How were they selling a dollar for 80 cents? The actual food is more expensive on grubhub than ordering through the restaurant, and then there are multiple fees on top of that.
Tons of marketing/advertising. The free GrubHub+ subscription through prime probably burned through a lot of cash. I doubt Amazon was paying them very much (if anything) to Grubhub. Then you have all of the corporate staff (around 3k based on google search) who are highly paid.
And the competition from UberEats and Doordash, who also are constantly promoting discounts, free orders, etc. so there's almost no way they can recoup actual costs let alone turn a profit.
But there is the cost of hosting, developers, drivers, etc.
And that's all cost that is not borne by the restaurant.
And there is a limit to how much people would pay to get something delivered. So they're probably pricing the delivery, etc less than they've actually paid.
We've seen this before and we'll see it again. There are lots of people who will pay for things below cost. Sometimes that cost comes down but a lot of the time it does not especially in relatively affluent countries. I don't have a personal driver or chef like I might have in some places. I do have some other house/yard services but very occasionally and I consider them luxuries.
I always wondered if the promotions were handled with restaurants more like "we (the platform) recoup our promo losses via the regular platform fee you (the restaurant) pay regardless" or more like "if a customer uses a promotion, we (platform and restaurant) split the loss, unrelated to the regular platform fee". Like when I use a platform promo for reasons well beyond trying a new place for the first time, am I screwing the restaurant, the platform, or some combination?
Mostly the restaurant, at least in the case of these companies' "free delivery" membership deals. Restaurants pay a higher commission on those orders. (Whether that's enough to outweigh the operating deficit built into their current pricing I have no idea, but some fraction is being passed along to their merchant "partners".)
It was an all stock transaction, so they maintained an indirect stake but it was significantly diluted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Eat_Takeaway.com Meanwhile Just Eat Takeaway investors got taken for a ride.
The degree to which startups with unsustainable business models can be called pump and dump schemes is debated. I wasn’t suggesting they committed fraud, but they definitely put their best foot forward before that transaction and believed it was in their interest to sell.
Also it’s not just unrelated 3rd parties, Enron was included because: “Enron falsely reported profits which inflated the stock price, they covered the real numbers by using questionable accounting practices. Twenty-nine Enron executives sold overvalued stock for more than a billion dollars before the company went bankrupt.”
all of it, including its future, was valued at $7 billion, but there was never $7 billion in cash. Maybe it was $700 million in cash paid for 10% of it, which would value the whole thing at $7 billion. If that totally-made-up 10% number happens to be the right number, then it hasn't lost much at all overall, but the investor who paid that has to share the sale price with a bunch of other shareholders who paid less. So, this owner lost money, but the firm did not necessarily.
(I'm not saying this is what happened, and maybe a quick google would get us closer to the actual numbers, I'm just saying you have to pay attention to the wording of what is being claimed; media likes to exaggerate.)
what has disappeared is "belief in the future prospects of this company to bring in profits worth $7B" which was why the last investors invested, and why the early investors set up the kitchens and other frameworks to support those hopes. And it's not that the opportunity wasn't a good one, perhaps a competitor "won", or perhaps there are too many competitors trying to share the $7B pie.
Those weird ghost kitchen things have more than half a billion dollars to spend on acquisitions?!
I wonder how this came to be - did they already have that big of a war chest, or did they hear they could buy a name brand and go back to their investors to finance it?
Looks like they only spent $150M in cash and took on $500M of debt to do the ancquisition. They raised $250M from outside investors to pay for it. So sounds like they have $100M to try to make a go of it.
I expect the value to go way down as they squeeze all sides of the equation: drivers, restaurants, and customers.
I’ll look up the addresses of restaurants on Uber Eats, using street view, before ordering. Most of them are at bodegas or otherwise non-restaurant spaces.
I recently saw a new burger joint pop up on Uber Eats with an address not far from my home. It turned out to be the address of the last remaining Ruby Tuesday restaurant in my area, but the burger place did not advertise any connection to Ruby Tuesday. Seemed very sketchy to me.
A ton of places are doing that. Restaurants that want to price things differently from their main. Or primarily in-store restaurant chains that don't want branding impacted by crappy delivery reviews. Keyword competition to improve sales. Menu, naming, picture, process experimentation. Additional placement in search results with different ranking. Bad review evasion. Limiting blast radius of bad reviews (eg, they still have a second high-rated listing for those X months they get less orders until a spat of negative reviews expire).
Basically, 'cheating' because it's not very honest, or can also be putting in extra effort to sell more and/or limit risk.
The way you put it doesn't sound like almost the mirror-image of the whole "ghost kitchens" thing. If established, reputable restaurants with known food quality are operating unde alternative branding in order to experiment with new marketing strategies, it doesn't really seem like 'cheating' to me.
Definitely not in the same category as a fly-by-night operation in a warehouse pretending to be an established restaurant.
Agree, it's all in how it's actually used. There are ghosts kitchens renaming themselves to avoid bad reviews, or to inflate their presence. But there are legit reasons to do it too.
They don’t have jack shit. It’s all based on hype, keep the train rolling so the early investors can get their cut while the other suckers hold the bag
I suppose these career options have relatively much higher chances of making good money:
1. Become a corporate lawyer, charge by the hour - win or lose, lawyers get paid
2. Run a soulless media company - rake in the ad dollars from both parties (during elections) and other soulless companies spending VC money on advertising (all the time)
They've raised $1.9B in funding over 6 funding rounds. How? Because their founder is Marc Lore:
> Lore was the CEO and co-founder of Quidsi, the parent company of a family of websites, including Diapers.com. Quidsi was sold in 2011 to Amazon for $545 million.
> Lore was appointed in September 2016 to lead Walmart's e-commerce division when his company Jet.com—an e-commerce website launched in 2014—was acquired by Walmart, Inc. Walmart purchased Jet for $3.3 billion.
IMHO it's sort of the inverse*: its not that weird ghost kitchen things have $500 mil for acquisitions, its that Marc Lore has enough salesmanship to get private capital to lend $100M to get a turnkey delivery business for his food entrepreneurship, and the banker loans can pretty it up to sound like $600M, and the decision makers at GrubHub get a mildly-embarrassing outcome instead of an extreme outcome. (shutdown)
* I know a decent amount about finance, but don't practice it daily enough to find it second nature. I'd appreciate a similarly colloquial perspective from someone who reads me as naive.
I think that future loosening of the credit markets due to political factors is also playing a roll. By the time the runway is spent they may expect to be in a very different market so buying scale now is the move.
I have a bad feeling about Wonder. One opened near my office and had a load of free meal promotions and it was packed. A few weeks later it went very quiet. I had a few meals and they were decidedly meh. The promise of ordering options across a dozen different cuisines is appealing but not when all of them are underwhelming.
This part feels like The Onion. 30 private taxis coordinating for your meal. "customers can order from upwards of 30 restaurants in a single order, with each item being made-to-order in a sequenced fashion so that they finish simultaneously and can be delivered to the customer together."
Its a ghost kitchen. It isn't 30 restaurants, its one restaurant with 30 brands.
This idea was tried years ago (they'd claim to be the first) by a company based out of Indianapolis named Clustertruck (https://www.clustertruck.com/); though their branding was more "one restaurant, 30 food truck brands". The aim was: you can order a bunch of stuff, the software in the kitchens times it to all come out at the same time, and ETAs the driver to pick it up for delivery.
