That's not a slam on businesses in a bubble phase, either. Many industries go through one before settling into a steady, sustainable state. Just surprised that delivery is still in one, while related industries, like ride-share are cooling off.
It would be more interesting if we knew how much they actually paid in hard cash; the rest is effectively just promises of money in the form of a valuation that hasn't materialized in liquid form yet.
If you're an early employee of Caviar and got $1M in AMZN stock or options? You could sell it for cash. DoorDash stock? It could be $0 in a few years for all you know, and you quite possibly have no avenues to liquidate it for anything now.
If they get big enough, next time they steal wages, they won't have to back down. Heck, if they get big enough, they can steal wages, drive the company broke, and then get a bail out to pay the higher ups that are making the decisions that drove the company into the ground in the first place.
We then have the gall to blame Adam Smith, who didn't even believe in separation of funding and management (i.e. he didn't believe in joint-stock companies)
As an example, take Uber. The Economist recently asked whether it can ever make money. [1] And events in the months since don't make it any clearer. [2]
I think tech's wave of quasi-monopolies (Google, Facebook, Amazon) gave investors the notion that similarly dominant players could be established in non-tech fields if they were dressed up as technology plays. So we see absurd amounts of cash being poured into things like Uber and WeWork. Unlike the previous players, we also see them going to IPO while they're still losing money.
And sadly, I think you're right about regulatory laxness. Antitrust regulation has been out of fashion for a long time. And if we see it come back, it could well be more an authoritarian political tool than any actual attempt to ensure competitive markets.
[1] https://www.economist.com/business/2019/04/27/can-uber-ever-...
[2] https://www.economist.com/business/2019/04/27/can-uber-ever-...
I think for there to be political will to redistribute the power that concentrates in monopolies, there needs to be a clear rallying cry.
When you look at the trust busters of the 20th and 19th century, they had a clear rallying cry from the masses: improve working conditions.
I wonder if with automation taking over, the new rallying cry will be UBI? I mean, to pay for such a thing, you need to redistribute social wealth, which is now concentrating in monopolies.
People notice the concentration of money, and the lack in other parts, more than the particulars of how markets work. Then the rallying cry brings about change in unexpected ways, maybe? I don't know, but I'm hopeful.
As to getting downvoted, I'm not surprised, my take: Many people in tech now are very idealistic and have a lot vested into the companies they work with. They truly believe door dash is about 'empowering small businesses' (or whatever pretty words their employer has on the about us).
And the thing is, doordash does do that. But the reason for it's valuation, and the ultimate purpose of the investors, is rent seeking. Providing service is the way to get people hooked, it's a secondary consideration for these investors. So anything that directly or indirectly highlights this discrepancy between what the workers are trying to achieve and what the ultimate company beneficiaries are trying to achieve, will be viewed with hostility by those who so truly want to make the world a better place. Which I think is the majority here. :)
Intervention? The government only discourages anticompetitive practices. Literally buying a competitor is not one, its subject to approval at some amounts, but is not anticompetitive behavior, as in predictably by the rules.
There should be enough role models by now to dissolve whatever egalitarian promise you were fed in elementary school. Why even waste any breath on these completely ineffective set of rules, when you already know the playbook, you spelled it out! Play those cards man, generational wealth is knocking at your door
travis kalanick is investing millions of his own cash into this space.
There's room to improve in the US, like making kitchens without the attached restaurant more prevalent, but as long as you have to get in a car to deliver the food, there's going to be the same problems the rideshare industry faces.
1) Ghost kitchens that only serve via delivery apps. You can save on rent by setting it up in an area with no foot-traffic. You can also get economies of scale.
2) Restaurants with dedicated entrances for delivery drivers. Baar Baar in NYC has a separate place where delivery workers can wait. In other restaurants, they have to wait in the limited dining area. One hopes that the workers still get to use restrooms & get some water, etc.
A variety of restaurants just doesn’t exist in many places. It’s fast food, fast casual, and maybe a couple of local pizza/taco places.
Beyond that, good luck.
Incidentally, that was my first estimate for how far in the country I was when I travelled a lot for work: "How many reviews does {insert fast food restaurant} have on Yelp?"
Turns out, people only leave lots of Yelp reviews for Taco Bells when that's the only thing around.
I have always heard food delivery as a business is a great way to lose money. Do you have any examples of companies doing it profitably?
Food delivery as part of a QSR can be profitable but most businesses don’t track margins efficiently enough to know the difference.
New business model for Square?: Acquire companies, onboard them onto Square's business platform, sell them
Network effects are pretty strong. Locally, I don't know anyone who uses anything other than SkipTheDishes.
