled by DoorDash employees.
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.
Gotcha, thanks. I did skim the article to try and find that but I missed it.
Sidewalk pickup is already a thing in plenty of places, so this doesn't sound all that different.
Sorry, I'm confused. I think it's totally reasonable to expect the customer to pick-up the food from the Waymo by walking to it. I feel that's what you were responding to, but I'm interested in the dynamic between the restaurant and the vehicle.
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?
Sidewalk pickup from stores & restaurants is also a thing. You place an order, drive your car up to the restaurant, and someone brings the order up to your car. Infinitely easier than finding a parking spot and walking into the store, especially in a busy neighborhood. This is the same thing.
Hummm. Okay. I guess I'm aware of this for like, grocery pickup or calling ahead for something like a BestBuy order, but I always envisioned those things being situations where the customer parks in a parking lot out in front of the store.
When I take Waymos around SF, a really common part of the process is, upon reaching the drop-off location, the Waymo realizes there's no space, the road is too busy to comfortably double-park, and it shifts into "Looking for a spot to pull-over..." mode. It's not uncommon for it to drive a full block away from my drop-off location in order to find a safe spot.
I was applying that mindset to this situation. I agree that if they can guarantee that a Waymo is just parking/double-parking right in front of the store and all the employee has to do is take a step outside, drop it in the trunk, and shut the trunk - that that is sustainable.
Cars clogging streets because someone wants a hamburger delivered…
We live in a very dumb era.
Yeah, cars should be clogging streets because people want to go get a hamburger instead.
But you understand that cars are made to transport people, and hamburgers are much smaller than people, hence it would be a tiny bit wasteful to drive hamburgers in "people cars", right?
But then a single car can carry multiple hamburgers to multiple people! Maybe that is still a better situation than multiple people driving multiple cars to each get a single hamburger :-)
So we need a car that drives around and makes hamburgers on-demand, drives to your home while it's being prepared, and delivers it hot and fresh to your door with a smaller bot.
To be clear, we do not need this, and I am being sarcastic. However, if a VC wants to fund me to do this, I'll try my best in the hours between my use of the startup's office sim-rig and the office wood workshop.
I believe you've (re)invented food trucks :)
Automated, VC-funded food trucks! Shittier food with less heart for twice the price!
And they scale! ;)
And when the truck runs out of ingredients to make hamburgers, a drone flies in and picks it up to take it to a ingredient-refill station.
It probably depends on where you live but I haven't had a food delivery in a car in like 3-4 years now. Drivers use bikes, e-bikes and mopeds.
In the U.S. unless you're in a big city, it's always cars.
If only someone invented some sort of 25lb vehicle that one can use their own human power to travel upon. Maybe something with a chain and gearing? No, that would be fantasy, back to my 5000lb steel block I go.
The point of comparison here would be a human delivery driver, who (as I understand) can be carrying multiple deliveries at a time. I think with Waymo's service, it's one delivery at a time, which results in more cars on the road for the same demand? (Or are there potentially several orders in the trunk when you go to get yours out?)
The convenience factor means people will utilize one option more often than the other. These are not equivalent exchanges.
The streets are just as clogged when they drive to the restaurant to eat.
You are both right in saying that cars are the root of all problems in urban and suburban areas.
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.
> Delivery, however, has increased the number of times people buy a meal made by somebody else.
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.
They already said we live in a very dumb era.
As long as the delivery doesn't occur during rush hour, you probably won't notice it much.
The environment will.
You mean the emissions from the EV doing the delivery? Or the emissions from the hydro or solar or wind (or even natural gas) used to generate the electricity that was stored in the battery?
The absurd waste of energy in moving a 4000lb object to deliver a 1lb object. You can attribute that to whatever source you want. It's still wasted energy.
And one can pay for that hamburger in four installments!
Agree to paying a fifth installment and you can get your hamburger pre-chewed.
I really want to see how they figure out the actual delivery of the food.
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?
From https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/your-doordash-order-delivered...
"When Waymo arrives, open the trunk with your DoorDash app and grab your items."
It also implies that the restaurant has to walk out to the car and place it in the car too. They aint gonna like that. Although to be fair most restaurants already hate the drivers that physically come into their restaurants and don't obey the rules.
Sweet. Now I can turn unsuspecting Waymo cars into drug delivery vehicles. It's the perfect cover.
And leave a massive digital trail with it. Genius!
Use stolen CC on App, pick up somewhere seedy far away from where you live. OP is right, this will be abused. What is keeping people from dumping weird things into the truck after picking up their $15 cheeseburger?
I have to assume rather than solving that problem the car will park on the curb and people will be expected to walk down and get it
People will love that when it’s raining or in snow. What about in cities where you can’t even find parking? Or you live on the 30th floor of an apartment complex? Lol these companies are so stupid.
> What about in cities where you can’t even find parking? Or you live on the 30th floor of an apartment complex? Lol these companies are so stupid
Do you think these drivers currently run around with two to a car, one to keep the engine running while they go around the block while the other goes upstairs?
Huh? Why would I think that? My comment is regarding the customer. With an automated delivery the customer receives the goods at the location where the delivery vehicle can park near the destination. Without automated delivery, the human receives the goods at their front door.