The company is still around but isn't all that successful. They split the software portion into a second company, closed down a bunch of kitchens, raised prices, etc. I think the reality that hit them was: It really doesn't matter all that much that you can order tacos and pasta all in one order, except for large parties but that's an uncommon situation. The genre of food matters less than the specific food being ordered (e.g. I don't just want a burger, i want a five guys burger). Additionally, the food might have usually been delivered at a higher quality than a typical Uber Eats/etc delivery, but that's still a distance away from restaurant quality; but the prices were obviously higher than eating at a restaurant.
Uber Eats/etc are barely successful, and the only reason they can find that success is because they don't have to manage all the typically lossy parts of food delivery (restaurants & the drivers). Gig apps are good businesses because they avoid this vertical integration: No depreciating assets, little real estate, low competition, no worry about managing minimum wage workers, no health inspections, no stoves breaking down, just some software engineers and marketing (I'm simplifying but you get my gist). Why anyone would think vertically integrating something involving a restaurant is a good idea is, well, crazy. Even ghost kitchens on the typical range of delivery apps are stupid; oh sure your startup is one of the most classically unprofitable kinds of businesses on the planet, I bet that'll survive when interest rates rise.
Uber Eats in the USA, yes, it's more hands off in terms of gig workers. In the UK and Germany and many other countries though, there have been many court rulings to essentially ban gig-working and enforce employee protections.
I was in Bloomington for college and ordered from ClusterTruck multiple times. I did think the food was notably more fresh than other delivery services.
A Wonder just opened near my house, and the "different restaurants" seem to really be just different sections of a large menu with distinct branding. I.e., there is a single physical kitchen that makes food from the different "restaurants".
There are a bunch of "restaurants" in our town that are just different menus serviced at the same ghost/cloud/dark kitchen. The quality is generally not good. I wonder about the quality at Wonder -- the broader the menu, the harder it is for the preparers to get good at it.
I'm thinking here of an Indian place near my office that graduated from ghost kitchen to food hall restaurant. I had their food both before and after, and the difference was night and day. I actually didn't want to try the food hall version, based on my experience with their ghost kitchen incarnation. But a friend convinced me to give them another chance, and now they're one of my favorite places for when I want to splurge on lunch.
I don't really know what the difference is, but I'm guessing it's that they didn't get to have a kitchen setup that was well adapted to their menu at the ghost kitchen.
You can change the name, the brand, of a ghost kitchen startup 'restaurant' overnight if you think it's stale due to bad consumer experiences. So you need to care less about those.
I don't think anyone thinks this is "innovation"... it's just a slightly different take on Uber Eats / Spoonrocket / food courts / cloud kitchens / etc.
And if there is an "innovation", it's the vertical integration... it's a business "innovation," not a tech one.
Upon seeing this, I first thought "a bread company is buying Grubhub?" Then I clicked the article and realized no, this is a different company I've never heard of, apparently because they're only located in five US states all in the northeast nowhere near where I live.
As others have said, they appear to have physical locations and you can even go eat in person there, and they don't pick up food from 30 different restaurants to deliver to you. They seem to just get licenses to use the names and recipes of celebrity chefs or other restaurants. That raises the question of what the point of a restaurant even is. Seemingly, there has to be some quality gain from using a particular kitchen and particular staff, a particular source of ingredients, whatever it is. There has to be a reason some enterprising businessperson can't just hire random cooks, buy recipes from celebrity chefs, and recreate the experience and quality of a meal at 30 different top rated restaurants in a single kitchen.
That seems just as impossible as delivering from 30 different places at the same time.
Because an enterprising businessperson has no idea how to run a kitchen.
Recipes are in many ways the least important part of what a chef provides. They're not secrets. If there's a "secret ingredient" it's that they're using more butter and salt than you'd use at home.
What a chef provides is a process. They get the ingredients ordered, at the quality level they want for a price they're willing to pay. They ensure that the ingredients show up, in the amounts needed, without waste and without falling short -- and have backup plans. They staff the kitchen, and ensure that they have all prepared their stations before service begins. They train the expediter to ensure that all of the food comes out together, without things waiting under the warmer.
The chef also provides a menu, which is more important than the recipes. It has something for every guest, and every item can be finished before the guest gets impatient.
It's not impossible for a business guy to hire a top-notch executive chef to do that work, but the business guy cannot do it. It requires years in the kitchen to know what factors are important. It requires a deep understanding of the culture of kitchen workers, and how to get the best out of them. It would require an enormous staff to do that properly, and training them extremely well.
You can see this at work at a place like The Cheesecake Factory. It's hardly great food, but it's reliably good. The menu is enormous, on par with a dozen restaurants at once. It can be done. You're just not going to do it Silicon Valley style, learning as you go.
I have enough trouble getting food on the table at the right time when I'm making a relatively simple meal for my family. Reading this description (which seems spot-on to me, though I don't have experience working in foodservice) is making me anxious just imagining it.
It is definitely nerve-wracking. But when things are going well, there's a kind of zen to it. They have the advantage of doing the same thing every day. They know the plan, and they stick to it.
Until something goes wrong with the plan -- somebody calls out sick, the refrigerator fails, an order gets messed up and has to be re-cooked -- and the rhythm gets disrupted. The dining room is full so new orders are getting backlogged, and more mistakes get made because you're off your game...
It's not for the faint of heart. It doesn't have to be as unpleasant as some TV shows make it out to be. But it's a whole different kettle of fish from cooking at home.
Microsoft cafeterias manage it by just contracting out most of the stations to local restaurants. They provide the trained staff and get a consistent revenue stream in return. They’ve even got a local celebrity chef branded restaurant in the executive building (34) with a 3 course fixed price menu. It’s not a single kitchen per se, but the equivalent is commercial kitchens that are all over the place with multiple clients sharing the space simultaneously. This just adds online ordering and centralized management.
At first blush, this might seem like another silly roll-up. However, I believe in Marc Lore completely and it will be interesting to see what this becomes. This is bad news for DoorDash (imo).
I could see a world where Doordash, Toast, etc specialize in delivery from existing restaurants, while Wonder/GrubHub lean into an exclusive selection of food from ghost kitchens.
whoa, they own Chai Pani and Fred's Meat and Bread, both of which are _excellent_ fast casual spots in Atlanta. It's just... it's like $28 for a Philly cheesesteak, so I've only been to each twice. edit: ok it's $16 each apparently, but still
But also, they own physical chains, real estate ("food halls" aka bougie food courts) and now... meal delivery? It sounds like the most expensive-to-operate things all squashed into one.
edit: and they own Blue Apron?!
I feel like they're going to buy Candy Crush next
It's really hard to see how this is going to work out long-term.
I wonder (no pun intended) how much of this is driven by Marc's residual dislike of Amazon?
Amazon currently has a partnership with Grubhub to provide Grubhub delivery as a Prime benefit.
Amazon competed strongly (some might say unfairly) many years ago with Marc's first big startup, Diapers.com, and effectively forced him to sell to Amazon.
He later started Jet.com and sold it to Walmart - in many ways as a second chance to compete with Amazon.
Grubhub has fallen so far it's amazing. They (and Seamless who is the same thing in different regions) had such a big start but had their model disrupted. And while they were being disrupted they were trying to turn a profit as a public company and DoorDash just ate their market as they were in growth mode. Interesting sequence of events that led to them being acquired by Wonder.
I feel for the restaurant owners: not only were they forced into accepting the likes of Grubhub as a middle man, that same middleman now also owns restaurants that compete directly with them. If the restaurants have any power at all they should stop using Grubhub right now. I don’t know anyone still using it (which is crazy, Seamless used to dominate NYC).
I sincerely hope the entire thing burns to the ground. The last thing I need in my life is for all the restaurants in my neighbourhood to be soulless, VC operated chains.
