What a good read on the Door Dash, Grubhub, Uber Eats type deliver economy… These guys have nailed the fundamental disconnects in the model, tested it, and then exposed the basic idea that it is fundamentally unsustainable. I for one am hoping that we go through a phase of economic development, post pandemic seizing the reigns of everything you do every day, that gets us to focus on sustainable business models and practices.
I would love to see those concepts valued again vs what seems to be an un-tethered march to justify business activities by the terms of exploitation alone.
“Which brings us to the question – what is the point of all this? These platforms are all losing money. Just think of all the meetings and lines of code and phone calls to make all of these nefarious things happen which just continue to bleed money. Why go through all this trouble?
Grubhub just lost $33 million on $360 million of revenue in Q1.
Doordash reportedly lost an insane $450 million off $900 million in revenue in 2019 (which does make me wonder if my dream of a decentralized network of pizza arbitrageurs does exist).
Uber Eats is Uber’s “most profitable division” 😂😂. Uber Eats lost $461 million in Q4 2019 off of revenue of $734 million. Sometimes I need to write this out to remind myself. Uber Eats spent $1.2 billion to make $734 million. In one quarter.
Amazon just bailed on restaurant delivery in the U.S.
What is it about the food delivery platform business? Restaurants are hurt. The primary labor is treated poorly. And the businesses themselves are terrible.”
More on their article here: https://themargins.substack.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage
