TechStuffFormer TechStuff co-host Lauren Vogelbaum comes back to TechStuff to talk about the chaotic, absurd, and sometimes infuriating world of food delivery apps. Are they good for restaurants? (No). Are they good for drivers? (Nope). Are they good for the companies themselves? (Not really).
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonavan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the Tech are Ye and Hey Tari, this one's for you.
I love all things tech. How's that?
You know? Tari's been bugging me about doing my old lead in. Today we have a very special episode with a very special guest co host. This co host is one of the co hosts of the Saverer podcast. She hosts the brain Stuff podcast, and ten years ago she was co host of this very ding dang show. Welcome back to tech Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum.
Oh, thank you, Hi, it is good to be back. And that I didn't need to know that number ten years That's fine, that's I'm fine with that.
Yeah. Yeah.
Do you remember how ten years ago you would often punctuate episodes with but Jonathan, you're so old.
It was important to remind you someone's got to keep you in line.
I mean, this will be the sobering fact of the episode. Next June, I turned fifty. So yeah, you were telling me I was sold when I was on the verge of forty. It turns out during the pasting of time, I've only gotten older and more cantankers.
I mean, I'm an entire like seven years younger, which means that I'm a heck in spring chickens.
Yeah yeah, seven years younger, as in she means she's actually de aged seven years over the course of ten. We don't know how she does it. And Lauren, when I invited you to come on to the show, I asked you if you had any suggestions for topics, and you came up with one that I had never really covered before, and I think is very important. And it's all about food delivery app companies. You know, your your door dashes, your Uber Eats, your grub hubs and what not. And you had talked about how you wanted to talk not just about how these things work, not really even about how they work. We're going to leave that stuff aside. We're going to talk about the impact these companies have had not just on customers, but restaurants and their own businesses. Because in the old house stuff works days, we might have called this how they don't work.
Yeah, well, so it's super fascinating to me as a human person who a you know, well, I mean, I think about food all the time because I'm sort of continually hungry, but also it's just in a hypoglycemic way. Don't worry, I'm doing fine. But also someone who talks about food for my podcast, if you couldn't tell from the namesaver, it's a food history, science and culture podcast. And we did an episode about delivery and takeout in general back in twenty eighteen, and it is wild to me how wrong those numbers were when I pulled up those notes to start taking notes for this episode, because like, there's been just a wild boom all of those delivery apps since the pandemic.
Of course, yeah yeah, yeah, you all might not remember this, but just a few years ago we had this global COVID nineteen outbreak where many of us were forced to work from home, and in fact, it completely transformed the way we do podcasts. Back in the old days, we would come into the house Stuff Works offices over at the old Pon City Market location, and we would record in one of the whisper rooms or one of the two podcast rooms. Well not one of the two, because Stuff you should know, pretty much had that one on lockdown, but the other one. And that's how it worked and we would come in. But then, of course the pandemic forced all of us to create kind of at home ad hoc podcast spaces.
Oh yeah, March thirteenth, like a Friday. I think they just emailed all of us. They were like, Okay, there's a pandemic, don't come back. We're mailing you on microphone.
Yeah, and we all got like overnight deliveries of like the bare basics we would need. And they're like, you got to have some sort of software to record into and then figure it out.
Yeah, and like also, oh, you needed a studio. I didn't have a walk in closet, which is kind of the best thing to do. So I just like opened the door to my closet and hung like my biggest gothist dresses on the back of the door and just talked into my clothes. And that was about a year. That was about a year of recording that was.
That was also very much like the way the original House Stuff Works podcast room was because all we had was a.
Giant Kirk closet. It was it was an alcove.
Yeah, way back in the day when we were back in Buckhead, even before the Pont City Market days.
Yeah, that's where we were recording originally.
Yeah. Yeah, and so during all that time where we're all locked down, Like obviously, food delivery services flourished, right because people wants their foods and they couldn't always go out and get them. You certainly couldn't go out and dine out in a lot of locations for a very long time. Yeah. So obviously, like like a lot of the tech sector in twenty twenty, they had a boom period. But as it turns out, that's that's not even the beginning of the story. It's not even the middle of the story. That's like the Act three part of the story. We've got a lot of precursor stuff to talk about. And I love that you included in our notes here a section on ancient history.
Oh yes, we have to go all the way back to the early nineteen nineties.
Yeah.
I almost wanted to say, Joe Piscopo was teaching America how to laugh. That's the nineteen eighties. So that doesn't even work.
Uh okay, So y'all might not know this, but one of the things that I learned from doing Savor is that one of the first, if not the very first products delivered from an online order was a pizza. It was nineteen ninety four, and this Pizza Hut franchise in Santa Cruz piloted pizza dot net. You could go online, fill out a form with your delivery info and your order, and it would be delivered. And I know that sounds really basic here and now, but it was revolutionary at the time. And it worked funnily enough by submitting data from the form to a server in Wichita, which was Pizza Hut's headquarters, which then sent the order to a computer at the restaurant in Santa Cruz, where an employee would receive it and then call you to confirm the order.
So not a one step process. In other words, no, no, yeah, As it turns out, this is an infrastructure that would not scale. Can you just imagine being that employee in Wichita, Kansas, Like I gotta call somebody over in Des Moines, Iowa because they ordered a pizza. But fascinating because I mean, like ninety four, that's before a lot of people even had a handle on what the World Wide Web, let alone the Internet was. Yeah, and certainly a time when I think a lot of people would have been reticent to order anything, because the thought of any kind of purchase over the internet seemed inherently dangerous, although in this case with calling to confirm your order, I don't know if the actual purchase happened over the phone.
That's yeah, that's what happened. That you would give you you'd give them your information at that point and so and go from there. But it was so early. But from there, and you know, with the growth of home computing and internet access, there were a few small businesses that picked up the concept, like The New York Times reported on one in upstate New York in nineteen ninety seven that hosted menus for forty restaurants and had like checkout system and used a third party delivery service. They reported in this article that more than five hundred people had visited the website.
Wow, yeah, which you know, again again early days for that kind of thing. Five hundreds right now, you're like five hundred clean, But no, that's a big deal.
It was.
It was, but it sounds so quaint. To quote The New York Times, there is no charge to visit the website, but the customer pays the delivery, varying from about four to six dollars depending on the service used.
Oh man, if simple times, and then I had to include I had to include the fun tangent. This is not connected to necessarily delivery services, but you know, just to show how important pizza is to the evolution of the Internet. One of the most famous examples of someone using the digital currency bitcoin to buy something tangible was in fact a pizza.
But it was. Yeah, but it.
Wasn't that suddenly Domino's was taking bitcoin instead a the titular Florida Man Florida man. In this case, a guy named Laslow went on too a bitcoin oriented forum and offered anyone who would be willing to bring him to I don't know, large ish pizzas so we would have some left over to eat the next day. For the princely sum of ten thousand bitcoin, could do it. So back then bitcoin wasn't worth anything. It was less than a penny for a bitcoin. But today that ten thousand bitcoin pizza would cost you one billion dollars because bitcoin is over one hundred thousand dollars now. Oh so that guy ordered two pizzas for a billion dollars. Talk about a raw deal.
