Having lived in NYC, Hong Kong and Singapore, the best system around all of this is ..
Singapore hawker center.
Turn up to somewhere ~10 mins or less from your location. Have a great meal for $5 (US) or less.
Continue
No delivery fees, delivery emissions or waste. Talk to people... The list goes on.
There are food courts elsewhere too. The main difference is government subsidized rent, and an older generation of people who are willing to work very hard for low overall income. The former can be solved by politics but the latter cannot. It is simply not sustainable. Look at the people who are working in these hawker centers: they are almost always old, and they are willing to work hard so that their children can work less hard in a nice air conditioned office. When these people retire, there will be no one to occupy these hawker centers at this price of food.
FWIW, Door Dash drivers aren't making much either.
Food preparation is harder work than driving, especially the kind of Asian food in hawker centers.
American mall food courts make me sad. Do you like Sbarro? What is Sbarro?
Danish culture has the concept of a work canteen as a basic expectation in any work arrangement, no matter the size of the company. I don't know why this isn't more popular everywhere else. Even if I had to take a slightly lower pre-tax salary I'd love not having to get takeout all the time.
I’ve worked several places, and it’s only the bigger companies that have a canteen.
Most smaller places it is “bring your food” or they get food in from a caterer to set up in the break room.
Or, if they're in a reasonably dense area, people go out to a nearby restaurant. Bring your own lunch has almost certainly declined over time. During the 10 years or so I worked for smaller companies in cities, it seemed as if going out for lunch with coworkers or otherwise was pretty much the norm. (Otherwise there were company cafeterias at the larger firms.)
Isn't that both unhealthier and more expensive ($ and time) than the alternatives?
When I worked downtown a number of years back a lunch special in Chinatown was about $6 and a nice break in the middle of the day. Not sure there was even a microwave in the office. Another company did have a lunch room but there were a number of good soup and/or sandwich places within a few minutes walk. Meals in any case were pretty similar to what I’d make at home and maybe a few dollars more expensive.
Can be, but e.g. in London all the major office space hubs also have a bunch of places that cater to office worker lunches. They tend to be comparatively cheap (emphasis on “comparatively”, mind you), and healthier than restaurant food.
Yes.
> work canteen
I had a job through a temp agency back in 2019, and we were occupying a rather spacious and well-equipped office building belonging to our client. One of the perks was free sodas and well-appointed break rooms, with fridge, microwave oven and all. However, there was no cafeteria nor canteen. Worse yet, there was no restaurant or deli within any reasonable walking distance to the site. It was a vast and dedicated office park with very large corporations as tenants, and evidently most of them did typically have cafeterias, or their actual employees had other arrangements.
Therefore I found myself preparing something at home to bring as "lunch" every day, and it was difficult because I am not good at preparing food at all. We were only alotted 30 minutes total to eat, and I found that barely enough time to put it together, heat something, and wolf it down. It was the most distasteful aspect of working there, having no other choice for breaks. We were working "swing shift" into the night (off at 10pm or so) and so the choices for meals after work were quite slim, and I was riding the bus anyway.
There are many office parks and corporate centers around here that feature at least one little deli or sandwich shop on the corner, that is walking distance for employees. I really don't think I'd accept work on-site at a place that lacked a cafeteria or a nearby restaurant.
> One of the perks was free sodas
Really bad for health, especially for people working into the night and presumably don’t get enough exercise.
Whenever I have a situation like this I get fat. I’d rather not have food from the company…
Hawker centers, like many other nice features of Singapore, is powered by immigrants paid much less than other citizens, while being strictly regulated in a way that only a wealthy yet tiny country can do.
I'm not saying it's necessarily all bad, just that it's not something we can replicate in western countries.
Until this year, only citizens / PRs were eligible to work at hawker centres. Even today, it’s quite restricted.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/hawker-stalls-can-...
Who do you think is delivering food?
That's just part of it. Anyone can deliver food, but effectively being a small food stand is completely different.
Now having enough small food stands to create a hawker center is even more difficult. But having a hawker center 10 minutes from anywhere, ran exclusively by immigrants but somehow still properly regulated?
> is powered by immigrants paid much less than other citizens
I mean, that's how Deliveroo and other delivery services (Uber eats and equivalents) works (at least here in Europe).
It was a mistake from my part to write a quick comment, there's much more than having a low pay that makes it impossible to have a similar hawker culture in other countries.
Singapore is effectively a big city, just the difference in geometry between it and pretty much any country you're thinking of makes it impossible to have a "hawker center 10 minutes of walk away from anybody".
I don't really understand the appeal of these delivery services.
Whenever I try them my food usually arrives cold and more than once has apparently gotten stolen and then I have to spend a bunch of time with delivery people messaging me saying the food is not there, and then have to talk to customer service to get a refund.
On top of that they practically double the cost of the already expensive food it seems to me.
If you live in a metro area it's really not like that. Prices are higher but my credit card gives me free Uber One, so fees + tip are managable. Plus Uber/Postmates offer (at least for me) extremely aggressive coupons pretty often, 20-40% off. Food arrives in 20-40 minutes. Don't order things that don't travel well (eg: fried food). Order enough that you'll have leftovers and can amortize the delivery cost over multiple meals.
We probably order delivery at least once a week. Usually a big batch of indian, chinese, a ton of tacos/rice/beans, etc. Stuff that keeps well. Then we'll have it for at least 2 meals each. I don't feel like it's that ridiculous honestly.
This right here. I'm in Chicago and this echo's true.
I'd also add that I've almost never needed to interact with the driver in the app. In the case there's a missing item or issue, support sorts it out quick enough.
My son has had been sick 10 days, our fridge has been emptied because it's been so hard to fit groceries into balancing work and childcare, my wife had the car on a playdate with my daughter, and for $25 someone brought a hot burrito to my door. It was worth every penny.
Most grocery stores do curbside pick up and delivery these days.
I hope your son is fine now.
That's my 2c. I've used it only twice in the past several years:
- one when I had the flu recently and was literally, non-hyperbolically barely well enough to operate the app enough to get food (for my family, too - not for me)
- once when i was out of town on business, and my previously-arranged food for my family back home fell through one day.
All your points are why I don't use it: it's already barely food (fast food), arrives cold, delivery issues, and EXTREMELY expensive. And in an era where, despite multiple raises, due to inflation I am STILL not making more CPI-adjusted income than I was in 2019, I'm not about to be lifestyle creeping for shitty cold wendy's.
My experience is similar. Unless it's something that delivery was solved for (e.g., literally Dominos or Chinese) it arrives in just an embarrassingly bad condition.
This is probably very location dependent. I live in an urban area and my food comes hot.
However, since I live in an urban area I have been just doing takeout and picking it up myself. The cost of these delivery apps went up radically over the last few years.
It’s so much cheaper to do takeout. I just do delivery when I have a huge time crunch.
Don’t ignore food addiction, the app turns into a button you can press on your phone and in a bit you’ll have a dopamine hit from the food. You don’t have to get dressed or confront the reality of your situation.
You're focusing on the downsides & potential downsides. They might not be a good option, but they sure are (usually) a very convenient one.
I'm with you. Maybe the appeal on the restaurant side.
I never understood why these delivery services are popular.
Yes people are lazy. But lazy to the point of paying an additionnal fee to be waiting twice the time it gets to fetch the same food yourself and receive dishes that are cold instead of hot? What is the incentive really? If only those delivery services would use devices that keep food warm and deliver from somewhere far from home, I would maybe understand, but they aren't even available in a wider than a small radius around your house, so it is always more convenient to walk/cycle/drive to wherever you would order that food anyway.
The only ones that do it relatively well are pizza joints and they usually have their own delivery service so you don't even have to use these apps.
I live in Bratislava and order food to work everyday. Delivery times are on par or less than what would take me to fetch the food myself. All delivery services in the area use thermally insulated boxes to transport the dishes - I can't remember if I ever received a cold dish (that wasn't supposed to be served cold).
And because I'm a software developer with a flexible work schedule paid hourly, the act of going to grab the food myself and not working for 30 minutes would cost me way more than delivery costs (even cooking my own meals can be more expensive when time is factored in, compared to food price at restaurant + delivery cost (for ~2 portions prepared in 30 minutes. Proper meal-prepping would be cheaper of course, but yeah I'm too lazy to do that)).
Also the food delivery services often offer discounts and with them it's sometimes cheaper to order the food than going to the restaurant and eat there. Yesterday I ordered with a 30% discount - I got a dish which would cost 10.80€ at the restaurant for 7.50€ including delivery.
> I'm a software developer with a flexible work schedule paid hourly, the act of going to grab the food myself and not working for 30 minutes would cost me way more than delivery costs (even cooking my own meals can be more expensive when time is factored in, compared to food price at restaurant + delivery cost (for ~2 portions prepared in 30 minutes
Off topic but I quit consulting because I had this exact realization. Sure making $1000 to fix a production outage in 15 minutes on a Saturday was amazing but it made me always think about life in billable hours to the point where I was not hanging out with friends or going to the gym anymore
Maybe I'm biased because I'm from an eastern EU country where hating your job is the local culture and cost of living is lower than in the USA, or because I worked like this part-time during college experienced FOMO because of it, so I learned to prioritize social events, but I never had this issue.
In fact, I'm the exact opposite - I value this kind of job arrangement, because I can earn enough money to live comfortably (and save some money) just by working 100-120 hours monthly, which gives me much more free time than working a normal full time job + I have the flexibility to take a day off (or even a week or two of vacations) anytime I want, but I still can work some weekends if I want some extra money...
