Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonavan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
Speaker 1: Tech are Ye and Hey Tari, this one's for you.
Speaker 2: I love all things tech. How's that?
Speaker 1: You know? Tari's been bugging me about doing my old
Speaker 1: lead in. Today we have a very special episode with
Speaker 1: a very special guest co host. This co host is
Speaker 1: one of the co hosts of the Saverer podcast. She
Speaker 1: hosts the brain Stuff podcast, and ten years ago she
Speaker 1: was co host of this very ding dang show. Welcome
Speaker 1: back to tech Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum.
Speaker 3: Oh, thank you, Hi, it is good to be back.
Speaker 3: And that I didn't need to know that number ten
Speaker 3: years That's fine, that's I'm fine with that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you remember how ten years ago you would often
Speaker 1: punctuate episodes with but Jonathan, you're so old.
Speaker 3: It was important to remind you someone's got to keep
Speaker 3: you in line.
Speaker 1: I mean, this will be the sobering fact of the episode.
Speaker 1: Next June, I turned fifty. So yeah, you were telling
Speaker 1: me I was sold when I was on the verge
Speaker 1: of forty. It turns out during the pasting of time,
Speaker 1: I've only gotten older and more cantankers.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm an entire like seven years younger, which
Speaker 3: means that I'm a heck in spring chickens.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, seven years younger, as in she means she's
Speaker 1: actually de aged seven years over the course of ten.
Speaker 1: We don't know how she does it. And Lauren, when
Speaker 1: I invited you to come on to the show, I
Speaker 1: asked you if you had any suggestions for topics, and
Speaker 1: you came up with one that I had never really
Speaker 1: covered before, and I think is very important. And it's
Speaker 1: all about food delivery app companies. You know, your your
Speaker 1: door dashes, your Uber Eats, your grub hubs and what not.
Speaker 1: And you had talked about how you wanted to talk
Speaker 1: not just about how these things work, not really even
Speaker 1: about how they work. We're going to leave that stuff aside.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about the impact these companies have
Speaker 1: had not just on customers, but restaurants and their own businesses.
Speaker 1: Because in the old house stuff works days, we might
Speaker 1: have called this how they don't work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, so it's super fascinating to me as a
Speaker 3: human person who a you know, well, I mean, I
Speaker 3: think about food all the time because I'm sort of
Speaker 3: continually hungry, but also it's just in a hypoglycemic way.
Speaker 3: Don't worry, I'm doing fine. But also someone who talks
Speaker 3: about food for my podcast, if you couldn't tell from
Speaker 3: the namesaver, it's a food history, science and culture podcast.
Speaker 3: And we did an episode about delivery and takeout in
Speaker 3: general back in twenty eighteen, and it is wild to
Speaker 3: me how wrong those numbers were when I pulled up
Speaker 3: those notes to start taking notes for this episode, because like,
Speaker 3: there's been just a wild boom all of those delivery
Speaker 3: apps since the pandemic.
Speaker 1: Of course, yeah yeah, yeah, you all might not remember this,
Speaker 1: but just a few years ago we had this global
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen outbreak where many of us were forced to
Speaker 1: work from home, and in fact, it completely transformed the
Speaker 1: way we do podcasts. Back in the old days, we
Speaker 1: would come into the house Stuff Works offices over at
Speaker 1: the old Pon City Market location, and we would record
Speaker 1: in one of the whisper rooms or one of the
Speaker 1: two podcast rooms. Well not one of the two, because
Speaker 1: Stuff you should know, pretty much had that one on lockdown,
Speaker 1: but the other one. And that's how it worked and
Speaker 1: we would come in. But then, of course the pandemic
Speaker 1: forced all of us to create kind of at home
Speaker 1: ad hoc podcast spaces.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, March thirteenth, like a Friday. I think they
Speaker 3: just emailed all of us. They were like, Okay, there's
Speaker 3: a pandemic, don't come back. We're mailing you on microphone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we all got like overnight deliveries of like
Speaker 1: the bare basics we would need. And they're like, you
Speaker 1: got to have some sort of software to record into
Speaker 1: and then figure it out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like also, oh, you needed a studio. I
Speaker 3: didn't have a walk in closet, which is kind of
Speaker 3: the best thing to do. So I just like opened
Speaker 3: the door to my closet and hung like my biggest
Speaker 3: gothist dresses on the back of the door and just
Speaker 3: talked into my clothes. And that was about a year.
Speaker 3: That was about a year of recording that was.
Speaker 1: That was also very much like the way the original
Speaker 1: House Stuff Works podcast room was because all we had
Speaker 1: was a.
Speaker 2: Giant Kirk closet. It was it was an alcove.
Speaker 1: Yeah, way back in the day when we were back
Speaker 1: in Buckhead, even before the Pont City Market days.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's where we were recording originally.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, and so during all that time where we're
Speaker 1: all locked down, Like obviously, food delivery services flourished, right
Speaker 1: because people wants their foods and they couldn't always go
Speaker 1: out and get them. You certainly couldn't go out and
Speaker 1: dine out in a lot of locations for a very
Speaker 1: long time. Yeah. So obviously, like like a lot of
Speaker 1: the tech sector in twenty twenty, they had a boom period.
Speaker 1: But as it turns out, that's that's not even the
Speaker 1: beginning of the story. It's not even the middle of
Speaker 1: the story. That's like the Act three part of the story.
Speaker 1: We've got a lot of precursor stuff to talk about.
Speaker 1: And I love that you included in our notes here
Speaker 1: a section on ancient history.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, we have to go all the way back
Speaker 3: to the early nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I almost wanted to say, Joe Piscopo was teaching America
Speaker 1: how to laugh. That's the nineteen eighties. So that doesn't
Speaker 1: even work.
Speaker 3: Uh okay, So y'all might not know this, but one
Speaker 3: of the things that I learned from doing Savor is
Speaker 3: that one of the first, if not the very first
Speaker 3: products delivered from an online order was a pizza. It
Speaker 3: was nineteen ninety four, and this Pizza Hut franchise in
Speaker 3: Santa Cruz piloted pizza dot net. You could go online,
Speaker 3: fill out a form with your delivery info and your order,
Speaker 3: and it would be delivered. And I know that sounds
Speaker 3: really basic here and now, but it was revolutionary at
Speaker 3: the time. And it worked funnily enough by submitting data
Speaker 3: from the form to a server in Wichita, which was
Speaker 3: Pizza Hut's headquarters, which then sent the order to a
Speaker 3: computer at the restaurant in Santa Cruz, where an employee
Speaker 3: would receive it and then call you to confirm the order.
