Restaurants are for those who are cash rich, but time poor.

The cheapest way to eat is to buy ingredients and cook it yourself.

Restaurants buy ingredients, and cook, but also have to add costs like rent and labor. Thus as money supply constricts businesses like restaurants see a slow down in customers.

The current economic policies in the US are explicitly designed to raise the prices of goods and services like health care. This will, as a first order effect, reduce the disposable cash available.

Restaurants will suffer first, they are a luxury easily and quickly discarded. But they are the canary. Expect to see all kinds of businesses, especially small businesses suffer, as these policies play out.

And just remember, you voted for this, and many people explicitly support these policies and their effects. These are not bugs, they are explicit design goals.

This is where drone deliveries will shine.

Drone deliveries are a lot more like social media, hotels or flights, and a lot less like traditional deliveries. Once you build out the infrastructure, your cost-per-delivery (OpEx) rounds to zero. You want to spread out your infrastructure costs across as many deliveries as possible, so it makes sense to increase utilization, even at extremely low delivery prices. This is the "Ryanair model."

Because drone deliveries are so cheap (and so fast, there's no traffic after all), long-range deliveries make much more sense. If you can do long-range, you care a lot less about where your restaurant is located and how many customers you have passing by. This makes your rent go down.

Long range also increases how many customers you can realistically serve. You can exploit this in two ways, either by hyperspecializing in some particular kind of food, or by introducing standardization and automation.

A large part of the reason why restaurants aren't automated is that they just don't have that many customers. It doesn't make sense to pay for expensive machines (or even design them) if you are constrained by both rent and range. If neither are a constraint, you can go wild.

I think it’s first order the rent (commercial) and second order the wages needed to pay rents (residential). Having seen the rents in the major cities I don’t know how people manage - it’s insanity.

The presence of so many food trucks to me points to real estate and rent prices as a higher order driver than wages

> High minimum wages

It is not the (not actually high) minimum wages. Stores I've known that had problems staying open were having to pay more than the minimum wage because housing is so expensive.

A different analysis of the same situation could be that there were actually too many restaurants that were not profitable and thus couldn't pay their workers a living wage thus needing to close down.

And maybe also that people don't have the means (anymore) to go to the restaurant every other day.

Australia has even higher minimum wages and chain restaurants are fairly rare and unpopular. Almost everything I see on the street is a small business with likely only one location.

I don't mean to be spitefully political, but shouldn't we perhaps compare wage costs to other costs in determining whether the business can run profitably? I've seen a lot of small businesses fall to rising real-estate costs.

It’s not the wages, it’s the (commercial) rent. Guaranteed.

At least in Seattle, I believe the high minimum wage is due to CoL in the city, which is very high due to rent cost, which is high because of geography and not building a lot. If there was a building boom which led to a surplus of rental units, and rents went down, you wouldn't need such a high minimum wage.

It's not just wages, it's every single avenue on which the government is forcing them to incur some cost and in every case it favors the big chain that has more locations, more meals, more everything to amortize the costs over. It was ignorable with some mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance when times were good but now that they aren't it's more obvious. Normally it's worth blaming rent to some extent but commercial RE is crap right now so that ain't it

> High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants.

Another way of putting this:

"Small restaurants can only operate at a profit if they're allowed to pay people so little they can't afford to live off of it."

Any business that can only survive by exploiting its workers does not deserve to exist.

The fact that there were many small restaurants that were operating just fine when the minimum wage was, relatively speaking, much higher (ie, you could work full-time waiting tables at minimum wage and still afford a house and kids) strongly suggests that this claim does not hold water.

You probably won't like not having employees. Those employees can start their own small cafeterias where the are owners who manage and work their business.

The real problem is affordable housing.

> High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants

The federal minimum wage in the US is pitiful and yes some cities and states do higher ones, but frankly if you’re operating on such small margins then you need to increase your prices. I’ve seen a trend of new restaurants opening with fixed menus/prices per head. They aren’t cheap, but they aren’t unreasonable, and it’s looking like at least here they are finding real footing. We’ll see in 5-10 years what the survival rate is I suppose.