But he was the first.
Yes, it was we'll be talking about a lot of raw deals, sometimes literally if you're ordering a salid.
But yeah, it was.
It was not an actual delivery service in that case. It was just some rando online who happened to live in the same Florida region who was willing to go and schlep to Papa John's and buy a couple of extra large pizzas and bring it to this guy, and then they got ten thousand bitcoin at the time. Of course, back then you'd had there were no way of knowing that bitcoin would eventually reach the absurd value of one hundred thousand dollars per bitcoin, which I still don't understand even though I cover this for a living.
Yeah. No, I feel real touch right now. So cool.
Yeah, we've got those early, early examples where it's a very primitive kind of Jerry rigged approach to delivery. Moving forward from that, we got into the dot com bubble craze where anyone could have an idea, or as I put it in our notes, an idea of an idea, and get investors excited about it, who would then pour ridiculous amounts of money. Because the Internet was just seen as a as a gold rush. Everyone wanted to get in on it. Everyone had fear of missing out, and in the process you had these folks who had interesting ideas, but they didn't have a real business plan that supported that idea in any kind of sustainable way. So the oh no, Yeah. The two examples I have in our notes are are Webvan and I was actually a customer of webvan because Atlanta was one of the cities they rolled out to after they opened in the Bay Area, and Cosmo, which I was never a customer of because that was like a bike messenger kind of thing. So it's more like really dense urban locations like New York City.
Yeah, you can't really ride bikes anywhere in Atlanta.
Not if you want to live. No, it's mad Max Fury Road out there, y'all. And not to mention like if the cars don't get you, the pothos will. So webvan gets started, and they were doing more like grocery delivery, right. It wasn't It wasn't like they'll go pick up a meal at your local burger king and bring it to you. But they also ran into the issue of creating an unsustainable business model, and they got so much money so early on that they immediately started to expand into other cities, like Atlanta was just one of them, Chicago and Seattle were others. And the problem was they had not proven that they could have a revenue model in their first city that would actually support the business before they started to try and scale. So I bet you can all guess where this goes, because ultimately Webvan, like so many other dot com companies, imploded. Now part of that is also because the market in general crashed. No more investors willing to burn money by throwing it at Webvan because it was just churning through that cash super fast, like as soon as it was coming in the door, it was going back out again. So without that constant source of cash influx from investors, Webvan couldn't, you know, screw around until it figured out how to make it work. Like the whole ethos of fake it till you make it just wasn't viable at that point, and so Webvan did not make it. It died along with Cosmo, which would eventually come back in a different form. But that's another story for another time. So the interesting thing to me is that some of those elements from the dot com days, I would argue are still in play today, and you know, we'll talk about those, but it's a slightly different story. Like I would say that the current run of food delivery app companies learned lessons from webvan, but in the way that they learned them so that they could repeat those mistakes almost exactly.
It does sound strikingly like some of the stories we're going to get into.
Yeah, especially like with companies like door Dash, and we're going to really dive into that and start talking about some of the elements of these app companies and some of the real major cons In just a second, before we do that, let's take a quick break to think our sponsors.
Okay, welcome back.
Now that we have all bowed to the altar of capitalism, we're going to talk about horrors of late stage capitalism for the rest of this episode. So let's talk a little bit about some of the app services that are out there. It's funny because they're in some ways there are fewer than there used to be because we've had some consolidation in the market. But the big three, or at least the three that I kept seeing sighted everywhere because obviously they're smaller ones and there's regional ones.
Yeah, and these are in the United States. There are a whole other players around the world.
An excellent point, Lauren, Yes, absolutely, So the big three that we were gonna be talking about, primarily, I'm talking about door Dash.
That's the big one. That's the one that I typically use.
When I use it, although now I feel so guilty now that I know more, I don't be using it so much.
But it's like sixty some percent of the American food app delivery business.
Wow.
And then you've got grub Hub, and then you've got Uber Eats, and Lauren, I'll tell you Uber Eats is one I never want to use. But that's because it has the word Uber in front of it, and that company is like toxic to me.
Uh huh oh yeah, No, same, same, And I understand that basically the drivers are the same, but I'm like, can I give them money through a different app?
Can I use a different incredibly corrupt corporation to siphon money in tiny drips to the poor gig economy workers who are actually doing the work.
Yeah.
If y'all wonder why I think Uber is toxic, you just need to look back at the year twenty seventeen.
Yepper's that's the exact year I was going to mention, uh huh.
Oh man, what a horrible whole Uber dug for itself had created such a toxic work culture that the guy who took over Uber after all that is still trying to dig the company out of it, you know, seven years later, and here we are. But that's another story for another episode. So what I thought was funny was that between those three, grub Hub is technically the oldest of the three big ones here in the States. And when it first started in two thousand and four, it was founded by Matt Maloney and Mike Evans. It didn't start off as food delivery. Instead, I think the story is Mike Evans was hungry and he was frustrated because he couldn't tell which pizza places in his area would actually deliver to his apartment. So I'm sure all of us have been in that situation where you're like, am I in the delivery area for this place? Or am I outside? Because then they're not gonna be able to bring my order to me or what?
And if I'm going to have to call someone on the phone, then like gosh, I don't want to have to call two places.
Yeah, yeah, especially if you're a millennial, because I understand that you will melt if you have to talk to another.
Human being on the phone.
True facts, and being.
A gen xer, I have a slightly higher tolerance, not much higher, Honestly, I can't claim to be super comfortable calling up strangers. But yeah, like he thought, oh wait, what if I create a tool that makes it easy for me to reference which restaurants are actually going to deliver to my place? And then what if I were to make that tool something that other people could use? And the story was he took one hundred and forty dollars out of his personal wealth, which was like the entirety of what he had at the time, I poured it in and that became Grubhub. So Grubhub initially was all about discovery, right, discovering which restaurants in your area could actually potentially deliver to you. And it would only be later, starting in twenty fourteen, when grubhub itself would pick up the delivery company service. By that time, they were no longer the first in that in that realm, someone else was already doing that, and that someone else was bumped up Bob Palo Alto Delivery. You all know Palo Alto Delivery, right, Oh yeah, yeah, Pad, good old Pad, Like I get tie from them all the time, the Pad tie.
It's great.
Oh man. Yeah. No, Palo Alto Delivery would of course change its name because those guys were thinking way too small.
They were like, hey, if we want to expand.
Beyond the Bay Area, maybe we don't call it Palo Alto. So they changed it to door Dash. This is where we have like the scary music sting because they're kind of the villain of the piece.
If I'm being honest.
I don't know if there's a hero of the piece.
No, I think everybody.
Well, I will say this, I think the gig workers are the heroes.