> Without automated delivery, the human receives the goods at their front door
Fair enough. Not really an issue in Phoenix. Plenty of buildings (in San Francisco and Atlanta, to memory) require delivery to be dropped off at a centralized location. And there aren’t many high rises, or months of monsoon, in Phoenix.
Phoenix would be a city where this will be less of an issue for sure, but you still have two and three story apartment buildings that require customers to go downstairs for their food.
Having to go outside significantly reduces the benefit of delivery. Now customers have to interrupt what they’re doing, make sure they look OK so the neighbors don’t see their underwear and bed hair, put on a jacket or raincoat in bad weather, possibly wait on 2 elevators, and pick up their food right next to their own car in the parking lot. In some cases, this could take five minutes. Customer realizes that they could just get in their car and drive to the restaurant at this point, so why order for delivery?
Makes no sense.
> but you still have two and three story apartment buildings that require customers to go downstairs for their food.
Everyone keeps ignoring you on this part, but they aren't thinking about people with disabilities or mobility issues that rely on delivery services to get their groceries because alternative or public welfare programs don't exist for this.
What happens when DoorDash, UberEats, Instacart, etc. all go autonomous? People with disabilities get screwed in the name of profit. They are already getting screwed with higher prices as is.
These customers can't simply "go downstairs and meet the car" the point of delivery specifically in this case is to have it brought right to your door. Automated cars miss this usecase entirely.
> What happens when DoorDash, UberEats, Instacart, etc. all go autonomous? People with disabilities get screwed
They get special accommodation. Food delivery via rideshare didn’t exist 20 years ago…
> In some cases, this could take five minutes. Customer realizes that they could just get in their car and drive to the restaurant at this point, so why order for delivery?
What? They’d stumble down in pyjamas. If they’re in a building that probably means exiting and re-entering a parking garage. Also, it’s Phoenix. Nothing is five minutes away—the urban plan is one of sprawl.
I agree it’s less convenient than door delivery. But against that is the cost of tipping and humans getting lost. For it is the fact that in many major cities, people routinely order food delivery despite being required by building policy to pick it up downstairs.
I think we’ve exhausted this discussion. It’s reduced down to simple individual opinions about whether it’s worth it to drive to a restaurant or not.
I only wanted to point out that The customers are getting less not more. And the companies will make less money because the automated cars are more expensive than drivers that are willing to take food for 2 to 3 dollars a delivery. If you fail to see that or recognize it, I’ll leave it at that.
> customers are getting less not more
I think plenty of Phoenicians will tip themselves to walk to the curb.
> the companies will make less money because the automated cars are more expensive than drivers
Disagree. The marginal cost for a late-night Waymo is probably already comparable to that of a driver, and that’s before we get to California’s Prop 22.
When I order food delivery I try to limit myself to locations nearby because I don't want to be a hassle and make a driver drive 10 miles out and 10 miles in. I also factor in a tip for the delivery itself.
If it's a robot delivering to me I don't care if I make the robot drive 30 miles out to get me food (as long as the food is something that won't taste notably worse after such a long drive of course). Plus I'm not going to tip the machine.
You clearly have never used these services or are out of touch. Having a human deliver kind of sucks, lots of risk of tampering with food and it’s overall a terrible experience especially for women.
This is a brilliant fix, for the case of folks wanting it physically delivered, I am sure you can or will be able to pay for that.
It won't. You're supposed to open the car door and grab your food.
Yeah the article is extremely light on details. It basically just announced a partnership and not any of the specifics.
Well they did mention one specific, and that is the fact that this service is only for DashMart orders i.e. the first part of any autonomous delivery order is at a DoorDash -controlled and -staffed facility. Where they can babysit the process.
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?
I live in a big city. DoorDash always delivers to an address 10 minutes away walking from my building. It is quite inconvenient in the winter. With human drivers, you can at least try to convince them to use Google Maps, but with an AI?
On second thought, prompt injection via delivery instructions?
Don't get me wrong, the gig economy is really bad, but unfortunately covers a big chunk of jobs. When this scales up (and it will), what would happen to these people and the economy in general? There won't be an UBI reasonable enough to deal with the aftermath of this reality (basic law of supply and demand).
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...
I guess I'm not quite as doom and gloom about this as you.
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.
> "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."
Here's the thing: This is good for the economy and human development overall.
What we're witnessing right now is the opposite: Mega corps trying to control almost every industry, and shifting the economic and social landscape from a capitalistic society to a neo-feudalistic one.
The socioeconomic implications of this shift will be something humanity has never experienced before, since the endgame is to automate everything. If we get to that point, either the government seizes the means of production (I don't agree with that since this is communism) and distributes wealth, or the government charges nearly a 97% on taxes (capital gains, etc but taxation is basically theft, hehe) and we start living in a "Jetsons"-like society, or we get a feudalistic society (hopefully I'm dead wrong).
Is there an in-between?
In the worst case we'll go back to where things were ~10 years ago. Not exactly earth shattering for society.
