This was not very doable pretty much everywhere outside NYC. The lower density of restaurants made it harder for delivery to be a thing except all the pizza places that offered it.
That's a generalization with no supporting data. As an actual sample size of 1; I lived in a smaller city of only about 250k people and there was a huge selection of restaurants that offered delivery, not just pizza.
Honestly DoorDash when it did come reduced restaurant profits, lowered quality of food delivered, and increased consumer costs. Zero advantage for anyone other than DoorDash unless you consider being able to search for the food in a single app and paying extra for it to be cold on arrival an advantage.
That is not a generalization, that is actually a fact. Doordash and other delivery apps gradually added restaurants on their platforms and still add new ones regularly. The fact that this happened in itself is a proof that they didn’t have food delivery as an option before.
If you want more concrete data, you need to look at how McDonald’s did deliveries in Manhattan but not rest of the US until they partnered with food delivery apps. Most other fast food chains did not have their own delivery network either.
Without commenting on this topic in general, you appear to have a flaw in your reasoning. That a restaurant was added to Doordash does not prove that it never had the ability to deliver before that.
It doesn’t guarantee that they never had the ability to deliver. But the fact that delivery apps grew (kept adding more restaurants so quickly) was in part that restaurants could do delivery when previously they didn’t. The parent‘s argument was that delivery was already a norm before, which clearly was not the case.
And I also point to restaurants that are newly added to delivery platforms, because you can easily verify if they previously could deliver or not.
It’s always dependent on wear you lived. I’ve always lived in my city of at least 1mil+ and growing up before DoorDash we could never get delivery because of zip code. Now with DoorDash it doesn’t matter. Delivery has always existed but that was mostly dependent on if the restaurant wanted to come to your area.
I've lived in a city of 50k people and smaller, and in various suburbs (of major cities) and ALWAYS had a collection of delivery menus in a bag next to the junk drawer. I don't think I've even lived anywhere that didn't have a reasonable amount of delivery. That's not to say such places aren't common... just that "unique to NYC" certainly doesn't describe it.
Doordash could just employ delivery drivers to solve this problem. No need for a 100% at will temp work force. They could just hire people part time or full time. And if work is really that surgy they could just have workers on call.
Why does “innovation” have to go hand in hand with fucked up labor practices?
Because we live in a capitalist society and profit is the only objective.
Not exploiting your workforce as much as you can is an almost guaranteed road to failure.
Imagine taking investor money and saying "I'll pay more to my workers so they can have decent lives". They'd oust you in a second. Same if you're in a publicly traded company.
The only possible way this doesn't happen is if you're running an already profitable private company, you're willing to grow at slower rates (which carries its own risks), your market allows it and you're not a sociopath.
At the end of the day this is all driven by market dynamics that affect everyone. Uber Eats doesn't have a secret sauce that makes it cheaper for drivers to deliver food in cities with lower restaurant density. Someone has to pay for gas, someone has to pay for drivers' time. Even in large cities Uber Eats is now more expensive than ordering directly from restaurants in the past, why would it be different for cities with fewer restaurants?
Oh I don't think anyone said they're making it cheaper. But a lot of restaurants now have expensive delivery instead of no delivery. Before, there were very few places where most restaurants would deliver.
