You have a bunch of stuff that needs to get from one point in a city to another. Which is more efficient
Having the customer use a whole car to drive to a place, get their thing, then drive home?
Or having a bunch of vehicles, each carrying a large amount of stuff, visiting multiple people per round-trip.
The problem is, if you have a very narrow delivery window- 20 minutes after the order is placed- you wont generally have enough orders to batch your deliveries together like that.
If we want to get to the world where 10 deliveries can be made per trip, we just need lots and lots of people to be using the food delivery system. Currently, the price of delivered food is prohibitive, and instead people opt to either eat at expensive rent-captured main-street restaurants, or, more frequently, to cook for themselves (subsistence economy much!)
Having a scaled delivery economy allows food production to move away from main-streets, or to move into delivery-only restaurants, dramatically lowering their rent and lowering the price of fresh-cooked food along with it.
This transition may happen organically, but this is not assured. The current market leader in most cities is Uber, who take a very large cut, seem to be very inefficient as a software producer (so maybe couldn’t lower their fees even if they wanted to), don’t pay drivers well and are terrible for restaurants, having a fairly evil policy of taking a percentage of the order (on top of a flat fee) even though the service they’re providing pretty much doesn’t have costs proportionate to the cost of the order, then, iirc, they forbid restaurants from raising the price of the menu items to cover that.
I would propose to switch to a particular low-overhead food delivery system now, but I don’t know of any. Low-cost software infrastructure may be a kind of product that can only thrive once we have coordinated commitment platforms. Without a method for manifesting an egg without the prohibitively costly chickens of risk-amortisating investment and advertising, there’s no incentive to build or talk about the candidates. We might have tens of viable uber clones lying around with hypercompetent twenty person dev teams, we wouldn’t talk about them, we seem to be too uncoordinated to lift them up, there would be no point.
(Although I have to ask; why don’t restaurants simply fund the development of their own delivery infrastructure? They have all the ad-space they could need.)
Also, signatories should commit to getting some kind of standard lockable street-side box so that the deliverer doesn’t have to exit their vehicle and find their way to the door.
Food delivery systems.
You have a bunch of stuff that needs to get from one point in a city to another. Which is more efficient
Having the customer use a whole car to drive to a place, get their thing, then drive home?
Or having a bunch of vehicles, each carrying a large amount of stuff, visiting multiple people per round-trip.
The problem is, if you have a very narrow delivery window- 20 minutes after the order is placed- you wont generally have enough orders to batch your deliveries together like that.
If we want to get to the world where 10 deliveries can be made per trip, we just need lots and lots of people to be using the food delivery system. Currently, the price of delivered food is prohibitive, and instead people opt to either eat at expensive rent-captured main-street restaurants, or, more frequently, to cook for themselves (subsistence economy much!)
Having a scaled delivery economy allows food production to move away from main-streets, or to move into delivery-only restaurants, dramatically lowering their rent and lowering the price of fresh-cooked food along with it.
This transition may happen organically, but this is not assured. The current market leader in most cities is Uber, who take a very large cut, seem to be very inefficient as a software producer (so maybe couldn’t lower their fees even if they wanted to), don’t pay drivers well and are terrible for restaurants, having a fairly evil policy of taking a percentage of the order (on top of a flat fee) even though the service they’re providing pretty much doesn’t have costs proportionate to the cost of the order, then, iirc, they forbid restaurants from raising the price of the menu items to cover that.
I would propose to switch to a particular low-overhead food delivery system now, but I don’t know of any. Low-cost software infrastructure may be a kind of product that can only thrive once we have coordinated commitment platforms. Without a method for manifesting an egg without the prohibitively costly chickens of risk-amortisating investment and advertising, there’s no incentive to build or talk about the candidates. We might have tens of viable uber clones lying around with hypercompetent twenty person dev teams, we wouldn’t talk about them, we seem to be too uncoordinated to lift them up, there would be no point.
(Although I have to ask; why don’t restaurants simply fund the development of their own delivery infrastructure? They have all the ad-space they could need.)
Also, signatories should commit to getting some kind of standard lockable street-side box so that the deliverer doesn’t have to exit their vehicle and find their way to the door.