Goodness, but they are oh and the and the underdog restaurant like small business restaurant. Yes people, Yes.
The restaurants and the drivers, I would say, are definitely like they're probably hurt worse than anybody else. I don't think consumers get out great either, but like the end customer, I don't think it's a great deal for them necessarily. But I definitely think that the restaurants and the drivers or the delivery people that they get shafted pretty dramatically. It's kind of hard to say it any other way.
Nope, that's just it.
So Uber announced uber Fresh in twenty fourteen, the same year that grub Hubs started to deliver, and of course alto deliveries have been going for a whole year by then, and then by twenty fifteen it became Uber Eats. So uber Fresh became uber eats, and that is that's kind of the ground setting for where we're going to talk next, which is actually about the business side of things. And this isn't typically a business podcast, but I think it's important to get and I of all the different components that are going together with this to kind of say like, sometimes tech enables things that aren't really good for anybody that's involved in the Like it's to a point where you're like, why is this even happening because no one's coming out well in this.
Like why have we why have we disrupted? Something like that's not always a good word.
Yeah, yeah, no. And in investment, it's like the go to right, Like for the longest time, everyone wanted to position the company to be We're going to disrupt the blank sector, right. So for Uber and lyft. It was the taxi sector. Well, originally it was the limo sector. That's what Uber started off as. So you have a really interesting stat here about how much this market is actually worth.
Yeah, So as of twenty twenty four, the global food delivery app market is worth some one hundred and twelve billion dollars a year.
Wild Okay, We're gonna have a lot of moments to kind of take a breather and say, hey, late stage capitalism sucks, doesn't it. So here's one of them, guys. And when I say guys, I apologize all you folks out there. I don't want to be, you know, dismissive of anybody, all you folks out there. This is why I think it. I say it sucks because you can have a company that is valued at a certain amount but doesn't produce anything of value or is actually actively harmful to itself and others.
Yeah, yeah, Like it doesn't support its own workers, it doesn't support the systems that it created to disrupt things like I'm like, what are what are we doing here?
Yeah, it's almost It kind of gives me the feeling of like a parasite that will stay on its host until the host dies and then the parasite dies too.
Like that's that's kind of what we're talking about. If we think about the host.
In this case are all the restaurants and as for where all this value goes, one of the crazy things about this business is that there's enough competition in the space among the large delivery services and all the various smaller regional ones that in order to compete against the others in the market, these companies will often run promotions that cut into their own revenue. So they're spending money in order to win customers at the expense of their competitors who are also doing the same thing. So even when these companies are generating revenue by being very popular, like even during the pandemic, they're spending that money often not just in your normal operating costs, but in an effort to stand out against the other big competitors. And so you just it's money comes in and money goes out.
Yeah. Greb Ho former CEO, called this the problem of and I quote promiscuous customers.
Wow, I mean, I like how it's blaming it on promiscuous customers when in fact, like I mean, okay, if I'm a customer, and I am. But let's say I'm a customer and I don't have any loyalty to any particular brand, right I don't. I don't care who's bringing me my food.
I just want food. Then I'm probably going.
To take the step of saying, all right, well, if I order from door Dash versus Uber Eats, how much is one going to be versus the other? Or even have grub Hub up. You know, maybe I've got like one of those James Bond Villain style bank of displays with all the different possibilities, and I'm gonna say, oh, well, this one, this delivery service B gives me the best deal.
I'm going to go with that, or even like delivery service Bee has the restaurant that I want to order from.
Oh yeah, yeah, because here's that too. There's that too. Man.
Oh, I've got so much to say, but yeah, I can't blame me for doing that, right. That's that's what customer does. That's what competition is supposed to do. Competition is supposed to be all about, you know, businesses competing for the for customers, customers having the chance to make choices that best reflect what they need and want and are able to purchase, So calling promiscuous customers, I'm like, that's putting the blame on them. I think is is maybe missing some of.
The bigger picture elements.
Yes, yes, yeah, Okay, Well I'm glad, I'm glad I'm not completely off base there. Sometimes I go off on these old men can taker's rants and then someone has to point out, like Jonathan, you're just missing the point, and I'm like, oh.
Okay, yeah, I just I think it's difficult at a certain point for anyone involved in all of this to wrap their head around what exactly is the product, who exactly is the customer, and what exactly is the service because there are too many of those overlapping in all of these decisions. As a hypothetically third party.
App Absolutely, yeah, yeah, you're hitting right on the point here. Let's let's talk about like.
Spoiler alert, y'all.
This next segment can be called how this is good for nobody? So, starting off, I like, how are these app app companies bad for restaurants? So on the restaurant side, when you, as a customer order something from a restaurant and you're doing it through one of these apps, the app ends up charging a commission fee to the restaurant. According to McKenzie the analyst firm, this commission fee can be anywhere between fifteen to thirty percent of what that meal is priced at on the app. So if I go and buy a ten dollars sandwich from some vendor, then the restaurant actually only gets seven of those American dollars, and three of those dollars go to whatever company I was using. So that's right off the bat. And on top of that, at least for a while, restaurants weren't. Apps were punishing restaurants that would price their delivery menu at a different rate than their dine and menu. So it meant that if you're thinking, oh, well, why don't you just if you're the restaurant, you're selling ten dollars sandwiches and you end up only taking seven dollars, why not increase the price so that it comes back down to the ten dollars and you're not taking a huge loss on that particular item. It's because the apps were like, don't you dare do that, or we will delist your butt.
Yeah yeah, right. So this isn't a big deal for big chains like McDonald's or whatever, but even fairly successful small business restaurants cannot absorb that unless they raise. These are places that are if you don't if you've never looked into managing a restaurant, or if you've never watched the beayar, these are places that are operating on extremely thin margins already.
Yeah, I saw one analysis saying that typically the profit margin for a restaurant is somewhere between seven to twenty two percent. That's twenty two being on the extremely high dream.
That's wild.
Yeah, if you're hitting.
Twenty two percent profit margin, you know you're swimming and pepperoni and money. But most most of them are closer to that seven percent. And that's because about a third of your revenue has to go to the ingredients, so all your food and stuff, about a third has to go to labor, and then a good deal of what's left over is going to rent an overhead, right, just the keeping the lights on, keeping the brick and mortar running. And then whatever's left is your profit. It typically isn't very much. So if on top of that, a delivery service is taking fifteen to thirty percent of the price of an item away as a commission, then you rapidly reach a point where there is no way to run a viable business if most or even a significant part of that business is in delivery service. And that's just that's just the brutal truth of it. Another quote from McKenzie. This is a direct quote from the mckenziy website.
Quote.
Even as customers are paying a forty percent premium on the cust of their actual meal, so end quote, that's you know, us having to pay more for the delivery thing than we would if we went to the restaurant to dine in. But getting back to the quote, it is worth noting that restaurants themselves receive around only fifty five percent of the total customer spend, so customers have to spend more and restaurants are getting less. That's what it boils down to.