A legal job I once did paid billable hours. There was something to be said for being paid for travel in off-hours, etc. But it does create this always on-the-clock mindset. On the one hand, you're basically never working for "free." On the other, as you say, you're always cognizant of the fact that you could be being paid if you work another hour.
> And because I'm a software developer with a flexible work schedule paid hourly, the act of going to grab the food myself and not working for 30 minutes would cost me way more than delivery costs
That doesn't make sense. Quite the opposite being flexible + paid hourly means that you are free to take a decent break.
Not taking proper time for a pause in the middle of a shift is both incredibly unhealthy and extremly unefficient as we can't be at 100% for long hours at a time.
Having said that anyone can prepare a decent meal in just a few minutes, there are literally tons of recipes where you just have to crudely cut stuff and throw them in a baking dish and in the oven or cook in a wok. + when you are working at home you can always eat some dinner leftovers + a bit of pan.
Your prices seems fine but I guess that is only because your delivery services are still in the pre-enshittification phase where they are competing for monopoly and actually losing money.
Ironically delivery apps to be designed for walkable (ie non US) cities. At least where I lived in the US, driving was always very congested and adds extra time for parking and such, always at least 30 min with huge variance based on traffic. Plus you have to pay for the energy to transport a 1.5 tonnes vehicle for.. usually a single meal.
In Europe it’s an electric kickbike or scooter at most, and they can pick up the food without parking. Still, not perfect, but a lot more efficient and the margins can be lower. They don’t have to hit you with those deceptive fees and tip shaming - often it’s the same consumer price.
To me, in the US it would make much more sense to chain deliveries similar to Amazon packages. A set daily menu, heaters in the truck, and multiple stops with TSM style route. Maybe that’s too much communism but it would at least make sense logistically.
A lot of offices around me have food delivery services operating in the lobby of the building. This food delivery service will often only serve a few restaurants every day with the restaurants rotating daily. Everyone is supposed to get their orders in by some cutoff in the morning, the food delivery operator makes one big pickup for all the orders for the building, and it all gets delivered at the lobby. You get a text when the delivery arrives. Delivery is really cheap since its essentially a cost shared with potentially several people.
The one operating in my building these days is Lunchdrop, but I've also seen Foodsby offered at other buildings. On the days I go into the office I look at the menu for the week and pick what meals I might want or I'll just plan on bringing in food. I get the email with the menu for the week either Saturday night or Sunday and can then order days ahead of time.
Are you talking from experience with DoorDash or Deliveroo? This has not been my experience with Deliveroo in London, UK. There’s just no way I could get the same food quicker, everyone is on motor/pedal bikes so delivery is usually about 20-30 minutes. Food is always hot on arrival bar the odd item (Nandos chips specifically, always cold).
Also I’m ordering Deliveroo specifically so I can get the time back, that’s the price you’re really paying - I had a long day at work and I want the time to relax and not spend it sourcing and making dinner.
Not my experience in London. In any zone that is not Zone 1-2, or other Deliveroo hot spots, my experience has always been not great with times that do reach also the 45 minutes to 1h for food delivery. We still do it occasionally _because we are lazy_.
However, we did draw some lines as some foods are not enjoyable in case one of those long wait times happens (e.g. pizza, burger, cooked meat dishes, etc).
Zone 2-3 here; Deliveroo is the only service that failed to even turn up, delivered to the wrong address then tried to blame me for "putting a pin in the wrong place" which I did not. Worse service ever.
Yeah, I never had cold food delivered. Maybe that's a US thing where you live 50km away from the restaurant or something.
If the restaurant is 30 miles away it's also going to be cold if you pick it up yourself and drive all the way home. And you'll be driving roughly twice as far, assuming a delivery drivers was positioned close to the restaurant.
In the US and none of the food delivery services deliver from some place as far away as 50km. I don’t know why you think that would be necessary in the US. That being said I have never received a food delivery that was cold or that wasn’t delivered in a timely manner.
I was poking fun at the fact that distances in the US tend to be bigger than e.g. in Europe, I figured that the delivery apps don't allow for that much of a range. Since I've read the complaint about cold food frequently, but like you have never received cold food, I figured it must be some US specific thing (but I guess not).
I am in Spain and the only restaurants that these services propose are in a 5km radius so it is often easier/faster to walk, cycle or take the motorbike to said place. The apps hide all stuff on other sides of the city so I wouldn't be able to order from 50km away anyway.
Nando's chips are cooked fresh when the delivery driver arrives so that they're as fresh as possible. The probelm here is that chips travel horribly.
Would recommend an air fryer for this; They are basically made to reheat things with oil on them already.
I am in Spain. So Uber Eats and Glovo are the most common services but they are equally bad anyway so I wouldn't expect Deliveroo to be better.
French fries don’t travel well.
French fries often don't travel well from the kitchen to the table. The hamburger/fries/related seems to be a pretty bad target for food delivery. Pizzas can at least be put in a warm oven which I do even if I'm just picking something up myself.
What's more, these services only go to make the customer experience of people who have actually turned up at the restaurant worse because the same staff are now having to cater for twice the amount of orders while they manage a long line of motorcycle drivers crowding around the entrance. Personally to me it's wild, spending restaurant money to eat at home.
+1.
Someone nailed it in the thread above related to the -time/+money, but after a couple of years working on it, I realized that the people that use those services are not the public that would go to a restaurant for a gastronomic experience, and that's ok.
At least for me, the biggest 3rd or maybe 4th order effect of the food delivery industry and their dark/gray kitchens is that the concept of having a nice cooked meal locally is almost over, with some exceptions.
Due to the over-optimization of the kitchens and the offset in terms of revenue that restaurants can have (i.e., orders without increasing the real estate), we have a bunch of pre-set mounted meals in almost all restaurants, and the probability of eating something tasty and unique is very low due to that.
The irony is that, at least in my experience, the best non-chain and/or fine restaurants that I found were the ones in some shopping centers in the Nordics for a simple accidental association: none of those has any possibility to have food delivery due to hard physical constraints, and my assumption is that, since they do not have this possibility, they have to deliver the best meal possible to have people return and build a positive reputation.
I am the type who would both go to a restaurant for a gastronomic experience and order from Deliveroo.
When I want "an experience" I travel to a high-end restaurant. A local restaurant does not deliver that experience, whether I order home or go eat there. When I feel like that quality food, I order it because I don't want to spend my time for that quality food.
> I travel to a high-end restaurant. A local restaurant does not deliver that experience
That is very generic.
There are people who travel to restaurants that are a walking distance from my place because they are known from afar to be very good. And they are not necessarily "high end" in the sense that they don't serve plates dressed according to a chief desire nor do they have sommelier, they just happen to make very good dishes anyway.
Not all good restaurants are the ones where you are greeted by some people in a tuxedo. And the good ones aren't necessarily far away from you.
It is however true where I live, and in all of the locations I've lived throughout my life.
And I did not say there aren't good ones closer, but that they don't offer enough of an experience for me to value wasting time traveling there, and eating somewhere where I don't have the comfort of being in my own home.
Some time I just go to the restaurant next door BECAUSE it is more comfortable than being in my own home: I don't have to set the table or clean it afterwards, wash anything or make sure they are correctly put in the dishwasher, or manage the trash etc and I can meet people there I wouldn't necessarily want in my own home, at least at that exact moment.
> I realized that the people that use those services are not the public that would go to a restaurant for a gastronomic experience, and that's ok.
And you’d be wrong with your assumption (because that’s what it is.)
5th order effect - enabling shut-in's to stay shut in.
I have other things to do, and don't drive. That's the incentive.
Cold food has never been a problem for me with these services.
I'd pick Deliveroo over a restaurants own delivery service any day because it means not having to keep track of numbers, having tracking, and trusting their customer service. In fact, to the point that while Deliveroo allows restaurants to do their own delivery, because you lose the tracking I tend to avoid ordering from restaurants that do.
When I don't want to make my own pizza dough and order it, I just call from the google maps link. It doesn't take longer than finding any delivery app in my smarthone.
And I will just wait 10 minutes, hop on my bicycle and 2 minutes later I get my pizza right out of the oven and head home directly much faster than any delivery rider would because they mutualize orders and let the first pizzas lose most of their heat while waiting to have sufficient orders.
Your lack of empathy is obvious when you say the benefit of these services is that "people are lazy". Many many people simply don't have extra time, and taking one thing off of their plate makes life easier. For many decades, pizza was one of the only meals you could get delivered, these services just expand that to more restaurants.
People are odd in terms of what they will tolerate. I prefer having a 15 mins stroll to pick up my coffee or food, for others it’s deal breaking.
The time argument is also weird. I find that I have a maximum of 6 hours highly productive work in me a day, perhaps an additional few hours of less productive work. A stroll or cooking recharges my mind. I envy all the people here who are working a productive 12 hour day.
People who say they are productve 8 to 12 hours a day with barely pause are just liars (or slaves that get whiped at the second they stop).
Heck, when I became parent and decided for a couple of years to work at 80% I realized I was doing the same amount of work as before and as much or more than any other colleague working at 100%. I only came back at 100% because I realized businesses are willing to subsidize procrastination over efficiency and I didn't find normal to be paid less if all I was asked in return was spending 1/5 of my work time time doing nothing productive for the company.
Not having the time is usually false. They don't prioritize that time over others.
It really depends on where you live. I'm in a suburb and my "15 minute stroll" consists of one mexican joint. Nothing is "walkable" from my place. A real shame because I have a plaza only a mile away... up the steepest hill possible. I get lazy.
in an urban area it makes less sense. Friend's house is across the street from a plaza consisting of a grocery store, corner store, starbucks, froyo joint, and a few other eateries.