Speaker 1: So not a one step process. In other words, no, no, yeah,
Speaker 1: As it turns out, this is an infrastructure that would
Speaker 1: not scale. Can you just imagine being that employee in Wichita, Kansas,
Speaker 1: Like I gotta call somebody over in Des Moines, Iowa
Speaker 1: because they ordered a pizza. But fascinating because I mean,
Speaker 1: like ninety four, that's before a lot of people even
Speaker 1: had a handle on what the World Wide Web, let
Speaker 1: alone the Internet was. Yeah, and certainly a time when
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people would have been reticent
Speaker 1: to order anything, because the thought of any kind of
Speaker 1: purchase over the internet seemed inherently dangerous, although in this
Speaker 1: case with calling to confirm your order, I don't know
Speaker 1: if the actual purchase happened over the phone.
Speaker 3: That's yeah, that's what happened. That you would give you
Speaker 3: you'd give them your information at that point and so
Speaker 3: and go from there. But it was so early. But
Speaker 3: from there, and you know, with the growth of home
Speaker 3: computing and internet access, there were a few small businesses
Speaker 3: that picked up the concept, like The New York Times
Speaker 3: reported on one in upstate New York in nineteen ninety
Speaker 3: seven that hosted menus for forty restaurants and had like
Speaker 3: checkout system and used a third party delivery service. They
Speaker 3: reported in this article that more than five hundred people
Speaker 3: had visited the website.
Speaker 1: Wow, yeah, which you know, again again early days for
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. Five hundreds right now, you're like
Speaker 1: five hundred clean, But no, that's a big deal.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 3: It was, but it sounds so quaint. To quote The
Speaker 3: New York Times, there is no charge to visit the website,
Speaker 3: but the customer pays the delivery, varying from about four
Speaker 3: to six dollars depending on the service used.
Speaker 1: Oh man, if simple times, and then I had to
Speaker 1: include I had to include the fun tangent. This is
Speaker 1: not connected to necessarily delivery services, but you know, just
Speaker 1: to show how important pizza is to the evolution of
Speaker 1: the Internet. One of the most famous examples of someone
Speaker 1: using the digital currency bitcoin to buy something tangible was
Speaker 1: in fact a pizza.
Speaker 2: But it was. Yeah, but it.
Speaker 1: Wasn't that suddenly Domino's was taking bitcoin instead a the
Speaker 1: titular Florida Man Florida man. In this case, a guy
Speaker 1: named Laslow went on too a bitcoin oriented forum and
Speaker 1: offered anyone who would be willing to bring him to
Speaker 1: I don't know, large ish pizzas so we would have
Speaker 1: some left over to eat the next day. For the
Speaker 1: princely sum of ten thousand bitcoin, could do it. So
Speaker 1: back then bitcoin wasn't worth anything. It was less than
Speaker 1: a penny for a bitcoin. But today that ten thousand
Speaker 1: bitcoin pizza would cost you one billion dollars because bitcoin
Speaker 1: is over one hundred thousand dollars now. Oh so that
Speaker 1: guy ordered two pizzas for a billion dollars. Talk about
Speaker 1: a raw deal.
Speaker 3: But he was the first.
Speaker 1: Yes, it was we'll be talking about a lot of
Speaker 1: raw deals, sometimes literally if you're ordering a salid.
Speaker 2: But yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It was not an actual delivery service in that case.
Speaker 1: It was just some rando online who happened to live
Speaker 1: in the same Florida region who was willing to go
Speaker 1: and schlep to Papa John's and buy a couple of
Speaker 1: extra large pizzas and bring it to this guy, and
Speaker 1: then they got ten thousand bitcoin at the time. Of course,
Speaker 1: back then you'd had there were no way of knowing
Speaker 1: that bitcoin would eventually reach the absurd value of one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars per bitcoin, which I still don't understand
Speaker 1: even though I cover this for a living.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, I feel real touch right now. So cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've got those early, early examples where it's a
Speaker 1: very primitive kind of Jerry rigged approach to delivery. Moving
Speaker 1: forward from that, we got into the dot com bubble
Speaker 1: craze where anyone could have an idea, or as I
Speaker 1: put it in our notes, an idea of an idea,
Speaker 1: and get investors excited about it, who would then pour
Speaker 1: ridiculous amounts of money. Because the Internet was just seen
Speaker 1: as a as a gold rush. Everyone wanted to get
Speaker 1: in on it. Everyone had fear of missing out, and
Speaker 1: in the process you had these folks who had interesting ideas,
Speaker 1: but they didn't have a real business plan that supported
Speaker 1: that idea in any kind of sustainable way. So the
Speaker 1: oh no, Yeah. The two examples I have in our
Speaker 1: notes are are Webvan and I was actually a customer
Speaker 1: of webvan because Atlanta was one of the cities they
Speaker 1: rolled out to after they opened in the Bay Area,
Speaker 1: and Cosmo, which I was never a customer of because
Speaker 1: that was like a bike messenger kind of thing. So
Speaker 1: it's more like really dense urban locations like New York City.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can't really ride bikes anywhere in Atlanta.
Speaker 1: Not if you want to live. No, it's mad Max
Speaker 1: Fury Road out there, y'all. And not to mention like
Speaker 1: if the cars don't get you, the pothos will. So
Speaker 1: webvan gets started, and they were doing more like grocery delivery, right.
Speaker 1: It wasn't It wasn't like they'll go pick up a
Speaker 1: meal at your local burger king and bring it to you.
Speaker 1: But they also ran into the issue of creating an
Speaker 1: unsustainable business model, and they got so much money so
Speaker 1: early on that they immediately started to expand into other cities,
Speaker 1: like Atlanta was just one of them, Chicago and Seattle
Speaker 1: were others. And the problem was they had not proven
Speaker 1: that they could have a revenue model in their first
Speaker 1: city that would actually support the business before they started
Speaker 1: to try and scale. So I bet you can all
Speaker 1: guess where this goes, because ultimately Webvan, like so many
Speaker 1: other dot com companies, imploded. Now part of that is
Speaker 1: also because the market in general crashed. No more investors
Speaker 1: willing to burn money by throwing it at Webvan because
Speaker 1: it was just churning through that cash super fast, like
Speaker 1: as soon as it was coming in the door, it
Speaker 1: was going back out again. So without that constant source
Speaker 1: of cash influx from investors, Webvan couldn't, you know, screw
Speaker 1: around until it figured out how to make it work.