Yeah, much, and at the scale that is disrupting in a negative sense the way that restaurants operate because of the sheer capacity that these apps give to customers to place orders. You know, in ye olden days, you walk into your favorite brunch spot, you realize there's an hour wait, you go someplace else. Yeah, but now that is invisible to the consumer, and it's up to the restaurant to put hold on their app orders, which no one wants to do when they get too busy to serve their physical customers, which is like, hypothetically the purpose of most restaurants to serve customers.
Yeah, the people who are actually there.
Who are there, Yeah, I don't know how many of y'all out there have had this experience, but I certainly have. And it's anecdotal, so it's not really you can't count this as evidence, but I've certainly had the experience of going to restaurants and feeling like, feels like it's taking longer for my order to get to me than it used to.
Yeah, and very well, maybe.
That the kitchen is backed up because they've got not just the orders of the other people you see around you, but all the different delivery services that are working with that. And it puts the restaurants in a very delicate position because either they play the game so that they can have access to these customers that otherwise they do not have. And more and more of us have become accustomed to being able to order from our favorite restaurants and have it delivered to us, rather than having to get our sorry butts off the couch and go back out. I am counting myself in this. I don't drive all Like, yeah, I don't drive. So if I'm not driving, I have a very limited number of restaurants that can easily reach without having to call a ride haling service, which, by the way, just as bad as all these always like ride hailing. Essentially, you could take the store, the conversation we're having and poured it over to right hailing. Basically it's very similar, yes, uh, except in there instead of it driving restaurants on business, it's driving like taxi services out of business anyway. Yeah, so like, uh, there's lots of people who have become accustomed to this, and so the fear is that if you don't play the game, you lose those customers and you might not have enough foot traffic to keep you going because again, those profit margins are so narrow, so you might think, yeah, I'd rather get something than nothing at.
All and nothing sure, right, because like restaurants are scared right now, Like keep in mind that some seventy thousand restaurants closed in America due to business challenges during the pandemic. So it's the choice of something or nothing at all. But you know, like they're also like they're missing out on tips for their workers, which can be discouraging to the staff. They're missing out on incidental orders that come from you sitting around for more than an hour and you're like, oh, let's order desert. Oh let's get another round. Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, Well, and that's another thing, right, like restaurants, Some restaurants will do the delivery stuff counting on the fact that they can do sales in their brick and mortar locations that cover for the lack of funds they're getting through the delivery. So in other words, like alcohol sales obviously, like that's something that restaurants can much more easily do in person than through delivery and can help compensate for the losses they might experience participating with a delivery app service. I'm glad you brought up the weight staff and their access to tips, because this is a reminder to anyone who's not in the United States that in many places in the US, it is absolutely criminal what weights staff can be paid.
Yeah. Yeah, this is a fun one. We did an episode about this a few years back on Savor and it is the angriest that I think I've ever heard Annie Reese be in her life. But yeah, like in the US, you are allowed to pay a restaurant server less than the minimum wage because it's called the tipped minimum. So how this works is you are assuming that the customer is going to make up for that gap in wages, and in fact that I'm the concept is like, maybe you get paid more.
But yeah, but maybe mister money bags has come in and has ordered a stake medium rare, and they liked you so much and called.
You so many diminutive.
Epithets that they have dropped like one hundred dollars on their fifty dollars bill or something.
But right, in practicality, that is frequently not how it works. And furthermore, the whole system is based on the fact that no one wanted to put No one wanted to pay formerly enslaved people to do jobs after enslavement ended in the United States. So that's fun.
Yeah, As it turns out, that whole thing about tips and businesses using tips to justify what should, in my opinion, be criminal behavior will come back around in this very conversation. But before we get to the point where my blood pressure rises and I pass out, let's take another quick break to think our sponsors.
Okay, we're back, get ready to get angrier.
So, yeah, it's terrible for restaurants in general, Like some restaurants can weather it better than others, as you mentioned, Lauren, But I think it's pretty safe to say that it's not great for pretty much any of the restaurants involved in this system, like they feel like they're in advice. I actually respect the restaurants that continue to hold out and not participate in the system. It's frustrating as a customer doesn't drive. But on the flip side, I'm like, well, I can at least be comforted in knowing that that restaurant's not bleeding themselves dry by catering to customers where they're getting less money due to commissions being taken out. But it's also bad for drivers, as it turns out, the folks who are actually delivering your food. If you thought the restaurants were getting the short end of the stick, well don't worry. There's a shorter end of that stick and the drivers are the ones getting it.
So in the early days.
When these food delivery apps were brand new, obviously there weren't that many people who were actually working as drivers and delivering food. So there's a relatively small pool of delivery people, which means the customers were there. So the demand was high, but the supply in the form of people what can actually pick the stuff up and bring it to you was low, and that meant that in order to attract new people to come in and drive for these companies, the companies were offering fairly significant payouts. And there was a New York Times article that data from twenty nineteen, so it was before the pandemic outbreak, which I'm sure would have dramatically altered how this story unfolded. But they talked about how in those early days, a Postmates, which rip Postmates delivery driver in New York City could get ten dollars per delivery just paid out from the company. So that's that's the ten dollars before tip. However, by the time it gets to around twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, you were talking more about four or five dollars. And they also would have these things called in Postmates, they call them blitz. This is the same thing that you would see in Uber as a driver or Lyft as a driver. The idea is that you get a map, kind of a heat map, showing you where demand is, and if demand is suddenly really concentrated in part of the city, then you get more money for heading over there and picking up jobs in that area because the demand is much higher there. So drivers will say, oh, I'm close to that part of the town anyway, I'm going to start driving in here until this, until this heat map changes, and I'm going to make extra money by delivering in this specific part of the city. Yeah. In those cases, you're talking about up to maybe twenty dollars per delivery, so that's huge.
Oh yeah, yeah, And usually I know that in ride apps this has passed on to the customer, where it's those surge rates where you wind up paying you know, thirty bucks for a ride instead of fifteen or whatever it is.
Well, the money has to come from somewhere, so it does make sense that the customer ends up being the one to foot that bill, because you can't stay in business as a company if you're just like, sure, I'll pay extra when the demand is higher. That's not how businesses work. So I'm not going to be I'm not going to be completely unreasonable, even though I'm still like late stage capitalism, blow eat the rich, and so while i still feel that deep in my soul, I'm not That's not how I'm going to go.
With this particular issue. But what was what You were.
Already starting to see some some questionable practices in these days, even back when there were decent payouts. Part of that is the way that these companies would try to attract new talent is to kind of crow about how much money drivers make per hour. But the catches a lot of these companies were only counting the actual minutes where someone was on a delivery job, and if they weren't on a delivery job, if you're working but you're idle because you don't have a job you can pick up at that particular moment, it doesn't count. So the company would be like, all right, let's count up out how many minutes did this person work today. Okay, they collectively worked two and a half hours. We're going to use that to calculate how much they earned per hour. And we're going to ignore the hour and a half of downtime this person had.