During Covid I did a lot of interviews with very high-level restauranteurs (mostly chefs) in my city, several of which had James Beard awards and beyond. This is not a flex, it’s purely for context. These are considered some of the best in the city.

They all said the exact same thing: Everyone is pushing their prices too low and promising high-quality, fresh ingredients that are all locally sourced and yada yada. That’s great, but it can’t be done in a sustainable way. Not if you want to actually pay a living wage or offer even the most modest benefits to your employees. The larger population needs to accept the fact that if we want restaurants to actually survive at all, we have to pay more for it and treat it as more of a luxury.

Good, ethical, cheap. Pick two.

Wild take. If you can’t pay a living wage your business shouldn’t exist.

Restaurants closing due to wage increases means workers were being exploited to cover unsustainable costs. Rents have to come down or wages need to go up across the board to cover the higher prices.

The billionaire class can’t eat enough food to keep restaurants open. They need to outsource it to the middle class.

> High minimum wages are making it nearly impossible to run small restaurants.

Not as much as one would think.

Rent (literal) and rent seeking (lending in this case) are the biggest drivers in food costs today.

The family restaurant in an owned building is a distant memory.

The wholesale price of food is very low at the point of production (farming) and absolutely bonkers at the retail and wholesale levels. Mostly because at every step of the chain there is debt, and massive interest payments that need to be made.

The HN set is on one side of the K shaped economy and the other half is looking very much like late stage capitalism.

Case in point: Fritos. 4.50 a bag, while the Walmart generic version is under 2 bucks. Why? Because Pepsi (owner of Fritos) is competing with apple for customers, aka SHAREHOLDERS, and has a massive amount of debt compared to Walmart. The primary input in Fritos is corn, whos price is close to 2019 levels.

Adjusted for income, those prices would be $15-$100 today. That seems in the right ballpark to me. I can get a pretty great dinner for $100/plate, especially if I don't need it to be in a fancy restaurant atmosphere.

A starting point would be actually having enough housing, so workers don't automatically need wages that can absorb the overhead of commuting an hour both ways just to make burgers.

So we should be talking about autonomous delivery of mealkits: HelloFresh, Marley Spoon, Dinnerly, Blue Apron, etc?

I put my money into the toaster but no food came out. Please send help.

well if you redefine the word "restaurant", sure...

>If you live in a very walkable place, you're less likely to use delivery

This makes sense as a theory but it doesn't match my observed reality at all. Everyone I know who frequently orders food on delivery apps live in dense, walkable cities.

Phoenix as a city doesn't make sense. It's entire existence is due to Arizona getting wayyyy too much in the way of water rights for the amount of economic activity that should be happening in it.

A bit hyperbolic. I’d rather walk outside in Phoenix in July for 20 minutes instead of 10 minutes in Tampa.

> that won't pass environmental review

In what way do walkable neighborhoods not pass environmental review?

> but if you're against the disenfranchisement of people.

Nobody is taking away their right to vote, so it isn't "disenfranchising" someone to put in a second icecream shop in their neighborhood when they only wanted one.

> San Francisco, local neighbourhoods discussed whether or not two ice-cream stores in the neighbourhood were too many ice-cream stores

SF seems to have a public feedback and planning problem that dysfunctionally favors nimbyism over regional needs and they end up shooting themselves in the foot with it over and over.

Tell us your lifestyle and we will definitely be able to point out a lot of crazy things, but I’m sure they do make sense for you for whatever reason. Perhaps someone ordering DoorDash so that their family can spend more time together. Any blanket statement is short shortsighted.

I take it you also sew your own clothing and get milk from your own cow?

If not, what makes cooking special?

> and tastier than eating out

Eehhh.. I'm a decent cook, I can adjust things for my taste but there's no way I can compete with people who do this for 40h/week over multiple years with kitchen appliances worth as much as a decent second hand car. Hell, good restaurants have access to produce I can't really get since I'm not going to tour 4 farms to make 1-4 portions of food.

