IMO this branch of the thread signifies the core of the issue.

I'd argue that if we went down the rabbit hole of delivery startups to find where the thought originated that these kinds of businesses "must work somehow", we'd find irrationality.

Recently, I've come to realize that maybe all that's bad in the world is simply that at one point in the value supply chain someone favored an irrational over a rational thought. In case that person was very influental, we get cases like this where food is delivered through a permanently unprofitable strategy.

I wish we could just further rationalize the whole business to find the actual product's value and its market fit. Intuitively, it probably lays within canibalizing the actual business heavily and by e.g. not really delivering food on demand anymore. People just want the convenice of getting food quickl yand a wide variety + a threshold of quality.

Delivery drivers are one option to a huge solution space.

But those companies and investors can't afford to backtrack anymore. They now have to die to make space for a more adjusted solution. It's absurd.