While they were waiting to get another for their phone. To make an annoying noise again. Sure.
Yeah.
So this would be like if you had an office job and you worked on a project and you finished the project and there was say an hour of downtime between that and the next project you could work on, and they were like, yeah, we're not paying you for that hour. You had to be here, you had to be here and be ready, but you don't get paid for that hour that you were here. That was your leisure time as far as we're concerned. Yeah, women unions exist.
Yes, Solidarity, solidarity absolutely, so don't worry.
It gets worse.
If you've used these food delivery apps services, you know that there's usually a way where you can add a tip to your driver, and a lot of these companies are very big on Hey, one of your tip goes to these drivers, which technically is true. What they don't tell you, at least something that has been practiced in the past, is while your tip will go to the driver, what they'll do is deduct however much tip you gave from the amount they would pay that driver normally, so that the company pays the difference. So if a company were to pay The example in the New York Times article was there was a delivery that would six dollars and eighty five cents, and the woman who ordered the delivery generously added a three dollars tip. Right, that's incredible. It's like an almost a fifty percent tip on top of the delivery, or at least six dollars eighty five cents I think was the payout, so I guess the full price was probably higher. But the driver, instead of giving six dollars and eighty five cents plus the three dollars tip, got six dollars and eighty five cents. And what the company was essentially saying is that three dollars tip you got that. We just didn't pay you three dollars because you got tip that much. This is sort of getting back to what Lauren was saying about weight staff and the idea of tips being just an anticipated and expected, foregone conclusion you're gonna be making out of the waves. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's just I don't have to pay.
You as much because you're getting tipped.
Yeah, And in this case, they're literally not paying as much per delivery. They're using the tip to be an excuse. They're subsidizing the company through tips by saying, oh, well, we don't have to pay you at six dollars eighty five cents, You got a tip for five dollars you get, we just have to throw in a buck eighty five.
What do you think for that one?
If you didn't hear it, I just did a big sigh.
Yes, basically all I heard it. I was just like, you know, I can't talk about it much because I do.
Get emotional, Like I legit, get emotional.
And I get angry. And then when I get angry, I get crying because I'm a cancer.
And so and by that I mean I was born in June.
I'm not a cancer on society or not. Like sure, I mean some people might say so, but don't worry. I'm leaving the show. So yeah, you'll be fine. Yeah this got me so mad. And then of course you have the other point in here, not just that. Okay, so the tips thing is terrible. But one thing these companies collectively have been doing both righte hailing and food app like these food delivery services is resisting the move to count drivers as employees.
Right This is a huge, like legal question that is plaguing our times and all of these major food delivery app companies anyway, probably all the delivery driver apps in general, they've all been embroiled in employment lawsuits that started cropping up for the food sector in around twenty fifteen, in which drivers have been accusing them of wrongfully classifying them as independent contractors instead of actual employees. And the business reason for that is, you know, if you're an independent contractor, you can pay someone below the minimum wage and you don't have to give them benefits. Sounds great, right hey yeah?
Yeah, Again, if you're a corp and you're thinking, how can I get away from all these pesky costs that my company would otherwise incur?
Oh, I got it.
I'll go with independent contractors. I can think of certain companies, one that we both worked for that kind of did this quite.
A bit, and we all started as that thing.
Yeah, I have fond memories of how stuff works. But the longer it went on, the harder it was to like that place and of course what it turned out to. I mean, I'm sure you know this that they got rid of their entire editorial board and replace it with AI.
Yeah. Yeah, that's something I struggle with still over on brain stuff, because I still get a lot of my topic concepts and like base scripts from HowStuffWorks dot Com, and now I have to vet every article that I pick up from the website in terms of whether or not it was written by AI. Most of them are labeled as such.
But I'm like, whooh, yeah, cool, because once upon a time we had journalistic standards at that place.
Anyway, Yeah, we're.
Getting away from it.
We're getting away from it.
But like, like, I think there's connective tissue that kind of ties this all together, this idea of tech enabling something like it makes me think of the the the quote from that documentary Jurassic Park Park, Yeah, you knew exactly where I was going. I like that You've worked with me so long. You knew what I was going to say, Like, she knows my jokes, y'all so much. She knew I was gonna be. Like, just because you could doesn't mean you should should Jeff Goldbloom Jurassic Park nineteen ninety seven or whatever it was.
Wow.
The fact that it was earlier, the nice I was like ninety two. But the fact that you knew where I was going, that's it's cool.
I do that joke too, which is part of what Yeah, it's.
Time for me to go out the pasture.
No, No, it's it's it is. It is one of those things I find frustrating, and I think it's indicative, Like when we look at the food delivery apps, like to me like that, that's a great example of how like you can see where the need is right, you can see where I'm a customer, I'm hungry, I want food from this place. This is going to deliver the food to me. I don't have to go there. The value proposition is clear. The business model that makes it supportable still remains.
Obtuse opaque, if you will, JANKI.
Yeah, yerhaps unattainable. But I mean there is hope that some of this worker rights things stuff is going to get worked out in the future. There was one of those lawsuits that I mentioned involving grub hubs specifically, was finally settled after eight years in a federal district court in California in favor of the driver.
Yeah, California's labor laws are sure incredibly friendly on the labor side, Thank goodness. You know, we got to have something to We have to balance Texas out somehow. Yeah, I know, shots fired at Texas. I love the state, y'all, but your court system is a mess.
Oh yeah, anyway, the.
Yeah, absolutely, like, and there are clearly repercussions for that, Like, if we get to a point where drivers are classified as employees, that's obviously going to have an enormous impact on the entire business, which ultimately will likely mean that consumers will have to pay more. But on the flip side of that, it might mean that it's a more equitable situation for the other parties there. And like, as a customer, I mean, granted, I'm in a very privileged position, but as a customer, I would feel much better knowing that the restaurants aren't taking out as much out in commissions as they had been, and that drivers are being fairly compensated, Like there aren't any groups within the ecosystem that are being victimized when right now that's clearly what's happening.
Yeah, I have this apparently socialist, communist whatever idea that like, when everyone is making a living wage, society works better.
Yeah.
I tend to agree with you, uh, and by ten I mean one agree with you. Yeah, I feel the same way. I Like, I've heard people argue like, yeah, but you know, I'm a small business owner and I worked really hard. I'm like, yeah, but your employees work really hard too, and don't they deserve to be able to afford basics like like a home.
And yeah, and the same thing on my end as a consumer, you know, like some people are like, well, I can't afford to go out to eat and to tip. Brother, that means you can't afford to go out to eat.
Yeah, yeah, until until such things change. Like there are certain restaurants in the United States where they specifically have a no tipping policy because they say, we pay our staff a living wage. And to you, I say, I doff my cap were I to wear one? Right?
Yeah?
