This is nearly incoherent… He doesn't order from Sprig because it's too efficient? I mean you are welcome to value whatever you want, but if you're against efficiency you will probably have a problem with nearly every for-profit business; all his complaints are at least as true of any restaurant that hires full time employees.
> In the hypothetical future we can label Full Josephine, many people don’t cook, but some people cook a lot more, and better, than ever before, and all of us, cooks and non-cooks, derive pleasure from that."
Minus rhetorical flourishes, this is identical to the Sprig future, with the difference that in the case of Sprig the cooks are compensated with full-time employment rather than the joy of cooking. It sounds like the author doesn't really value that, but I bet a lot of Sprig employees do!
The actual future: Some people cook for Josephine, some work for Sprig, some work for traditional restaurants, some people eat the above food, lots of people still make their own food.
I thought his point was that Sprig promotes a more "megacorp" future where if you enjoy cooking and want to do it for a living you must work for Sprig or a similar megacorp as an employee, with little agency in your cooking or career.
On the other hand, he thinks Josephine's model promotes a future where telecommunications helps connect people who are more akin to small-business owners than employees with customers. These people then have more agency in their cooking (in addition to the human connection with customers).
I personally think that eventually AIs will be able to master cooking as well so we won't have human cooks involved at all except as a fashion statement.
I think his "objection" is similar to mine in that technology supposedly promises that everyone can be a producer, but instead we are getting even more centralization. We see the same thing in technology, were instead of open standards we get e.g. Facebook. Or in startups were the prospects of actually competing with one of the larger players is almost theoretical at this point.
A lot of people are fine with living for the moment hoping they can make it rich before opportunities shift. Others think more about what future they want to see.
I think his point is that Josephine has a sense of community, that the people behind the cooking are fully visible, whereas in Sprig the people are just cogs in a system.
He paints full Josephine in great color, but that's exactly what Airbnb is - connecting visitors with people want to host people in their homes. Airbnb doesn't dictate the experience beyond some guidelines, they don't hire hosts, etc.
But
We see Airbnb enabling bad actors on its platform, refusing to take action against them, posting ads all over san Francisco to sink prop f - acting like a mega Corp.
Josephine is not mega Corp, yet. But imagine if it became huge. I bet it'd look more like sprig, and all the other mega corps, than the author would like.
Pretty much the only wildly successful company I can think of that has not ended up acting like a mega Corp is craigslist.
He could also cook entirely by himself and feel worse yet knowing he's hoarding his money and not parting with some of it for food knowing some of it would end up employing otherwise people who'd have a hard time finding skilled employment.
He has no proof what's going on behind the scenes, and jumped into conclusion and project a holier than thou attitude just because.
People that write such articles should realize that they can cause a lot of damage to businesses. If you don't have significant evidence that people working for such companies are not treated well and are unhappy then go do your homework first, otherwise it's just unethical and irresponsible to publish your intuitions and project them as facts.
Exactly. "Dystopian"? Hyperbole much? This person is just ordering delivery, leaving a nice tip and then making a huge assumption about the lives of the cooks and delivery people. It's not like the restaurants have child labor camps making you dim sum for Christ's sake.
It's important to note that this is not a news article and the writer, Robin Sloan, is not a journalist. This is an opinion piece by a (very good!) novelist. He is free to articulate his opinion without "significant evidence" and you are free to think his opinion is baseless.
The author is a novelist, if you think the article was actually about these two ephemeral zygotes in a techbro's slide deck that will both likely die in the next year and don't really matter then you've truly missed the entire point.
The thought never enters many peoples heads that the person delivering food hosting rooms, driving cars thinks the person buying the service has a terrible life. 'So busy they can't even cook themselves a meal, forget that'.
No coercion, no evidence, just innuendo and undergraduate forelock tugging.
I see a future where a much smaller percentage of people cook. Roughly equivalent in percentage and frequency as adults that would play a musical instrument or tend to a garden.
Right now a lot of people cook meals not just because they enjoy to do so, but because having someone else cook healthy meals for you all the time is too expensive. A "Full Sprig" society can hopefully leverage specialization and economies of scale the same way that people no longer keep hens for eggs.
Yes, the feel-good-local-farm(kitchen)-to-table aspect is lost, but most people don't care about that.