Sometimes I miss when delivery meant either Chinese or pizza, and the businesses were specialized in that kind of work. Which meant it didn't cost an arm and a leg, and the whole system was vertically integrated in a way that gave your food a fighting chance of still being hot by the time it arrived.
Also the restaurants got a chance to teach their delivery staff how to properly handle the food. Which meant that the Chinese restaurants, for example, could get away with using oyster pails instead of having to resort to the "maximum packaging waste" option.
I refuse to use GrubHub and not only because it makes a $12 sandwich into a $22 sandwich, but also because small business needs cash. If you're tipping $2.37 on your credit card, kick bricks.
> Both companies are private, so neither has a "market cap"
Private companies have shares. Given a per-share price, you can get a market cap. For a company with debt, like GrubHub, enterprise value is a better metric.
Same way you do for a public company. From trades and valuations. Private shares exchange hands in private transactions as well as almost every time the company raises money. If a company issues incentive stock options, they're required to calculate a 409A price, which while a bullshit number, is indeed a per-share price.
> how do you know what trades took place, and how many shares were traded, and at what price?
Company generally has these records. Various other sources, e.g. PitchBook, compile them. In some jurisdictions (e.g. UK and India) they have to be publicly announced, though that's becoming less common.
TL; DR It is incredibly wrong to suggest private companies don't have a market cap. As in finance 101 wrong.
> Same way you do for a public company. From trades and valuations.
no, it's not the same, because the information is not publicly available. They are the same in that in both cases you multiply two numbers together; they are not the same inasmuch as your ability to know those numbers is vastly different. To say they're the same is misleading.
What the heck is going on here? This feels very ZIRP-ey; private equity chasing disruption in the hopes of the next acquisition.
Is this just a race to the bottom as all these delivery companies burn cash to subsidize their failing model and hope that they can be the last one standing?
edit: I did some research. Ghost kitchens are generally inspected by federal or state authorities, but laws for inspection vary widely by state, and it can be difficult for customers to see or understand inspection results. E.g. You go to a restaurant and see the health grade in the window, but when you order from an online vendor who shares the same kitchen with 5 other vendors, it's very hard to trace the food your getting to the kitchen it's being prepared in and the relevant inspection history.
> [Wonder is] creating the super app for mealtime [...] re-envisioning the future of food delivery [...] pioneering a new category of “Fast Fine” dining.
Press release copywriting is such an artform in ways I'm sure they don't intend for. I don't think I could spin "ghost kitchen ordering app" into that much bullshit. That takes real skill.
Which is an empty platitude if restaurants won't meet customers where they are - on their smartphones. I'll use my local restaurants' app/webpage when there is one and get pick-up, but if there isn't one, I'll be real - I just use Doordash. When I've got people over and need to order food, it'll take 45 mins between everything else going on to figure out a restaurant, and then another hour to pick some food. And then someone changes their mind while on the phone with the restaurant. Orrrr (after we pick a restaurant) we just pass the phone around.
This really seems like exaggeration. Two hours? How many people are we talking about here?
Also, nothing you've mentioned really solves your issues. Even with DoorDash, you'll need to pick a restaurant. And DoorDash doesn't solve the problem of someone changing their mind as they are ordering.
And then you still have to wait for the food to be prepared and delivered. And there's no guarantee on when it will arrive. So it winds up being a wash.
Also, there's a reason places that don't do delivery don't do it. The cost doesn't justify it. Then there's the whole "meet me where I am" attitude. They're the ones with the service you want. You have some obligation to meet them yourself.
And if you don't want to, that's fine. We used to manage all of this well enough before
You've never herded cats? That time is wall clock time, so to be clear, It isn't 1:45 collectively sitting down and paying attention to that one specific task. (That would be too easy.) Just like how it'll take three days to write six hours of code because of all of the other work stuff going on during a busy week, in my experience it just takes roughly three hours of wall clock time from "start beginning the process of ordering food" to food in mouth. Most of that is spent not ordering food. Finishing up some work stuff or finishing the TV/movie someone put on or hey check out this one video on YouTube/Tiktok/etc and getting sucked down a rabbithole, or a quick game of whatever cards, or a discussion about how someone's life/work/relationship/whatever is going. Just normal distractible people things.
The cashier at the restaurant isn't going to, (nor should they!) wait on hold for that entire hour of mostly not ordering food. Ordering via phone app doesn't care how long it takes after we start, or that we got utterly distracted and came back to it 20 minutes later.
It starts to take too long when it's more than a dozen or two people, though there usually aren't that many. At some point though, it becomes more effective to get people's dietary restrictions and make decisions for everybody, but just ordering a bunch of pizzas is considered a (delicious) failure mode to be avoided.
Doordash's app mostly doesn't help in figuring out which restaurant to go with, though it does say what got ordered last time. and has a rating and $ signs.
The process becomes asynchronous. each person gets the phone and figures out what they want, without the rest of the group just staring at that one person until they finish. No one needs to manage orders beyond passing the phone around and eventually pressing checkout. The person who changes their mind just gets the phone back before the checkout button is pressed and edits the order. Doing that verbally via the phone is terrible. It's also understood that there's no changing after checkout is pressed.
To be clear, restaurants don't have to meet me on Doordash, but they do have to meet me at least halfway, which is on the Internet, and that there are local restaurants who do. They have their own webpage, they take orders there, it isn't run by Doordash, and we just send someone(s) to go pick up the food. At least one of them is operated by Square, which also runs that place's PoS system. So I'm not holding restaurants to some impossibly high bar that none of them seem to be able to meet, just discussing the reality of operating a restaurant in the digital age.
Restaurants modernized and installed telephones and credit card machines and now, they also need a digital presence to compete. There are umpteen restaurants competing for my business and if it's too much friction to eat their food, chances are I'm just not gonna eat there and my business ends up at a competitors.
I mean, they don't actually have to. There are some spots that don't have a website and still only take cash and it's word of mouth, and I frequent them infrequently, but that's their business model, so good for them, so long as it's actually working for them.
We used to order lunch for an office of 15 people just fine over the phone. We had a drawer stuffed with local takeout menus. The hardest part was deciding where to order from but that's the same with Doordash.
Ah, but there's the catch. Resturants aren't meeting you there, Grubhub workers are. Resturaunts largely just optimize for takeout, and whether or not your food arrives warm is less of their problem and more of the Grubhub worker's issue. And as delivery drivers quit over low pay and their businesses go bankrupt, I really see no way for restaurants to support this behavior.
Additionally, you have to look at it from a pragmatic perspective. When I visit the East and West coast of the US, meal delivery is popular enough that you might think it's a booming business. Everywhere else it's pretty much dead though. In places where the cost of living isn't enough to compensate for a restaurant and their middleman (read: most of the US), you can't even find a driver most hours of the day. It's one of those nonsense businesses like Uber that seems like a great idea on paper but one that falls apart outside the Bay Area economy. Most places in America are not gentrified enough to pay peons gas money in exchange for hand-delivered McDonalds.
The whole comment was about how hard it is to wrangle 10+ people. How is that digital, or not real life? It's literally a group of people spending time together face to face.
I didn't think I was complaing, just documenting my situation. I don't think having a cellphone and a credit card and friends and access to doordash puts me into some super privileged category among people posting here even if globally some people don't have running water or Internet.
Not sure how that makes me shallow but I'm all ears, I'd love to learn.
Maybe I'm reading into your actions and projecting my bias more than I intended.