Yeah, that ethics is nice when that when you encounter it, it's just so rare. Interestingly, one of the things one of the arguments I ran into when I was looking at the webvan story came from someone who had formerly worked at webvan and then moved on and worked at places like Oracle or whatever, was saying that he felt that one of Webvan's big mistakes was trying to aim for a mass market customer pool instead of making it a luxury item. And the reason for that is for this business model to work, we have to price it like a luxury item. But since we were arguing we're going to give you whole food style food at safe way style prices, you were hamstringing yourself right out the gate. And if instead you say we'll give you whole foods, quality goods at essentially whole foods and slightly elevated prices, but we bring it to you, then your customer base is going to be smaller, but is also going to be made up of people willing and able to pay that. And if that service is to exist, that's the one way that that part of the revenue model makes sense. And it's unfortunate that it cuts other people out who might otherwise benefit from the service. But ultimately, if your business is unsustainable at most, what you're doing is you're treading water for a given number of years before everything collapses, just as it did with the dot com bubble.
Hey, we're not done.
There's still it's still bad for customers, you know, because it does cost us more.
You know.
Again, I'm going to quote McKenzie again because they had a great piece on this and they said, quote, if a typical meal from a fast casual restaurant is priced on a delivery platform's menu at around twenty five dollars, The customer might end up paying a total of roughly thirty five dollars excluding tax, because there's all those additional fees, some of which might seem like artuary. Yeah, okay, like where does this come from?
Where did that?
Like I get I get a delivery fee, like a delivery searcharge on top of this. That makes sense, But then if you have extra fees, what do those go to?
Now?
Right now here in the United States, as we record this, we have organizations that are trying to make sure that like hidden fees and such are far more transparent. But I'm telling you that will not be the case come January twentieth. That will change dramatically as we have a change in administrations. And I say that confidently because the people who are typically arguing for the other side are the ones who are going to be put in charge. They're the ones who are like, you know, pro business, but by pro business they often mean like pro profit, and pro profit often comes at the expense of consumers and employees. I mean, that's really what it comes down to. So while we currently can enjoy a brief surge of support for transparency, I don't think it's going to last. Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe I'm too sent, Lauren, am I two cynical?
That would be lovely if you were. I love it when you're wrong.
No, you know, in this case, I wouldn't mind it myself. Like I'm typically pretty grouchy when I'm wrong, but in this case, I'd be kind of happy if I were, like, hey, you know that thing you said you were one hundred percent off base, Like, hey, if that means people are are are being transparent with their their billing methods and all those hidden fees are suddenly revealed, I'm all for it, because, y'all, I can't. I remember buying a ticket to a concert once where the convenience fee was literally more than the ticket I was buying.
Absolutely yeah, uh yeah, whoo. I love that. I love that. No, and I didn't think of I didn't think of your point at all while I was having a brief moment of joy in this life reading that FTC news headline about companies like ticket Master and stuff that have all of these like what does that fee for? Nobody knows? Yeah, yeah, and to at least make it more transparent, to at least not hit you with that when you're already seven stages into the checkout process, and you know, you know that there's a million other swifties trying to get those tickets. Yeah, whatever the case may be.
Yeah, I'm still of the Sohi while again, I'm in a privileged position, and I could technically afford a ticket to say, the B fifty two's concert that's going to happen in Athens, Georgia to open up their new hockey arena for the rock Lobsters. That's the name of their that's the name of the minor league hockey team in Athens.
Isn't that great?
That was a beautiful sentence.
Absolutely.
I literally was looking at tickets and then I started seeing the price tag and I was like, I'm still I'm still a nineties kid, where I'm like, like, man, pan more than thirty bucks to see a band play is just a rip off.
Man.
That's how my brain works, because I went to clubs in Athens, Georgia in the nineties and if you were paying more than thirty bucks and you were getting shaken down.
I grew up with Depression era grandparents. Man, Like I still save my yogurt tubs.
Yeah, oh no, listen, our our glassware are Mason Jars, so I hear you. Hey, this is Jonathan from the Future breaking in on the conversation that Lauren and Jonathan had in the past. Lauren's trying real hard not to laugh on the other end of the microphone. Right now, we're gonna have to take a quick break to thank our sponsors, but we'll be right back with more grousing about this terrible business model. It turns out like these app companies, they're taking money from restaurants and commissions. They're taking money from customers in the form of customer fees that are somewhat difficult to understand. Also, by the way I even put down, they have subscription models where you can for a monthly price pay a subscription where those fees are are reduced or waived. And I love your perspective on that.
Yeah, this is so this is so mafia to me, because it's like, hey, we instated these completely arbitrary fees, would you like to pay to remove some of them? Like what kind of shake?
I know?
Right? Like and of course, like the.
Benefit to the company is sure, if you're ordering all the time, if you're ordering delivery all the time. Then maybe a subscription would mean that on a month to month basis, you're spending slightly less than you would assuming that you would be buying the exact same things in either case. But if you're the kind who just occasionally buys stuff, if you subscribe to this and the company is like awesome, for any month where you didn't order anything, you still paid us.
We still made money, still pay us ten bucks, And that's great.
Now that money still spends the same y'all. But it turns out that even though companies have all these different methods of generating revenue, they're not profitable.
Yeah, I love these evil corporate overlords. Still aren't profitable.
They aren't. There's they don't make money, y'all. They don't.
I mean they make money, but they don't make more money than they're spending. So they're operating at a loss. Like the sobering thing I saw in all the granted this was from twenty twenty three, but the sobering thing I saw was that door Dash has never had a twelve month period where it made a profit. It made a profit one quarter where it was like a pandemic boom where they made a profit in one quarter, but otherwise they're spending more money than they're bringing in. And yet you have investors pouring money into these companies. I guess hoping that in the long term, once they do hit that sweet spot of scale, they're going to be printing money like it's nobody's business, and the returns are just going to come flowing into the coffers.
This is so all right. So, year over year from April of twenty nineteen to April of twenty twenty, sales were up on these apps by one hundred and sixty two percent because a number of things happened in April of twenty twenty.
Yes, but.
Like and sales are still up year over year for these for most of these companies, but by only by like seven to eight percent. And when you take that to your shareholders, yeah, you know, they're like, what.
Right, Like everybody eats.
But again, the operating costs are incredibly high, and they're variable costs that are impossible to predict from quarter to quarter or even week to week. And if your variable costs are that variable, you know, where you can't plan, then how the heck do you forge a path to profitability? Like if I don't know how much it's going to cost me to do business next month. I can't be sure I'll be in business two months from now. And that's how all of these app companies are operating. I also looked at an article in the Motley Fool, which typically I don't look at because I'm not an investment kind of person, and I find a lot of their stuff impenetrable to me because I'm like, number go up that. I mean, I don't I'm dumb when it comes to that. But the Molly Pool had this great bit about door Dash in particular, So this is a this is a quote about door Dash quote. The company has large variable costs on every order, making up fifty percent of revenue in the first quarter, and spends twenty five percent of its revenue on sales and marketing to attract and retain its customer base. Add on research and development costs and general administrative overhead, and door Dash posted a one hundred and seventy one million operation loss in Q one. That was in twenty twenty three, so that is a year old. But that's that's not unusual. That is sort of a typical experience for these these companies.
