[itsdavesanders]

IS it cheaper? Better, maybe, depending on the restaurant. But I can’t see how it’s cheaper when you have to hire and insure drivers, manage shifts, deal with delivery areas, fuel costs, more accounting, etc etc.

Also I live in a pretty good sized city of about 350k in our metro area, and before these delivery services only the national pizza places delivered. When I moved here from a larger city I was shocked there wasn’t a single Chinese delivery place. So I’m thinking that the costs and management were just too high.

The right model might be the Waiter on the Way model, which hires regular drivers but can offer the service turnkey. But there needs to be more of those, and there doesn’t seem to be for some reason.

[al_borland]

>Also I live in a pretty good sized city of about 350k in our metro area, and before these delivery services only the national pizza places delivered. When I moved here from a larger city I was shocked there wasn’t a single Chinese delivery place. So I’m thinking that the costs and management were just too high.

This is interesting. When I was in college I could order Chinese delivery from about 5 different places, and they'd do it until about 4 or 5am. This was in a city of about 78k. After school I moved to another college town. It was double the population with a much more well known school. In this town, I don't think there was any Chinese delivery, and a vast majority of the places closed really early for a college town; maybe 8-10pm.

I wonder if smaller towns with lower rent leave more margin for extra hours and delivery, where as those with higher rents need to focus on staffing the core hours with as few people as possible to make the books balance? Just a theory, as I've never worked in these industries.

Near me, I still see Dominos doing their own delivery, with their corporate owned vehicles. I also see some local pizza places doing their own delivery as well. Jimmy Johns still does its own delivery as well, even if going through Door Dash, they just hand off the order, it doesn't go through the normal Door Dash process.

[dom96]

I lived in a tiny town in Northern Ireland and every chinese/indian/pizza place managed to deliver food just fine. They still do I bet. UberEats/Deliveroo/DoorDash are just skimming the little profit that these operations made (and failing to be profitable)