Speaker 1: Like the whole ethos of fake it till you make
Speaker 1: it just wasn't viable at that point, and so Webvan
Speaker 1: did not make it. It died along with Cosmo, which
Speaker 1: would eventually come back in a different form. But that's
Speaker 1: another story for another time. So the interesting thing to
Speaker 1: me is that some of those elements from the dot
Speaker 1: com days, I would argue are still in play today,
Speaker 1: and you know, we'll talk about those, but it's a
Speaker 1: slightly different story. Like I would say that the current
Speaker 1: run of food delivery app companies learned lessons from webvan,
Speaker 1: but in the way that they learned them so that
Speaker 1: they could repeat those mistakes almost exactly.
Speaker 3: It does sound strikingly like some of the stories we're
Speaker 3: going to get into.
Speaker 1: Yeah, especially like with companies like door Dash, and we're
Speaker 1: going to really dive into that and start talking about
Speaker 1: some of the elements of these app companies and some
Speaker 1: of the real major cons In just a second, before
Speaker 1: we do that, let's take a quick break to think
Speaker 1: our sponsors.
Speaker 2: Okay, welcome back.
Speaker 1: Now that we have all bowed to the altar of capitalism,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about horrors of late stage capitalism
Speaker 1: for the rest of this episode. So let's talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about some of the app services that are
Speaker 1: out there. It's funny because they're in some ways there
Speaker 1: are fewer than there used to be because we've had
Speaker 1: some consolidation in the market. But the big three, or
Speaker 1: at least the three that I kept seeing sighted everywhere
Speaker 1: because obviously they're smaller ones and there's regional ones.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and these are in the United States. There are
Speaker 3: a whole other players around the world.
Speaker 1: An excellent point, Lauren, Yes, absolutely, So the big three
Speaker 1: that we were gonna be talking about, primarily, I'm talking
Speaker 1: about door Dash.
Speaker 2: That's the big one. That's the one that I typically use.
Speaker 1: When I use it, although now I feel so guilty
Speaker 1: now that I know more, I don't be using it
Speaker 1: so much.
Speaker 3: But it's like sixty some percent of the American food
Speaker 3: app delivery business.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: And then you've got grub Hub, and then you've got
Speaker 1: Uber Eats, and Lauren, I'll tell you Uber Eats is
Speaker 1: one I never want to use. But that's because it
Speaker 1: has the word Uber in front of it, and that
Speaker 1: company is like toxic to me.
Speaker 3: Uh huh oh yeah, No, same, same, And I understand
Speaker 3: that basically the drivers are the same, but I'm like,
Speaker 3: can I give them money through a different app?
Speaker 1: Can I use a different incredibly corrupt corporation to siphon
Speaker 1: money in tiny drips to the poor gig economy workers
Speaker 1: who are actually doing the work.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: If y'all wonder why I think Uber is toxic, you
Speaker 1: just need to look back at the year twenty seventeen.
Speaker 3: Yepper's that's the exact year I was going to mention,
Speaker 3: uh huh.
Speaker 1: Oh man, what a horrible whole Uber dug for itself
Speaker 1: had created such a toxic work culture that the guy
Speaker 1: who took over Uber after all that is still trying
Speaker 1: to dig the company out of it, you know, seven
Speaker 1: years later, and here we are. But that's another story
Speaker 1: for another episode. So what I thought was funny was
Speaker 1: that between those three, grub Hub is technically the oldest
Speaker 1: of the three big ones here in the States. And
Speaker 1: when it first started in two thousand and four, it
Speaker 1: was founded by Matt Maloney and Mike Evans. It didn't
Speaker 1: start off as food delivery. Instead, I think the story
Speaker 1: is Mike Evans was hungry and he was frustrated because
Speaker 1: he couldn't tell which pizza places in his area would
Speaker 1: actually deliver to his apartment. So I'm sure all of
Speaker 1: us have been in that situation where you're like, am
Speaker 1: I in the delivery area for this place? Or am
Speaker 1: I outside? Because then they're not gonna be able to
Speaker 1: bring my order to me or what?
Speaker 3: And if I'm going to have to call someone on
Speaker 3: the phone, then like gosh, I don't want to have
Speaker 3: to call two places.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, especially if you're a millennial, because I understand
Speaker 1: that you will melt if you have to talk to another.
Speaker 2: Human being on the phone.
Speaker 3: True facts, and being.
Speaker 1: A gen xer, I have a slightly higher tolerance, not
Speaker 1: much higher, Honestly, I can't claim to be super comfortable
Speaker 1: calling up strangers. But yeah, like he thought, oh wait,
Speaker 1: what if I create a tool that makes it easy
Speaker 1: for me to reference which restaurants are actually going to
Speaker 1: deliver to my place? And then what if I were
Speaker 1: to make that tool something that other people could use?
Speaker 1: And the story was he took one hundred and forty
Speaker 1: dollars out of his personal wealth, which was like the
Speaker 1: entirety of what he had at the time, I poured
Speaker 1: it in and that became Grubhub. So Grubhub initially was
Speaker 1: all about discovery, right, discovering which restaurants in your area
Speaker 1: could actually potentially deliver to you. And it would only
Speaker 1: be later, starting in twenty fourteen, when grubhub itself would
Speaker 1: pick up the delivery company service. By that time, they
Speaker 1: were no longer the first in that in that realm,
Speaker 1: someone else was already doing that, and that someone else
Speaker 1: was bumped up Bob Palo Alto Delivery. You all know
Speaker 1: Palo Alto Delivery, right, Oh yeah, yeah, Pad, good old Pad,
Speaker 1: Like I get tie from them all the time, the
Speaker 1: Pad tie.
Speaker 2: It's great.
Speaker 1: Oh man. Yeah. No, Palo Alto Delivery would of course
Speaker 1: change its name because those guys were thinking way too small.
Speaker 2: They were like, hey, if we want to expand.
Speaker 1: Beyond the Bay Area, maybe we don't call it Palo Alto.
Speaker 1: So they changed it to door Dash. This is where
Speaker 1: we have like the scary music sting because they're kind
Speaker 1: of the villain of the piece.
Speaker 2: If I'm being honest.
Speaker 3: I don't know if there's a hero of the piece.
Speaker 2: No, I think everybody.
Speaker 1: Well, I will say this, I think the gig workers
Speaker 1: are the heroes.
Speaker 3: Goodness, but they are oh and the and the underdog
Speaker 3: restaurant like small business restaurant. Yes people, Yes.
