Grubhub as a database was an amazing service in college. In cities, there was a large number of nearby restaurants you may never have even heard of and you finally could see the full collection instead of just defaulting to Pizza Hut. Delivery was limited to however far away the restaurant was willing to lose one of their own employees for a bit, it was free or nearly free, and a shitty delivery driver was bad for business.
This is now a new hell. We have floating drivers, picking up multiple food orders from multiple restaurants and driving in the wrong direction while your food gets cold.
We have ghost kitchen restaurants having multiple online store fronts to hide the bad reviews of their crap food for the actual restaurant.
We have small businesses and large corporations demanding 15 to 20 percent of the order cost to deliver the food a few blocks. But they'll lower it to 10 percent if you get a subscription. And they still want a tip.
Even the existing aggregators like Yelp won't actually show you what's around without paging through tiny slices of their information ranked almost arbitrarily by random people on the Internet and gamed by businesses paying to rank higher.
I just don't bother with delivery. I get subscriptions to nearly all the food services included with my credit cards, banks, or some other random service and it's still not worth it. Either I'm eating out at a restaurant, where I'll begrudgingly tip, or I'm picking up food from somewhere I can get to within a ten minute walk or drive. Grubhub, Door Dash, and the like provide no value anymore. The massive loss in value of GrubHub still was not enough.
Everytime I order Grubhub/etc - which is like you decreasing quick to never again - I miss Foursquare. Foursquare did exactly what you’re talking about in terms of surfacing new places. But it was friends who were doing the surfacing.
Not sure how active it is outside large US cities but I've been using Beli (https://beliapp.com/) for the past couple years. It's essentially friends stack-ranking restaurants they've been to, which is useful because I can adjust for their biases -- they care varying amounts about service, cleanliness, authenticity, creativity, ambiance, etc. I regularly find new spots through friends and can decide if I trust their taste enough to order/check it out in person.
Only downside is it's pretty limited to the yuppie-foodie crowd - like in NYC, once you venture into deeper Brooklyn/Queens/The Bronx, you won't find much on there.
Same. The ghost kitchens and also exorbitant costs (particularly due to city imposed costs here) made me abandon all delivery services. I now prefer picking things up and enjoy the time driving to the restaurant with music or a podcast. It’s also nice to interact with other humans. I save lots of money and get something out of it.
Market cap is just speculative pricing, the grand illusion of wealth. Then, there is investment banking advice, which is still speculative. The real value is only confirmed when a transaction occurs.
A couple things happened: delivery services were unusually popular due to lockdowns, and that ended. Couple that with the drying up of investments in 2021ish that caused shrinking valuations for everyone. And you get this transaction which itself includes a premium.
I bet these services get a lot of new users and then when the service is terrible and doesn't meet expectations they never go back. I tried them all once or twice then never again when it would regularly take 2+ hours for my food to get delivered. Never had a single good experience with a food delivery app. They actually seem to have regressed all food delivery which before this usually was managed by the restaurant with its own delivery drivers. Now no restaurants really deliver so now we're all forced to use these apps. It sucks!
This is now a new hell. We have floating drivers, picking up multiple food orders from multiple restaurants and driving in the wrong direction while your food gets cold.
We have ghost kitchen restaurants having multiple online store fronts to hide the bad reviews of their crap food for the actual restaurant.
We have small businesses and large corporations demanding 15 to 20 percent of the order cost to deliver the food a few blocks. But they'll lower it to 10 percent if you get a subscription. And they still want a tip.
Even the existing aggregators like Yelp won't actually show you what's around without paging through tiny slices of their information ranked almost arbitrarily by random people on the Internet and gamed by businesses paying to rank higher.
I just don't bother with delivery. I get subscriptions to nearly all the food services included with my credit cards, banks, or some other random service and it's still not worth it. Either I'm eating out at a restaurant, where I'll begrudgingly tip, or I'm picking up food from somewhere I can get to within a ten minute walk or drive. Grubhub, Door Dash, and the like provide no value anymore. The massive loss in value of GrubHub still was not enough.
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