Uber Eats Nationwide Shipping

[shtopointo]

This must be a marketing thing, right? (I had to check the date to make sure it wasn't April 1st)

The use case is bagels or pizza across the country? If you don't eat those within the hour they're not good anymore. Other than that, I really can't think of a situation where I would be willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money for cold food.

[yellowapple]

> If you don't eat those within the hour they're not good anymore.

Blasphemy. Pizza is best when served cold the next morning.

[erikpukinskis]

> If you don't eat [bagels] within the hour they're not good anymore

This is a very New York/New Jersey perspective. And I respect that your palette is too refined to ever accept a non-fresh bagel.

But there are people who live outside of NY/NJ, who don't have a bagel shop down the street. And you may be surprised to learn that some of us love bagels, and will even eat a toasted bagel. I understand this is an abomination no New Yorker or New Jerseyan would ever touch. But I can assure you many of us with lower standards get quite a bit of joy out of a good re-toasted bagel. If a bagel is sliced and frozen shortly after baking it actually keeps fairly well.

Again, I can't recommend you ever try a toasted bagel yourself. You would certainly be disgusted by it, as any respectable New Yorker would be. But for the rest of us they can be quite enjoyable.

[dawnerd]

Doordash has had similar. Such an incredible waste of resources.

[lotophage]

I assume that they have to be reheated at the destination city before delivery. They may even be cooked there. In Australia several years ago you could get "freshly baked" French croissants from the supermarket. They were actually frozen "parbaked" goods that were cooked on the day.

[telecuda]

I’ve used GoldBelly to ship Philadelphia tomato pie to Florida for an inflated price. Same idea. It’s great for special occasions and gifts.

[88913527]

Is this market bigger than I might be thinking it to be? It's a cool feature, but my investor hat seems less thrilled. It seems expensive and seldom used. But the profit margins could be good.

[wombat-man]

Yeah it just looks like a goldbelly competitor.

[IceMetalPunk]

:O I attended college in upstate New York, and I practically lived on the pizza from one particular pizza place there. I've been back home for 7 years, and I still crave it and miss it. If they expand from NYC to the larger New York area and include that one pizza place... I will pay any premium for it.

To anyone saying "but the pizza will be cold": I used to order an extra large chicken-bacon-ranch pizza just for me, and have refrigerated -- and not reheated -- leftovers all week. Still delicious. I've tried to recreate that pizza myself many times, and it never comes out quite the same.

...now I want pizza, dammit.

[efrank02]

Mister Shoes?

[king-geedorah]

Which spot?

[whywhywhydude]

I thought it was a April 1 joke. Are they planning to freeze the food first before shipping through Fedex?

[enlyth]

Me too, what kind of nonsense is someone paying 200 dollars for some reheatable pasta and having it delivered thousands of miles? It sounds like an exercise on how to create the most wasteful and ridiculous business ever.

[telecuda]

Typically these things will ship deconstructed and require minimal cooking/assembly, like a weekly meal delivery kit. For example, you might receive a roll in one type of packaging and the sandwich contents in another, boxed with a few freezer packs.

[wildmanx]

Read the room, Uber. We are in a climate crisis.

[stuntkite]

My god. In my opinion this is downright offensive. Even if for no other reason that in city delivery french fries are an abomination.... but also all the other disgusting carbon and workforce issues that this is going to encourage.

MMMMMM. $5000 Nobu from 10 hours ago! THIS SHIT IS DELICIOUS!

[nowherebeen]

You are basically eating microwave food when it gets there.

For $200, you might as well go to a restaurant in-person.

[nonameiguess]

I was in New York last Christmas, as for most Christmases since my wife's family all live there, and my wife insisted we stay on the lower east side because she went to school there and had some nostalgia. The end of the block our hotel was on had a place called Katz's Deli with a line that was around the corner and a several hour wait pretty much starting at 7 AM or earlier every morning.

We never went because I didn't want to stand in line for that long, but I noticed the side of the building said they'll ship nationwide. That seemed crazy to me, like no matter how good the meal is, it can't possibly be as good once it's been in transit for a day. What sorts of meals don't degrade in texture and taste within a few hours of being cooked? I would love to send my friends and family in other parts of the country some great Texas BBQ that has no equivalent anywhere else I've ever been, but even that isn't nearly as good once it has gone cold and been reheated. Unless you ship it in a humidor, I don't see how you avoid losing moisture. Is that what they do?

[lastofthemojito]

I had Goldbelly ship me a brisket from a BBQ place in Texas and I felt like it traveled well. It shipped frozen, and they provided instructions on thawing and reheating, and it really turned out to be delicious. Not quite as good as fresh from the smoker in Texas, but better than brisket I can get in my area.