Ah, Phoenix — as prophesised by "Not Just Bikes"!
https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=buVxsUBX4tIRmxDS&t=858
Spent last week in Phoenix, rode Waymo a dozen times. Autonomous taxis are the future. Don't have to tip, don't have to worry about pissing off the driver if I'm only going a few blocks. Price is reasonable, seems less than Uber or a standard taxi.
Question is how many humans will forgo owning a car altogether once autonomous vehicles are ubiquitous.
I don't like the wait time though. I don't want to wait 5 minutes for my Waymo to arrive for a 10 minute trip down to the grocery store when I can wait 0 minutes and hop in my own car and just drive there myself.
I do like autonomous cars though, but they won't completely remove car ownership.
You can still tip the shareholders. Like DoorDash did until it got caught.
Or Like Dave App or Chime.
Fun fact about Dave App's tipping. If you bring the value to zero you saw an animation of a kid's food being taken away from them.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/11/...
Wow, that FTC case gets worse and worse the farther into it you read. What a scumbag company. It's like they opened the "Dark Patterns Unleashed" book and followed every example.
How can I know my tip actually goes to the shareholders and isn't squandered by executives?
"don't have to tip" is a completely separate and solvable issue without autonomous vehicles.
It isn't when it is cultural. There is nothing forcing people to tip, except not wanting to feel shame or be shamed by others. For example, while out on a date.
in some towns (like SF) folks have used Waymo thousands of times - its everywhere, for a good reason - while its not always faster, it's more consistent, pleasant and safe.
> Question is how many humans will forgo owning a car altogether once autonomous vehicles are ubiquitous.
Not any time soon. There are WAY too many edge cases that autonomous vehicles are just scratching the surface on.
Americans scraping the bottom of the barrel to avoid investing in public transport.
The suburban landscape will take time to densify.
In the mean time Waymo integrated with transit (timed transfers and unified payments) would make using the existing rail lines more appealing.
We have two cars. With Waymo we would go to only owning one.
> The prices will be set as high as the supply and demand curve allows. Considering that they're the only autonomous car provider in operation, that curve will not be consumer-friendly.
Or go from being an N car household to an N-1 car household.
Something's wrong with the city if you have to take a taxi just to go a few blocks.
I had to carry a couple of gallons of dairy for a trade show. Too heavy for the 15 minute walk. First world problem, I suppose, but Waymo was a convenient point-to-piont option.
Better question is why people are blind to their local bus offerings. I find them highly convenient.
A lot of bus routes suck and people don't like to plan ahead for how they'll get someplace, so they often default to the most general transportation available (personal vehicles) if the transit network isn't good enough for everyday tasks.
As an example, my wife's 15m car commute would take 45m by bus transfer to the nearest stop, which is a couple miles from the destination on a freeway onramp. The transit system is fixing it, but that date is 3 years away. That's still better than the routes some people have.
And lest you think the local transit agency sucks (by American standards), they don't. They just prioritize office workers heading to/from downtown instead of people moving radially through the metro area.
I know a lot of people who live by like 10 min frequency routes or better and usually its me revealing their existence to them when I use it to show up to their house. Could it work for all trips? Of course not. But plenty could be done on busses as it is. People are blind to them though. No one bothers to look at transit system maps. They see the couple rail lines listed on google maps and assume there is no other transit offering.
Love it.
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).
In house delivery has existed for a lot of business for a long time. For instance, nearly every pizza store would do delivery themselves. Many still do. However those services didn't introduce a middleman between you, the store, and the driver who extracted money from all 3.
And the pizza arrived hot because they had an insulated pizza carrier. The good old days.
And also pizza places were very fickle with where they'd deliver to preserve that level of service.
When you operate a delivery service for your restaurant, there's A lot of overhead. You have to strike a balance between paying deliverers their wages, and timely service for your customers. If you mismatch your number of deliverers to the business you have for the day, then you're either throwing away money, or making your customers wait a very long time for their food, which also may have knock-on effects in the kitchen, if you don't want the food to be cold, you might need to wait to start preparing it until your delivery guy is on the way back from his route. Outsourcing delivery to a delivery company seems like a win from restaurants, which is probably why so many have signed up for it.
And yet despite all the supposed barriers the most hole in the wall pizza joints had decent delivery service.
What do you mean 'costs more for everyone'? You're not forced to use any of it.
Problems with the current companies aside, asserting that we just shouldn't have general food delivery services at any price is strange. You could make the same argument against take-out too - anyone aside from the sick and the old is capable of cooking their own meals too, restaurant kitchen work is a notoriously poor work environment at low wages, etc...
> with a limited understanding of labour laws, rights, and protections
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.
Yeah this just reeks of 'old man yelling at cloud' with nothing practical or realistic
I personally have never ordered food from any delivery service and only a few times a year from any restaurant at all, because I know how to cook and worse case, make a peanut butter sandwich.
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?
People using these services know how to cook, they're usually trying to save time. Especially if they don't want to interrupt their work to ready a meal.
I don't know about other people, but I can cook almost as fast as dealing with a delivery service. Most meals I eat take about 15 minutes to make.
You can pre-order lunch to arrive for your lunchtime meetings in about a minute in the app. Probably less convenient if you have an apartment, compared to a house, though.
lol this is capitalism buddy. food delivery exists because people want it and pay for it, you actually don't get a say at all on if it needs to 'go away'.