Pizza delivery has been ubiquitous in small town America for decades, and pizza has nothing uniquely suitable to delivery except perhaps standardized packaging. And takeout from all types of restaurants has been even more ubiquitous.
So I'm not sure why you're so confused by the popularity of a service where someone else picks up your takeout order and brings it to you. Other than valid concerns about the labor practices of these delivery companies, and of course the occasional botched delivery (this also happened every so often with traditional pizza delivery in my small town growing up in the 90s), there's nothing to be confused about. It's just paying a bit extra for convenience, a tale as old as time.
First of all, not everyone has a vehicle. I certainly don't. So it will take me much more time in most cases.
And it's convenient when you have friends over and want to spend your time talking to them not getting food.
I guess it's a cultural thing, but here in France if you invite some friends over, you are expected to cook. It doesn't need to be fancy or anything.
The only time its okay to order food its when people came for something else in the first place (moving, doing some handywork...)
Otherwise just set a meetup at a restaurant and split the bill.
I think that's a French thing yeah. Here in Spain if people make dinner it's really a special occasion and you'd tell them they are coming for 'dinner'. Usually you do something really simple like finger food, get takeout or just grab some beers and snacks at the cafe downstairs.
The idea is to spend the most time with your friends, not in the kitchen. But I know in France food is a bigger thing.
The thing is also that here dinner is usually an afternoon thing.
Among my crowd in the US, the host may order some pizza but it's generally pot luck to some degree. Personally, I'll at least cook a main dish (and would be happy to do more) but people will bring stuff anyway and then we'll have too much food :-)
they usually have their own delivery service so you don't even have to use these apps
Still? Around me almost all the pizza places have stopped offering their own delivery services and moved to apps.
If you have more money than time, and you don't mind the quality, it seems like not a bad trade.
>the time it gets to fetch the same food yourself
Why do you think that people are simply capable of fetching the same food themselves?
What if they don't have transportation, what if they are too sick?
> What if they don't have transportation, what if they are too sick?
Some customers of these would fit this, but I suspect the vast majority of the valuation is from delivering food to people who could pick it up themselves if they had to.
That's just bullshit. You don't know how far away the restaurants are and how many people don't own cars or if they do, the traffic back and forth and wait time would be more than a guy on a motorbike.
People want to insert morality and virtue in every stupid thing. Cold showers, delivery or not, wake up times. Get a grip and sort your own shit while other people decide to use and pay for other services that you might not.
It's fine to criticize cost or experience but to pretend you're superior for your choices... Ridiculous.
It's one thing to pay the reasonable costs (including a living wage) for things you want, it's another to demand a massive company enslave those with little other choice to provide you what you want at a low price.
Or people are sick, or drunk or high and want food but also want to be safe.
Is this a dichotomy? Door dash or get the food yourself? No. Like OP said, there are places that still have their own drivers...
Laziness and here they are not that much more expensive. A few euros at most. Regular discounts make it close enough. So not having to walk to my car and drive somewhere and back is reasonable effort save.
And vast majority of time food is entirely fine and warm enough.
That's actually what turned me off from Doordash as the pandemic ended. they added a bunch of extra fees to the point where some $15 order doubles in price after all is said and done. "service fee", deliery fee, and then tip. Not to mention the fast food itself is just more expensive.
> Yes people are lazy.
You dont seem to understand just how lazy people are.
They are and I include myself in this category every now and then. But even when I had to go into an office every day, I had quite a few things I could toss into the oven or skillet and have ready in a few minutes.
Have some friends over and want to get a couple pizzas that everyone is happy with? Sure I get that rather than someone having to go out and pick them up. But, as a routine thing, I've never gotten the attraction of delivery.
Same here. I prepare 2-3 meals for myself every day. Breakfast this morning was scrambled eggs. It took maybe 15 minutes, and for part of that time I was also checking emails and getting dressed for the day. For lunch I'll throw together a salad in a few minutes. Meal prep just isn't the hardship people seem to think it is, and by doing my own, I spend about a tenth as much on food as my co-workers who get everything delivered.
That doesn't mean I begrudge them their use of these services. If that's what they want to spend their income on, that's their business. I just think it's foolish and based on misconceptions.
> Meal prep just isn't the hardship people seem to think it is
For you, and your circumstances. For other people, it’s exactly as hard as they think it is.
I can’t use a knife, or look down to prepare food without risking the inability to use large parts of my body for the rest of the day and potentially the next.
Though my answer to this is shakes, not food service to be fair.
> based on misconceptions
You don’t say?
>I had quite a few things I could toss into the oven or skillet and have ready in a few minutes.
I don't. That was eggs for me, but alas. At best I have oatmeal ready.
Buying a dozen eggs and maybe some cheese and associated veggies is still a lot cheaper than getting meal delivers. Also sautéed shrimp. Pasta with even store bought sauce. I sometimes don’t feel like cooking either but it honestly doesn’t need to take a lot of effort or money.
Yes, but it feels a lot worse. What's competing when I'm at the grocery is different from when I'm ordering delivery. I've cut down my Doordash substantially but I still have my down days a few times in a month where I'm either really lazy or really crunched for time at work.
I do in fact have pasta but I wouldn't call it much of a meal by itself. I usually cook it with some ground beef or turkey and try to keep some leftovers, but that leaves the realm of "quick 10 minute meals".
I'll keep the shrimp in mind when going for groceries next time as well. I'm all ears for some quick and tasty sources of protein.
Frozen shrimp was good when I had a priority on quick dinners; usually some shrimp scampi variant. Have a turkey farm in town so a frozen turkey pie isn't a bad option. You do have the option of refrigerated ravioli or tortellini with some store-bought pasta sauce which comes closer to being a whole meal. After all, not every meal needs to be a complete/balanced one. I've also found other frozen stuff like soup dumplings that are really quick/easy to prep.
Chickpeas!
Even cheaper than eggs and much longer shelf life
Interesting. Sure. I'll grab a can next time I go for groceries and see if I like the taste.
Who watches my kids while I get the food?
I know there are always edge cases, but, just spit-balling here, maybe the other parent? When I was a kid, my dad got the pizza while mom stayed home. It's a tradition I brought to the next generation as well, and, by god, I hope my kids continue it as well.
Also, consider if you can order from a restaurant with in house delivery instead of using Door Dash.
You can prepare food at home if you're not too comfortable in the kitchen. You can learn to enjoy it too after some first failed attempts, everybody fails at the beginning of this journey...
I could understand getting delivery as the emergency resort but doing that on a regular basis does not make sense to me. I think of preparing food as a form of self care.
I love cooking but when I had a baby and a toddler I used delivery a lot
Just to add to this conversation, because I haven't seen it discussed yet -
One of the groups of people using these apps are the disabled. Those aren't people who can just hop in a car. And they aren't always able to walk. But they absolutely are people who feel run ragged and too tired to cook some nights.
Australia's NDIS even partners with some of them to perform that service.
Live in a major city without a car/bike. Many restaurants within close physical proximity.
> The only ones that do it relatively well are pizza joints and they usually have their own delivery service so you don't even have to use these apps.
At least in my area, the pizza joints also use DoorDash now. They're not just available on DoorDash. It is delivered by DoorDash also when ordering directly from the pizza joint.
My car broke down and it's taking forever to fix! Delivery services have made this much less of a problem.
i pay a bit more so I can get food to my house from wherever i want
how is this hard to understand lol
Not going to presume your lifestyle, but many regular users of food delivery are paying a steep premium to eat junk for the convenience of not having to drive 10 minutes
I substantially reduced my doordash, but I still have off days where I either just drove back home tired or otherwise just feel too down to order out and am low on groceries. It's a nice "once a week" kind of luxury thesse days
It's amusing because the "luxury" of going to a restaurant isn't even being discussed - just the added luxury of delivery.
But going out to eat is a big cost compared to eating at home!
Delivery times don't matter as much - you can always order 15-30 mins earlier, you could also microwave the food a few seconds if it is cold.
That said, I am not a fan of ordering often - food quality is generally bad in my area, those extra fees are just nuts and the drivers get screwed the most, followed by restaurants.
Those services have their use, and I'm glad that they exist, but it feels like people are just abusing them for convenience. It's unfathomable to me that there are people (I personally know of a few) who use a food delivery service on a daily basis for no good reason other than "i'm just lazy". The amount of money being wasted really makes my head spin.
You’d be extremely surprised if you saw internal dashboards. Kinda opens up your mind to society’s decision making processes when you see the numbers.
You fire and forget. Order something for lunch, get back to work. Eventually ring at the door with food.
> What is the incentive really? > I would maybe understand, but they aren't even available in a wider than a small radius around your house, so it is always more convenient to walk/cycle/drive to wherever you would order that food anyway.
I know that you mentioned the incentive from the customer perspective, but since I've worked in 2 of the top 5 world food delivery companies, I can have some insights about it beyond people's laziness.
1) Availability of different cuisines regardless of distance: If you're talking about a bikeable, small-sized European capital or city with a limited number of restaurants, yes—you can place your order in person without any issue. But if you're in a mid-sized city with a high variety of restaurants, like Berlin, that’s not feasible. Most of the time, people don't use the app to order from the local pizza place; they use it to get a nice Indian, Japanese, Nepalese, or Thai dish from a restaurant 6 to 10 km away, especially on a rainy Friday.
2) It’s hard for restaurants to coordinate table bookings with walk-ins: Many restaurants join the platform because, while they can manage bookings and some fixed demand, they also risk losing walk-in customers (dynamic demand) when there's no space available. What restaurants do now is manage both bookings and walk-ins without worrying about losing revenue—because delivery can make up for no-shows or frustrated walk-ins.