Speaker 1: The restaurants and the drivers, I would say, are definitely
Speaker 1: like they're probably hurt worse than anybody else. I don't
Speaker 1: think consumers get out great either, but like the end customer,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's a great deal for them necessarily.
Speaker 1: But I definitely think that the restaurants and the drivers
Speaker 1: or the delivery people that they get shafted pretty dramatically.
Speaker 1: It's kind of hard to say it any other way.
Speaker 3: Nope, that's just it.
Speaker 1: So Uber announced uber Fresh in twenty fourteen, the same
Speaker 1: year that grub Hubs started to deliver, and of course
Speaker 1: alto deliveries have been going for a whole year by then,
Speaker 1: and then by twenty fifteen it became Uber Eats. So
Speaker 1: uber Fresh became uber eats, and that is that's kind
Speaker 1: of the ground setting for where we're going to talk next,
Speaker 1: which is actually about the business side of things. And
Speaker 1: this isn't typically a business podcast, but I think it's
Speaker 1: important to get and I of all the different components
Speaker 1: that are going together with this to kind of say like,
Speaker 1: sometimes tech enables things that aren't really good for anybody
Speaker 1: that's involved in the Like it's to a point where
Speaker 1: you're like, why is this even happening because no one's
Speaker 1: coming out well in this.
Speaker 3: Like why have we why have we disrupted? Something like
Speaker 3: that's not always a good word.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no. And in investment, it's like the go
Speaker 1: to right, Like for the longest time, everyone wanted to
Speaker 1: position the company to be We're going to disrupt the
Speaker 1: blank sector, right. So for Uber and lyft. It was
Speaker 1: the taxi sector. Well, originally it was the limo sector.
Speaker 1: That's what Uber started off as. So you have a
Speaker 1: really interesting stat here about how much this market is
Speaker 1: actually worth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So as of twenty twenty four, the global food
Speaker 3: delivery app market is worth some one hundred and twelve
Speaker 3: billion dollars a year.
Speaker 1: Wild Okay, We're gonna have a lot of moments to
Speaker 1: kind of take a breather and say, hey, late stage
Speaker 1: capitalism sucks, doesn't it. So here's one of them, guys.
Speaker 1: And when I say guys, I apologize all you folks
Speaker 1: out there. I don't want to be, you know, dismissive
Speaker 1: of anybody, all you folks out there. This is why
Speaker 1: I think it. I say it sucks because you can
Speaker 1: have a company that is valued at a certain amount
Speaker 1: but doesn't produce anything of value or is actually actively
Speaker 1: harmful to itself and others.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, Like it doesn't support its own workers, it
Speaker 3: doesn't support the systems that it created to disrupt things
Speaker 3: like I'm like, what are what are we doing here?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's almost It kind of gives me the feeling
Speaker 1: of like a parasite that will stay on its host
Speaker 1: until the host dies and then the parasite dies too.
Speaker 2: Like that's that's kind of what we're talking about. If
Speaker 2: we think about the host.
Speaker 1: In this case are all the restaurants and as for
Speaker 1: where all this value goes, one of the crazy things
Speaker 1: about this business is that there's enough competition in the
Speaker 1: space among the large delivery services and all the various
Speaker 1: smaller regional ones that in order to compete against the
Speaker 1: others in the market, these companies will often run promotions
Speaker 1: that cut into their own revenue. So they're spending money
Speaker 1: in order to win customers at the expense of their
Speaker 1: competitors who are also doing the same thing. So even
Speaker 1: when these companies are generating revenue by being very popular,
Speaker 1: like even during the pandemic, they're spending that money often
Speaker 1: not just in your normal operating costs, but in an
Speaker 1: effort to stand out against the other big competitors. And
Speaker 1: so you just it's money comes in and money goes out.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Greb Ho former CEO, called this the problem of
Speaker 3: and I quote promiscuous customers.
Speaker 1: Wow, I mean, I like how it's blaming it on
Speaker 1: promiscuous customers when in fact, like I mean, okay, if
Speaker 1: I'm a customer, and I am. But let's say I'm
Speaker 1: a customer and I don't have any loyalty to any
Speaker 1: particular brand, right I don't. I don't care who's bringing
Speaker 1: me my food.
Speaker 2: I just want food. Then I'm probably going.
Speaker 1: To take the step of saying, all right, well, if
Speaker 1: I order from door Dash versus Uber Eats, how much
Speaker 1: is one going to be versus the other? Or even
Speaker 1: have grub Hub up. You know, maybe I've got like
Speaker 1: one of those James Bond Villain style bank of displays
Speaker 1: with all the different possibilities, and I'm gonna say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this one, this delivery service B gives me the best deal.
Speaker 3: I'm going to go with that, or even like delivery
Speaker 3: service Bee has the restaurant that I want to order from.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, because here's that too. There's that too. Man.
Speaker 1: Oh, I've got so much to say, but yeah, I
Speaker 1: can't blame me for doing that, right. That's that's what
Speaker 1: customer does. That's what competition is supposed to do. Competition
Speaker 1: is supposed to be all about, you know, businesses competing
Speaker 1: for the for customers, customers having the chance to make
Speaker 1: choices that best reflect what they need and want and
Speaker 1: are able to purchase, So calling promiscuous customers, I'm like,
Speaker 1: that's putting the blame on them. I think is is
Speaker 1: maybe missing some of.
Speaker 2: The bigger picture elements.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yeah, Okay, Well I'm glad, I'm glad I'm
Speaker 1: not completely off base there. Sometimes I go off on
Speaker 1: these old men can taker's rants and then someone has
Speaker 1: to point out, like Jonathan, you're just missing the point,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, oh.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, I just I think it's difficult at a
Speaker 3: certain point for anyone involved in all of this to
Speaker 3: wrap their head around what exactly is the product, who
Speaker 3: exactly is the customer, and what exactly is the service
Speaker 3: because there are too many of those overlapping in all
Speaker 3: of these decisions. As a hypothetically third party.
Speaker 1: App Absolutely, yeah, yeah, you're hitting right on the point here.
Speaker 1: Let's let's talk about like.
Speaker 2: Spoiler alert, y'all.
Speaker 1: This next segment can be called how this is good
Speaker 1: for nobody? So, starting off, I like, how are these
Speaker 1: app app companies bad for restaurants? So on the restaurant side,
Speaker 1: when you, as a customer order something from a restaurant
Speaker 1: and you're doing it through one of these apps, the
Speaker 1: app ends up charging a commission fee to the restaurant.