When I used to order food through Uber eats I would always feel bad about it because the ultimate labor costs are abstracted through those layers of convenience.
If it is helpful, I consider fast online shipping to be unethical, and customer woes are misdirected at the wrong layer of abstraction, often ignoring the intensive labor costs because they are intentionally hidden.
That doesn't address why I'm shallow for describing my lived experience, or my extreme privilege because I'm someone who has access to, and has used Doordash. If you don't use their platform then the delivery people on that platform aren't getting jobs and aren't getting paid. If you want to help them, tip them 50% in cash.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, unfortunately, and we all take our stand where we choose to. I could afford a better phone, but since smarphones have matured, I chose to buy refurbished phones because of the slavery inherent in their creation. Buying refurbished phones minimizes that as best I can while not giving up modern conveniences. Similarly, I'm happy to use a restaurant's app/website instead of Doordash when there is one, but one of my favorite restaurants is only on doordash (Ben's Fast Food, which is delicious healthy food with lots of greens, they just have a terrible name).
Or just order from local restaurants using GrubHub. Most mark up their menu prices to absorb the hit they take from working with GrubHub and similar services. Some will encourage you to order directly or through a different 3rd party by including a flier with the delivery order. But many others only offer delivery through 3rd parties like GrubHub.
That's good for you. I prefer putting together my order with the menu on my phone, adding notes and having a moment to think about those notes, adding delivery instructions, tipping with the same credit card I pay with, tracking my order, having an order history I can view, and not bothering people who are busy running a restaurant and don't need to be talking to me on the phone since this has all been automated for a couple decades. And to be frank, many restaurant workers don't have the best English skills and may be in a loud environment, making phone calls more difficult.
honestly I order from five or so places with regularity and at each of those places there are two or three things I actually order. Most of the time I really don't think GrubHub is providing any value that merits giving them a cut. I know that I like the orange chicken at the Chinese place near me, the white pie from the New York pizza place, the drive-through burger from the burger place, etc, etc, etc. I don't really need a menu. But yeah, if I'm in a new place and I'm doing a whole browse and search affair, looking at a new menu, reading reviews and all that, I just use Grubhub. That's just not actually most of my delivery. Most of my delivery is "I don't feel like cooking dinner tonight" -> order from one of my regulars.
> And to be frank, many restaurant workers don't have the best English skills and may be in a loud environment, making phone calls more difficult.
Yeah I dunno this argument feels very alien to me, because even people with poor English skills know the names of the items on their menu. It's not like I'm calling them to have an in-depth conversation, I'm just naming items off of their menu. Also I call in for pickup for like half my orders and pick up myself. At a bunch of places the food is cheaper if you just call.
c'mon man he means adding notes to the order like "put the sauce on the side" or "my building has two entrances, use the one on the left", you're being ridiculous.
>I just call them, it's not like the phone company takes a cut when you order on the phone.
Make sure you call the right number. Grubhub (and others possibly) will set up phone numbers[0] and websites[1] controlled by them and forwarded to the restaurant so they can take a cut.
Local grocery stores have basically been extinct for decades- and realistically that isn't that surprising given they mostly sell commodity products. We don't need to let restaurants suffer the same fate.
Agreed. I'm super lucky in that we have a local independent grocery in our neighborhood. Prices are definitely a little higher than the big grocery chains, but the convenience of walking 2.5 blocks is hard to beat when I need something immediately (which turns out is fairly often).
Yet another company propped up by private equity. Wonder Group raised $700M during a funding round in March 2024, with a total of $1.5B raised overall [1]
How long until it succumbs to the same fate as other PE funded companies (Foxtrot)? Then the people left holding the bag are the vendors that won’t get paid. Employees don’t get paid. Doors locked up one day with no reason.
Love how it has all of these celebrity endorsements as well to keep the facade going.
At the end of the day, it’s a glorified ghost kitchen.
Mentions the $650mln they'll pay Just Eat for it, neglects the fact Just Eat paid $7.3bln. Quite the write down. And in just 4 years.
They are actually paying $150 mln in cash and taking on $500 mln in debt.
multi level narketing
Where did all the money go?
Well, when you're in the business of selling a dollar for eighty cents, all the money probably got flushed down the toilet.
How were they selling a dollar for 80 cents? The actual food is more expensive on grubhub than ordering through the restaurant, and then there are multiple fees on top of that.
Tons of marketing/advertising. The free GrubHub+ subscription through prime probably burned through a lot of cash. I doubt Amazon was paying them very much (if anything) to Grubhub. Then you have all of the corporate staff (around 3k based on google search) who are highly paid.
And the competition from UberEats and Doordash, who also are constantly promoting discounts, free orders, etc. so there's almost no way they can recoup actual costs let alone turn a profit.
But there is the cost of hosting, developers, drivers, etc.
And that's all cost that is not borne by the restaurant.
And there is a limit to how much people would pay to get something delivered. So they're probably pricing the delivery, etc less than they've actually paid.
We've seen this before and we'll see it again. There are lots of people who will pay for things below cost. Sometimes that cost comes down but a lot of the time it does not especially in relatively affluent countries. I don't have a personal driver or chef like I might have in some places. I do have some other house/yard services but very occasionally and I consider them luxuries.
If you're in zero interest rate policy, money looks like it's worth almost nothing.
You get $10/month dining credits if you’re an Amex card holder. Imagine the cost of all promotions.
I always wondered if the promotions were handled with restaurants more like "we (the platform) recoup our promo losses via the regular platform fee you (the restaurant) pay regardless" or more like "if a customer uses a promotion, we (platform and restaurant) split the loss, unrelated to the regular platform fee". Like when I use a platform promo for reasons well beyond trying a new place for the first time, am I screwing the restaurant, the platform, or some combination?
Mostly the restaurant, at least in the case of these companies' "free delivery" membership deals. Restaurants pay a higher commission on those orders. (Whether that's enough to outweigh the operating deficit built into their current pricing I have no idea, but some fraction is being passed along to their merchant "partners".)
[dead]
Earlier investors. Ever hear of pump and dump? After you sell you’re insulated from future performance as long as you don’t commit actual fraud etc.
> Earlier investors. Ever hear of pump and dump?
When did GrubHub buy early investors' shares with company cash?
Early investors had already “sold” the company well before this transaction: https://about.grubhub.com/news/grubhub-stockholders-approve-...
It was an all stock transaction, so they maintained an indirect stake but it was significantly diluted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Eat_Takeaway.com Meanwhile Just Eat Takeaway investors got taken for a ride.
This does not seem like pump and dump:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pumpanddump.asp
The degree to which startups with unsustainable business models can be called pump and dump schemes is debated. I wasn’t suggesting they committed fraud, but they definitely put their best foot forward before that transaction and believed it was in their interest to sell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump
Also it’s not just unrelated 3rd parties, Enron was included because: “Enron falsely reported profits which inflated the stock price, they covered the real numbers by using questionable accounting practices. Twenty-nine Enron executives sold overvalued stock for more than a billion dollars before the company went bankrupt.”
The 7.5 billion? To the company that previously owned Grubhub. I believe that's how much Just Eat paid for it.
Where did the valuation go? Doordash and Uber Eats managed to eat them alive.
>Where did all the money go?
all of it, including its future, was valued at $7 billion, but there was never $7 billion in cash. Maybe it was $700 million in cash paid for 10% of it, which would value the whole thing at $7 billion. If that totally-made-up 10% number happens to be the right number, then it hasn't lost much at all overall, but the investor who paid that has to share the sale price with a bunch of other shareholders who paid less. So, this owner lost money, but the firm did not necessarily.