Yes, and to be honest if you know how to read, you can also cook. Just google a recipe with good reviews and follow it to the letter, the outcome will most likely be good enough.

> Or people learning to cook instead of being lazy slobs.

There are many reasons people eat out beside lack of cooking knowledge or desire to be social. You seem like you value feeling superior to these people. Perhaps you can find a way to value yourself without looking down on everyone who makes different choices?

> Plus it is cheaper, faster, healthier and tastier than eating out.

You can get some of those 4 but in my experience, getting all 4 at the same time doesn't happen often.

or go to any other country where grabbing tasty food around the corner with your friends is a regular and affordable social activity...

Single occupancy vehicles make up most of the traffic on the road. For most people, the most significant cost of being on the road is their time. With self driving cars, our roads will be full of zero occupancy vehicles.

Zipline's platform 2 is VTOL and is essentially a quad rotor + 1 rear swivel motor, during delivery. A fixed wing won't help you much if you have a failure while hovering. Google's Wing is a very similar design (6 hover motors on a boom, two booms, one along each wing). The key is flight system redundancies, something consumer drones simply don't have, and Zipline also has a ballistic parachute in case of severe failures since their aircraft is fairly large.

Maybe they won't ever become a "big thing", but Zipline is already delivering food directly to consumers in TX and elsewhere.

The problem is it all needs to grow with use and buildings aren't very mobile. You build something with plenty of road/sidewalk at the edge of the city, city grows, traffic increases, land gets expensive so the buildings get as big as possible and split into smaller apartments, street and sidewalk need to grow, there's nowhere to grow, street eats some of the sidewalk since it's more 'necessary'/utilitarian as pedestrians deal with congestion better than cars and western governments are allergic to motorcycles/scooters. Eventually as a middle point a bicycle lane might sprout since it's kind of the mid point of utility and leisure.

But you can't make things obscenely large in the beginning since then if the area doesn't take off you have a huge amount of infrastructure that still needs maintenance and it also feels like a ghost town with less usage.

It was all a lot easier in the 20th century because there wasn't this mix of speed/capability. The cars were shit, horse carriages aren't exactly fast, bicycles were shit... You had | 20hp trabantesque cars - 5hp horse carriage - bicycle - pedestrian |. Now you have | 400 hp cars - faster (e)bicycles - pedestrians | combined with increased safety culture so you need more splittage and more barriers (be it trees, an actual barrier, curvy roads built to slow people down, etc)

Have you ever seen one? Because the ones I have seen IRL doing deliveries where especially lost in open spaces. They do not make sense how they are moving and its not that obvious where its going. Like a goose on the side-walk: you need to be vary because you cannot really determine what it will do next. But in theory, they should work great ...

Yes they do but if I want to grab something to eat I just go downstairs and have a supermarket or a restaurant within 5 minutes walk so there's that.

dabbawalas have existed for a century

It is expensive like London is expensive. There are rich people and there are not rich people like other expensive places around the world. Median income in la county is only $38k however.

Oh I tried at one point to get paid while I'm spending time biking anyhow. Doordash wasnt taking new dashers. Ubereats let me sign up but 3 days of having the app open I got no orders so I gave up. I guess they deprioritize bike delivery that heavily. Little do they know I am faster than cars on surface streets.

Jobifying anything makes it a bit shit. There be deadlines. There be angry customers. There be rain and hale.

Ehh, I take the full lane. I survive. They honk sometimes sure.

> little interest in keeping the area around them a pleasant environment to live in

Some interest in reducing evasive maneuvers or counter-attacks triggered by noise.

51% of car trips in the US are less than 6 miles long. Maybe reconsider if you need a multi ton vehicle with 300 mile range to get a loaf of bread.

https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10318

Other people mentioned Zume pizza tried this in the past. Currently there is a company doing this San Mateo call Olhso:

https://www.olhsotruck.com/

They have not implemented the Mad Max style of vehicular combat you described, yet.