Speaker 1: According to McKenzie the analyst firm, this commission fee can
Speaker 1: be anywhere between fifteen to thirty percent of what that
Speaker 1: meal is priced at on the app. So if I
Speaker 1: go and buy a ten dollars sandwich from some vendor,
Speaker 1: then the restaurant actually only gets seven of those American dollars,
Speaker 1: and three of those dollars go to whatever company I
Speaker 1: was using. So that's right off the bat. And on
Speaker 1: top of that, at least for a while, restaurants weren't.
Speaker 1: Apps were punishing restaurants that would price their delivery menu
Speaker 1: at a different rate than their dine and menu. So
Speaker 1: it meant that if you're thinking, oh, well, why don't
Speaker 1: you just if you're the restaurant, you're selling ten dollars
Speaker 1: sandwiches and you end up only taking seven dollars, why
Speaker 1: not increase the price so that it comes back down
Speaker 1: to the ten dollars and you're not taking a huge
Speaker 1: loss on that particular item. It's because the apps were like,
Speaker 1: don't you dare do that, or we will delist your butt.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, right. So this isn't a big deal for
Speaker 3: big chains like McDonald's or whatever, but even fairly successful
Speaker 3: small business restaurants cannot absorb that unless they raise. These
Speaker 3: are places that are if you don't if you've never
Speaker 3: looked into managing a restaurant, or if you've never watched
Speaker 3: the beayar, these are places that are operating on extremely
Speaker 3: thin margins already.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I saw one analysis saying that typically the profit
Speaker 1: margin for a restaurant is somewhere between seven to twenty
Speaker 1: two percent. That's twenty two being on the extremely high dream.
Speaker 3: That's wild.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're hitting.
Speaker 1: Twenty two percent profit margin, you know you're swimming and
Speaker 1: pepperoni and money. But most most of them are closer
Speaker 1: to that seven percent. And that's because about a third
Speaker 1: of your revenue has to go to the ingredients, so
Speaker 1: all your food and stuff, about a third has to
Speaker 1: go to labor, and then a good deal of what's
Speaker 1: left over is going to rent an overhead, right, just
Speaker 1: the keeping the lights on, keeping the brick and mortar running.
Speaker 1: And then whatever's left is your profit. It typically isn't
Speaker 1: very much. So if on top of that, a delivery
Speaker 1: service is taking fifteen to thirty percent of the price
Speaker 1: of an item away as a commission, then you rapidly
Speaker 1: reach a point where there is no way to run
Speaker 1: a viable business if most or even a significant part
Speaker 1: of that business is in delivery service. And that's just
Speaker 1: that's just the brutal truth of it. Another quote from McKenzie.
Speaker 1: This is a direct quote from the mckenziy website.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: Even as customers are paying a forty percent premium on
Speaker 1: the cust of their actual meal, so end quote, that's
Speaker 1: you know, us having to pay more for the delivery
Speaker 1: thing than we would if we went to the restaurant
Speaker 1: to dine in. But getting back to the quote, it
Speaker 1: is worth noting that restaurants themselves receive around only fifty
Speaker 1: five percent of the total customer spend, so customers have
Speaker 1: to spend more and restaurants are getting less. That's what
Speaker 1: it boils down to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, much, and at the scale that is disrupting in
Speaker 3: a negative sense the way that restaurants operate because of
Speaker 3: the sheer capacity that these apps give to customers to
Speaker 3: place orders. You know, in ye olden days, you walk
Speaker 3: into your favorite brunch spot, you realize there's an hour wait,
Speaker 3: you go someplace else. Yeah, but now that is invisible
Speaker 3: to the consumer, and it's up to the restaurant to
Speaker 3: put hold on their app orders, which no one wants
Speaker 3: to do when they get too busy to serve their
Speaker 3: physical customers, which is like, hypothetically the purpose of most
Speaker 3: restaurants to serve customers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the people who are actually there.
Speaker 1: Who are there, Yeah, I don't know how many of
Speaker 1: y'all out there have had this experience, but I certainly have.
Speaker 1: And it's anecdotal, so it's not really you can't count
Speaker 1: this as evidence, but I've certainly had the experience of
Speaker 1: going to restaurants and feeling like, feels like it's taking
Speaker 1: longer for my order to get to me than it
Speaker 1: used to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and very well, maybe.
Speaker 1: That the kitchen is backed up because they've got not
Speaker 1: just the orders of the other people you see around you,
Speaker 1: but all the different delivery services that are working with that.
Speaker 1: And it puts the restaurants in a very delicate position
Speaker 1: because either they play the game so that they can
Speaker 1: have access to these customers that otherwise they do not have.
Speaker 1: And more and more of us have become accustomed to
Speaker 1: being able to order from our favorite restaurants and have
Speaker 1: it delivered to us, rather than having to get our
Speaker 1: sorry butts off the couch and go back out. I
Speaker 1: am counting myself in this. I don't drive all Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't drive. So if I'm not driving, I have
Speaker 1: a very limited number of restaurants that can easily reach
Speaker 1: without having to call a ride haling service, which, by
Speaker 1: the way, just as bad as all these always like
Speaker 1: ride hailing. Essentially, you could take the store, the conversation
Speaker 1: we're having and poured it over to right hailing. Basically
Speaker 1: it's very similar, yes, uh, except in there instead of
Speaker 1: it driving restaurants on business, it's driving like taxi services
Speaker 1: out of business anyway. Yeah, so like, uh, there's lots
Speaker 1: of people who have become accustomed to this, and so
Speaker 1: the fear is that if you don't play the game,
Speaker 1: you lose those customers and you might not have enough
Speaker 1: foot traffic to keep you going because again, those profit
Speaker 1: margins are so narrow, so you might think, yeah, I'd
Speaker 1: rather get something than nothing at.
Speaker 3: All and nothing sure, right, because like restaurants are scared
Speaker 3: right now, Like keep in mind that some seventy thousand
Speaker 3: restaurants closed in America due to business challenges during the pandemic.
Speaker 3: So it's the choice of something or nothing at all.