(I'm not saying this is what happened, and maybe a quick google would get us closer to the actual numbers, I'm just saying you have to pay attention to the wording of what is being claimed; media likes to exaggerate.)
what has disappeared is "belief in the future prospects of this company to bring in profits worth $7B" which was why the last investors invested, and why the early investors set up the kitchens and other frameworks to support those hopes. And it's not that the opportunity wasn't a good one, perhaps a competitor "won", or perhaps there are too many competitors trying to share the $7B pie.
This is a winner takes all market. They spend it on becoming the US leader.
Every country has one platform that wins, everyone else loses the billions. There's no second place.
There's zero reason for it to be winner take all.
UberEats, DoorDash, whoever
Where it always goes, to the top.
Lowered expectations.
FAANG salaries and freebies.
FAANG wasn't involved at any point
But FAANG-level salaries, right? To compete?
That's called fair market compensation.
I'm not saying it's not. Please read the previous comment for context.
[dead]
It's kinda funny since they beat Uber in the bidding war and Uber is probably one of two reasons why it's only worth 650 million now.
Those weird ghost kitchen things have more than half a billion dollars to spend on acquisitions?!
I wonder how this came to be - did they already have that big of a war chest, or did they hear they could buy a name brand and go back to their investors to finance it?
Looks like they only spent $150M in cash and took on $500M of debt to do the ancquisition. They raised $250M from outside investors to pay for it. So sounds like they have $100M to try to make a go of it.
I expect the value to go way down as they squeeze all sides of the equation: drivers, restaurants, and customers.
I’ll look up the addresses of restaurants on Uber Eats, using street view, before ordering. Most of them are at bodegas or otherwise non-restaurant spaces.
I recently saw a new burger joint pop up on Uber Eats with an address not far from my home. It turned out to be the address of the last remaining Ruby Tuesday restaurant in my area, but the burger place did not advertise any connection to Ruby Tuesday. Seemed very sketchy to me.
A ton of places are doing that. Restaurants that want to price things differently from their main. Or primarily in-store restaurant chains that don't want branding impacted by crappy delivery reviews. Keyword competition to improve sales. Menu, naming, picture, process experimentation. Additional placement in search results with different ranking. Bad review evasion. Limiting blast radius of bad reviews (eg, they still have a second high-rated listing for those X months they get less orders until a spat of negative reviews expire).
Basically, 'cheating' because it's not very honest, or can also be putting in extra effort to sell more and/or limit risk.
The way you put it doesn't sound like almost the mirror-image of the whole "ghost kitchens" thing. If established, reputable restaurants with known food quality are operating unde alternative branding in order to experiment with new marketing strategies, it doesn't really seem like 'cheating' to me.
Definitely not in the same category as a fly-by-night operation in a warehouse pretending to be an established restaurant.
Agree, it's all in how it's actually used. There are ghosts kitchens renaming themselves to avoid bad reviews, or to inflate their presence. But there are legit reasons to do it too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_restaurant
Also chuck e cheese, tgi fridays run these.
Denny's has two or three different brands they will advertise as different restaurants in a single area.
I see this is as simply buying scale more quickly than they could grow organically.
Apparently they have totaled ~$1.7B in funding according to Bloomberg:
> Lore’s startup also raised $250 million in equity investment, bringing the total amount of capital it’s secured to $1.7 billion
They don’t have jack shit. It’s all based on hype, keep the train rolling so the early investors can get their cut while the other suckers hold the bag
I suppose these career options have relatively much higher chances of making good money:
1. Become a corporate lawyer, charge by the hour - win or lose, lawyers get paid
2. Run a soulless media company - rake in the ad dollars from both parties (during elections) and other soulless companies spending VC money on advertising (all the time)
3. Be early investor, pump and dump
They've raised $1.9B in funding over 6 funding rounds. How? Because their founder is Marc Lore:
> Lore was the CEO and co-founder of Quidsi, the parent company of a family of websites, including Diapers.com. Quidsi was sold in 2011 to Amazon for $545 million.
> Lore was appointed in September 2016 to lead Walmart's e-commerce division when his company Jet.com—an e-commerce website launched in 2014—was acquired by Walmart, Inc. Walmart purchased Jet for $3.3 billion.
https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organ...
IMHO it's sort of the inverse*: its not that weird ghost kitchen things have $500 mil for acquisitions, its that Marc Lore has enough salesmanship to get private capital to lend $100M to get a turnkey delivery business for his food entrepreneurship, and the banker loans can pretty it up to sound like $600M, and the decision makers at GrubHub get a mildly-embarrassing outcome instead of an extreme outcome. (shutdown)
* I know a decent amount about finance, but don't practice it daily enough to find it second nature. I'd appreciate a similarly colloquial perspective from someone who reads me as naive.
I think that future loosening of the credit markets due to political factors is also playing a roll. By the time the runway is spent they may expect to be in a very different market so buying scale now is the move.
Grubhub has revenue, which means they might be able to finance the acquisition with debt.
[flagged]
I have a bad feeling about Wonder. One opened near my office and had a load of free meal promotions and it was packed. A few weeks later it went very quiet. I had a few meals and they were decidedly meh. The promise of ordering options across a dozen different cuisines is appealing but not when all of them are underwhelming.
They raised 250m and spent 150m cash on GrubHub with 500 in debt.
Discussion (26 points, 3 hours ago, 63 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42127304
This part feels like The Onion. 30 private taxis coordinating for your meal. "customers can order from upwards of 30 restaurants in a single order, with each item being made-to-order in a sequenced fashion so that they finish simultaneously and can be delivered to the customer together."
Its a ghost kitchen. It isn't 30 restaurants, its one restaurant with 30 brands.
This idea was tried years ago (they'd claim to be the first) by a company based out of Indianapolis named Clustertruck (https://www.clustertruck.com/); though their branding was more "one restaurant, 30 food truck brands". The aim was: you can order a bunch of stuff, the software in the kitchens times it to all come out at the same time, and ETAs the driver to pick it up for delivery.
The company is still around but isn't all that successful. They split the software portion into a second company, closed down a bunch of kitchens, raised prices, etc. I think the reality that hit them was: It really doesn't matter all that much that you can order tacos and pasta all in one order, except for large parties but that's an uncommon situation. The genre of food matters less than the specific food being ordered (e.g. I don't just want a burger, i want a five guys burger). Additionally, the food might have usually been delivered at a higher quality than a typical Uber Eats/etc delivery, but that's still a distance away from restaurant quality; but the prices were obviously higher than eating at a restaurant.
Uber Eats/etc are barely successful, and the only reason they can find that success is because they don't have to manage all the typically lossy parts of food delivery (restaurants & the drivers). Gig apps are good businesses because they avoid this vertical integration: No depreciating assets, little real estate, low competition, no worry about managing minimum wage workers, no health inspections, no stoves breaking down, just some software engineers and marketing (I'm simplifying but you get my gist). Why anyone would think vertically integrating something involving a restaurant is a good idea is, well, crazy. Even ghost kitchens on the typical range of delivery apps are stupid; oh sure your startup is one of the most classically unprofitable kinds of businesses on the planet, I bet that'll survive when interest rates rise.
Uber Eats in the USA, yes, it's more hands off in terms of gig workers. In the UK and Germany and many other countries though, there have been many court rulings to essentially ban gig-working and enforce employee protections.
What does a ban on gig working look like?
That workers must be essentially treated as employees and everything that comes with that, including the minimum wage
I was in Bloomington for college and ordered from ClusterTruck multiple times. I did think the food was notably more fresh than other delivery services.