3) Food delivery removes waiting logistics: If you walk, cycle, or drive, you incur the full logistics cost plus the opportunity cost (e.g., if you're organizing an event and need to set aside an hour for food). With delivery platforms, you can "actively wait"—you place the order through the app and do other things while waiting. You’re paying for both the logistics and the saved opportunity cost.
4) Restaurants can optimize menus and kitchen efficiency instead of real estate: This relates to point 2. In my experience, restaurants are becoming more like a front-end experience for dine-in customers, but many are transforming into what could be called "kitchens as a service." Customers order remotely, and a highly optimized kitchen, in terms of logistics and execution, prepares a specific dish. One thing I've noticed—and personally feel conflicted about—is that restaurants are betting on hyper-optimization by selling more of what I call "pre-mounted standardized dishes." In other words, instead of restaurants thinking about increasing their space to accommodate potential walk-ins, they will move towards maximizing kitchen efficiency.
Example: In Brazilian food restaurants, they have preset portions of rice, beans, French fries, and salad, and just reheat pre-cooked steak. For Thai food, they keep cold dressings in containers, and all noodles are pre-cooked and stored in warmers, and so on.
Your last point is the most interesting: restaurants are now optimizing for cranking out generic slop.
for fast food restaurants, they always have.
I mean in bigger cities lots of people don't have cars, they might also be in the middle of something and so having someone else get the food makes sense. And a lot of people have "too much money", leading to them being like "yeah I'll pay like 40 bucks for somebody to bring these burgers to me so I can just keep on playing something with a friend".
And you know... if food is cold, you probably have a microwave?
Whether this is a good use of money is debatable but I think it's pretty easy to imagine scenarios in which this would be used.
>if food is cold, you probably have a microwave?
Order $40 of mediocre food and pop it in the microwave when it gets to you, cold. No surprise this is the community that brought us Soylent.
Do these people even like food? Fine if not, but in that case stock up on broccoli, rice and chicken and eat it every day; you'll save money and be healthier.
> Do these people even like food?
They don't.
Basically they _consume_ food like they _consume_ shows on Netflix.
They want tons of choice, they want something constantly new, but they never actually enjoy what they consume. Ask them what they ate last week and they can't tell you. Ask them what they thought about what they just ate, same result.
It would be fine if it wasn't for the tons of trash that creates and the cooks/delivery people that are exploited by this system.
I'm not sure the comparison with Netflix is fair as the latter does have some good shows. But, in the case of food delivery, yes, some subset of people are neither choosy nor especially price-sensitive and they're an ideal target audience.
OTOH when you are in a big city you usually have food available virtually at your doorstep. That is my experience at least.
They do use devices to keep the food warm such as the pizza like boxes. Also, my family members who DoorDash wait by popular destinations to pickup orders quicker and they deliver them within 20 minutes.
In the US, I think you underestimate the power of lazy.
But seriously, people without transportation (or whose family has a single vehicle and it’s at work with someone), people with disabilities …
In any case, it’s seriously overpriced. Uber Eats offered me “$30 off” and the final bill would still have been twice the restaurant prices - and Uber likely has a markup on that as well.
It seems like the neighborhood Facebook feeds are full of people complaining about incorrect orders, missing food, stolen food, food that got delivered to the wrong house, as well as drivers complaining about not getting tips, customers incorrectly reporting food as stolen or missing...
> In any case, it’s seriously overpriced.
As someone on Twitter aptly put, "you're ordering a taxi for your burrito"
What do you expect the price to be?
In the ideal case, your burrito is sharing a taxi with many other burritos going the same direction.
It's still a taxi for your burrito where you pay three entities: the restaurant, the delivery, and Doordash
They kept it really cheap over the pandemic. But that long ended and we are indeed back to taxi prices.
Doordash's first ever quarterly profit was in late 2024, 12 years after founding.
Just like most companies from ZIRP era it was held together by unlimited investor money that let it grow through price dumping.
There are an almost unlimited number of services out there that many people want but aren't willing to pay the true cost of providing. Food delivery (in whatever form) is one such in many cases.
Food delivery is a game changer with little kids to feed.
>Food delivery is a game changer with little kids to feed.
Can you elaborate?
I have little kids. We buy food at the grocery store and cook it. What game is being changed? You're talking about ordering takeout.
Let me explain - it is not a replacement for daily meals - of course we do cook both from scratch and frozen stuff for dailies. I would go broke pretty quickly if we ordered delivery every night. It is a replacement for eating out. If you have little kids and take them out for dining (let's say as a treat), first you need to agree on where to go, then a bunch of complaints about the lack of X / Y at the menu, then them getting bored etc. Delivery means you can do this all at your home's comfort - if somebody wants to make a scene - sure go ahead!
Otherwise I would also prefer to eat in the restaurant, cheaper and easier as well.
Easier to put chicken nuggets in an air fryer than order them from DoorDash last time I checked
This is what always gets me about it. I get being to lazy to cook and to drunk or busy to drive or whatever. But there are actually tons of pretty good frozen prepared meals these days. If you're lazy and this happens to you all the time, throw a bunch of those in the freezer. Cleaning a baking sheet isn't actually more cleanup work than dealing with take out trash. You'll probably get the food just as fast as the delivery service as well.
There's definitely something to be said for having some things in the freezer you can throw in the oven now and then. I cook regularly but I have those.
My mother cooked but, when I was growing up, tossing a Swanson TV dinner or some Stouffer's frozen thing in the oven if my parents were going out was pretty routine. I'm sure I'd turn up my nose today but I probably regarded it as a bit of a treat at the time.
Is it, though? Is it really?
First you have to have frozen chicken nuggets on hand at home. That means that you've already been to the grocery store, picked some up, and brought them home somehow to be stored.
Now you've also got a working and clean air fryer, sink, utensils, and other kitchen accoutrements that can be used on the nuggets. You may also find it necessary to have, on-hand, some condiments or side dishes to make a complete meal of the nuggets you're trying to make.
Then you put them onto a plate -- hope you got a plate -- and eat them with clean utensils, and then you clean that stuff up, wipe the counter, wash and put away dishes. Then you make a note on your shopping list or inventory, to replenish what you just ate.
It's not a simple proposition, all of these steps, especially when someone is a bachelor, mentally ill, isolated, etc. You feel it's easier for you, that is great, you've got some life skills, but other people struggle mightily with just the cleanup bits, for example.
Is this a point being made via absurdity or is this your sincere position? Buying a five pound bag of frozen nuggets and a bottle of ketchup isn’t climbing everest. Maintaining a shopping list takes no effort at all. Being depressed doesn’t get better by eating out of a carry out box.
Your whole comment is just infantilization, plain and simple.
My kitchen has never been as prepared since I had kids. I used to have a very limited stock of food but it changed when I had kids. So quite the opposite in my experience.
> I never understood why these delivery services are popular.
I don’t understand this lack of ability to think beyond your own circumstance.
None of what you wrote is applicable to my life or circumstances, plus I’m disabled to boot.
> waiting... dishes that are cold
No wait, simply order early or hold off eating for 30 mins, while you for sure have other things to entertain yourself with. Or not, because you're busy doing work or whatever, and the exact time of the meal isn't the biggest concern. Neither is if food is hot. You eat 3 meals every day for an entire life time, not all of them needs to be amazing.
Have you ever had a hangover
* Dons tinfoil hat *
They want you scared alone and staring at a screen. These services allow people to withdraw from the social interaction of ordering food in person- they feed off of and encourage social anxiety.
Honestly when I lived in Ireland I sometimes preferred an app because there were times I couldn’t tell what people were saying (loud background noises, accents, etc)
You make it sound like a therapists' conspiracy.
I think the DoorDash culture is promoted because it means you can now work an hour more of (often unpaid) overtime, without worrying for your dinner. Or that you won't resist the extra time commuting to a far office location, so that your employer can save on their office space rent. Or won't complain for being forced to live out of the city because funds have bought up all the housing for "investment" and you can no longer afford a place in it.
I think you're arguing against yourself in the last paragraph. Decades of ordering pizza proves the market for food delivery. And the app makes it even easier than calling and talking to a person for both sides.
I haven't used DD or ordered pizza since 2022 at the latest, but I usually got enough food that it didn't get cold. Since it was so expensive I'd load up on appetizers and extras so I could get at least 2 meals out of it.
I don't get it today because I heard how expensive it got, and my apartment complex is huge and I don't trust them to find my unit.
For whatever reason, pizza and Chinese delivery seems to work--at least in reasonably dense areas. I haven't really used since college, long time ago. Don't really have reasonable options these days. I probably would now and then if they were available but I fall back on some things that I just keep in the house and basically take no time/effort.
you also get smaller portions
You need to check your privilege. This is also a very ableist take.
Some people don't want a car. Some can't afford a car. Some can't drive. Some simply don't want to pay to maintain, insure, fuel and park it. Some simply don't want to take the time to leave the house, get their car, drive to some place, pick up their food and then drive home
There is absolutely both a need and a desire for delivery. Yes, you can get a bad delivery experience. I've had more than one pizza delivered where the boxes were clearly on their side, possibly because they fell off the car seat. Some drivers had hot bags. Most did not. The dedicated drivers for Dominos do, which is why that works.
Where delivery works particularly well (IME) is NYC and there they most often are on bikes, sometimes scooters. It tends to be an incredibly efficient operation.
Presumably they are referring to the customers that are able bodied and own a car. You are stating the obvious
I personally believe that money spent on delivery food is a waste of money, unless it's an emergency or it's sushi: any type of food (excluding sushi) will arrive soggy (especially pizza or burgers) and/or cold and it will definitely be more expensive than necessary.
