1. Many of their restaurants are simply not geared well for being in the delivery business. They don’t have good parking for drivers. Their menu is built around dining in, not 30 mins in a car. Their delivery packaging is subpar or overkill. They really have to train their restaurant partners to succeed or they won’t get repeat business. They have an inventory problem.
2. The value proposition of food delivery really only exists in the largest cities. Not everyone wants to eat out, but in smaller towns it’s easy to access and social. For somebody who spends 3 hours commuting each day, cooking and dining out lack appeal, but that isn’t a problem for the majority of Americans.
3. There simply isn’t much margin in the restaurant business. Most are happy to run on 1-3% margin. Food cost, scheduling labor around varying demand, and overhead with tremendous fixed and surprise costs. A spike in fuel prices can spell for a losing year, simply based on food cost and reduced demand.
I think a new model of kitchen is in order. An on-demand food service would be able to provide very fresh and hot food in short order, without soggy packaging. It could run by a network of sort of Forward Operating Bases that are positioned around predicted demand, and may move based on data. They may take walk up orders but are tooled around providing delicious food to delivery vehicles. I can imagine a lot of frictionless ways to get food into cars, scooters, or even autonomous delivery wagons, if you knew in advance that is the business you are in. They can take preorders and run their inventories based on that data to avoid food waste. There are no tables to bus, plates to break and wash, or floors to maintain. With good planning the kitchens can be cheap to build, own, and run. And the food can be the very best, made by people in the neighborhood for the neighborhood.
Until all that is common, ya I don’t think the thing works without subsidies. If we did then food delivery would have been much more common; it’s never been a technological problem.
Case in point of delivery optimized to the hilt: Dominos Pizza. It actually all comes down to the menu.
And that assumes that a restaurant business that's geared to delivery and pickup exclusively/primarily is possible. Which AFAIK is mostly limited to pizza and Chinese in most places--where delivery is mostly a solved problem.
Gilt is a poor example because it's a nearly out of business discount shop. but Mr porter and most online stores will offer free shipping and returns. The exception are a lot of brand specific pages - 7formankind i always found to be really bad. But try all the hundreds of boutique web stores - i've never seen them charge for return shipping.
Why would this be an illegal one? It has the potential to be a big force one day but nothing near that now and WF and grocery delivery both have lots of competition.
All the company needs is some pressure to shore up some long overdue culture debt. This is the fastest growing company in history after all. Not every aspect of the company was going to come out of the over perfectly baked when you grow that quickly. Uber isn't the first successful startup with this issue and it won't be the last.
Replacing the leader would be a terrible mistake. I'm not a religious person, but I do wish more people were familiar with the lesson taught in the parables of the Lost Son, Lost Sheep or Lost Coin. Redemption is always possible. Society as a whole would be much better off if we gave more people a chance to redeem themselves. Not considering people capable of redemption and considering people deserving of punishment without mercy is the reason we (the United States) have the disaster that is the largest incarcerated population in the World.
I don't see any reason why Charlotte Willner's account of what happened at Facebook couldn't apply just as easily to Uber. What makes you say that things are not in the same league? Katherine Losses' allegations are as salacious as anything I've heard about Uber (or many other successful early stage tech companies for that matter)
After five months of examining the company's culture,
Uber's new human resources officer, Liane Hornsey
concluded that the firm's treatment of women was no
worse than what occurs at other companies.
Uber's biggest employee problems are pay and pride, not
sexism, says HR boss “Wherever I have worked, I have
seen things that are not great for women,” Hornsey said
in a USA TODAY interview. “I don’t think it’s about tech,
or this city or this company. I think it’s about the
world of work, and I think that it’s something that we
have to take really super seriously.”
Liane Hornsey was formerly the VP of People Operations at Google for like 5 years I think. I'm far more inclined to believe her account of what things are like than any journalist lazily trolling for any disgruntled former employee to recount a story that will generate ad impressions.
It's kind of ironic that that article uses Elon Musk as his example, especially in light of this first hand account of an accomplish rocket scientist explaining how impressed he was with Elon Musk learning rocket science by himself.
I generally agree with the sentiment that we should end the cult of the CEO, but that doesn't negate the fact that some CEOs might actually deserve the praise and respect they get.
Until you've actually worked directly for the Elon Musks, Mark Zuckerbergs, Travis Kalanicks and Steve Jobses of the world, you shouldn't dismiss that they might have actually earned cults they've created.
I think redemption is definitely important space to allow for, however it probably shouldn't mean keeping everything as it is. Or rather, Kalanick can still redeem themself not as the CEO of Uber
lyft somewhat had first mover advantage in SF. Uber had first mover advantage in every other city. Uber already existed in SF and was doing black car rides and a lot of people in NY/SF knew of it - which Uber used to leapfrog Lyft's first move advantage.
Historically, diet shakes/meal replacement shakes/etc have been almost entirely sugar, and slimfast is infamous for exactly that.
> if it had that much sugar, it wouldve never gained a reputation for losing weight.
That's not how advertising works. :)
(There is a new variant of slimfast with low sugar, but that's a very recent exception to the rule. Most slimfast is high sugar, and historically all slimfast was high sugar. It's like arguing "coke doesn't have lots of sugar", and linking the nutritional information to diet coke.)
Football is much more tough than hockey and needs recovery time. Hockey is tough but Football you have running backs/WRs getting hit on every other play. You have the QB getting knocked down 3-5 times a game. The the offensive line is having a pushing and hand war with the defensive line on every single play while playing strategically and covering additional players. The WRs have to sprint on every play. And for special teams you have the opposite team running at you as you run at them.
Amazon’s food delivery failed and closed last month. Caviar was sold to Doordash. Postmates is struggling.