A Wonder just opened near my house, and the "different restaurants" seem to really be just different sections of a large menu with distinct branding. I.e., there is a single physical kitchen that makes food from the different "restaurants".
There are a bunch of "restaurants" in our town that are just different menus serviced at the same ghost/cloud/dark kitchen. The quality is generally not good. I wonder about the quality at Wonder -- the broader the menu, the harder it is for the preparers to get good at it.
I'm thinking here of an Indian place near my office that graduated from ghost kitchen to food hall restaurant. I had their food both before and after, and the difference was night and day. I actually didn't want to try the food hall version, based on my experience with their ghost kitchen incarnation. But a friend convinced me to give them another chance, and now they're one of my favorite places for when I want to splurge on lunch.
I don't really know what the difference is, but I'm guessing it's that they didn't get to have a kitchen setup that was well adapted to their menu at the ghost kitchen.
You can change the name, the brand, of a ghost kitchen startup 'restaurant' overnight if you think it's stale due to bad consumer experiences. So you need to care less about those.
Yeah, it's a cloud kitchen with a eating area.
I don't think anyone thinks this is "innovation"... it's just a slightly different take on Uber Eats / Spoonrocket / food courts / cloud kitchens / etc.
And if there is an "innovation", it's the vertical integration... it's a business "innovation," not a tech one.
[dead]
Upon seeing this, I first thought "a bread company is buying Grubhub?" Then I clicked the article and realized no, this is a different company I've never heard of, apparently because they're only located in five US states all in the northeast nowhere near where I live.
As others have said, they appear to have physical locations and you can even go eat in person there, and they don't pick up food from 30 different restaurants to deliver to you. They seem to just get licenses to use the names and recipes of celebrity chefs or other restaurants. That raises the question of what the point of a restaurant even is. Seemingly, there has to be some quality gain from using a particular kitchen and particular staff, a particular source of ingredients, whatever it is. There has to be a reason some enterprising businessperson can't just hire random cooks, buy recipes from celebrity chefs, and recreate the experience and quality of a meal at 30 different top rated restaurants in a single kitchen.
That seems just as impossible as delivering from 30 different places at the same time.
Because an enterprising businessperson has no idea how to run a kitchen.
Recipes are in many ways the least important part of what a chef provides. They're not secrets. If there's a "secret ingredient" it's that they're using more butter and salt than you'd use at home.
What a chef provides is a process. They get the ingredients ordered, at the quality level they want for a price they're willing to pay. They ensure that the ingredients show up, in the amounts needed, without waste and without falling short -- and have backup plans. They staff the kitchen, and ensure that they have all prepared their stations before service begins. They train the expediter to ensure that all of the food comes out together, without things waiting under the warmer.
The chef also provides a menu, which is more important than the recipes. It has something for every guest, and every item can be finished before the guest gets impatient.
It's not impossible for a business guy to hire a top-notch executive chef to do that work, but the business guy cannot do it. It requires years in the kitchen to know what factors are important. It requires a deep understanding of the culture of kitchen workers, and how to get the best out of them. It would require an enormous staff to do that properly, and training them extremely well.
You can see this at work at a place like The Cheesecake Factory. It's hardly great food, but it's reliably good. The menu is enormous, on par with a dozen restaurants at once. It can be done. You're just not going to do it Silicon Valley style, learning as you go.
I have enough trouble getting food on the table at the right time when I'm making a relatively simple meal for my family. Reading this description (which seems spot-on to me, though I don't have experience working in foodservice) is making me anxious just imagining it.
It is definitely nerve-wracking. But when things are going well, there's a kind of zen to it. They have the advantage of doing the same thing every day. They know the plan, and they stick to it.
Until something goes wrong with the plan -- somebody calls out sick, the refrigerator fails, an order gets messed up and has to be re-cooked -- and the rhythm gets disrupted. The dining room is full so new orders are getting backlogged, and more mistakes get made because you're off your game...
It's not for the faint of heart. It doesn't have to be as unpleasant as some TV shows make it out to be. But it's a whole different kettle of fish from cooking at home.
Microsoft cafeterias manage it by just contracting out most of the stations to local restaurants. They provide the trained staff and get a consistent revenue stream in return. They’ve even got a local celebrity chef branded restaurant in the executive building (34) with a 3 course fixed price menu. It’s not a single kitchen per se, but the equivalent is commercial kitchens that are all over the place with multiple clients sharing the space simultaneously. This just adds online ordering and centralized management.
Agree, I don't think that's going to work in practice.
At first blush, this might seem like another silly roll-up. However, I believe in Marc Lore completely and it will be interesting to see what this becomes. This is bad news for DoorDash (imo).
To be fair, DoorDash is bad news for DoorDash because a $8 meal costs $30.
Ahhh a slice line
I mean, they're all like that, adding on 40% to the actual meal total.
Y is the problem of Y. It's profiteering and exploitation.
I could see a world where Doordash, Toast, etc specialize in delivery from existing restaurants, while Wonder/GrubHub lean into an exclusive selection of food from ghost kitchens.
whoa, they own Chai Pani and Fred's Meat and Bread, both of which are _excellent_ fast casual spots in Atlanta. It's just... it's like $28 for a Philly cheesesteak, so I've only been to each twice. edit: ok it's $16 each apparently, but still
But also, they own physical chains, real estate ("food halls" aka bougie food courts) and now... meal delivery? It sounds like the most expensive-to-operate things all squashed into one.
edit: and they own Blue Apron?! I feel like they're going to buy Candy Crush next
It's really hard to see how this is going to work out long-term.
Acquisition of Farming Simulator incoming...
I don’t think they necessarily own the restaurants. They license the menu and cook/sell from a ghost kitchen.
Meat and Bread is in Seattle and Vancouver too, and yes, it’s fantastic lunch.
Looks like it's "Fred's Meat and Bread" which is different than the Meet & Bread chain in Vancouver, Calgary, and Austin.
Microsoft bought Candy Crush for $75 billion.
Apparently Wonder is unrelated to Wonder Bread.
Also unrelated to Stevie Wonder.
Apparently Wonder is unrelated to Wonder Bread
The deal was paid for with Wonder's bread.
I wonder (no pun intended) how much of this is driven by Marc's residual dislike of Amazon?
Amazon currently has a partnership with Grubhub to provide Grubhub delivery as a Prime benefit.
Amazon competed strongly (some might say unfairly) many years ago with Marc's first big startup, Diapers.com, and effectively forced him to sell to Amazon.
He later started Jet.com and sold it to Walmart - in many ways as a second chance to compete with Amazon.
"new kind of food hall" sounds much better than ghost kitchen
Wonder guy is a trader and I think this is a good trade. The question is who is he going to dump this whole thing to next?
Grubhub has fallen so far it's amazing. They (and Seamless who is the same thing in different regions) had such a big start but had their model disrupted. And while they were being disrupted they were trying to turn a profit as a public company and DoorDash just ate their market as they were in growth mode. Interesting sequence of events that led to them being acquired by Wonder.
Silly money, behaving stupidly.
I feel for the restaurant owners: not only were they forced into accepting the likes of Grubhub as a middle man, that same middleman now also owns restaurants that compete directly with them. If the restaurants have any power at all they should stop using Grubhub right now. I don’t know anyone still using it (which is crazy, Seamless used to dominate NYC).
I sincerely hope the entire thing burns to the ground. The last thing I need in my life is for all the restaurants in my neighbourhood to be soulless, VC operated chains.
Delivery should be done as a coop between local businesses. Always should have been that way.
