alt Hacker NewsThe problem for restaurant-employed delivery staff is nearly the same as the customer-employed delivery staff mentioned above. The driver sits around in the restaurant parking lot twiddling his thumbs and then 10 lunch orders come in over the course of an hour, most of which while the driver’s out delivering the first order. The last order ends up taking 2 hours to get to the customer who is not at all pleased with cold, soggy food long after the lunch break ended.
The food delivery app business works like the insurance business: the aggregate drivers form a risk pool [1] to protect restaurants from the variability of demand. This allows a single restaurant to be able to accept 10 food delivery orders in a matter of minutes just as easily as they would for orders coming in from the tables in their dining room. The app would dispatch up to 10 drivers to handle those orders and even automatically batch them according to proximity of destination.
Of course the app can also handle multiple restaurants in a similar area in the same way so that drivers can be dispatched most efficiently to handle all the demand for an entire city. The more drivers, restaurants, and customers centralize on a single delivery app, the more efficient the system can be (assuming the app developers know how to optimize the transshipment problem [2]).
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You can't really fix the problem that everyone tends to order during lunch and dinner hours. No matter how you arrange the delivery staff, there will be too much demand during those times, and too little the rest of the day.
There's arguably been some efficiency lost, as some restaurants had the drivers cross trained to help with making the food.
The problem for restaurant-employed delivery staff is nearly the same as the customer-employed delivery staff mentioned above.
And yet somehow we had restaurant delivery for 50 years before the invention of the cell phone. And grocery delivery for a hundred years before that.
Both pizza joints, and the Chinese place I order from employ their own people.
The only thing that's changed is that a certain cohort of people are terrified to pick up a phone and speak to another human being, and so delegate that most basic of human functions to a computer program.
The only actual utility of these apps is the ability to track and obsess over the precise location of my food, as if I'm going to die of starvation if I don't know exactly where it is.
Lovely, it’s really a useful tool.
Unfortunately it’s management is opaque and manipulative, in the hands of a one self-interested actor.
If anything, this sort of market would be well served by a publicly funded (not necessarily by a Government, let’s throw blockchains into the mix) neutral and transparent platform
What businesses need is delivery drivers.
If the business has a delivery driver, that driver should get priority on the app. But that'll never happen, because that's a slippery slope to just being an ordering platform - a much smaller moat.
I was a driver. When not delivering, we waited, checked out, cooked food, got ahead on end-of-night cleaning, etc.
If the orders piled in, we made them ourselves then delivered them. If it was a slow night, they let a line cook go and we took over, while the manager filled in while we were out on delivery.
We were the ones who stayed late to clean the kitchen, because we delivered right up until close. On slow nights, we got out the door right at close. On busy nights, it might be two hours later as we handled the backlog of cleanup / closeout.
Delivery drivers are efficient flexible resources with less overhead than the apps.