I very much doubt that. Cooking is a part of every culture. It's more than just being about a healthy meal. For many people it defines who you are. The on-demand technophiles are not representative of the majority.
Certainly people cook less these days but if you get out of the young, hip, affluent areas of town to where the majority of people actually live - it doesn't seem very likely that home cooking is going anywhere.
I cook all my meals. I spend an average of 3.4 hours per week in both cooking and washing the dishes. I order all my groceries to an online supermarket. I could save 3.4 hours by spending 300-400$ more and losing control over what I eat and how it was done. No thanks.
Cooking is not going anywhere. I simply cannot understand why common people with a kitchen would not cook. It just takes some planning and cooking enough food that it last 2-3 days.
I thought it was more about the fact that the sharing economy can either create positive, meaningful interactions that connect neighbors and neighborhoods, or it can turn your neighbors into faceless drones that you only interact with via the touch of an app button.
I admit that the dystopian future the author sets out seems a little drastic, but it does remind me of Jobs' "below the API" argument.
For anyone who can't be bothered reading the self-indulgent, concise rubbish since he doesn't actually provide the explanation:
"I will dismiss out of hand any article suggesting that the sharing economy can be about connecting people with others instead of separating them, and I will post something snarky and condescending instead of engaging with an interesting point"
For anyone wondering if that ellipses is at all misleading, here's the full quote:
"We make these choices, bit by bit. I stopped ordering from Sprig back in the spring, because (a) I don’t like that future and (b) they sent me a truly sub-par chicken sandwich."
FWIW, I found the article to be really well written.
FWIW the restaurants behind these actually do a lot better. Imagine you own a restaurant. You serve lunch and dinner. You kitchen is utilized from 11 to 2 for lunch and from 6 to 10 for dinner. With these apps your kitchen now is utilized before 11 prepping food for delivery for lunch and again from 2 to 6, prepping food for dinner. You're now making more on your capital investments and your kitchen staff is getting more hours. The people cooking the food are the same as if you went to a restaurant and the people delivering are the same that would be wait staff. If you didn't feel bad for these people before why would you feel bad for them now because there is an app in front?
I'd like to believe that but long-term, I expect the app is just a rent-seeking gatekeeper between the restaurant and their customers. We can expect the gatekeeper to turn the screw and make margins barely survivable eliminating quality leaving only a few low cost supply chain optimisers.
We see the same pattern again and again. Small businesses should fight like hell to keep a direct relationship with their customers.
Let me stand up for Sprig. They have, in my opinion, found the holy grail of McDonalds meets Whole Foods. They are serving organic food from local farms, made by local chefs, with the lowest carbon footprint of anyone -- all in a form factor that people will actually use. That's why I favor their future over that of Pizza Hut, Postmates, Uber Eats, and even Josephine. Instead of looking for faults, I think they deserve a round of applause.
That was my first thought when I read about Josephine. It appears as though selling home-made food recently became legal in California[1] (after the cook has passed an online course). I imagine most other states won't be so amenable to passing legislation that lowers food safety standards. New York, for example, allows home production of only a few category of foods and explicitly prohibits direct internet sales[2].
In case anyone associated with Sprig reads this, I had written you guys off a while ago because I can't stand landing pages that do weird/ annoying scrolling. I just checked and it's still like that... please just make it a natural-scrolling page and I promise I'll give you a shot (instead of SpoonRocket which also does healthy).
Tangentially, Mark Bittman's food posts on the New York Times, like 'The Minimalist' - as well as his books - changed my life. His philosophy is that we do have time in our lives to cook, and that there can be great value in doing so. Personally, I find it to be a nice balance to being so heavily involved with technology all day.
I've been looking for something like this in my life, but what's a good place to start learning how to cook?
I'm a young single dude in his 20s, and the most I can do is boil some pasta. I work from home so time is not really a huge issue, I just don't know where to start. Any tips?
I'm surprised HN is so against this article. I'm unhappy with the idea of "full Sprig" or "full Josephine". Furthermore, a "full Sprig" or "full Josephine" society is impossible with their current business models as I highly doubt their contractors have enough money to use their own services, especially if they get sick and have to deal with their uninsured medical costs. The lack of regulations around these services is just a way for the company to transfer more liabilities onto their contractors (cough employees) and reduce costs for themselves and their customers.
