[HN Gopher] Food delivery apps rack up $20B in losses in fierce ...
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Food delivery apps rack up $20B in losses in fierce battle for
diners
Author : belter
Score : 5 points
Date : 2024-05-29 21:38 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ft.com)
| al_borland wrote:
| It seems like everyone loses in this model. Consumers are paying
| 2x normal pricing to get delivery. I've heard very mixed reviews
| from drivers. Restaurants seem to feel the need to jack up the
| prices to not get destroyed by the fees being charged. And the
| delivery services... the ones selling the shovels... are losing
| $20B somehow.
|
| I miss old delivery services when stores had their own drivers.
| It was much more consistent, and if there was a problem they'd
| make it right. DoorDash will give refund, which is fine, but
| doesn't help with solving food problem that led me to them in the
| first place.
|
| I also had DoorDash try to guilt me into ignoring issues by
| saying I reported things more often than most and it hurt the
| restaurants and drivers. I was getting bags with more than 50% of
| my order missing, sometimes the main course missing, and many
| times a completely different meal with someone else's name on it.
| Trying to make me feel guilty for reporting when I didn't get
| what I paid for, when I was paying a premium for it, left a
| really bad taste in my mouth. They tried to make it sound like I
| was taking advantage of their policy, without explicitly saying
| it, and that wasn't the case at all.
|
| A few things that would solve most problems would be:
|
| 1. Having the restaurant contact the customer if something isn't
| available, like any standard restaurant would in the pre-DoorDash
| days. This way order issues can get resolved, either my
| substitutions or adjusting the order cost and expectations
| accordingly.
|
| 2. Having a unique and simple code that is really big on the
| receipt. Some places currently use something like last name,
| first initial, which has been a been a problem with some of the
| wrong orders. Looking at the receipt I can see some ambiguity and
| where someone in a hurry would make a mistake.
|
| 3. Show issue rates at restaurants. On what percentage of orders
| are mistakes made that lead to a refund? This would be a helpful
| stat, as I have noticed some restaurants are much worse than
| others, to the point I stopped ordering from them. Let the
| customer see this, and better yet, if they fall below a certain
| threshold, kick them off the app until they can get their act
| together and show they fixed whatever the problem was. Things
| like this make everyone look bad.
|
| These are things these companies should be fixing with their
| system to reduce these problems, not trying to shift blame to
| customers.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Tech and specialization of food delivery was supposed to make
| things more efficient. The opposite is the reality. Now I try
| to order from places really close to me so picking it up myself
| is the best option, or order from a mom'n'pop pizza/restaurant
| that still does their own deliveries to a very local area.
| Havoc wrote:
| I just don't get why people keep ordering from them. It's not
| that hard to throw a steak in a pan or whatever.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| It would be interesting to see how many people work for the
| delivery apps and how many of them would otherwise be working for
| the restaurants they're now delivering food for. Could some of
| the difficulties restaurants are having finding workers be due to
| part of labor market they usually have access to are now doing
| delivery instead of production?
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(page generated 2024-05-29 23:03 UTC)