You're still thinking too small. Think back to the heady days of intense Java popularity and strain your brain to remember your Gang Of Four...

What's better than a Factory?

A FactoryFactory!

Why order a burrito that is made in a truck, when you can order a BurritoFactory that is constructed en route to you, to your exact specifications, and from then on, will make you endless burritos from the comfort of your own home?!?

Zume already tried with pizza in the Bay Area (though the trucks weren't self driving), IIRC.

Didn't work out, last I checked.

(Edited a bunch of times for doofusness.)

Maybe you don't order one up? Instead it's like an ice-cream truck but for grownups and it's burritos. The music could be mariachi chiptunes

Is this how the fast food wars of Demolition Man started?

Finally a vision of the future I can get behind

But they're more like taquitos than burritos for aerodynamic reasons, also they get flame grilled as they re-enter. The secret sauce IP is getting the ablative tortilla just right so it doesn't totally burn off during reentry but also isn't to thick once it gets in the hand.

No worries, the v4 starship will finally work, and somehow through musk stock manipulation it will be really cheap (ignore the current excitement around v3 starship about to start flight).

Speak for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UX7NJLYyb4

My read of the comment wasn't that he was "blaming" either, but explaining where the fees come from.

It sounds like the direct increase to the consumer's prices is done by the restaurant itself, but the reason the restaurant is charging higher prices are to make up for the fees they're charged by UE/DD.

In other words, UE/DD restaurant-side service fees eat into the restaurant's profit margins, so the restaurant passes on the cost increases to the consumer to get them back.

To be clear, no idea about how closely these statements correspond to the world, just that this seems to be OP's claim.

I’m not “blaming” anyone really. I don’t fault the restaurants for raising prices to cover the costs. I don’t love how opaque the whole thing is but I understand both sides.

It’s all a shell games so that they can say “free delivery” and/or not have to call out “this item is $5 but you will pay a 20% more to get it delivered through DoorDash”. They just hide that “fee” in the item price.

Nope, I work for Touchpoint https://www.touchpoint.io/

How about algorithmic collusion? https://consumerlaw.berkeley.edu/news/california-slams-door-...

Based on the fact that other platforms like GrubHub hijacked Google Places registrations for restaurants and also presented menus of non-customer restaurants in the platform, yes, I would not be surprised at all if that type of shenanigans were going on at DoorDash as well.

Also, Doordash does not have "zero fees" for orders when you pay for DashPass, they have "reduced" fees. I do absolutely hate the practice of "Taxes & Fees" being a line item and only when you click into it do you see that the taxes are minimal and most of that is the platform fees.

I'm not sure how UberEats/etc handle it but it's absolutely crazy how much of a markup there is to order through Doordash vs going to pick it up when you factor in Restaurant Upcharge + Doordash Fees + Tip. It's easy to have an $8 item suddenly cost $20 or more total out-of-pocket when all is said and done.

so like, Amazon Prime?

It's the opposite — you're legally protected to resell anything you buy and the seller can't stop you. I'm not sure if food has any caveats, but in general, IP law cannot stop you from reselling an item.

It's called the First-Sale Doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

This exact arbitrage, performed by Doordash, was exploited.

https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage

IP law, no, for the same reason nothing stops me from reselling the Ralph Lauren shirt I bought as a Ralph Lauren shirt, so long as I make no pretenses of being Ralph Lauren, and I make no modifications to it. The good is the same, IP protected good. I'm just re-selling it.

Food safety? There might be some restrictions related to food handling, but to my understanding they're mostly pretty rote food handling safety training stuff that I'd hope delivery companies provide anyway.

If you're in a jurisdiction that taxes prepare food, then the government is going to be unhappy about missing the tax on the second sale.

This has been happening for a good while. There are loads of instances of food delivery companies creating unauthorized websites for restaurants with a phone number and url owned by the delivery company. They are literally buying the food and reselling it to you at a markup.