I think all of these startups are "solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand"[0] and do so by taking advantage (and perpetuating) massive income inequality.
> "solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand"[0]
Yeah, it's not like people with kids ever get take-out or delivery, right?
Maybe this kind of issue is more relevant to affluent young people, but it's hardly irrevelant to others. There's nothing wrong with targeting a luxury market. Even middle class people can afford some luxuries.
There's something utterly perverse with the logic that "Some people are getting left-behind by the current economy; definitely definitely don't find them new, value-creating jobs because that will spirit-murder them."
There is also something utterly preverse in pretending exploitative "sharing economy" companies create the kind of "value" that should be encouraged, especially as it displaces less exploitative companies.
Which of course is a propagation of the very thing you claim they so nobly rescue these lost souls from!
There's another option in between Sprig and Josephine that's both a bit slower and far more "human" in the way the author wants.
Doordash brings you food from local restaurants (the same ones you eat at when you go out with your friends). It costs a little more than sprig, and it takes a couple more minutes.
But the food is individualized and made to order. It's familiar, made by the human beings you can go talk to the next time you're in there during a night out.
In short, it's the perfect in-between. And given the tone of the article, not all that surprising the author totally ignored it.
"Sprig" as I see it isn't likely to replace/centralise all of cooking. It's nothing more than an easier 'takeaway', a 'cometo' if you will.
This sort of thing's been around for years in the UK: HungryHouse, JustEat, precursors to Deliveroo, etc. - I was shocked recently in the US when I couldn't find an equivalent (I guess I didn't search long enough to find Sprig, or it's not yet widespread enough).
For me at least, but I'm pretty sure for most people, HH or JE is like the 'one stop' place you can go to choose a takeaway. I don't have to think "I want Chinese food, let me find a Chinese place that delivers", or "I want pizza today, let me find a pizza takeaway site" - it's all in one place.
But that certainly doesn't mean that all my food comes from a "centralised" place, and I never cook...
> This sort of thing's been around for years in the UK: HungryHouse, JustEat, precursors to Deliveroo, etc.
You are correct, and those services just wrap what's been around for even longer - the local curry house that keeps a couple of moped drivers and a telephone operator on staff. It's a fairly old-fashioned business model.
Can we please stop describing mildly unsettling thoughts about technology as "dystopian?"
You are gaining convenience at the theoretical expense of small businesses at some point in the future. This is hardly the stuff of Orwellian nightmares.
[In fairness, I assume the "dystopian" subheading was chosen by an editor, and not by the writer himself (his own phrase: 'hardly utopian').]
I think a lot of these SF-based food startups are filling a need that exists because of SF's fairly bad model of urbanization. Things are kinda dense, but not really, and it's very hard to get around.
If SF was a more spread out city like Sacramento or Houston, driving to a grocery store or a Chipotle or an inexpensive eatery would be trivial to get your food. If it was much more dense (and easy to get around) like Manhattan or Bangkok or Tokyo, it would be trivial to get prepared food at any price since restaurants and street side cooks of all kinds can effectively get to dense districts to sell food.
Yeah, that's true. Parking is really a pain for most restaurants. Basically... good luck.
But grocery stores (at least Safeway / Trader Joes / Whole Foods) generally have attached parking and aren't too bad to park at. Though I still try to go during off-peak hours.
I really like the Josephine concept... mainly because I like "home cooking" I like to cook too.
That said, I think that delivery services for food itself will probably become more common too. If restaurants could just make food, and ping an uber-like service for a driver to do the pickup/delivery it could work out better. Some restaurants aren't busy every day, being able to combine nearby pickups and deliveries for multiple restaurants could be a huge success.
I do think it would take more than the combined infrastructure of grubhub + uber though. Simply because orchestration on grubhub is usually limited/partial menus, and the deliveries themselves can go from simple to complicated... living in a gated apartment (where there's a separate gate to the walk-up entrance, etc) makes deliveries difficult for someone who hasn't been there.
I'd love to see restaurants able to share delivery drivers... and delivery drivers able to stay active, when a single location isn't busy, another may be, and to top that, it would allow more places to offer local delivery.