Speaker 3: But you know, like they're also like they're missing out
Speaker 3: on tips for their workers, which can be discouraging to
Speaker 3: the staff. They're missing out on incidental orders that come
Speaker 3: from you sitting around for more than an hour and
Speaker 3: you're like, oh, let's order desert. Oh let's get another round. Sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, and that's another thing, right, like restaurants, Some
Speaker 1: restaurants will do the delivery stuff counting on the fact
Speaker 1: that they can do sales in their brick and mortar
Speaker 1: locations that cover for the lack of funds they're getting
Speaker 1: through the delivery. So in other words, like alcohol sales obviously,
Speaker 1: like that's something that restaurants can much more easily do
Speaker 1: in person than through delivery and can help compensate for
Speaker 1: the losses they might experience participating with a delivery app service.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought up the weight staff and their
Speaker 1: access to tips, because this is a reminder to anyone
Speaker 1: who's not in the United States that in many places
Speaker 1: in the US, it is absolutely criminal what weights staff
Speaker 1: can be paid.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, this is a fun one. We did an
Speaker 3: episode about this a few years back on Savor and
Speaker 3: it is the angriest that I think I've ever heard
Speaker 3: Annie Reese be in her life. But yeah, like in
Speaker 3: the US, you are allowed to pay a restaurant server
Speaker 3: less than the minimum wage because it's called the tipped minimum.
Speaker 3: So how this works is you are assuming that the
Speaker 3: customer is going to make up for that gap in wages,
Speaker 3: and in fact that I'm the concept is like, maybe
Speaker 3: you get paid more.
Speaker 1: But yeah, but maybe mister money bags has come in
Speaker 1: and has ordered a stake medium rare, and they liked
Speaker 1: you so much and called.
Speaker 2: You so many diminutive.
Speaker 1: Epithets that they have dropped like one hundred dollars on
Speaker 1: their fifty dollars bill or something.
Speaker 3: But right, in practicality, that is frequently not how it works.
Speaker 3: And furthermore, the whole system is based on the fact
Speaker 3: that no one wanted to put No one wanted to
Speaker 3: pay formerly enslaved people to do jobs after enslavement ended
Speaker 3: in the United States. So that's fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, As it turns out, that whole thing about tips
Speaker 1: and businesses using tips to justify what should, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: be criminal behavior will come back around in this very conversation.
Speaker 1: But before we get to the point where my blood
Speaker 1: pressure rises and I pass out, let's take another quick
Speaker 1: break to think our sponsors.
Speaker 2: Okay, we're back, get ready to get angrier.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, it's terrible for restaurants in general, Like some
Speaker 1: restaurants can weather it better than others, as you mentioned, Lauren,
Speaker 1: But I think it's pretty safe to say that it's
Speaker 1: not great for pretty much any of the restaurants involved
Speaker 1: in this system, like they feel like they're in advice.
Speaker 1: I actually respect the restaurants that continue to hold out
Speaker 1: and not participate in the system. It's frustrating as a
Speaker 1: customer doesn't drive. But on the flip side, I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: I can at least be comforted in knowing that that
Speaker 1: restaurant's not bleeding themselves dry by catering to customers where
Speaker 1: they're getting less money due to commissions being taken out.
Speaker 1: But it's also bad for drivers, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: the folks who are actually delivering your food. If you
Speaker 1: thought the restaurants were getting the short end of the stick,
Speaker 1: well don't worry. There's a shorter end of that stick
Speaker 1: and the drivers are the ones getting it.
Speaker 2: So in the early days.
Speaker 1: When these food delivery apps were brand new, obviously there
Speaker 1: weren't that many people who were actually working as drivers
Speaker 1: and delivering food. So there's a relatively small pool of
Speaker 1: delivery people, which means the customers were there. So the
Speaker 1: demand was high, but the supply in the form of
Speaker 1: people what can actually pick the stuff up and bring
Speaker 1: it to you was low, and that meant that in
Speaker 1: order to attract new people to come in and drive
Speaker 1: for these companies, the companies were offering fairly significant payouts.
Speaker 1: And there was a New York Times article that data
Speaker 1: from twenty nineteen, so it was before the pandemic outbreak,
Speaker 1: which I'm sure would have dramatically altered how this story unfolded.
Speaker 1: But they talked about how in those early days, a Postmates,
Speaker 1: which rip Postmates delivery driver in New York City could
Speaker 1: get ten dollars per delivery just paid out from the company.
Speaker 1: So that's that's the ten dollars before tip. However, by
Speaker 1: the time it gets to around twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, you were talking more about four or five dollars.
Speaker 1: And they also would have these things called in Postmates,
Speaker 1: they call them blitz. This is the same thing that
Speaker 1: you would see in Uber as a driver or Lyft
Speaker 1: as a driver. The idea is that you get a map,
Speaker 1: kind of a heat map, showing you where demand is,
Speaker 1: and if demand is suddenly really concentrated in part of
Speaker 1: the city, then you get more money for heading over
Speaker 1: there and picking up jobs in that area because the
Speaker 1: demand is much higher there. So drivers will say, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm close to that part of the town anyway, I'm
Speaker 1: going to start driving in here until this, until this
Speaker 1: heat map changes, and I'm going to make extra money
Speaker 1: by delivering in this specific part of the city. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In those cases, you're talking about up to maybe twenty
Speaker 1: dollars per delivery, so that's huge.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, And usually I know that in ride
Speaker 3: apps this has passed on to the customer, where it's
Speaker 3: those surge rates where you wind up paying you know,
Speaker 3: thirty bucks for a ride instead of fifteen or whatever
Speaker 3: it is.
Speaker 1: Well, the money has to come from somewhere, so it
Speaker 1: does make sense that the customer ends up being the
Speaker 1: one to foot that bill, because you can't stay in
Speaker 1: business as a company if you're just like, sure, I'll
Speaker 1: pay extra when the demand is higher. That's not how
Speaker 1: businesses work. So I'm not going to be I'm not
Speaker 1: going to be completely unreasonable, even though I'm still like
Speaker 1: late stage capitalism, blow eat the rich, and so while
Speaker 1: i still feel that deep in my soul, I'm not
Speaker 1: That's not how I'm going to go.
Speaker 2: With this particular issue. But what was what You were.
Speaker 1: Already starting to see some some questionable practices in these days,
Speaker 1: even back when there were decent payouts. Part of that
Speaker 1: is the way that these companies would try to attract
Speaker 1: new talent is to kind of crow about how much
Speaker 1: money drivers make per hour. But the catches a lot
Speaker 1: of these companies were only counting the actual minutes where
Speaker 1: someone was on a delivery job, and if they weren't
Speaker 1: on a delivery job, if you're working but you're idle
Speaker 1: because you don't have a job you can pick up
Speaker 1: at that particular moment, it doesn't count. So the company
Speaker 1: would be like, all right, let's count up out how
Speaker 1: many minutes did this person work today. Okay, they collectively
Speaker 1: worked two and a half hours. We're going to use
Speaker 1: that to calculate how much they earned per hour. And
Speaker 1: we're going to ignore the hour and a half of
Speaker 1: downtime this person had.
