There is no scale to be had at local delivery. Between various services, banks, and credit cards, I get the paid tier of all the delivery apps for "free", so I am paying the absolute minimum.

It makes no sense to me for these "scalable" companies to pick up my food, drive in the wrong direction, wait at another restaurant, then continue to drive in the wrong direction to drop off that order, and then get me my cold food that I still paid more for than menu price with an expected tip the driver can see before they even pick up my order. I gave up on the whole concept once I moved somewhere with more than two places that are walking distance. Not all of them are great but it's still a better deal than a terrible delivery from an amazing place at a huge mark up.

The worst time line is the cheap places that used to offer free delivery growing up having their delivery handled by a lightly skinned version of DoorDash.

If you think you can use a coupon for a discount you actually are just paying the full price of their delivery fee without the delivery service discount you get directly from DoorDash.

> The worst time line is the cheap places that used to offer free delivery growing up

Its not even a vague old memory. Until COVID, free delivery with low minimal order € and regular prices were the norm, Now it's €3-5 for delivery, €20 minimum and 25% markup on item prices.

Pooling together delivery drivers should make things better for the customer, instead of significantly worse.

  Pooling together delivery drivers should make things better for the
  customer, instead of significantly worse.

Sure, if Doordash operated at a loss.

No, no loss. If things were working well, pooling drivers would reduce costs and doordash would charge some percent of that reduction.

Yes, loss. No matter how much efficiency (lol) Doordash were bringing to the equation there's always the matter of profit and paying back the vulture capitalists.

The way they achieve profit is by charging money. Which I accounted for.

If your reduce your client's costs by $3000 and you charge $2000 to do it, everyone is happy and you can make a nice profit.

And remember the "efficiency" is relative to tons of restaurant-specific delivery drivers. It's possible.

Door Dash famously was not profitable during the time period when everyone was locked inside their homes and couldn't go to restaurants directly.

It's a fake business where the only play is to be a middle man that causes prices to go up so they can deliver cold food.

This conversation thread starting with jorvi's comment is a hypothetical about what delivery is supposed to be.

  It's possible.

Not with the Doordash model it's not. Sure you have the low paid serfs which help restaurants sidestep the various requirements applied to actual employees (e.g. transit and health insurance benefits). But you also have duplicate payment processing and customer support infrastructure, the legal staff required because your business model requires skirting or outright breaking the law, the higher rate of refunds/returns due to hawking food that's ill suited to travel (against the restaurant's wishes), drivers that now have to drive all over town to different restaurants, orders that are prioritized by the size of the attached "gratuity", etc.

The Domino's model was cheaper for the customer because it's inherently more efficient than Doordash. There were no angry restaurants suing to get off of your platform. Drivers were either making deliveries or at a specific restaurant ready to make a delivery. Customers didn't have to pay two separate merchant fees or ensure profit for two separate companies. Plus Domino's incentivized fast deliveries (there were external costs to this however), ensuring that the restaurant could efficiently utilize their delivery drivers.

Plus you're also likely underestimating the return that the vulture capitalists are demanding.