Yeah, and the thing is like those administrative costs include all of this work. Like the amount of scrabbling that these companies are doing like little crabs in a bucket is a lot. Like they're wrangling these big partnerships. For example, DoorDash has offered free trial memberships, which you mentioned earlier, for customers of like Roku and Chase. They launched a co branded Chase credit card. They're offering exclusive access to different retailers, like like Costco is only through Uber, CBS is only through door Dash, and they're negotiating. Also, I didn't know this exclusivity agreements with small local restaurants.
So in that case, you're like, oh, you can only get delivery from this place if you go through this one specific.
App and so on a contract level. Like that's that's wild to me because you have these huge corporations going to you know.
Billy Bob's barbecue boutique, yeah or whatever it may be. Listen, no hate on Billy Bubs. They make a mean smoked turkey. Leg I had to come up with something I would actually eat be a second.
It was like a lot of barbecue stuff off limits for barbecue, Like why did I say barbecue.
Maybe because Fox Brothers is right next door Fox Brothers, Fox Brothers smoked chicken wings. Okay, uh, I can't get distracted, Actually I absolutely can, but I won't alight. So the yeah, this is like just a rough deal all around to the point where there are still think pieces being generated every year about is this actually a viable industry or will the rug get pulled out from under it at some point? Will there be a point where these companies can do business in such a way where they're not killing the restaurants because obviously if they kill the restaurants, then there's no delivery business either, and they're not bleeding the customer to the point where everyone says, no, let's not order delivery, it's too expensive, let's just go there.
Right, or do without yeah, or do without yeah.
And the answer to that is still unknown, like we just don't know. It really heavily depends on how much investor how much risk investors are willing to take on.
This to me, by the.
Way, Lauren, is really kind of wild because I think about companies that generally speaking, like establish companies that have shareholders, how they often will favor short term results over long term direction. Oh, like that's usually how we think about capitalism these days, right, Like, you know, forget about what long term success looks like, we need to make it go up this quarter exactly?
Can it go up next quarter?
We gotta we gotta grow quarter to quarter. Like, if we that number, it's not it's not enough that we make money. We have to grow forever. Yeah, yeah, forever grow. Hey, we worked for a company called Discovery that found out that's really hard to do. Hey, Warner Brothers, Discovery, how's things going?
Uh?
Man, I'm throwing a lot of shade. I mean, I'm going out, who cares? Like this is where a burning tech stuff down? As I leave, I'll tell the new hosts it's yours.
No.
Uh but yeah, it's just it's just super super hard to look at and and justify or or to to grasp with these two different realities where you have investors on one side who expect monthly improvement or quarterly improvement, and meanwhile you have these other investors who are making the long term bet that one day these companies are going to not just be profitable, but be able to grow year over year just like other businesses. And it seems perhaps Yeah, yeah, so, uh, this has been a bummer.
Yeah. So interestingly, the industry does have a little bit of a solution, but I'm wondering exactly how borkeed that solution is.
I'm yeah, I don't know how realistic the solution is.
Either, let's let's think it over.
So one solution that I mentioned already is this idea that the whatever the future version of this, however it shakes out, like hopefully one the one of the future predictions is that there'll be fewer competitors, that these these companies are going to further consolidate, because as you mentioned, Lauren, we've already seen that like Postmates is no longer its own.
Thing, right, Yeah, they got bought by someone. Yeah yeah. Uber also bought out Drizzly Yeah.
Yeah, And there were other instances of that too. I remember looking and seeing like a couple of others, some of which were services I had never heard of, which might have been like regional or something. But so that's part of it is that when there are fewer competitors, then you have less not that I think fewer competitors is necessarily good, but it means that you'll have less of this wild spending on the corporate front of trying to run different promotions in order to attracting keys. Right, yeah, you're essentially your undercut is what Lyft and Uber did, especially in the early days, where they tried to bleed the other one out of a market by severely underpricing rides and hopefully just convince the competitor that, oh, this region is just not profitable. Let's pick up stakes and move. Didn't work out that way. It eventually shook out that they just kind of had to cohabitat in most markets anyway. The other element is that consumers will be paid more like we will we will foot the bill for uh.
These these.
Various fees in order to keep the business afloat as far as revenue goes without it cannibalizing the entire restaurant industry. And again that that's rough for people who are dependent upon this for the occasional delivery, but they're not in a income level where that's something they can easily do. So that's the solution I've heard. Have you heard any others, Laine or are we are we doomed?
Okay, well, well what if? What if restaurants should even have the restaurant part. What if they were only for app delivery?
Oh, you mean if they were like a ghost.
This is where your American Shadows thing comes into play, right, Oh, spooky ghost kitchen.
I really would.
Ghost kitchen was something we could talk like, we could just do a thirteen Days of Halloween. But it's just ghost kitchens. I did.
I was searching my Google drive for ghost kitchens to see I knew that I had made notes about it somewhere and I couldn't remember where, and American Shadows outlines did come up.
That's hilarious.
Ghost kitchens are also sometimes called dark kitchens. You might be familiar with these. These are kitchens that technically don't have a brick and mortar space of their own. They might rent kitchen space in an existing restaurant. They might even be a subset of an existing restaurant. It's just it almost becomes like a test kitchen where a restaurant can can start making cuisines that normally they like. It's normally an Italian restaurant, but we're gonna make impanadas or whatever it may be, right, And sometimes it's like a kitchen that's run out of I ordered one once that was a kitchen run out of a church, a local church just down the street from where I live. They sold very expensive grilled cheese sandwiches.
Were they good grilled cheese sandwiches?
I would say they were almost holy because it wasn't actually run by the church. It was just in the anyway. Almost Yeah, it was church adjacent. It was it was Jesus. So I was having a Cheesus moment. Yeah, Lawd's just shaking her head to disapproval. Annie would have liked that one anyway. An he loves puns.
Yeah.
So, so these are our businesses. Sometimes they will all coexist in one structure and use the same kitchen equipment and kitchen utilities and all that sort of stuff. But they'll be like five or six or sometimes eight different restaurants, all all represented and.