Speaker 3: While they were waiting to get another for their phone.
Speaker 3: To make an annoying noise again. Sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this would be like if you had an office
Speaker 1: job and you worked on a project and you finished
Speaker 1: the project and there was say an hour of downtime
Speaker 1: between that and the next project you could work on,
Speaker 1: and they were like, yeah, we're not paying you for
Speaker 1: that hour. You had to be here, you had to
Speaker 1: be here and be ready, but you don't get paid
Speaker 1: for that hour that you were here. That was your
Speaker 1: leisure time as far as we're concerned. Yeah, women unions exist.
Speaker 3: Yes, Solidarity, solidarity absolutely, so don't worry.
Speaker 2: It gets worse.
Speaker 1: If you've used these food delivery apps services, you know
Speaker 1: that there's usually a way where you can add a
Speaker 1: tip to your driver, and a lot of these companies
Speaker 1: are very big on Hey, one of your tip goes
Speaker 1: to these drivers, which technically is true. What they don't
Speaker 1: tell you, at least something that has been practiced in
Speaker 1: the past, is while your tip will go to the driver,
Speaker 1: what they'll do is deduct however much tip you gave
Speaker 1: from the amount they would pay that driver normally, so
Speaker 1: that the company pays the difference. So if a company
Speaker 1: were to pay The example in the New York Times
Speaker 1: article was there was a delivery that would six dollars
Speaker 1: and eighty five cents, and the woman who ordered the
Speaker 1: delivery generously added a three dollars tip. Right, that's incredible.
Speaker 1: It's like an almost a fifty percent tip on top
Speaker 1: of the delivery, or at least six dollars eighty five
Speaker 1: cents I think was the payout, so I guess the
Speaker 1: full price was probably higher. But the driver, instead of
Speaker 1: giving six dollars and eighty five cents plus the three
Speaker 1: dollars tip, got six dollars and eighty five cents. And
Speaker 1: what the company was essentially saying is that three dollars
Speaker 1: tip you got that. We just didn't pay you three
Speaker 1: dollars because you got tip that much. This is sort
Speaker 1: of getting back to what Lauren was saying about weight
Speaker 1: staff and the idea of tips being just an anticipated
Speaker 1: and expected, foregone conclusion you're gonna be making out of
Speaker 1: the waves. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, that's just I don't have
Speaker 1: to pay.
Speaker 3: You as much because you're getting tipped.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And in this case, they're literally not paying as
Speaker 1: much per delivery. They're using the tip to be an excuse.
Speaker 1: They're subsidizing the company through tips by saying, oh, well,
Speaker 1: we don't have to pay you at six dollars eighty
Speaker 1: five cents, You got a tip for five dollars you get,
Speaker 1: we just have to throw in a buck eighty five.
Speaker 2: What do you think for that one?
Speaker 3: If you didn't hear it, I just did a big sigh.
Speaker 1: Yes, basically all I heard it. I was just like,
Speaker 1: you know, I can't talk about it much because I do.
Speaker 2: Get emotional, Like I legit, get emotional.
Speaker 1: And I get angry. And then when I get angry,
Speaker 1: I get crying because I'm a cancer.
Speaker 2: And so and by that I mean I was born
Speaker 2: in June.
Speaker 1: I'm not a cancer on society or not. Like sure,
Speaker 1: I mean some people might say so, but don't worry.
Speaker 1: I'm leaving the show. So yeah, you'll be fine. Yeah
Speaker 1: this got me so mad. And then of course you
Speaker 1: have the other point in here, not just that. Okay,
Speaker 1: so the tips thing is terrible. But one thing these
Speaker 1: companies collectively have been doing both righte hailing and food
Speaker 1: app like these food delivery services is resisting the move
Speaker 1: to count drivers as employees.
Speaker 3: Right This is a huge, like legal question that is
Speaker 3: plaguing our times and all of these major food delivery
Speaker 3: app companies anyway, probably all the delivery driver apps in general,
Speaker 3: they've all been embroiled in employment lawsuits that started cropping
Speaker 3: up for the food sector in around twenty fifteen, in
Speaker 3: which drivers have been accusing them of wrongfully classifying them
Speaker 3: as independent contractors instead of actual employees. And the business
Speaker 3: reason for that is, you know, if you're an independent contractor,
Speaker 3: you can pay someone below the minimum wage and you
Speaker 3: don't have to give them benefits. Sounds great, right hey yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Again, if you're a corp and you're thinking, how
Speaker 1: can I get away from all these pesky costs that
Speaker 1: my company would otherwise incur?
Speaker 2: Oh, I got it.
Speaker 1: I'll go with independent contractors. I can think of certain companies,
Speaker 1: one that we both worked for that kind of did
Speaker 1: this quite.
Speaker 3: A bit, and we all started as that thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have fond memories of how stuff works. But
Speaker 1: the longer it went on, the harder it was to
Speaker 1: like that place and of course what it turned out to.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm sure you know this that they got
Speaker 1: rid of their entire editorial board and replace it with AI.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, that's something I struggle with still over on
Speaker 3: brain stuff, because I still get a lot of my
Speaker 3: topic concepts and like base scripts from HowStuffWorks dot Com,
Speaker 3: and now I have to vet every article that I
Speaker 3: pick up from the website in terms of whether or
Speaker 3: not it was written by AI. Most of them are
Speaker 3: labeled as such.
Speaker 1: But I'm like, whooh, yeah, cool, because once upon a
Speaker 1: time we had journalistic standards at that place.
Speaker 2: Anyway, Yeah, we're.
Speaker 3: Getting away from it.
Speaker 2: We're getting away from it.
Speaker 1: But like, like, I think there's connective tissue that kind
Speaker 1: of ties this all together, this idea of tech enabling
Speaker 1: something like it makes me think of the the the
Speaker 1: quote from that documentary Jurassic Park Park, Yeah, you knew
Speaker 1: exactly where I was going. I like that You've worked
Speaker 1: with me so long. You knew what I was going
Speaker 1: to say, Like, she knows my jokes, y'all so much.
Speaker 1: She knew I was gonna be. Like, just because you
Speaker 1: could doesn't mean you should should Jeff Goldbloom Jurassic Park
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety seven or whatever it was.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: The fact that it was earlier, the nice I was
Speaker 1: like ninety two. But the fact that you knew where
Speaker 1: I was going, that's it's cool.