This is ridiculous. In what macroeconomic transformation have we ever landed on just one mechanism of production or distribution? There exists room for both Sprig and Josephine - much like there exists room for both fast casual and fine dining, and for both Uber and taxis, and brick-and-mortar book stores and Amazon (who just opened a brick-and-mortar book store). There is often displacement and pressure to compete, but most of the time we don't collectively make a singular choice, eradicating the other choice totally. There are over 300 million people in this country who all have to eat every day (leaving aside whether they do or don't). What are the chances that all of them are going to land on the same way to buy or prepare food? Zero, just like it is right now.
[+] [-] jvm|10 years ago|reply
> In the hypothetical future we can label Full Josephine, many people don’t cook, but some people cook a lot more, and better, than ever before, and all of us, cooks and non-cooks, derive pleasure from that."
Minus rhetorical flourishes, this is identical to the Sprig future, with the difference that in the case of Sprig the cooks are compensated with full-time employment rather than the joy of cooking. It sounds like the author doesn't really value that, but I bet a lot of Sprig employees do!
The actual future: Some people cook for Josephine, some work for Sprig, some work for traditional restaurants, some people eat the above food, lots of people still make their own food.
[+] [-] jacinda|10 years ago|reply
On the other hand, he thinks Josephine's model promotes a future where telecommunications helps connect people who are more akin to small-business owners than employees with customers. These people then have more agency in their cooking (in addition to the human connection with customers).
I personally think that eventually AIs will be able to master cooking as well so we won't have human cooks involved at all except as a fashion statement.
[+] [-] gozo|10 years ago|reply
A lot of people are fine with living for the moment hoping they can make it rich before opportunities shift. Others think more about what future they want to see.
[+] [-] adminprof|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xivzgrev|10 years ago|reply
But
We see Airbnb enabling bad actors on its platform, refusing to take action against them, posting ads all over san Francisco to sink prop f - acting like a mega Corp.
Josephine is not mega Corp, yet. But imagine if it became huge. I bet it'd look more like sprig, and all the other mega corps, than the author would like.
Pretty much the only wildly successful company I can think of that has not ended up acting like a mega Corp is craigslist.
[+] [-] mreiland|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nitrogen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] halayli|10 years ago|reply
People that write such articles should realize that they can cause a lot of damage to businesses. If you don't have significant evidence that people working for such companies are not treated well and are unhappy then go do your homework first, otherwise it's just unethical and irresponsible to publish your intuitions and project them as facts.
[+] [-] e_modad|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reedk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woah|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meowface|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wfo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brc|10 years ago|reply
No coercion, no evidence, just innuendo and undergraduate forelock tugging.
[+] [-] mastermojo|10 years ago|reply
Right now a lot of people cook meals not just because they enjoy to do so, but because having someone else cook healthy meals for you all the time is too expensive. A "Full Sprig" society can hopefully leverage specialization and economies of scale the same way that people no longer keep hens for eggs.
Yes, the feel-good-local-farm(kitchen)-to-table aspect is lost, but most people don't care about that.
[+] [-] debaserab2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakejake|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tetheno|10 years ago|reply
Cooking is not going anywhere. I simply cannot understand why common people with a kitchen would not cook. It just takes some planning and cooking enough food that it last 2-3 days.
[+] [-] stupidcar|10 years ago|reply
"I stopped ordering from Sprig back in the spring, because ... they sent me a truly sub-par chicken sandwich."
[+] [-] paxtonab|10 years ago|reply
I admit that the dystopian future the author sets out seems a little drastic, but it does remind me of Jobs' "below the API" argument.
[+] [-] wfo|10 years ago|reply
"I will dismiss out of hand any article suggesting that the sharing economy can be about connecting people with others instead of separating them, and I will post something snarky and condescending instead of engaging with an interesting point"
[+] [-] cwp|10 years ago|reply
"We make these choices, bit by bit. I stopped ordering from Sprig back in the spring, because (a) I don’t like that future and (b) they sent me a truly sub-par chicken sandwich."
FWIW, I found the article to be really well written.
[+] [-] malandrew|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duncanawoods|10 years ago|reply
We see the same pattern again and again. Small businesses should fight like hell to keep a direct relationship with their customers.
[+] [-] thejerz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martingordon|10 years ago|reply
[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2014/01/29/c...
