If I'm at home I'll look at the menu of my favourite indian/chineese/whatever place, phone them up, and they deliver it as they have done for decades.
I've spent two nights in a hotel since March, normally it's 70 a year. One night I ordered a dominos as I got back to the hotel just before 2300. The other night I ate out with a supplier.
Likewise with Uber, if I'm at home and not flying off somewhere, I'm not going to be ordering a taxi, either to get to the airport, or when I'm in a strange city on the other side of the planet.
I can see this is the golden age of takeaways and home-delivery (which basically means amazon or groceries), but I don't see it for takeaways.
So many times, I will be super busy with the kids, or work, or housework, and I will just pull up DoorDash with one hand (while the other is feeding a hangry 1 year old) and hit ‘reorder’ on one of my past meals. Literally 15 seconds and food is on the way.
Compare this to having to call someone, wait on hold, give my phone number/address, tell them my order, correct the mistakes, find my wallet, get out my credit card, give them the number, confirm the number and expiration and security code, then sign a paper copy with the tip when the driver drops it off.
Can I do the old style of delivery? Sure, but man it is a lot easier now.
Most fast food place either use JustEat or Hungry to accept your order and take your credit card information, if they don't have their own website or app. They will have their own drivers, employed and paid directly by the restaurant and they don't expect a tip.
That's what I compare any "startup" food delivery service to. So they will always be worse and more expensive, because a third party is now involved.
Tastier the food, stronger the accent.
Several places we flat out can’t communicate with.
The worse is a local pizza joint with the thickest Indian accent I’ve every heard. I work with Indians, and I still can’t understand them. Really good pizza.
Ask the whole kid angle. Kids screaming, work screaming, wife screaming...
Why isn't this a thing? Is it that few/no restaurants have delivery drivers?
I can't imagine many restaurants benefit that much from the discovery features in UE/DD/etc.
As for discovery, I don’t have data, but I know personally that about half of my regular order spots are places I found by scrolling through door dash.
Your argument (that it is not much of a barrier to use the old way) can be made for so many of the quality of life improvements we have made over the course of human history. Not every advancement is an entire new category of things we can accomplish; so much is just slight improvements that save time and make things a bit easier.
I feel like there has been a backlash against time saving tech, where people wax nostalgic about how much better the older/slower systems were. I don't understand it. I am so happy for all the timesaving advancements we have made over the years. Now, if we don't use that saved time wisely, that is a whole other issue. However, I don't think going back to slower systems is the solution to not using our free time well.
It isn't a luddite backlash. It's just that in many cases the value-add for customers doesn't justify the price difference.
There are certain benefits to apps that exist, don't get me wrong. Discoverability, flexible pricing, direct-to-consumer-marketing, etc. But most of those don't apply to me at the consumer level. Do I want to pay 20% more for the convenience of browsing menus? Not really. I'm on the app to buy food and get it delivered. Insofar as some places now offer delivery where before they didn't, I benefit. Insofar as the same places I used to frequent now apply a markup to cover the cut the app gets, I lose out.
The UX improvement of being able to press 'reorder' has never eclipsed calling into my favourite local spot, asking for the regular, wishing the owner well, then discovering he put extra dumplings in the bag for me.
I view it as an unstable equilibrium -- something's gotta give sooner or later, these businesses are barely sustainable. Is the convenience ultimately worth it in the aggregate, if Uber needs to embrace tactics like these just to survive?
(I admit I have a bias here, I think the gig economy sucks.)
You're also enabling a parasitic corporation to generate more revenue, when it should be shuttered with nearly a billion in losses every quarter.
.... from somewhere new