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When autonomous grocery delivery becomes common, that's going to be huge for people without cars.
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.
If people were legally allowed to live near grocery stores, they wouldn't feel the need to carry four to six bags of groceries along with them.
Just for a bit of comparison... I'm in the UK and don't drive. It is a 10-min walk to a big Tesco superstore, which is really convenient. It is on my commute too (which I also walk, Uber if its raining heavily).
That is a US thing. They even have a term for it: food desert.
As European it's hard to imagine a place where you cannot walk to a grocery store.
It's not inherently an American thing, it's the result of several mid-century zoning and urban design decisions.
I used to live in a 1920s era "streetcar suburb" neighbourhood. I lived on the third floor, and the ground level was a full (but small) grocery store. I never spent more than ~$50 at a time on groceries because I only bought for a couple days at a time.
The same decisions and laws that created the current system can be changed to take us back to the "norm" in the rest of the world.
Same with Asia.
People have a lot of hyperbole about grocery store density. Pull up a random city and see how they are actually distributed. Even in flyover state metros grocery stores are basically evenly distributed 1-3 miles apart from the next across the entire urbanized/suburbanized area.
In my California suburban hometown, half of the housing was in the hills and any store, let alone a grocery store, was effectively unwalkable.
> If people were legally allowed to live near grocery stores
My rural grocery store is 1.9 mi away. I tend to shop a few times a week, and only for what I need.
How many bags is "only for what I need" and how large is your household?
> How many bags is "only for what I need" and how large is your household?
Generally one bag, mostly produce. Maybe a meat I’ll cook that day.
House size ranges from one to five. The only time I wind up with a full fridge is around holidays or when I have houseguests with food anxiety.
> If people were legally allowed to live near grocery stores
What are you talking about? What backwaters country is this? In many places in the world, people live literally on top of grocery stores, such law would be ridiculed until the law makers have to socially isolate themselves if they tried to come up with something so stupid.
I assume OP is talking about US zoning laws which separate residential zones from commercial ones.
But in cities and towns you must have mixed zoning like the rest of the world?
The great majority of development in American cities over the last 75 years has been single-use, with neighborhoods of exclusively single-family houses separated from nearby commercial strips with big parking lots along wide roads.
The downtown/center of older cities may still have mixed use, and there have been changes happening in recent years to allow/build more apartments and mixed use areas, but, generally outside of the densest parts of the largest cities commercial and residential areas are required to be separate, with personal cars as the primary/only way to get between them.
This has been a bit of a self-reinforcing phenomenon, IMO, as car-first infrastructure puts people at the mercy of traffic congestion, and means that any apartment building or business in their vicinity will result in more cars passing through, more congestion, more competition for parking, as well as the presence of the large parking lots that cities mandate for any new construction, which themselves make it unpleasant to get around in any other way.
> the median distance to the nearest food store for the overall U.S. population was 0.9 miles, with 40 percent of the U.S. population living more than 1 mile from a food store. The median distance to the third-nearest food store for the overall population was 1.7 miles. When the ERS researchers looked at rural food store access, they found that the median distance to the nearest and the third-nearest food store was 3.1 miles and 6.1 miles, respectively.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/june/u-s-shoppers-...
In older areas, some. But practically anything after WW2, not nearly as much.
It's somewhat misleading to talk about distance-to-X in a lot of American places. I live less than a mile from the nearest grocery as the crow flies, but if I wanted to walk there I have to traverse my entire street to get to an exit road (as opposed to walking out my back gate; the whole back is fenced because the exit road is directly behind my house). Then I have to walk down a fairly busy one-lane-each-way road with no sidewalks or shoulders present (i.e., you're going to be walking in a shallow drainage ditch - hope it's not raining!) for a few hundred meters, cross two busy multilane roads, and walk across an unshaded parking lot.
The US, which is where Phoenix is. And yes, my point is that we (in the US) should have walkable (and bikeable) cities, like much of the rest of the world.
100 yards isn't a walkable distance in Phoenix in the summer.
Yes it is.
I wouldn't want any elderly person I knew walking that distance in any of the 3 weeks Phoenix typically spends over 100 degrees (even hotter over pavement).
100 yards is less than a block. Did you mean to say a longer distance?
And yeah, walkable cities includes infrastructure that does not magnify the sun at pedestrians (see: shade, plants)
You know what desert cultures around the world do to avoid this phenomenon? They just go outside in the mornings and evenings.
They are talking about US suburbs. For example, the house I grew up in is over a mile to the nearest grocery and you have to cross two large intersections on the way.
The intersection stuff sucks, but "over a mile" seems to be between 1.5 to 2km, is that considered far to walk in the US? Measuring where I go to have my morning coffee at a cafe each day, it seems to be 1.3km away, and I walk there and back every morning...
Are you carrying your groceries to the coffee shop? Also, walking places in US suburbs is a miserable experience, especially in the Southwest where it gets hot. Everything is spread out with large parking lots, sidewalks are a maybe, the roads are busy and there is no shade or sound dampening.
> Are you carrying your groceries to the coffee shop?