If it's illegal nobody cares.

> it's not like online retailers having different prices for the same SKU, it's the same restaurant

But those online retailers are supplied by the same distributor who is supplied by the same manufacturer.

    - ManufacturerA -> (Amazon|Walmart) -> Customer
    - RestaurantA -> (Pickup|Doordash|Uber) -> Customer

> I'd prefer the overhead to show up as its own line item, rather than obscuring the actual cost of the service.

Me too. Especially that they already ALSO add a service fee in many (most?) locales, in addition to the delivery fee and the tip.

    - Item priced 30% higher
    - Delivery fee
    - Service fee
    - Tip

Just because you don’t like it should not make it illegal.

> I'd prefer the overhead to show up as its own line item, rather than obscuring the actual cost of the service.

While that’s what you prefer, the market (most other users, including whale spenders) doesn’t care to know the actual cost.

> I’m pretty sure DoorDash is the one who increases the price on their end, not the business

That is not correct. Doordash takes a 20-30% commission on each sale, so businesses preemptively increase the prices to offset that. They're not forced to and doordash isn't doing it for them. But, you know, they're still effectively "forced" to if their in-store prices don't have great margins to begin with...

Not always

- https://www.eater.com/2020/1/29/21113416/grubhub-seamless-ki...

- https://www.knoxnews.com/story/entertainment/dining/2018/10/...

- https://lawstreetmedia.com/featured/restaurant-sues-doordash...

- https://www.golocalprov.com/news/legal-but-unethical-ri-rest...

- https://www.wctv.tv/2023/12/19/phony-restaurant-listing-door...

Unless something has changed over the last couple years, restaurants opt in to being available on those apps. Uber Eats and the others are generally integrated into the restaurant's point of sales system.

When the market is captured by the marketplace apps: No, not really

Sure they can, and go bankrupt because people order more than they go to restaurants nowadays.

That calculation doesn’t work. If an item costs $10, and Uber marks it up 25% then Uber lists it at $12.50. When Uber takes 25% of the marked up price, they’re taking $3.125 and the restaurant is getting less than $10.

And then you wonder about the obesity crisis.

Amazon is the model to observe here; before that, Walmart. Red Widgets and Blue Widgets are sold. The platform rewards whichever product is cheaper. Initially this will lead to the two competing their margin away, and then the only way to compete is to start substituting inferior materials or craftsmanship. Consumers can theoretically make the choice to switch away from these products, putting the bad actors out of business, but there is a cost associated with this switch, and consumers may not always be aware of product substitutions, nor of the availability of potential alternatives.

Soviet-style command economies aren’t a better alternative, but it’s an incentive problem with market economies without an obvious solution; market fundamentalists get around it by just insisting that if consumers really cared, they’d seek out alternatives, but this doesn’t solve the problem until after it happens.

This problem is mirrored by an incentive structure observed in government where a concerted interest group can expend more time and effort lobbying for a budget allocation than an individual can expend resisting it.

That number includes chains. Those restaurants (McD's for example) get preferential treatment - they are on the front-page and they pay no or little commission. That would skew the average. And maximum probably does not include all the potential add-on fees.

What is making you skeptical?

But they can deliver without being a middleman. E.g. they can work as contractors for the restaurant.

But now, instead, they are the ones taking the customer's orders, and hence they become the portal for the business (and thus, middlemen). Which is a bad situation for the restaurant owners.

> 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.

So we need a car that drives around and makes hamburgers on-demand, drives to your home while it's being prepared, and delivers it hot and fresh to your door with a smaller bot.

To be clear, we do not need this, and I am being sarcastic. However, if a VC wants to fund me to do this, I'll try my best in the hours between my use of the startup's office sim-rig and the office wood workshop.

In the U.S. unless you're in a big city, it's always cars.

The absurd waste of energy in moving a 4000lb object to deliver a 1lb object. You can attribute that to whatever source you want. It's still wasted energy.