Doordash and the Pizza arbitrage is a mandatory read on the economics of the delivery apps.
It is inevitable for DoorDash to make tipping an even more annoying and intrusive part of Deliveroo. I can't wait to see how europeen users react to that.
Will be interesting.
Back when I used Deliveroo, tipping always led to worse delivery success rates so I gave up.
They suddenly became really bad recently, which is unfortunate as they generally had the edge on Uber Eats (total charlatans!)
> tipping always led to worse delivery success rates
What does this mean? If you don't tip on doordash in the US, your order just arrives a few minutes later than usual since the auction starts at a lower price and drivers will reject the lowest prices
> A few minutes later than usual
That’s an understatement. Your order sits on the shelf for while before someone picks up if you don’t tip, sometimes more than 30 mins, until DoorDash forces some poor underpaid driver to pick it up sometimes with incentives, but mostly threats on their livelihood. In some cases, drivers do pick it up, don’t deliver, eat your stuff, or drive in other directions to focus on other orders. Orders without tips do extremely poorly these days.
That model will die within weeks in Europe.
Customers will not correlate poor tipping with poor service, because tipping is considered so culturally different. If that behaviour starts to happen, customers will just use it once or twice, have a poor experience and decide "nope, that doesn't work for me, I'll not use that any more".
In the UK Deliveroo offers me a chance to tip when making an order but only really "pushes" it after delivery, conforming to the UK sense of a tip being in response to great service. I've only been minded to do it once when a driver genuinely did something exceptional when I messed up an order - so he got a £5 tip on a £2.50 delivery fee from a restaurant about a mile away from me.
DoorDash could actually try something innovative here - they could eradicate tips, and push service fees up a little, and make a big deal of it in their marketing that their gig economy riders are getting a great deal. If it catches on, you could find this ripple out into other services like Uber, and perhaps change the tone on tipping in general in other scenarios, too.
A tip is essentially an extra 15-20% pseudo-tax on food delivery (at least in the US-where some people feel entitled to be tipped just for doing their job).
> A tip is essentially an extra 15-20% pseudo-tax on food delivery
Then what's the delivery fee?
The fee is to make the delivery happen at all, the tip is to make it happen in a timely manner.
to make the delivery fee seem lower than it really is.
Extra profit for the app, on top of the 30% they charge the restaurant. They do technically pull from the delivery fee for the base offering to drivers, but they certainly don't start the offering there.
No, a tip is a variable component of the price of having your burrito delivered to you in a private taxi cab, and if you don't want to pay it, go pick up your own burrito.
No, I'm already paying for a delivery service fee. A tip is an extra thank you. If restaurants charge me a mandatory fee ("tip") on top of my food price, there's no extra tip on top of that.
I mean, you can choose to pay or not pay for the service. I'm not saying you should go out of your way to patronize businesses that charge you more for your burrito taxi than you think it's worth. But if your burritos arrive cold because you are the lowest bidder for the service, I think you've lost some of the moral high ground to complain.
I have a high moral high ground because I don't use these services at all due to poor treatment of employees.
It's difficult to conflate the moral high ground with maximal participation in a weird auction format when people are just trying to buy a burrito.
In most other countries (like mine Australia) the price of the good is the advertised price. There is no extra weird moral based financial game played on top.
I mean, OK, but they're treated badly because they're not paid enough, which makes tipping a strange complaint! You could use the service, if you wanted. Just pay what it really costs.
> they're treated badly because they're not paid enough
They're also treated badly because they don't know how much they'll get paid in practice, which makes financial planning even more difficult, including comparing job offers. Instead of just getting the higher-paid job, you get lured into accepting a low-paying one with promises of tips that may or may not materialize. My salary is basically the main thing that's legally enforceable when I sign an employment contract, but I wouldn't even get that if I relied on tips.
> Just pay what it really costs.
How much is that exactly? Is that +5/10/20% of the initial price?
Tipping when it becomes non-negligible completely breaks transparency (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(market)) which makes everything less efficient.
> You could use the service, if you wanted. Just pay what it really costs.
Then they should have whatever that is be the actual displayed cost.
As it stands now, there’s an often delivery fee which apparently does not guarantee and reasonable delivery time. How does that make any sense?
Oh certainly, it doesn't make sense at all. We should be presented the cost of the service, including a reasonable wage for the driver.
But it's a little odd to turn this into a moral issue when the app actually does give you the means to pay the driver what you believe is actually fair, above the base amount being charged.
So what this really tells me is that you just think the true cost is more than you want to pay. Which is totally fine.
It doesn't make any sense and it's purely exploitative.
However, you should still tip, because not tipping isn't a protest. You're not hurting doordash by not tipping, you're just hurting the driver and yourself. The driver who, as we've all rightfully pointed out, is already exploited.
Yes so your solution is to buy into that exploitative model?
It’s not a tip. A tip is an additional sign of appreciation for the quality of service. When this becomes a compulsory addition (as it seems to be in US culture) it’s simply a hidden tax, paying it in advance of receiving said service is even more ridiculous. In this case - as we seem to have established - it’s a model that hurts both worker and consumer, allowing exploitative employers to externalise costs by presenting a false moral dilemma.
That's not a solution, but it's what you should be doing. A solution is legislation, any other "solution" is a lie and we should actively disregard anyone who claims otherwise.
> it’s a model that hurts both worker and consumer
Yes, it is. But by not tipping, you're objectively hurting the worker more. Notice my choice of words here - objectively. That means don't bother trying to argue against it.
> but it's what you should be doing
Why?
You haven't even begun to further explain nor explore the wider economic and social implications of what you claim to be the one true way, nor potential alternatives (and why they are impossible or insufficient). You're making increasingly bold claims, therefore you should perhaps back them up. Simply declaring what you think to be true as objectively so, doesn't make it such.
> That means don't bother trying to argue against it.
Thanks, wasn't sure if this was meant to be humorous but it did give me a chuckle.
It's not purely US. In the UK, an "optional" (though not really) ~10% service fee is often added for sit-down service though not if you just pay at the bar. So more like Anglosphere than just US--though US is both higher and more pervasive. I forget what it was the other day but I was asked about a tip for some totally routine retail transaction.
> more like Anglosphere
No such wide spread culture or requirement in 50% of the counties considered to be in the Anglosphere.
Whilst it might exist in some capacity, a capacity that is far more limited, not applied in the same manner and easily avoided. It’s not even remotely the same as the situation in the US where it’s effectively mandatory across the board.
There is no reason for a tip to be given before the actual service is provided. A tip is meant to show appreciation for the quality of service, not to be an insurance to get a barely decent one.
If you’re never coming back or feel it will not reputational impact you, there’s no economic incentive to tip after the service is rendered either.
It’s a moral and social contract decision. In particular if you want to incentive the world to provide good service.
If food delivery services were presented to end users as some sort of bidding model, sure, but it's not. It's presented as simply as "you order food, food gets delivered to you". There's no ability to see how my order might be affected by how much I pay.
For the record, I never use food delivery services because the upcharge is absurd. If I want food delivery it'll be pizza and that's it. At least that's an honest transaction and I don't have to wonder when my food will arrive or how cold it might be.
I don't think GGGP was complaining about the price. I think they were complaining about it being a non-disclosed fee (like tax) while also not being a clearly defined amount (pseudo-tax) and with aggressively bad consequences if someone doesn't go along with the mind game (deliverer eats the food, wastes an hour of your time while you're hungry, need to follow up with support, etc) rather than just an up-front rejection.
Obviously nobody wants to order food on ebay, and if you're going to argue that an auction is the only possible outcome why wouldn't that apply to the restaurant itself too? The restaurant could aggressively underpay/understaff chefs, then you go to pick up the order and restaurant says "Oh someone else offered to buy food at a higher price, but feel free to order again and offer more, and sit here for 30m while we prepare it!"
Yes I paid for a service, I expect to receive said service
Honestly only Americans could come up with this BS justification about "lowest bidder" for a service I'm fully paying for
I’m not from the US so I’m barely concerned with tipping but it seems to me that even in the US, the amount you tip is dependent of the QoS you got.
So I really don’t see the point of tipping beforehand. You can tip the driver when he delivers the meal if that’s what you want.
Anything before the service have been delivered sounds like a fee and, if I understand other comments here, a mean to pay for your position in the queue which imho sounds pretty disgusting.
And even then, you won't know how good or cold it is until you've unwrapped it and started eating it.
No, the service fee is the price of having a burrito delivered.
To be honest, this is all nonsense. When I Doordash I don't really tip and things are fine. My wife tips 10% and she's fine. But I think it's pretty funny that you're going around defending pricing dark patterns with the latest Twitter-trend-du-jour. It's a pity you couldn't refer to the burrito as "slop" eaten only by the "deeply unserious" who need to "go to therapy" because you're "begging them, please read a book". Maybe a little description of how the "enshittification" of the delivery process leads to "ghoulish" requests that demonstrate "late-stage capitalism" in a "mask-off moment".
In the bay area we're talking 25min vs 30min. It's a pretty simple auction: The price increases until someone accepts. The driver has no idea how much you tipped.
Note the implications: If every driver in your area accepts orders at the same price, doordash will absorb the entire tip from every order. I dunno why people make up FUD instead of just doing an image search for what the driver's UI looks like.
https://www.reddit.com/r/doordash_drivers/comments/1kfu6ah/t...
Edit: while it is true that base pay does go up if an order gets declined, it doesn’t ALWAYS go up and if it does, it takes a while to get it to a reasonable rate. That is when your order just sits there.
Wait, wait... You now need to tip BEFORE receiving any service at all? WTF is wrong with you USA?