Obviously no. But where I lived ~20 years ago the nearest grocery was a 20 minute walk there and then 20 minute walk back with two or four shopping bags with stuff, and I wasn't the only one walking there when needing to do shopping.
I think it's more common than not out in the world that things are far away so you need to spend awful amount of time on just getting places. Unless you live in a city of course.
My grocery store is 3 miles (~5km) away with nearly zero sidewalks, and I live in the capital city of my state. America is a hellscape in that respect.
Counterpoint: my family in New Delhi regularly gets groceries (and booze and cigarettes and pet food) delivered. Convenience comes in many forms, and not everyone values the same elements similarly.
Bless your non-merican heart :_)
The solution is walkable towns/cities. Not deliveries hahaha.
Sure, how has that worked over the past fifty years? Let’s try deliveries now and see if that helps
It mostly hasn't worked in the US because cities mostly haven't been doing it. It seems to work great in other places.
A lot of problems are easy if you can get everyone to coordinate. Wishful thinking is not a plan though.
You don't need to get everyone to coordinate. You need politicians to not listen to the lobby of home owners and real estate companies worried about their investments (in other words, ignore the NIMBYs). Change the zoning laws, incentivize developing mixed use, prioritize pedestrian and cycling infrastructure and stop prioritizing cars and parking.
Walkable cities have been working great since the dawn of cities. They continue to work fine where they are allowed to exist.
They've always been allowed to exist in the US.
But the US also allows suburbs, and it turns out a ton of people prefer those, having backyards for their kids.
I love cities but I'm also well aware that tons of people don't want to be stuck in cities.
Walkable cities are actually illegal in much of the US due to zoning laws right now. The reason you don't see shops in residential suburban developments is not because there is no demand, it's because it's literally illegal.
Having walkable and bikeable destinations is compatible with back yards. It just needs to be legal to build it.
Works completely perfectly in Japan.
Outside of big cities in Japan, car ownership is quite high (usually 2 cars per household).
Just rebuild society. Easy!
I agree, but changing zoning is more difficult
Grocery delivery services are already ruining the regular supermarkets. My local grocery store used to always have fresh stock and full shelves. For the past year or two I've noticed a rapid increase in delivery shoppers who typically have 2-3 hand baskets or 2 full carts with them in aisles and clearing out shelves of food.
That doesn't make any sense.
People aren't eating more food. Before they just had to go themselves.
And supermarkets restock constantly throughout the day from the back.
Walmart will apparently delivery groceries to me for free under the right incantation. I don't know how much advantage autonomy will add to that.
Funny that you think the autonomous offerings pass the savings to the human customer.
Grocery shopping done by task rabbits / etc leaves things to be desired. Quality of choices on things. Maybe its good for staples and saving you time there.
“… but it's expensive due to the drivers.“
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.
Right, unless the drivers are using ebikes or scooters, they're paying more in vehicle maintenance and gas than they're making in fees.
Don’t forget depreciation of the vehicle and the risk of an accident as well.
Why would DoorDash want to assume all that responsibility when they have such a good legal scam against all their drivers right now? I call it a scam because DoorDash claims to not be taking the tips of drivers, but given the puny payouts per delivery the drivers lose money and time without the tips, so how can they claim they’re not taking the tips.
Does it still cost an arm and a leg to order though ?
Should presumably get cheaper now that there’s fewer humans in the loop. But from looking at their prices I’m always assuming it’s meant for affluent people paying a premium to save time and effort so maybe it doesn’t need to be cheaper.
> Should presumably get cheaper now that there’s fewer humans in the loop
They barely pay the humans in the loop now, apparently. I don't see them lowering costs because of this but I guess we'll see.
The prices will be set as high as the supply and demand curve allows. Considering that they're the only autonomous car provider in operation, that curve will not be consumer-friendly.
> The prices will be set as high as the supply and demand curve allows.
Absolutely
> Considering that they're the only autonomous car provider in operation, that curve will not be consumer-friendly.
Waymo+Doordash also competes against non-autonomous delivery.
What could "the curve will not be consumer-friendly" mean in this context?
The whole point of creating a robot taxi service is to sell to consumers. If it's not consumer-friendly, then consumers won't buy it, which defeats the point?
Robot taxis are hardly a staple one needs to exist, people have been easily living without robot taxis, and if the price is consumer-unfriendly, they will simply not use them.
That's the thing though it doesn't go to the humans as a driver
That's why drivers try to take you off the platform and pay in cash/venmo
I mean waymo is the same price as ordering a human driver. Charging less is leaving money on the table now that this pricing has been established in the consumer mindshare.
Just wait till they offer a "tip your driver" when there is no driver... It would be absurd but I wouldn't put it past them.
Should presumably get cheaper now that there’s fewer humans in the loop.
It seems more likely that they'll keep the prices as they are and make some excuse about "shareholder value."
They've already acclimated two entire generations to paying crazy amounts for food delivery. Why would they start charging less?
Until there is competition, they'll keep feeding off of the fatted calf. And completion is likely a decade or more away.
The competition is grocery delivery, which is a lot cheaper.
No tip, which for me is the majority of the "extra" cost on food delivery.