[blakesterz]

I can answer this! Last Christmas someone sent us a big box of stuff from Katz's. The meats (there were 3 or 4) were vacuum packed, and there was some condiments and some bread and I forget what else. It was all packed in a big box with ice packs. I think it was shipped over night from Katz's.

I assume that most deli meats don't lose much being packed up like this? I can't say for sure, but this kind of stuff is probably already served in a similar state, not right out of the oven. So I can only assume it tasted more or less like it would if we have gone to Katz's. The bread no doubt would be better fresh.

It all tasted... ok. I expected it to be awesome, but it was just ok.

[fennecfoxen]

This post amuses me because of the classic Katz Deli slogan of WWII: “Send a salami to your boy in the army!”

[dreamcompiler]

I've mail-ordered Katz's corned beef and pastrami and it holds up pretty well. It's not cheap but then it's not cheap in the restaurant either. If you love their stuff I recommend their mail order service.

[BryanBeshore]

Sounds like a story I heard about people sending task rabbit'ers to stand in line at 6am for a "Cronut" at some shop in SOHO.

[igetspam]

There's a Saltlick in AUS. It travels.

[reducesuffering]

I would love to hear Dara or Uber PR squeam trying to explain how this isn’t flagrantly hypocritical to any climate change “green” talk they do. If I was an employee who cared about those things, I’d be feeling pretty betrayed.

https://www.uber.com/us/en/about/sustainability/

[HideousKojima]

Reminds me of Ezell's Chicken in Seattle. Apparently Oprah loved the place (they had a big photo of her on the wall that she'd written a fairly lengthy note on) and supposedly she would regularly have their chicken delivered to her by plane from Seattle to her home in Chicago.

[celim307]

Which is wild cause I lived in both and while ezelles is good, there’s tons of just as good places in Chicago

[donsupreme]

now you can buy an In-&-Out burger + fries from the east coast for $100

[bombcar]

Is this an extremely delayed April fools joke?

I also wanted to parse it as "Uber devours, consumes, masticates Nationwide Shipping" and that they had bought DHL or something.

[rilindo]

I look forward to ordering my favorite Thai delivery[1] from LA

[1] http://www.tgexpress.net/

[Arrath]

Having it delivered probably won't take much longer than it would to get through the drive-thru line.

[Apocryphon]

Wonder how In-n-Out burgers would taste if they were frozen like White Castle sliders.

[bee_rider]

This seems like it will require coordinating with the local entity (I mean they aren't going to ship the whole meal all made up, right? It'll have to be a microwave-dinner-ized version I guess?). Is this really a core competency of Uber? I thought their main business model is ramming through services by ignoring local entities.

[servercobra]

If we can't get the fabled SF -> NYC burrito tunnel [0] I guess this will have to do.

[0] https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...

[lwhi]

I despise UberEats.

Their customer support is a scripted, gaslit hellscape where the customer is always wrong.

[elforce002]

Me too. I vouched to never use them. I prefer calling directly to the restaurant (it's also cheaper for customers and the place can retain that 30% which is crazy to say the least).

[gordon_freeman]

This seems strange especially when the target market seems small as I don't see many people would have such cravings to get NYC food delivered to LA. But I am not sure. On the other hand, I would really love to get some Neapolitan pizza from Napoli. :)

[Ekaros]

What if they get the order wrong?

Also, is there anyway they have logistics to handle something like this?

[maddynator]

This could be a ploy to make stuff in local cloud kitchen, charge for cross country shipping and delivering locally cooked stale food.

IDK, I seems to have a pessimistic view of it at the moment

[elforce002]

I think you are right. If you order a pizza from NYC, how are you sure it's from NYC and not from your local store?

Charge a big shipping fee while getting a local product.

I really hope they go under this decade.

[ghaff]

Doesn't really make sense generally. But it can make sense to ship frozen or smoked food in moderate quantities. There are a few companies I periodically order from--usually around the holidays. Not cheap but if it isn't something you can get locally and it can survive shipping reasonably, it's reasonable to order as an occasional thing. But it's usually a fairly big order. I can't imagine having a pizza shipped.

[igetspam]

Oh man... If I thought a sandwich could travel... Freshly Baked Eatery in downtown San Jose. Hands down my favorite sandwich place on the planet. The bread is always fresh. It wouldn't survive a flight from SJC to AUS and I'm moving even further in a few weeks. One of th top five things I miss about the bay area.

[iancmceachern]

My favorite sandwich ship on the planet is Two Cousins in San Carlos.