[2]: http://www.agriculture.ny.gov/fs/consumer/processor.html
[+] [-] orthoganol|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adminprof|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PhantomGremlin|10 years ago|reply
They take $50 million in VC money and come up with that POS website. And they they think they're "winning".
[+] [-] gdubs|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prezjordan|10 years ago|reply
I'm a young single dude in his 20s, and the most I can do is boil some pasta. I work from home so time is not really a huge issue, I just don't know where to start. Any tips?
[+] [-] lightcatcher|10 years ago|reply
I think all of these startups are "solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand"[0] and do so by taking advantage (and perpetuating) massive income inequality.
[0] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/27/change-the-worl...
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|10 years ago|reply
Yeah, it's not like people with kids ever get take-out or delivery, right?
Maybe this kind of issue is more relevant to affluent young people, but it's hardly irrevelant to others. There's nothing wrong with targeting a luxury market. Even middle class people can afford some luxuries.
[+] [-] patio11|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2048|10 years ago|reply
Which of course is a propagation of the very thing you claim they so nobly rescue these lost souls from!
[+] [-] datapolitical|10 years ago|reply
Doordash brings you food from local restaurants (the same ones you eat at when you go out with your friends). It costs a little more than sprig, and it takes a couple more minutes.
But the food is individualized and made to order. It's familiar, made by the human beings you can go talk to the next time you're in there during a night out.
In short, it's the perfect in-between. And given the tone of the article, not all that surprising the author totally ignored it.
[+] [-] OJFord|10 years ago|reply
"Sprig" as I see it isn't likely to replace/centralise all of cooking. It's nothing more than an easier 'takeaway', a 'cometo' if you will.
This sort of thing's been around for years in the UK: HungryHouse, JustEat, precursors to Deliveroo, etc. - I was shocked recently in the US when I couldn't find an equivalent (I guess I didn't search long enough to find Sprig, or it's not yet widespread enough).
For me at least, but I'm pretty sure for most people, HH or JE is like the 'one stop' place you can go to choose a takeaway. I don't have to think "I want Chinese food, let me find a Chinese place that delivers", or "I want pizza today, let me find a pizza takeaway site" - it's all in one place.
But that certainly doesn't mean that all my food comes from a "centralised" place, and I never cook...
[+] [-] SideburnsOfDoom|10 years ago|reply
You are correct, and those services just wrap what's been around for even longer - the local curry house that keeps a couple of moped drivers and a telephone operator on staff. It's a fairly old-fashioned business model.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|10 years ago|reply
You are gaining convenience at the theoretical expense of small businesses at some point in the future. This is hardly the stuff of Orwellian nightmares.
[In fairness, I assume the "dystopian" subheading was chosen by an editor, and not by the writer himself (his own phrase: 'hardly utopian').]
[+] [-] sbilstein|10 years ago|reply
If SF was a more spread out city like Sacramento or Houston, driving to a grocery store or a Chipotle or an inexpensive eatery would be trivial to get your food. If it was much more dense (and easy to get around) like Manhattan or Bangkok or Tokyo, it would be trivial to get prepared food at any price since restaurants and street side cooks of all kinds can effectively get to dense districts to sell food.
[+] [-] Reedx|10 years ago|reply
But grocery stores (at least Safeway / Trader Joes / Whole Foods) generally have attached parking and aren't too bad to park at. Though I still try to go during off-peak hours.
[+] [-] mbrock|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tracker1|10 years ago|reply
That said, I think that delivery services for food itself will probably become more common too. If restaurants could just make food, and ping an uber-like service for a driver to do the pickup/delivery it could work out better. Some restaurants aren't busy every day, being able to combine nearby pickups and deliveries for multiple restaurants could be a huge success.
I do think it would take more than the combined infrastructure of grubhub + uber though. Simply because orchestration on grubhub is usually limited/partial menus, and the deliveries themselves can go from simple to complicated... living in a gated apartment (where there's a separate gate to the walk-up entrance, etc) makes deliveries difficult for someone who hasn't been there.
I'd love to see restaurants able to share delivery drivers... and delivery drivers able to stay active, when a single location isn't busy, another may be, and to top that, it would allow more places to offer local delivery.
[+] [-] Aqueous|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bambax|10 years ago|reply
Why does he not learn to cook instead, and meet people on the market where he would go buy ingredients?