It probably costs more
I live in a city that has had Waymo's (via Uber) for a while now and I have done a complete 180 on them. Not only are they usually cheaper than a traditional Uber, but they drive far more defensively, and don't come with the social baggage associated with a traditional Uber either (tipping, small talk).
> Not only are they usually cheaper than a traditional Uber
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.
> Uber/Lyft were far cheaper than other options when they launched until they put everything else out of business, then jacked up the price
Source? Particularly inflation adjusted? Uber, specifically, started out as black cars only.
Rides were like $4-7. A ride over $10 was rare.
I took a ride home two nights ago for under $7. On the other hand, I tend to avoid Ubers in New York (versus taxis), but that’s one part local demand and one part local regulation.
That's been my attitude as well. I'm not convinced they'll stay cheaper for long, and when I say "cheaper" its marginal. Cost of the ride is the similar, but it seems there is no tip built into the price yet.
Many of my female friends have had bad experiences with ride share drivers, so I think there's a strong market demand.
Its funny because when ride sharing first came out -- everyone had a great experience for the most part (early adopters/risk takers). Then the long tail (and VC growth money disappeared) came around and the pay got worse, job was a grind and the quality tanked.
I don't doubt that we will have the same thing with all these new options. Maybe the social baggage won't be there but there will be weird new things that pop up...
When it first came out you didn't have people working it full time. It would be like dads making side money after the kid was put to bed.
> the long tail (and VC growth money disappeared) came around and the pay got worse, job was a grind and the quality tanked
As well as the prices, wait times and ubiquity.
I’m not saying it’s a panacea. But I don’t think most people want to go back to when Uber was only black cars.
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> How it makes us less human
Fewer horses, too!
There is nothing natural about driving a car. Nothing democratic about a driver in front ferrying one or two in the back, both knowing each will rate the other, one knowing they are working for a tip, all while managing a fleet of apps whose owners run datacenters to rip them off.
Human-driven cars were a deadly necessity. But like lead pipes and child labour, we’re better off past it.
Drivers were never a necessity for anyone but automobile manufacturing executives.
That gives me an idea. Autonomous taxis with cats in them.
90% of what you said still relates to capitalism, more specifically surveillance capitalism.
> 90% of what you said still relates to capitalism
It relates to economics. Do you think a central planner would swear off robotics because it feels dehumanizing?
A central planner probably would've built mass transit back in the 50s. And most people wouldn't have cars. And the ones that did would be driving trabants.
> It relates to economics. Do you think a central planner would swear off robotics because it feels dehumanizing?
This is a straw man. There are many shades of grey between big companies, fueled by cheap VC money, that wipe out taxi drivers associated in small companies by operating at loss for many years and a centrally planned economy.
Yeah our humanity relies on worrying about if your uber driver might be a reckless driver or harass you. Driving is a means to an end, self driving cars will one day be cheaper better and safer which is a boon to all consumers at the expense of the comparatively few drivers
Do you miss asking the switchboard operator to connect your call?
People are trying to get from one place to another, not have a social experience. If they could teleport themselves they would.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw01trwmul0
It's really complicated. Because even though there might be a bit of friction between you and that rideshare driver, ride-sharing keeps a lot of people off the streets.
If this technology really takes off in the next 5 to 10 years, we're going to see a lot of people without the employer of last resort. Eventually gig work might disappear completely. In a lot of cities you'll see people on electric bikes or scooters delivering food. If that's completely automated, sure it'll be a lot quicker and faster, but what's going to happen to people who depend on these jobs.
I don't think our economic system is ready for this. And I'm not talking about any particular country either, it's going to be a worldwide issue.
Humans are quite bad at a lot of primarily human tasks... I'm grateful every time I don't have to deal with a secretary behind the phone, bank teller, travel agent, etc thanks to all these functionalities having become automated. One exception was ordering food in Japan at some restaurants which was done on iPads and food was being delivered by robots, because I actually really enjoyed interacting with the delightful and polite people over there. I cannot say the same about people in where I live.
How does it make us less human?
The less social interaction part.
The reason it's illegal to build a small grocery store near where people live (so they don't have to spent so much time and money acquiring groceries) has the complete opposite to do with capitalism.
I've noticed these little wheeled drones running around in the bicycle lanes in the east valley, usually with a biker following it not too far behind. I kind of figured they were going to be using them to roll out an autonomous delivery service at some point.
This is a great step in increasing the utilization of Waymo vehicles. Ideally Waymo's would be operating continuously doing useful work and reducing the number of dead-head legs.
Pull in to the Waymo after work, eat someone’s dinner while you’re stuck in traffic.. I like it
What a wonderful way to discover new cuisines!
I foresee this generating a lot of really funny TikTok's.
There goes one career option for laid off SWEs
How does this work? The customer has to go outside to a car, open the door (or trunk) and take an object?
It would be interesting to see if this could be combined with those little sidewalk bots to do the last mile, effectively having the Waymos act like buses for the bots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhxPO-dUanI
Those things need a last 100ft microbot
Currently it cost DoorDash an Ubereats 2 to 3 dollars to send food to the front door of someone’s house. It takes about 20 to 30 minutes for that driver to form all the steps to do the delivery. This works out to $6 dollars per hour of driver time. The driver is paying insurance, gas, time, depreciation insurance, accident repairs, maintenance, and everything. DoorDash pays $144 per day for approximately 48 deliveries with a human driver.
