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.

Now I’m kind of curious after reading your comment - did anyone mostly correctly predict this dystopia 5-10 years ago? It seems somewhat obvious enough that maybe at least one person nailed it

If I order from my local pizza restaurant for collection it ends up being about 50% of the cost of any food delivery app. I quite enjoy the walk too.

I used to be able to order Chinese Food or Pizza and pay a $2 tip on top of the order and everyone was happy. Ordering food has changed for the worse in innumerous ways.

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.

I'll begrudgingly tip

THANKS!

Multi-billion valuation? Even suckers know it wasn't really worth that much. A Wall Street London Hong Kong casino game.

I've never understood the value proposition here. Of course they have to charge 200% to deliver you a combo meal. Getting a taxi from the restaurant to your place would cost at least as much. Driver time, gas, insurance, vehicle depreciation, time spent getting to the restaurant... it's got to add up to several dollars at least even if they carried no food at all.

It should cost about the same to deliver $200 worth of filet mignon with truffles. Same amount, much smaller percentage. I'm surprised people ever order small amounts of food through those services.

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!

>real value is only confirmed when a transaction occurs

Market cap is based on the last transaction that occurred. Are you saying it's speculative until the entire company is purchased?

I think the real scheme behind these companies was to monopolize the restaurant industry the way that uber has monopolized the taxi industry.

7.3B makes sense if you hold 40% of the restaurant business across the US.

Build out delivery network for existing restaurants, capture all of their order data, use that data to create ghost kitchens to sap business, ghost kitchens can turn into full restaurants, and continue as far as you could.

The 7.3 billion dollars figure doesn't come from market cap. It was the price that Just Eat actually paid to purchase the entirety of GrubHub 4 years ago. So it wasn't speculative, someone actually paid it in full.