Sometimes I miss when delivery meant either Chinese or pizza, and the businesses were specialized in that kind of work. Which meant it didn't cost an arm and a leg, and the whole system was vertically integrated in a way that gave your food a fighting chance of still being hot by the time it arrived.
Also the restaurants got a chance to teach their delivery staff how to properly handle the food. Which meant that the Chinese restaurants, for example, could get away with using oyster pails instead of having to resort to the "maximum packaging waste" option.
Restaurant business is so risky anyhow, managing a co-op too sounds like a big extra load to take on.
I refuse to use GrubHub and not only because it makes a $12 sandwich into a $22 sandwich, but also because small business needs cash. If you're tipping $2.37 on your credit card, kick bricks.
I thought the tips go to the delivery person, not the restaurant?
I stopped using Seamless when the corner sandwich shop went from $15 on an $8 sandwich to $25.
It made my blood boil when the receipt had 3 different fees before we even got to the tip.
How do these deals work?
I am assuming, and I could be very wrong, that Wonder is smaller by market cap than Grubhub.
Both companies are private, so neither has a "market cap". They just need to agree on a price.
In this case, GrubHub had taken on a bunch of debt; Wonder agreed to assume it, and GrubHub's owners/investors get $150M in cash.
> Both companies are private, so neither has a "market cap"
Private companies have shares. Given a per-share price, you can get a market cap. For a company with debt, like GrubHub, enterprise value is a better metric.
> Given a per-share price
how do you know the per-share price
> how do you know the per-share price
Same way you do for a public company. From trades and valuations. Private shares exchange hands in private transactions as well as almost every time the company raises money. If a company issues incentive stock options, they're required to calculate a 409A price, which while a bullshit number, is indeed a per-share price.
Corporations, by law, have shares.
> Same way you do for a public company. From trades and valuations.
how do you know what trades took place, and how many shares were traded, and at what price?
> how do you know what trades took place, and how many shares were traded, and at what price?
Company generally has these records. Various other sources, e.g. PitchBook, compile them. In some jurisdictions (e.g. UK and India) they have to be publicly announced, though that's becoming less common.
TL; DR It is incredibly wrong to suggest private companies don't have a market cap. As in finance 101 wrong.
> Same way you do for a public company. From trades and valuations.
no, it's not the same, because the information is not publicly available. They are the same in that in both cases you multiply two numbers together; they are not the same inasmuch as your ability to know those numbers is vastly different. To say they're the same is misleading.
You don't think lack of liquidity, small number of transactions etc casts some doubt on the "true value" of those shares?
Did they really go from some big number to some small number in an eyeblink with this latest transaction?
look at their about page, they have access that you don't have. They literally don't understand.
But they don't need to publicly disclose it, so "you" probably don't know the price. Someone does, sure.
Wonder was valued at 3.5 billion USD in 2022: https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/17/marc-lores-food-delivery-s...
Both companies are not public. The investors need to agree on the price and the deal is done.
What the heck is going on here? This feels very ZIRP-ey; private equity chasing disruption in the hopes of the next acquisition.
Is this just a race to the bottom as all these delivery companies burn cash to subsidize their failing model and hope that they can be the last one standing?
[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42127304
[dupe "dupe" comment] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42129024
Does that say dupe? Just flagging it properly
Ghost kitchens are the biggest scam in the food delivery world. why would anyone pay for an unsanitary kitchen to fry them up some frozen food?
Who says they're unsanitary? Are they not subject to the same kinds of health inspections that regular restaurants have to go through?
In the UK and EU they certainly are.
In they U.S. they are often converted shipping containers or poorly regulated rental kitchens
I... don't think that's right?
edit: I did some research. Ghost kitchens are generally inspected by federal or state authorities, but laws for inspection vary widely by state, and it can be difficult for customers to see or understand inspection results. E.g. You go to a restaurant and see the health grade in the window, but when you order from an online vendor who shares the same kitchen with 5 other vendors, it's very hard to trace the food your getting to the kitchen it's being prepared in and the relevant inspection history.
more here: https://www.theregreview.org/2021/01/13/verniero-paranormal-...
My buddy ordered from a spot called "Mega Quesadilla" and was raving about it. Turns out the ghost kitchen was just an IHOP making quesadillas.
And there's nothing wrong with that. IHOP has a well equipped kitchen and great cooks. And making a quesadilla isn't exactly rocket science.
Most of the legacy chain restaurants do this. Outback Steakhouse has a chicken tender ghost kitchen, Denny's has a grilled cheese / melt brand, etc
Many normal restaurants do a lot of heating up pre-prepared food as well.
1990s app buzz: discover and distribute music 100,000% more efficiently than brick and mortar!
2020s app buzz: eat food at least as expensive as brick-and-mortar that is no worse in quality!
> no worse in quality!
Evidence needed.
the easy wins are gone, but the funding is still there!
The point still stands, at least you get table service and hot food if you go into the restaurant
a lot of fast food is frozen at some point. That's just how that industry works.
Americans are happy to pay for any food that goes directly in to mouths. They'd pay more if pre-chewed.
Wonder owns Blue Apron too.
> [Wonder is] creating the super app for mealtime [...] re-envisioning the future of food delivery [...] pioneering a new category of “Fast Fine” dining.
Press release copywriting is such an artform in ways I'm sure they don't intend for. I don't think I could spin "ghost kitchen ordering app" into that much bullshit. That takes real skill.
Support your local restaurants. Don’t let these vampire platform companies enshitify your city’s food scene.
Which is an empty platitude if restaurants won't meet customers where they are - on their smartphones. I'll use my local restaurants' app/webpage when there is one and get pick-up, but if there isn't one, I'll be real - I just use Doordash. When I've got people over and need to order food, it'll take 45 mins between everything else going on to figure out a restaurant, and then another hour to pick some food. And then someone changes their mind while on the phone with the restaurant. Orrrr (after we pick a restaurant) we just pass the phone around.
This really seems like exaggeration. Two hours? How many people are we talking about here?
Also, nothing you've mentioned really solves your issues. Even with DoorDash, you'll need to pick a restaurant. And DoorDash doesn't solve the problem of someone changing their mind as they are ordering.
And then you still have to wait for the food to be prepared and delivered. And there's no guarantee on when it will arrive. So it winds up being a wash.
Also, there's a reason places that don't do delivery don't do it. The cost doesn't justify it. Then there's the whole "meet me where I am" attitude. They're the ones with the service you want. You have some obligation to meet them yourself.
And if you don't want to, that's fine. We used to manage all of this well enough before
You've never herded cats? That time is wall clock time, so to be clear, It isn't 1:45 collectively sitting down and paying attention to that one specific task. (That would be too easy.) Just like how it'll take three days to write six hours of code because of all of the other work stuff going on during a busy week, in my experience it just takes roughly three hours of wall clock time from "start beginning the process of ordering food" to food in mouth. Most of that is spent not ordering food. Finishing up some work stuff or finishing the TV/movie someone put on or hey check out this one video on YouTube/Tiktok/etc and getting sucked down a rabbithole, or a quick game of whatever cards, or a discussion about how someone's life/work/relationship/whatever is going. Just normal distractible people things.
The cashier at the restaurant isn't going to, (nor should they!) wait on hold for that entire hour of mostly not ordering food. Ordering via phone app doesn't care how long it takes after we start, or that we got utterly distracted and came back to it 20 minutes later.
It starts to take too long when it's more than a dozen or two people, though there usually aren't that many. At some point though, it becomes more effective to get people's dietary restrictions and make decisions for everybody, but just ordering a bunch of pizzas is considered a (delicious) failure mode to be avoided.