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).
I think this assumption is incorrect "Most cars are useful for 100,000 miles so the vehicle should be able to deliver for about 416 days."
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.
The company does it not because they think it will be cheaper but because if they DON'T do it, and something changes, someone else will eat their (delivered) lunch.
Even when it doesn’t accomplish the task and cost three times more than the current method? Seems like we’re far away from this working.
Don’t do what? They’re just buying Waymo cars and building a plug-in to send waypoints to the car from their delivery software system. Waymo did all the hard work.
Ballistic food , not so great. Years ago we went to an ice hockey game with our children.subway sandwich was there with their sandwich gun. They can shoot 6 inch sandwiches into the crowd. They got carried away and some sandwiches hit the ceiling of the arena, some disassembled on route to the crowd but most made to happy sports fans. My oldest son was quite young still and he was so distraught/ disgusted by the bits of sandwich flying around he has never entered a subway sandwich shop since then.
Sorry about the impact on your son, but that's a hilarious story.
I'm so thirsty for Elixir success stories I got prematurely excited from the headline
robots in the warehouse talking to robots on the streets talking to car robots. starting of robot swarms
Oh wow, it almost like Yandex delivery in some districts of Moscow. Though there it is a land drone.
Sprinkle some LLM when assembling your cart (aka Walmart / OpenAI partnership), and you got entire futuristic pipeline.
Autonomous delivery by vehicles works pretty well in China already, it should work in the US too.
Not surprised. Phoenix is one of those rare and contrived physical locations that doesn't get weather or seasons. No snow, little rain. The road surface and road edges are always visible and never change. People always stay in the clearly visible lanes. It's the perfect place to field semi-autonomous vehicles that can't hack it in normal regions so it looks like they're more capable than they are.
If Waymo were launching in Minneapolis I'd be surprised and delighted. But this is just more of the same.
This post seems to imply this is a trick or false progress. Why not start where it’s feasible/easier as you prove the business model and work out unforeseen issues?
Because they've been doing it SF and Phoenix over and over for the last decade with no progress while saying they were fully autonomous. I guess it's not so much about the companies but the technology itself not actually being capable yet. So they stick to the cheat regions rather than attempting to actually make autonomous vehicles (because that's too difficult, they'd have crash/failures making news).
Your argument would definitely apply in 2015. Not so much in 2025.
> they've been doing it SF and Phoenix over and over for the last decade with no progress
When were you last in a Waymo? I use them almost exclusively in Phoenix.
> they stick to the cheat regions
Do you think it doesn’t snow in Atlanta?
I think that you don't understand snow (real winter) and how it effects vehicles. A dusting of snow that stays on the ground for a day before melting is not an issue. The issue is when the snow keeps the road markings covered for literally weeks or months at a time. When the lanes are not visible to human drivers and they form new flocking based emergent lanes which all humans follow instead of the actual lanes. When the snow piles on the edge of the road change the width from week to week and force parked cars out into the middle of the old lane.
Snow is not a problem. Snow that stays is a problem. Atlanta doesn't get snow that stays. Waymo is noticbly absent from Buffalo after their one prior attempt.
> you don't understand snow and how it effects vehicles
Tell me more about how the 92” of snow my town got last winter leaves me ignorant.
> Snow is not a problem. Snow that stays is a problem
Snow used to be a problem! It isn’t anymore because it’s solved. My Subaru can keep lane using radar alone, following the car in front of me, in a blizzard.
> Waymo is noticbly absent from Buffalo after their one prior attempt
They’re also noticeably absent from Chula Vista [1].
Also, I know I don’t understand snow, but maybe the folks in Denver do [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
[2] https://denverite.com/2025/09/02/denver-waymo-pilot-project-...
Hey, which town do you live in? I want to know where I should be steering clear of Subarus in the winter ;)
> want to know where I should be steering clear of Subarus in the winter ;)
We’re actually pretty good! The fuckwits are in the FWD rental cars that can’t brake, ever, and souped-up F-million fifties driven by rich 17-year olds who predictably flip them on flat straightaways despite infinite farmland run-off, at grade, on both sides.
And to be clear, I’m never leaving the Subaru alone. The Subaru isn’t letting me leave it alone. But the notion that Waymo couldn’t figure out snowstorms is one I’ll readily challenge given the Subaru’s radar frequently sees white cars in a white out before I make them out visually (at 15 mph with hazards on). In the snow, an autonomous vehicle’s radar (note: not lidar and certainly not cameras) have an advantage over humans.
It may just be that robo-taxis don't operate in snowy conditions for a while and those regions have to wait for year-round service.
No progress? They started doing rides from SFO into the Bay Area this year.
This is about a business / vertical launch more so than an autonomous driving breakthrough.
Ah, yeah, but from that point of view it's not much of a news story and one wonders why anyone cares?
> doesn't get weather or seasons
Phoenix just broke rainfall records two days in a row and regularly gets dust storms. Those are both challenging conditions for drivers.