I explained why you don't need to tip before delivery; your food will just arrive 5min later. Ignore the replies making up fake consequences. He's clearly never used doordash.
It means if you add a tip there's a higher probability of them screwing up the delivery, either not finding my flat (apartment) at all or being severely delayed because they sent someone who cannot read the simple English directions. If you do not add a tip then this tends not to happen. It's the inverse of what you'd expec. It may be some side-effect of Deliveroo asking for the tip in advance - one theory is that the delivery agent thinks I'll give a cash in hand tip and therefore tries harder; or it could be something more obscure, eg perhaps the illiterate delivery agents (of which there are many in London now) generally work faster but cope less well with any modest complexity and they are being rewarded by an algorithm that does not take that into account.
I wish they just exposed the auction system to make the whole tipping thing moot. A slider that sets your delivery fee that updates based on demand / driver availability would eliminate a lot of the awkward social dynamics.
Low fee slower less likely to get a driver. High fee faster drivers will take your order over others.
Deliveroo has not operated in Germany for a while. It might go like that in other countries.
and just exited HK few months ago
Left Australia some time last year. Ironic, given the name.
The one and only time I used Deliveroo I gave a 1 pound tip. A pound or two is a normal service tip for many places in the UK. You would tip your hairdresser or the taxi 1-2 pounds.
I usually give whatever decent change I have laying around, or a fiver if I know them and it has been a while. I never tip via the app. I do tell the driver they'll get a cash tip in the instructions though.
These things are omnipresent in European capitals, it's quite striking. It might be inconvenient but it's not gonna stop people any more than the privacy concerns of the apps do.
Tipping is NOT omnipresent in the European capital I live in. Of course some apps have tipping options but I never found correlation in service quality to tipping. On the contrary, when I tipped, service quality was “less optimal” and I noticed visible entitlement.
That being said, it is cultural norm here to tip by rounding up the order(say total is 2.59/ you tip by asking to make it 3.00/) when you are ordering in person and the service is/was good and the food is/was also good quality. Alternatively, in some restaurant, it is not usual to tip as order is collected by someone near the cash register while served by someone else entirely and someone else is preparing it. Once you are done eating, you return the dishes and go home, so there is no option to tip as you simply don’t tip at the prepayment step because you don’t know the food and service yet, you don’t tip the server as they simply bring the food and walk away.
I don't know why both replies are about tipping when I didn't mention it at all. I meant these delivery drivers are everywhere. I've never used these data-sucking app so I don't know anything about them.
I live in France and use Deliveroo (or UberEats some rare times) maybe once a month.
There is already a tipping UI in the app, but it is not intrusive, nothing as aggressive as what you'd experience in the US where you're inclined to pre-tip even before the delivery happens.
As for the capitals, yes it is becoming a thing but from my personal experience it is limited to touristy places
Click "no" or ignore depending on UI.
The Deliveroo app already asks if you want to tip.
>It is inevitable for DoorDash to make tipping an even more annoying and intrusive part of Deliveroo. I can't wait to see how europeen users react to that.
On demand food delivery is a premium luxury service (though the platforms have done their best to market it as otherwise). Please tip accordingly. These people work their asses off and are generally from a very low income background. If you have problems with that, go to the grocery store.
> On demand food delivery is a premium luxury service, though the platforms have done their best to market it as otherwise. Please tip accordingly
I stopped automatically tipping in New York City and the Bay Area. They earn a minimum wage now [1]. If they go above and beyond, sure, I'll tip. But if they just do their job, there are now regulations that have them get paid.
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/news/018-24/mayor-adams-first-a...
Wait staff have had minimum wage protection for a very long time at the federal level, do you not tip them anywhere?
> Wait staff have had minimum wage protection for a very long time at the federal level, do you not tip them anywhere?
Different contexts. Even though restaurants are meant to make up the gap between the tipped and actual minimums, they often don't. And delivery drivers in New York and California are making well above the federal minimumw wage. Most importantly: a restaurant tip is split between skilled servers and kitchen staff. It's going to multiple people, each of whom have developed a specialised skill that adds value to my experience. None of that is true for someone carting my food to my home.
Absent regulation, I think tipping drivers and delivery staff is good. With regulation, the tradeoff has sort of been made for me.
Explain the logic of not tipping people who make minimum wage?
Because logically I should give tips to every service worker I interact with that makes min wage. I'm obviously not going to do that. If I do tip some category of service workers, it's certainly not going to be the ones that eat/delay/spit in my food as a get back for not tipping them, and it's certainly not going to be the group that makes well above min wage (I. E waiters are the highest-paid min. wage staff).
> Explain the logic of not tipping people who make minimum wage?
It's more that they're regulated, the price of the delivered food is already high, and I'm not putting a premium on their labour above e.g. the folks who prepared the food.
It’s you that needs to explain the logic behind why these people need to be compulsorily tipped instead of receiving a reasonable base wage.
How do I know what their wages are?
That's great for NYC. The other 99% of their markets do not.
NYC and California are 10% of the US population and I'd be unsurprised if the two make up 50% of the food delivery market. Flyover states aren't dense enough for drivers to drop off 3 orders on the way to your home and the median income in many states isn't high enough for people to buy private taxis for their burritos
How are you defining markets? I would be surprised if the 99% stat is true at either the national or global level
or maybe let's not play guessing games with the livelihood of people working in these fields, and let's bake a livable wage in the price... like any other service job ?
Except no other service job does. Outside of a patchwork of local ordinances here and there, few servers makes beyond the state/federal minimum wage without tips. A minimum wage which is almost always below the poverty line.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
I live in Oregon and employees here make a minimum of $14.70/hour and $15.95 in the Portland Metro area before tips. California and Washington have slightly higher minimums, seemingly state-wide. There are other states listed that are not as generous.
I tip but am sympathetic to my relatives who don't. Many places expect you to pay and tip, then take your drinks and food to the table, bus your tables, etc.
The dollar amount doesn't matter if it doesn't add up to a living wage. $15 an hour at 40 hours a week is 31,200 annual before taxes. Is that a living wage in Oregon?
> $15 an hour at 40 hours a week is 31,200 before taxes. Is that a living wage in Oregon?
Absolutely with a roommate.
Low compensation is how the world shouts "we don't value your work, do something else". They should listen.
The comment rears like "This is impossible to do in the US", while it is commonplace in many countries around the world. And of course, there are also many countries where it's more shaded (in Germany you don't need to tip, but it is definitely appreciated and it's leaning a bit more towards the US, but still far away from it)
These kinds of comments always leave me a little puzzled. The people working at the grocery store may well be low income people as well, as well as anyone on the chain of growing and transporting that food.
You do realise you're replying to a comment about a company operating in countries where compulsory tipping isn't normalised?
Tipping culture results in far, far worse working conditions.
Either don't tip, or don't use the service. If you do tip, you're contributing to workers being exploited.
If they want to deliver they can. If they don't they don't have to. There's no problem here. There's a market clearing price and a regulation to protect not being paid enough. I don't also have to guess at a price higher than that. It doesn't give me too much pain if something isn't delivered on time or at all. I can happily adjust plans and rate down the thing I can't get.
As HN frequently points out "your business model is not my problem".
My two cents, tipping should be optional and only reserved for exceptional service.
It is problem with business taking advantage of low income groups and business should be guilt into doing the right thing. Not people for not tipping.
If a company can't exist/ will be bankrupt ( or whatever the greedy business owners complain) if they can't provide livable( not minimum wage that was set 10 years ago and never account for inflation) wage to workers they should not exist in first place.
Tipping just enables this exploitation and at the same time paying billion of dollars to shareholders . I have read news about companies, owners taking share of the tip.
delivery drivers should protest and make sure government to pass bills to stop this exploitation.
these business are taking advantage of situation of vulnerable people who either have to sleep hungry and not exploited or be exploited but have a meal. No idea how we can as a society make it better.
Note that Deliveroo’s Hong Kong business was sold to Foodpanda a few weeks earlier. So it looks like DoorDash only wanted to buy certain markets.
It makes sense that they wouldn't buy the HK business. Operating in HK essentially means entering the Chinese market, which feels like a bold responsibility for Doordash to take on. Better to let a company that's better positioned to buy out that part of the business.
China’s gig-economy dwarves the west. I actually don’t think they can enter the market, simply because the competition will eat them alive.
Interestingly, here in the Phoenix market, with plenty of competing delivery services, there is at least one Chinese native service that competes with the “round eyes”.
Next door in Mesa, there is a significant designated Asian Quarter. So there is a high concentration of Asian restaurants and grocery stores. On a few occasions when ordering DoorDash from one of the big Chinese places, someone from the Chinese service delivered it instead; all receipts were printed in Chinese and sometimes I apparently received someone else’s order entirely.
I believe they did this on purpose to promote use of that native service for this set of restaurants. Unfortunately I don’t feel like reaching out to them or installing their weird Chinese language app, so I decided to simply steer clear of those most authentic restaurants instead.
> competes with the “round eyes”. > weird Chinese language app
Not sure if you're intending it, but this reads as really racist.
For what it’s worth Mongolians call Westerners ‘coloured eyes’ - I wouldn’t immediately consider ‘round eyes’ having racist intent.
> weird Chinese language app
I can’t really defend that one though.
It's playing off the old trend of depicting Asians with slits for eyes and buck teeth. You can't call one racist without including the rest.
From a business standpoint, operating in China means basically every aspect of your operations need to be duplicated and built from scratch. Accounting, legal, compliance, engineering. People in China don't use the same payment methods. Hiring people is different. The ability to reuse your existing business knowledge and infrastructure is completely kneecapped.
You're likely referring to HungryPanda (熊猫外卖), which has carved out quite a niche in this and now operates across the US, Canada, Australia, Asia (outside China), Europe, etc.