Hummm. Okay. I guess I'm aware of this for like, grocery pickup or calling ahead for something like a BestBuy order, but I always envisioned those things being situations where the customer parks in a parking lot out in front of the store.

When I take Waymos around SF, a really common part of the process is, upon reaching the drop-off location, the Waymo realizes there's no space, the road is too busy to comfortably double-park, and it shifts into "Looking for a spot to pull-over..." mode. It's not uncommon for it to drive a full block away from my drop-off location in order to find a safe spot.

I was applying that mindset to this situation. I agree that if they can guarantee that a Waymo is just parking/double-parking right in front of the store and all the employee has to do is take a step outside, drop it in the trunk, and shut the trunk - that that is sustainable.

Use stolen CC on App, pick up somewhere seedy far away from where you live. OP is right, this will be abused. What is keeping people from dumping weird things into the truck after picking up their $15 cheeseburger?

Huh? Why would I think that? My comment is regarding the customer. With an automated delivery the customer receives the goods at the location where the delivery vehicle can park near the destination. Without automated delivery, the human receives the goods at their front door.

True, there was a smaller service area. Luckily I lived in NJ so you could throw a rock and hit 3 pizza shops.

You can pre-order lunch to arrive for your lunchtime meetings in about a minute in the app. Probably less convenient if you have an apartment, compared to a house, though.

Honestly it does not sound that far from reality.

I guess the parent is referencing this kind of study:

> The overall average cost to own and operate a new car in 2025 is $11,577 (decrease of $719 from 2024).

https://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/UPDATE-A...

I know a lot of people who live by like 10 min frequency routes or better and usually its me revealing their existence to them when I use it to show up to their house. Could it work for all trips? Of course not. But plenty could be done on busses as it is. People are blind to them though. No one bothers to look at transit system maps. They see the couple rail lines listed on google maps and assume there is no other transit offering.

> How many bags is "only for what I need" and how large is your household?

Generally one bag, mostly produce. Maybe a meat I’ll cook that day.

House size ranges from one to five. The only time I wind up with a full fridge is around holidays or when I have houseguests with food anxiety.

But in cities and towns you must have mixed zoning like the rest of the world?

100 yards isn't a walkable distance in Phoenix in the summer.

The intersection stuff sucks, but "over a mile" seems to be between 1.5 to 2km, is that considered far to walk in the US? Measuring where I go to have my morning coffee at a cafe each day, it seems to be 1.3km away, and I walk there and back every morning...

Counterpoint: my family in New Delhi regularly gets groceries (and booze and cigarettes and pet food) delivered. Convenience comes in many forms, and not everyone values the same elements similarly.

A lot of problems are easy if you can get everyone to coordinate. Wishful thinking is not a plan though.

They've always been allowed to exist in the US.

But the US also allows suburbs, and it turns out a ton of people prefer those, having backyards for their kids.

I love cities but I'm also well aware that tons of people don't want to be stuck in cities.

Outside of big cities in Japan, car ownership is quite high (usually 2 cars per household).

I took a ride home two nights ago for under $7. On the other hand, I tend to avoid Ubers in New York (versus taxis), but that’s one part local demand and one part local regulation.

Yes. The quality of a delivered pizza is higher than the quality of other delivered foods relative to the quality of getting them for dine in at the restaurant.

Do /you/ understand food delivery?

I think that you don't understand snow (real winter) and how it effects vehicles. A dusting of snow that stays on the ground for a day before melting is not an issue. The issue is when the snow keeps the road markings covered for literally weeks or months at a time. When the lanes are not visible to human drivers and they form new flocking based emergent lanes which all humans follow instead of the actual lanes. When the snow piles on the edge of the road change the width from week to week and force parked cars out into the middle of the old lane.

Snow is not a problem. Snow that stays is a problem. Atlanta doesn't get snow that stays. Waymo is noticbly absent from Buffalo after their one prior attempt.

Ah, yeah, but from that point of view it's not much of a news story and one wonders why anyone cares?