And waymo suspended service during that.
Looks like some cars got stuck in a storm a few weeks ago, so they don't seem to be proactively suspending operation during bad weather: https://www.abc15.com/news/local-news/waymo-temporarily-susp...
They have them in LA but they geolocked all the hilly/narrow/challenging areas from the system.
It's definitely easier to drive than in many places, but "doesn't get weather" is not quite right when there are significant dust storms every year. But few people even know what haboob means, so I guess they don't know how bad the loss of visibility is during one.
Waymo post: https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/your-doordash-order-delivered...
The next step is to build little robot kitchens in the vehicles and drive around preparing what people order en route. (kidding. maybe).
Done
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjyJRTM0knE
That was the original business model of Zume Pizza. Didn't work out because the acceleration in turns caused melted cheese to fly off the pizzas, among other issues.
Interesting trade-offs for a customer. No more expectation to tip or dealing with drivers potentially running scams. On the other side, I assume you now need to go unload the delivery from the car yourself, a much worse experience for apartment dwellers or the disabled.
Either way, we're going to see a lot more of this. More and more of the gig economy being automated away.
Waymo, a company with an operating loss of $1.23 billion in the first quarter and revenues declining by 9% in that quarter launches subsidized food delivery in Phoenix, undercutting humans who need the money.
That's the wrong framing to look at.
When you buy a car, do you stop to think of the taxi drivers who lost money because of that choice? Or when you grow vegetables, the potential loss of income to farmers?
The right way to think about is in aggregate. Does this improve the productivity of the _society_, and if the answer is yes - then we (especially folks on HN) should be supportive of technological progress.
It is not progress when a monopoly uses dumping prices in order to become a bigger monopoly. It may be in fact illegal.
If Waymo ever raises prices drivers can easily re-join the market and compete, the cost of doing so is basically free, so how is this a monopoly? There is no barrier to entry for their competition in the food delivery market
It is right to be skeptical, but I dont see how monopoly plays into this at all. Even if we assume Google is a monopoly company with Search or Ads, how Waymo delivers has got nothing to do with Search and Ads.
Perhaps you were trying to Google is a big tech company and they have gobs of cash, and that's why they are doing it. Precisely, and it is a public market company - so if it isnt a good use of their money, people will vote with their wallet.
Also, there are other richer companies (Apple etc) who can do exactly this thing. Nobody is stopping or unfairly being affected due to Waymo delivering food.
The Waymo people are so ruthless with eliminating dissent. It is understandable given that no one but nerds wants to ride in a surveilled dorky car and children can disable it with a traffic cone.
Enjoy your operating loss!
EDIT (in reply to the attacks below):
"The reason you look like a dork riding a Segway is that you look smug."
Source: "Leftist" Paul Graham
This is an example of the online species "dirtbag leftist who posts like a bully from an 80s teen movie for some reason" [0].
Nobody cares that much if they're in a "dorky" car or not. Women don't want Uber drivers sexually harassing them, other people don't want Uber drivers trying to convert them to a new religion or lecturing them about their weird opinions on every imaginable topic, and almost every other culture is more twee than Americans and not obsessed with looking cool.
[0] Their origin story is thinking "nerds" were bad because they were gutless centrists or something, so they started replying to them on Twitter with stuff about "shoving them in lockers". They've evolved into people whose main policy is that petty crimes like transit fare evasion are actually good because they make cities into a kind of dive bar where being there makes you cool and gets you laid.
> undercutting humans who need the money.
That's not how capitalism nor the world works..
That's communism and it doesn't work (each according to his needs, each according to his abilities).
Greed and capitalism are what make the world go 'round.
> That's not how capitalism nor the world works..
Scott Bessent worked with Soros (who was previously the devil for Republicans, but I digress). His buddy Mr. Citrone (also Soros) was betting heavily on Argentine. Turns out that Chainsaw-Milei wasn't so competent after all and Argentine needs a bailout. So, in the best socialist manner, Citrone is bailed out under the condition that Milei is reelected.
Or should we talk about DARPA socialism for companies or socialism for the Silicon Valley bank?
> each according to his needs, each according to his abilities
That is called the Peter Principle in "capitalism".
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Disclaimer: European position incoming.
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.
> Food delivery is something I truly have never understood
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...
Ok? So you've never lived anywhere that isn't relatively central and walkable. Many people do (even in Europe!). I am one of them. And on a night when I am working late being able to order a hot pizza to my front door is a godsend.
Every single person (including me) who sees no value in DoorUberDashing food around agrees that Domino's Pizza has it's place in society.
Prior to DoorDash I had zero obstacles to getting a fresh pizza delivered.
So you do understand food delivery. Is it a stretch then to imagine why a service that expands the delivery market from a handful of pizza and chinese restaurants to ~every restaurant in the city (that wants to opt in without hiring its own fleet of drivers) is successful?
Yes. The quality of a delivered pizza is higher than the quality of other delivered foods relative to the quality of getting them for dine in at the restaurant.
Do /you/ understand food delivery?
> if I have time to eat I also have the time to get the food.
Absolutely untrue.
Wonder how the robots will fair, will they be discarded in rivers like e-scooters
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