I actually use this, I'm really into authentic Chinese food and some of the places aren't on the mainstream delivery apps but are on HungryPanda. The app is pretty bad but usable.
Probably related that Foodpanda announced they were shutting down in Thailand.
Interested to see how this plays out.
Deliveroo has been on a downslope for a while; exiting international markets and losing home market share. And despite DoorDash's US dominance, they still haven't made significant growth with their international operations.
still haven't made significant growth with their international operations
DoorDash operates under the brand Wolt in Europe, and based just on how much I see their branding on delivery people around town, they seem to have grown quite a bit and the past couple of years.
That's fair, and I understand their international dynamics, though brand <> growth.
They've been active outside of N.America for >5 years and aside from expanding their geo footprint, they're still far from winning in most/ all markets. Which is surely the aim.
I rode for deliveroo for about a month and a half before they got out of Dodge in Europe due to breaking employment rules. The good riders who joined early were making ridiculous amounts of money in the beginning. When I came on the rider pool was diluted and it just got worse.
They ought to rename themselves Deliveroo. It's a better name.
I've never understood why no delivery app driver can find my flat, despite me clearly marking its location with a pin, making a note of where I am, and making sure that when you put my address into google maps, it points directly at my flat. Every single delivery driver has to phone me and ask where I am while they stand on the other side of the road, looking at a house I don't live in. Are they seriously all this incompetent??
</rant>
My building is at the end of the block but all the delivery apps think it's in the middle or towards the other end even though when you put my address in Google Maps the location is correct. So I've taken to standing outside when the driver is close and flagging them down.
That's what I have to do as well. I'm not sure what the purpose of the "here is exactly where I am" map thing on Deliveroo is if they just completely ignore it, as well as the delivery driver instructions
A lot of them just completely ignore the written instructions and map.
These purchases only goal is to reduce competition and create monopolies. And the some people will defend the companies with "but if they are the best why should not be a monopoly?". The easy answer is that they are bad but just purchased their monopoly with investor money.
Capitalism is dying.
I recently found out that Wolt (being available in lots of european countries) is also owned by DoorDash
Mergers and acquisitions working the way mergers and acquisitions have always worked is not "capitalism is dying".
In France we have still a bit of competition with a super small company called delicity.
They have surprisingly survived the past few years by making drivers a priority. Basically, all drivers recommend delicity in my area because they pay more, and they tell restaurants to sign up.
Don't know how they are going to compete now.
My neighbor has delivery (sometimes two separate drivers/services at a time when him and his wife want different types of food) at least 3 times a week. To each their own with their finances, but I just can’t bring myself to pay all of the extra fees. Also, the food is usually listed at a higher price to make up for the cut the various apps take.
I’d rather just call the restaurant directly and get it myself. For some of these restaurants, the savings is 20-35% by just grabbing it rather than using a delivery app.
So your time has no value (not just going there and back, but preparing to leave, dressing, undressing etc.)?
Your car/other transport is completely free? I wonder what's the difference, but I've calculated for myself a while back and going to a restaurant just isn't worth it.
For me often even if I literally drive by a shopping centre when this restaurant is, I would just order on my phone instead and have it delivered to my home. It takes so much time to park in multi-story garage, then go like 200+m from my car to this restaurant (the only Burger King in my city) and back, wait for the order... Doesn't make sense for me, I hate this time wasting system.
But now Uber Eats announced the One will only cover half of the delivery fee, so looking at the trend of enshittification from now in it soon might be just worth it...
Not OP, but when I order take out, I usually pick it up on my way from work. It hardly takes any extra time or mileage. It's often faster than ordering delivery. Also, somehow with delivery the food is always colder than when I pick it up myself.
Time? I cook a lot. I'd argue time spent showering, shaving, cooking, etc. can be useful and relaxing "thinking" time. These are only a chore if you have the wrong mindset.
Well, time enjoyed spending isn't time wasted. For me I don't like cooking, showering, shaving (or especially picking up deliveries), I do it as least as I can. On the other hand I do walk for like 1-1.5h every day, and this time I do enjoy.
First FreeNow and now Deliveroo. So much for European independence from US companies. It’s a wonder why these sales were approved in this climate.
> a wonder why these sales were approved in this climate
The EU and UK have no good options at the merger level. If they block the sale, it trashes the start-up ecosystem. If they let it through, an American company buys a local one.
The fundamental problem is the paucity of new-firm formation in the EU and UK, the scaling barriers they face that American compeitors don't, and the increased culture of risk-taking in America that lets its firms pay more for acquisitions. The last can't be addressed. The first two probably can by the EU. (The UK is not a viable sovereign entity in these regards.)
Yes as an American who’s loved in Europe for six years or so the risk taking and desire to start and do things a little differently is just night and day more than it is in Europe, generally speaking.
I'll never forget how jealous the Dutch coffee shop owner I met was of Americans.
Dude worked at a bank - respectable white collar job acc. to his Dutch friends and family. He picked up a passion for coffee and wanted to open his own shop. His loved ones all thought he was nuts to leave a stable job for a maybe.
I'm sure there's a degree of that in the US, but we have a lot more "just try stuff" in our cultural myths than the Europeans tend to. Guy felt like his options were keep a job he hates or be disowned by everyone he knows.
Perhaps his friends and family were just being reasonable? Leaving banking to start a coffee shop is a drastic, risky move. Passion doesn't pay the bills or fund retirement and I'd legitimately wonder if someone was having a mental health crisis if they told me that was their plan.
> Passion doesn't pay the bills or fund retirement and I'd legitimately wonder if someone was having a mental health crisis if they told me that was their plan
We're still on a startup board, correct?
That's not what I thought HN primarily was.
It's advertising, outreach, and public relations for a startup incubator company. There aren't ads here, because the website is the ad.
What's the point of working in finance if you don't make enough money to quit and try something new for a couple of years? You make it sound like his job only pays a little more than flipping burgers.
New coffeshop owner most likely pays less than flipping burgers. I'd imagine for the first three years at least, it's going to be a loss, especially on a cash flow basis. If the business can survive long enough, it might work out.
OTOH, if it fails, you just go back to banking, right? No big deal; hopefully you had fun.
Very anecdotal and stereotypical, of course. Doesn't quite paint the whole picture, though I agree there's usually a sentiment of risk aversion in the _conservative_ part of any population, perhaps more so in countries where employment for anything beyond SMEs is more normalized, like Germany and Austria that have adopted a "Rhine capitalism" model that is much more constrained.
Just to give some counter-weight to this, the Netherlands has a self-employment rate that is significantly higher than the EU average [1], one of the higher EU rates of high-growth micro/small enterprises [2], a whole array of tax benefits for the self-employed and SMEs and a relatively fast moving law system that makes it increasingly easier for SMEs to be founded. And let's not forget a bunch of capitalist/financial scoops (first stock market, 1602; first investment banking, 1700s; first investment fund, 1774; etc.) some of which still have a presence today. Needless to say my experience is quite the opposite.
[1] https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/en/tools/skills-intelligence/s... [2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
> I'm sure there's a degree of that in the US, but we have a lot more "just try stuff" in our cultural myths than the Europeans tend to
Myth is the important word here for most people in the US. Unless you are already fairly wealthy or have wealthy parents your options are incredibly limited in the US because of the lack of a social safety net.
Where in the US? In California if you quit your job you'll get free healthcare and ~$300/mo in food on your EBT card. You only have to be wealthy enough to pay rent. Median net worth in the US is $200k which can last quite a while.
The vast majority of people in the US don't live in California, and even those who do might be slightly better off in terms of healthcare and food, but given that CA has the second highest cost of living behind Hawaii and >25% of the country's homeless population I'm not sure it's considerably better.
Net worth is a poor metric for this, it includes a lot of illiquid assets. You can't eat your car if you lose your job. On the other hand the median savings account balance is $8k which isn't going to last very long at all
> You can't eat your car if you lose your job.
No, but you can live in and save rent. Gotta be able to move it, at least every once in a while, though.
Live in a college town. Either do contracting, or work at eg CVS/Walgreens/Sam's Club/Costco etc for $16-$20 per hour. Pay your bills with that. Work on your start-up ambitions. It will provide you a forever runway. Is it easy? Of course not, it's very long hours. It's very viable however. I did that path at one point so I wouldn't need VC while I hacked away at ideas, wouldn't have any contracting conflicts, and wouldn't have to touch my investments to sustain myself. And those businesses will also give you decent health insurance (worth $8k-$10k in terms of if you had to foot the bill solo).
Meh - this isn't a Europe thing. That same sentiment of their friends and family would be even much stronger in e.g. Korea or India.
Deliveroo is a UK company. It doesn't matter to the EU. It's also very much non strategic so I don't see why it would be blocked either way.
The GP said European, not EU. Its a concern in the UK too.
There is no such thing as European independence. Europe is a continent, not a political entity.
The EU is a political entity which happens to be reconsidering its independence from the US. The UK very much is not and is kowtowing favours hoping to get a good deal.
Yes, but the comment said "European" nonetheless.
"European" describes multiple political entities each of which has similar concerns.
The only one of those entities that has actually made any progress towards independence from the US is Russia.
I don't think UK has similar concern as the rest of the UE.
What they have in common is doing nothing effective.
Unfortunately the current UK government has about as much backbone as a jellyfish.
From what I read Deliveroo was founded by two Americans and they got their VC investments from the US. Its just that they focused their operations in Europe.