Doordash's app mostly doesn't help in figuring out which restaurant to go with, though it does say what got ordered last time. and has a rating and $ signs. The process becomes asynchronous. each person gets the phone and figures out what they want, without the rest of the group just staring at that one person until they finish. No one needs to manage orders beyond passing the phone around and eventually pressing checkout. The person who changes their mind just gets the phone back before the checkout button is pressed and edits the order. Doing that verbally via the phone is terrible. It's also understood that there's no changing after checkout is pressed.
To be clear, restaurants don't have to meet me on Doordash, but they do have to meet me at least halfway, which is on the Internet, and that there are local restaurants who do. They have their own webpage, they take orders there, it isn't run by Doordash, and we just send someone(s) to go pick up the food. At least one of them is operated by Square, which also runs that place's PoS system. So I'm not holding restaurants to some impossibly high bar that none of them seem to be able to meet, just discussing the reality of operating a restaurant in the digital age.
Restaurants modernized and installed telephones and credit card machines and now, they also need a digital presence to compete. There are umpteen restaurants competing for my business and if it's too much friction to eat their food, chances are I'm just not gonna eat there and my business ends up at a competitors.
I mean, they don't actually have to. There are some spots that don't have a website and still only take cash and it's word of mouth, and I frequent them infrequently, but that's their business model, so good for them, so long as it's actually working for them.
We used to order lunch for an office of 15 people just fine over the phone. We had a drawer stuffed with local takeout menus. The hardest part was deciding where to order from but that's the same with Doordash.
Ah, but there's the catch. Resturants aren't meeting you there, Grubhub workers are. Resturaunts largely just optimize for takeout, and whether or not your food arrives warm is less of their problem and more of the Grubhub worker's issue. And as delivery drivers quit over low pay and their businesses go bankrupt, I really see no way for restaurants to support this behavior.
Additionally, you have to look at it from a pragmatic perspective. When I visit the East and West coast of the US, meal delivery is popular enough that you might think it's a booming business. Everywhere else it's pretty much dead though. In places where the cost of living isn't enough to compensate for a restaurant and their middleman (read: most of the US), you can't even find a driver most hours of the day. It's one of those nonsense businesses like Uber that seems like a great idea on paper but one that falls apart outside the Bay Area economy. Most places in America are not gentrified enough to pay peons gas money in exchange for hand-delivered McDonalds.
edited to be clear this is for pickup. a number of local restaurants meet me there.
[flagged]
The whole comment was about how hard it is to wrangle 10+ people. How is that digital, or not real life? It's literally a group of people spending time together face to face.
Being a host isn't hard at all.
You just have to care and prepare.
They are offloading their responsibilities and then complaining about friction. It is an extremely privileged and shallow take.
I didn't think I was complaing, just documenting my situation. I don't think having a cellphone and a credit card and friends and access to doordash puts me into some super privileged category among people posting here even if globally some people don't have running water or Internet.
Not sure how that makes me shallow but I'm all ears, I'd love to learn.
Maybe I'm reading into your actions and projecting my bias more than I intended.
When I used to order food through Uber eats I would always feel bad about it because the ultimate labor costs are abstracted through those layers of convenience.
If it is helpful, I consider fast online shipping to be unethical, and customer woes are misdirected at the wrong layer of abstraction, often ignoring the intensive labor costs because they are intentionally hidden.
Does that help explain my viewpoint?
That doesn't address why I'm shallow for describing my lived experience, or my extreme privilege because I'm someone who has access to, and has used Doordash. If you don't use their platform then the delivery people on that platform aren't getting jobs and aren't getting paid. If you want to help them, tip them 50% in cash.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, unfortunately, and we all take our stand where we choose to. I could afford a better phone, but since smarphones have matured, I chose to buy refurbished phones because of the slavery inherent in their creation. Buying refurbished phones minimizes that as best I can while not giving up modern conveniences. Similarly, I'm happy to use a restaurant's app/website instead of Doordash when there is one, but one of my favorite restaurants is only on doordash (Ben's Fast Food, which is delicious healthy food with lots of greens, they just have a terrible name).
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Or just order from local restaurants using GrubHub. Most mark up their menu prices to absorb the hit they take from working with GrubHub and similar services. Some will encourage you to order directly or through a different 3rd party by including a flier with the delivery order. But many others only offer delivery through 3rd parties like GrubHub.
I just call them, it's not like the phone company takes a cut when you order on the phone.
That's good for you. I prefer putting together my order with the menu on my phone, adding notes and having a moment to think about those notes, adding delivery instructions, tipping with the same credit card I pay with, tracking my order, having an order history I can view, and not bothering people who are busy running a restaurant and don't need to be talking to me on the phone since this has all been automated for a couple decades. And to be frank, many restaurant workers don't have the best English skills and may be in a loud environment, making phone calls more difficult.
honestly I order from five or so places with regularity and at each of those places there are two or three things I actually order. Most of the time I really don't think GrubHub is providing any value that merits giving them a cut. I know that I like the orange chicken at the Chinese place near me, the white pie from the New York pizza place, the drive-through burger from the burger place, etc, etc, etc. I don't really need a menu. But yeah, if I'm in a new place and I'm doing a whole browse and search affair, looking at a new menu, reading reviews and all that, I just use Grubhub. That's just not actually most of my delivery. Most of my delivery is "I don't feel like cooking dinner tonight" -> order from one of my regulars.
> And to be frank, many restaurant workers don't have the best English skills and may be in a loud environment, making phone calls more difficult.
Yeah I dunno this argument feels very alien to me, because even people with poor English skills know the names of the items on their menu. It's not like I'm calling them to have an in-depth conversation, I'm just naming items off of their menu. Also I call in for pickup for like half my orders and pick up myself. At a bunch of places the food is cheaper if you just call.
[flagged]
c'mon man he means adding notes to the order like "put the sauce on the side" or "my building has two entrances, use the one on the left", you're being ridiculous.
>I just call them, it's not like the phone company takes a cut when you order on the phone.
Make sure you call the right number. Grubhub (and others possibly) will set up phone numbers[0] and websites[1] controlled by them and forwarded to the restaurant so they can take a cut.
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756878/yelp-grubhub-comm...
[1] https://www.grubstreet.com/2019/07/everything-you-need-to-kn...
We say shopping at Whole Foods, Walmart, and Kroger.
Local grocery stores have basically been extinct for decades- and realistically that isn't that surprising given they mostly sell commodity products. We don't need to let restaurants suffer the same fate.
Agreed. I'm super lucky in that we have a local independent grocery in our neighborhood. Prices are definitely a little higher than the big grocery chains, but the convenience of walking 2.5 blocks is hard to beat when I need something immediately (which turns out is fairly often).
Restaurants are by definition food commodification.
What point are you trying to make? Seems like a failure of government to enforce monopolization laws than individual consumers.
Consumers are voters.
no, we don't. if we're not mindless little drones we stopped shopping there a long time ago, don't lump us in with yourself
Someone's defensive about a statement of the American populace.
Yet another company propped up by private equity. Wonder Group raised $700M during a funding round in March 2024, with a total of $1.5B raised overall [1]
How long until it succumbs to the same fate as other PE funded companies (Foxtrot)? Then the people left holding the bag are the vendors that won’t get paid. Employees don’t get paid. Doors locked up one day with no reason.
Love how it has all of these celebrity endorsements as well to keep the facade going.
At the end of the day, it’s a glorified ghost kitchen.
[1] https://www.inc.com/rebecca-deczynski/wonder-marc-lores-fast...
[dead]
marc lore is underrated