Yeah, yeah, and so it hypothetically brings down the overhead for everyone. Yeah, and you know, like so the basic reason for this is that, you know, because of this rise of online convenience culture, and also, you know, we all had some legit health concerns during the pandemic. Some people still do. So digital food orders and delivery has been outpacing the growth of dine in traffic by like three hundred percent since twenty fourteen. Yikes, and you know, and that counts, you know, right, Like even before the pandemic, we saw a reduction in in house dining, with chains like Starbucks operating drive through only locations. Lots of pizza chains have spots that are delivery or pick up only. But some of these ghost kitchen concepts are weirder, like for the ones operated by the big chains, Like is it expanding into a new concept or is it kind of catfishing people? Yeah, Like some of these places have branded themselves as being part of another chain, like Chili's has It's just Wings or Boston Market has Rotisserie Roast, And I think that those have pretty prominent branding like hey, this is from this place, right, But others have been real opaque. I think Chili's only came around to being clear about it, Like recently, Applebee's operated one called Cosmic Wings. Denny's has a sandwich concept called the Meltdown. I hoop had thrilled cheese.
Man. I need to get a job just naming ghost kitchens, like like do you need a do you need a lame dad joke name for your ghost kitchen concept called Jonathan.
They're all like this to attract your attention on these apps.
Yeah, I've definitely seen them too on door dash, Like there are times where I'll look and I'll say, huh, that looks like a weird restaurant name. I've not heard of it. It says it's a mile and a half away. How do I not know of this place?
Right?
It turns out it's a ghost kitchen. And not that there's any again, not that there's anything wrong with that, but some of them are these sort of spin offs of existing brands. Some of them are entrepreneurs who are hoping to make a mark in the restaurant space without again having the massive overhead like you were talking about, Lauren, Like a lot of these kitchens have very few people actually working the kitchen itself. So like, I feel conflicted about these too, because for the ones that are multiple outlets that are all using the same space, it may just be a relatively tiny staff that's responsible for making the whitest variety Like forget forget the Cheesecake Factory with its eight hundred page menu. This is even more variety than that, and that gets wild.
Yeah, and I don't know, like, okay, so this is this is a fun callback. One of Uber's co founders in twenty eighteen bought a controlling interest in a controlling interest in this ghost kitchen property company called Cloud Kitchens. That Uber co founder and the reason this was in twenty eighteen was the guy who made Uber so toxic, Calanick kal Nick.
Yep, yeah, I have never heard a good story about Travis Kalanick.
He and honestly, he looks I'm rewatching the good place right now, and he looks like the bad place.
Dude.
He looks like the guy who's like who's like, hey, how you doing you pregnant?
Oh yeah, that guy that's impossible like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, No.
He comes across with an incredible bro energy that I just can't really abide by.
Oh yeah yeah.
And you know, there's a lot more we could say about ghost kitchens too. I mean the Internet tie ins, Mister Beast being a famous one where he used his name and his clout to kind of do a tie in and try and do this this restaurant, and there is, or at least there was like a pop up kitchen physical mister Beast place, at least for a short while, but they were all mostly places that were doing something else. And then on top of that, we're also doing mister Beast's stuff. And as you might imagine, because this wasn't like a true franchise, there was no like actual standard of quality. Not to say that you were necessarily going to get a bad experience going from one location to another, but it would not be a consistent experience.
Right, right, which is what we have not been trained to expect from a franchise.
Right.
We've been we've all grown up on McDonald's and there you know, precise number of fries per containers.
Right, Yeah, I'm if I'm going to an outback steakhouse, I want to know that bluemin onion is going to have that specific spice blend and sauce that's going to put me into a cardiac arrest.
After three mins.
Slap every time.
Oh it's so good, but I can never have it again.
No, you probably shouldn't.
Well I never should have, but now I can't because it would kill me. That's just the truth of things, like That's that's my life. Now, That's okay. I had plenty of them leading up to that, So.
I identified the problem I.
Didn't miss out.
Is what I'm saying is that I got to experience the transcendent joy of eating a blumin onion at an outback steakhouse listening to Jamaine Clement, a New Zealand performer, do the commercials for Outback. So you know, I feel like I feel like I'm in a good space. Well, I wish we had a nice spin to put on the end of this. I mean, I hope that this industry does shake out in a way where all the various parties involved end up getting a decent like go of it, and not have it be something where it's an unsustainable business model that is predatory upon the very entities that make the business possible, that being the restaurants and the drivers. Like it's it's clearly not something that can last forever, and the question just is when does it all collapse in on itself or when does the industry change so that it can support itself, And we just don't know.
Yeah, I would love to see it though, because heck, it is lovely getting nice food delivered to my house.
Yeah, and not not having to, you know, go out there and fight it. It also would be nice if we could find a solution where if we do make the effort to go out to brunch, we can finally actually eat at those places we've heard about forever but can never actually get a table at.
I think that's just Atlanta. I don't think. I don't think we're ever going to have a solution to Atlanta brunch culture.
I want to go to Dell Bar so bad, long time I only do walk up. Oh yeah, doh bar. Okay, Well that's micro podcasting to like a very narrow audience there, narrow casting to the extreme. Lauren, thank you so much for coming back to tech stuff to revel in the madness and chaos that is the food delivery app business.
Oh yeah, anytime. I love madness and chaos. No, thank you so much for having me. It's been it's been wonderful being back.
Please tell everybody where they can find your work.
Oh yeah, sure. If you would like to listen to my other podcasts, they are brain Stuff, Savor that spelled the American Way as a vo r and uh yeah, American Shadows is defunct now. But if you if you like true crime, like historical true crime, and I'm kind of doing like you know, like my my kind of sweaty balls voice. You know, I'm like, real, real serious about it.
Your voice, it's.
Yeah, exactly, Sorry, that's like a decade's old SNL joke.
Yeah, no, I love.
I listened, I because I was like, oh, I didn't somehow I never even knew about this show that you had done, Like I don't know how it slipped under my radar. I didn't know about it. And then I started listening. I was like, uh, she's pulling a Ben Bolin. She's she has altered her voice slightly for this because of the tone of the show.
Mm hm. Those and the aforementioned Thirteen Days of Halloween oh so good. And then Twelve Ghosts, which was also fantastic. Oh I loved working on that one so much. And Twelve Ghosts is a wintertime, nice, spooky anthology show. Our celebrity host for the whole thing was Malcolm McDowell. I technically had lines with Malcolm McDowell. We didn't do them together, but you know, but he talks to my character. That's wild. I loved it.
I got to do an episode of season two of Thirteen Days of Halloween, and technically I got to act against Katheen to Jimmy, although I didn't share physical space with her at all or even hear her, I was I was acting off of I think it was Matt Frederick who had to say her lines to me.
That sounds right while I was.
Talking into a human head shaped microphone.
So weird.
Yeah, the bine oorl mics. I love those, y'all. Thank you so much for listening. Hope you enjoyed this epic rant of an episode as we railed against the heavens and hold out what little hope we can have for a SAE future in this industry. Please take care of yourselves if you feel the need to order delivery, don't have a huge guilt trip over it. But you know, being an informed consumer I think is always the right way to go.
Yeah, and tip your driver, Tip.
Your driver, tip your driver.
And if you find out that the company was using it to subsidize their business, flip them off real good. Okay, With all that being said, take care of yourselves and I'll talk to you again.
Really.
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