This isn't meant to be a triggering comment. I'm genuinely curious to learn about other people's reactions to DoorDash's former tipping system.
Why so unforgiving? Because you can't deter unethical behavior by merely asking for a perpetrator to discontinue the unethical behavior if/when exposed. The expected value of a penalty needs to exceed the financial reward of the behavior it is meant to punish. Furthermore, I don't trust companies who are likely to be unethical the moment someone isn't looking.
That way DoorDash provides at least a partial matching contribution to my tip instead of eating from my tip.
Once they modify their system and move to a system where drivers get 100% of the tips the drivers will probably see approximately the same payouts on average, just with higher variance across drivers. Basically what DoorDash was doing is the same as tip-pooling at a restaurant which isn't exactly a controversial practice.
Also they announced they were "investigating the issue" for 4 months before, and then didn't make a change. So let's not congratulate them until its been confirmed to be actually working as drivers and customers expect.
There are some restaurants that are exclusive on certain platforms (UberEats for example is exclusive with McDonalds), so if you want that, there's only one game in town, but most people I know who use these platforms regularly (myself included) aren't using them for a specific restaurant. It's more like, "I want sushi! I wonder what is available on my platform of choice?"
Beyond they all have slightly different pricing models, but at the end of the day they all cost about the same.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/7/11/20688108/postmates-acqu...
Looks like Doordash doubled its US marketshare in the last year mostly at Grubhub's expense while others have remained more or less flat.
For example as a user I have literally never had a good experience with Caviar. It almost always wrong in different ways.
As a courier one time the guy called and said that the restaurant was taking so long that Caviar would no longer pay him to wait so we ended up paying him out of pocket to cover it (he said we could cancel and get our money back but that he'd also get nothing after waiting for a very long time).
Uber Eats, as a user, has usually worked pretty well. As a courier one of them told us they constantly have out of date restaurant menus, people order from them, the restaurant substitutes or ignores it completely and now they have to deal with an angry person.
It really feels like restaurants are not equipped to handle these types of services and all of the services don't train their people if at all, as well as treating them kinda like crap many times.
That courier was full of shit. You get paid regardless of customer status, and you also get paid per minute over a certain delay threshold. Sounds like you just got a bad actor.
I mean, that's basically what he said but that it had been an hour and a half (IIRC) and he said Courier would stop paying him to wait.
I've never been a courier so I wouldn't know.
A lot has changed since then, and we’ve had several pretty negative encounters with them including one where the CS rep basically accused us of lying about not receiving our food. (I suspect it was misdelivered because the map software they used put our address as our neighbors house two doors down.)
My last experience with them: The app told us to contact them for an ETA on our food. The actual status of our order wasn’t clear. We had a dasher and then we didn’t have a dasher. There was no way to contact them. We tried “Contact the dasher” and the number didn’t go through. We tried to use the chat functionality (which is ridiculously buried under four or five levels of clicks and even then not immediately obvious” when it used to be basically automatic if you clicked “help”) and it wouldn’t connect us. We tried another number which also didn’t go through. The website had a message about difficulty placing orders at that time but ours was already placed.
So there we sat in limbo not knowing if the food would ever arrive and no way to contact anybody. Should we just go out to eat? We didn’t know. We did use their web form contact them, but the response came way too late to not have ruined our meal time. Eventually our order was cancelled and to their credit they gave us $50 credits but meh.
DoorDash app and website are a dumpster fire with usability and bugs galore.
The issue is as a user is if you bring this up to DoorDash support they have no internal process for handling reported issues with the app and website and letting the development team know.
As far as I know, DoorDash wasn't in that space before; I wonder if that's part of the reason for the acquisition. (The alternative is that they may not be interested in that side of the business at all and shut it down.)
How are these acquisitions not in violation of these laws. Especially from the Big Tech Cos that slurp up literally any small competitor.
From the article:
"DoorDash's acquisition of Caviar creates a highly differentiated company with a unique brand and wide-ranging selection."
How is this not a play at eliminating competition?
To your more general question of "how is this not a play at eliminating competition" - consider it more "can we (DoorDash) make more money operating Caviar by finding synergies with our existing infrastructure, than we pay for Caviar based on a model that describes Caviar operating under Square without that benefit?" That's a question of efficiency, not competition, and it's generally a good thing.
Using a monopoly in one industry to negatively affect businesses in another industry or gain a monopoly there is illegal.
I’m trying to figure out if their Developer API is a chasing-Stripe distraction for them or a good defensive move.
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/18/perspectives/principles-gig-e...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/01/square-earnings-q2-2019.html
Seriously, I don't know the logic behind behind that name.