FWIW there still are some popular European alternatives left, such as Bolt, Glovo or JustEat
Tangential and anecdotal, but despite supposedly being the UK market leader JustEats is pretty terrible. I've used them twice in as many years and the experience was awful both times. Missing items, meat in vegetarian dishes, late delivery, cold food etc... . You can report issues via the app but have to select one of a generic list of issues and only get a paltry partial refund - think 33% off for an order that was stone cold on arrival. The app doesn't seem to be able to handle more than one issue per order. There is a well-hidden customer service chat but they don't seem to be any more flexible than the ap.
No-one's approval is required apart from the company's board...
Not strictly true. In the UK, at least, a sale of a business needs to be signed off by the Cabinet Office if it is considered strategic or a security risk [1].
Unlikely, in the case of Deliveroo, but I went through this exact process and it took about a month or so to get sign off and to be allowed to sell my own company to a foreign buyer (health tech)
There’s also monopoly and competition regulation that could stop a sale.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/national-security-and-investment...
Does any of this apply to Deliveroo, though?
The general case is that no approval is needed in the UK to sell a company to anyone. This is a "free country".
This was especially a reply to the implied suggestion that there was some sort of political approval process.
The EU’s competition review will likely apply due to DoorDash’s Wolt subsidiary. The criteria is outlined here: https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/mergers/procedures_e...
I doubt the EU is going to block it since AFAIk they’re not competing in any country directly against each other.
Competition reviews are common, although I don't know enough about the two companies to know if they have high enough market share in any countries where they both operate.
There might be because they are big but this should be a formality since Doordash does not operate in any countries where Deliveroo does.
My reply was rather to the suggestion that there was some sort of political approval.
And Wolt.
Ugh. Deliveroo is a pretty borderline proposition as is already. Can’t imagine this will improve it
If it wasn’t for Amex discounts I wouldn’t use it at all
Most startups in the UK have either:
1. Sold to a foreign buyer
2. Shut down
3. Relocated to the US
4. Are stagnant
The UK is up for sale (at a discount)
That is how globalisation is supposed to work.
British companies have bought plenty abroad too:
it works great until you realize that your country's most strategic economic assets are in the hands of a strategic rival or shut down.
Whether it works well or not is a different issue.
It is 1) a deliberate decision and 2) not unique to any one country.
You could say the same for traditional businesses. Or real estate. Or the farmlands. Even the political parties (for the princely sum of 50,000 quid).
The UK is up for sale.
It is a global phenomenon and is a result of how capital markets work. When you have money, it’s easier to make more money by gobbling up assets. US has capital more readily available to try new things, fail and eventually build massive successes. The successes then get reinvested in the form of even more capital.
When Manchester United is owned by US billionaires, everything else is up for grabs.
And yet the UK attracts twice the VC investments the next European country does.
Is it because of the language?
London is the biggest tech hub outside of the US and one of the biggest financial hubs anywhere, plus Oxford and Cambridge are just 1 hour away by train.
> London is the biggest tech hub outside of the US
You must be excluding China there, as it alone has multiple tech hubs that make London look meaningless.
Which Chinese city is bigger than London in VC money?
Tech hub != VC money.
Read the thread again. Since you haven't given your any metrics of your own, the default is the one already in context of the thread.
Fair enough, though VC hub would've been a more apt phrasing then. I just mentioned it because in terms of actual tech development going on, the gap between 1. SV / China and 2. anywhere else (including London) is so absurdly vast it's almost meaningless to be 2nd in VC investment, you might as well be 10th.
That's fair, I don't disagree, I was just giving reasons why the UK gets so much more VC than European countries. I was probably a bit slapdash with my statement but I think it's true in the context I was speaking in.
Banking and incorporation laws.
International operations? Is DoorDash entering new markets?
> Outside the United States, DoorDash and its European subsidiary Wolt have operations in a combined total of 32 other countries as of the end of 2024.
From wikipedia.
Little did I know. Thanks!
I wish these apps allowed ordering takeout.
You can do that on both Deliveroo and Uber Eats in the UK
I'm not sure why anyone would pay a 30% markup vs restaurant menu + fees to pick it up themself though
This is disappointing from an innovation perspective. I know Deliveroo are just there to make money but they were uniquely positioned to do something transformative with their apps over the past ten years. Instead, we’ve basically seen little to no innovation on the consumer product other than an expansion from restaurants to now including grocery deliveries and group ordering.
What about including a human, social element? Deliveroo could have been a channel for building a relationship between customers and Frankie’s Pizza where I could hear about upcoming specials, promotions, news about their expansion to a second location etc.
There could be an integration with power users (superhosts, sort of, but the analogy isn’t exact) where consensus can form around who really is the best Chinese food in town. Let’s get the hygiene rating of the kitchen front and centre too (perhaps they do this in some markets?)
For the riders, why has there never been a successful internal commitment to building a positive human workforce on the city streets? I feel like the brand started that way with their iconic jerseys and oversized food boxes but devolved into freelancers of the lowest common denominator. When my orders started arriving 50/50 in a just eat thermal bag, it really drove home the point that these services are never about long term value for the human workforce. We are now haggling on price in an auction against everyone else in the same way airline flights compete solely on price. When that happens, just as with airlines, any notion of a quality product or differentiation on service goes down the drain. It’s as if the major component of service differentiation is the lower price which is such a shame when there’s so much opportunity to shine as a food service app.
If these companies truly do want to race to the bottom as generic low latency courier services then perhaps we will hopefully see them exit the app layer and solely occupy the transport layer, leaving space at the app level for someone who cares about the state of restaurants, food, and quality, leaving the delivery part to the auction apps. I’d much rather have a high quality integrated service but if we’re obviously not going to get that then the sooner they stop trying the better.
Last time I used deliveroo I got a spam/scam phone call 20 minutes later. I presume the drivers sell customer names, addresses, and phone numbers.
These apps don't usually give the driver or restaurant access to the customer's phone number.
They use a proxy system where the driver has to call a standard number provided by the app and then input a code to identify the specific customer.
That's typically only available while the order is in progress.
Do you know for sure that's the case for deliveroo?
> We’ll cover more than 40 countries with a combined population of more than 1 billion people, enabling us to provide more local businesses with the tools and technology they need to thrive,” said Tony Xu, CEO and Co-founder of DoorDash.
This makes zero sense to me for a logistics company specializing in local to local deliveries. Being bigger in a given geographic area grants some benefits of scale and efficiency but being in Seattle and Bangkok there's really no difference than two separate apps. Just with the nature of the business you probably want this to be as local as possible so the profits aren't siphoned out of your community.
As an example, US has Uber and Lyft and Mexico has Uber and Didi. When someone from Mexico goes to US, they probably wont have Lyft, and someone from the US won’t have Didi. So Uber gets most travellers’ business automatically.
Likewise even though Uber in Japan is (almost) all taxis and not actual Uber drivers, most global tourists have Uber and not something like Go that’s specific to Japan. So they are profiting off almost all the taxi rides from Western visitors.
> Being bigger in a given geographic area grants some benefits of scale and efficiency
And dictating terms to local restaurants and delivery workers, with the threat of shutting them out of the largest market.
If you've made your restaurant dependent on any deliver app, you've already made a fatal mistake in a cutthroat industry.
It doesn't take great effort for a restaurant to do good without being on these apps. But some owners want to pay 15-20% of their gross revenue to a megacorp for the rest of their lives rather than invest a few hundreds or thousands in getting their own customers. We see the same thing in a ton of industries.
The more cutthroat an industry is, the less players in it are able to avoid long-term risks like dependence on a single party, if those risks provide a short-term edge.
Both my local Indian and Chinese use justeat. I don't select them because they're on justeat, I use justeat because it has them.
If they changed to another platform then I'd simply move to that platform. Of course these companies did deliveries far before techbros decided to "disrupt" the industry.
That's great. Wanna bet the future of your family business on the great majority of consumers acting like you, and only a negligible number being steered by convenience and habit?
Based on what I see on my local Uber Eats, it’s mostly delivering food from low-quality ghost kitchens and McDonald’s to people who can’t be bothered to find anything better.
I’d find it too depressing to run any kind of family business that involved food delivery.
Yup, before "tech" arrived food delivery was quite normal in the UK, and from watching 80s and 90s sitcoms quite normal in the US too. Indeed the "pizza porn trope" is as old as the hills [0]
I don't know anyone that regularly orders a takeaway by looking at some random website for some random crap, maybe it's a big city thing. I've tried to use things like ubereats in the past when away on business - last time in New York where everywhere was closed downtown at about 11pm, including the hotel room service. I was very disappointed, and vowed never again. I did something similar a couple of years earlier with the same vow though.
[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PizzaBoySpecialD...
People often travel outside of their town. Having the same app in the next place you are offers some benefits for the users. And potential for earnings.
It's junk food people, don't eat it!
Probably a needed move (and timely with the recent upsurge in Reform UK wins). Deliveroo has been running on a regulatory arbitrage -- it got to decent size in the UK due to lax laws on low quality/illegal immigration. If that has an expiry date approaching (it looks like it does), to maintain its scale it has to plan for a technological shift in the way it operates -- it is too small to do that by itself. DoorDash isn't.
Maybe the reason your comment has been downvoted is because people on HN aren’t aware of the intersection between UK employment law, specifically independent contractors substitution rules, delivery apps and modern slavery.
An easy to follow starting point here for people interested:
https://archive.ph/2024.03.15-193026/https://inews.co.uk/new...
Here in London, we've already boycotted all the services except Dominoes. Poor practices, delivery to wrong addresses, cold food, worse quality compared to eat-out, and items often missing. It's quicker and better for me to hike up the hill and eat the same food than to deal with all the nonsense. Deliveroo was particularly bad. On top of that, it's restaurant prices for take away food. There's no advantage for me.