Speaker 3: I do that joke too, which is part of what Yeah, it's.
Speaker 2: Time for me to go out the pasture.
Speaker 1: No, No, it's it's it is. It is one of
Speaker 1: those things I find frustrating, and I think it's indicative,
Speaker 1: Like when we look at the food delivery apps, like
Speaker 1: to me like that, that's a great example of how
Speaker 1: like you can see where the need is right, you
Speaker 1: can see where I'm a customer, I'm hungry, I want
Speaker 1: food from this place. This is going to deliver the
Speaker 1: food to me. I don't have to go there. The
Speaker 1: value proposition is clear. The business model that makes it
Speaker 1: supportable still remains.
Speaker 2: Obtuse opaque, if you will, JANKI.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yerhaps unattainable. But I mean there is hope that
Speaker 3: some of this worker rights things stuff is going to
Speaker 3: get worked out in the future. There was one of
Speaker 3: those lawsuits that I mentioned involving grub hubs specifically, was
Speaker 3: finally settled after eight years in a federal district court
Speaker 3: in California in favor of the driver.
Speaker 1: Yeah, California's labor laws are sure incredibly friendly on the
Speaker 1: labor side, Thank goodness. You know, we got to have
Speaker 1: something to We have to balance Texas out somehow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, shots fired at Texas. I love the state, y'all,
Speaker 1: but your court system is a mess.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, anyway, the.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, like, and there are clearly repercussions for that, Like,
Speaker 1: if we get to a point where drivers are classified
Speaker 1: as employees, that's obviously going to have an enormous impact
Speaker 1: on the entire business, which ultimately will likely mean that
Speaker 1: consumers will have to pay more. But on the flip
Speaker 1: side of that, it might mean that it's a more
Speaker 1: equitable situation for the other parties there. And like, as
Speaker 1: a customer, I mean, granted, I'm in a very privileged position,
Speaker 1: but as a customer, I would feel much better knowing
Speaker 1: that the restaurants aren't taking out as much out in
Speaker 1: commissions as they had been, and that drivers are being
Speaker 1: fairly compensated, Like there aren't any groups within the ecosystem
Speaker 1: that are being victimized when right now that's clearly what's happening.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have this apparently socialist, communist whatever idea that like,
Speaker 3: when everyone is making a living wage, society works better.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I tend to agree with you, uh, and by ten
Speaker 1: I mean one agree with you. Yeah, I feel the
Speaker 1: same way. I Like, I've heard people argue like, yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know, I'm a small business owner and I
Speaker 1: worked really hard. I'm like, yeah, but your employees work
Speaker 1: really hard too, and don't they deserve to be able
Speaker 1: to afford basics like like a home.
Speaker 3: And yeah, and the same thing on my end as
Speaker 3: a consumer, you know, like some people are like, well,
Speaker 3: I can't afford to go out to eat and to tip. Brother,
Speaker 3: that means you can't afford to go out to eat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, until until such things change. Like there are
Speaker 1: certain restaurants in the United States where they specifically have
Speaker 1: a no tipping policy because they say, we pay our
Speaker 1: staff a living wage. And to you, I say, I
Speaker 1: doff my cap were I to wear one? Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that ethics is nice when that when you encounter it,
Speaker 1: it's just so rare. Interestingly, one of the things one
Speaker 1: of the arguments I ran into when I was looking
Speaker 1: at the webvan story came from someone who had formerly
Speaker 1: worked at webvan and then moved on and worked at
Speaker 1: places like Oracle or whatever, was saying that he felt
Speaker 1: that one of Webvan's big mistakes was trying to aim
Speaker 1: for a mass market customer pool instead of making it
Speaker 1: a luxury item. And the reason for that is for
Speaker 1: this business model to work, we have to price it
Speaker 1: like a luxury item. But since we were arguing we're
Speaker 1: going to give you whole food style food at safe
Speaker 1: way style prices, you were hamstringing yourself right out the gate.
Speaker 1: And if instead you say we'll give you whole foods,
Speaker 1: quality goods at essentially whole foods and slightly elevated prices,
Speaker 1: but we bring it to you, then your customer base
Speaker 1: is going to be smaller, but is also going to
Speaker 1: be made up of people willing and able to pay that.
Speaker 1: And if that service is to exist, that's the one
Speaker 1: way that that part of the revenue model makes sense.
Speaker 1: And it's unfortunate that it cuts other people out who
Speaker 1: might otherwise benefit from the service. But ultimately, if your
Speaker 1: business is unsustainable at most, what you're doing is you're
Speaker 1: treading water for a given number of years before everything collapses,
Speaker 1: just as it did with the dot com bubble.
Speaker 2: Hey, we're not done.
Speaker 1: There's still it's still bad for customers, you know, because
Speaker 1: it does cost us more.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Again, I'm going to quote McKenzie again because they had
Speaker 1: a great piece on this and they said, quote, if
Speaker 1: a typical meal from a fast casual restaurant is priced
Speaker 1: on a delivery platform's menu at around twenty five dollars,
Speaker 1: The customer might end up paying a total of roughly
Speaker 1: thirty five dollars excluding tax, because there's all those additional fees,
Speaker 1: some of which might seem like artuary. Yeah, okay, like
Speaker 1: where does this come from?
Speaker 2: Where did that?
Speaker 1: Like I get I get a delivery fee, like a
Speaker 1: delivery searcharge on top of this. That makes sense, But
Speaker 1: then if you have extra fees, what do those go to?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 1: Right now here in the United States, as we record this,
Speaker 1: we have organizations that are trying to make sure that
Speaker 1: like hidden fees and such are far more transparent. But
Speaker 1: I'm telling you that will not be the case come
Speaker 1: January twentieth. That will change dramatically as we have a
Speaker 1: change in administrations. And I say that confidently because the
Speaker 1: people who are typically arguing for the other side are
Speaker 1: the ones who are going to be put in charge.
Speaker 1: They're the ones who are like, you know, pro business,
Speaker 1: but by pro business they often mean like pro profit,
Speaker 1: and pro profit often comes at the expense of consumers
Speaker 1: and employees. I mean, that's really what it comes down to.
Speaker 1: So while we currently can enjoy a brief surge of
Speaker 1: support for transparency, I don't think it's going to last.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'm wrong, Maybe I'm too sent, Lauren, am I
Speaker 1: two cynical?
Speaker 3: That would be lovely if you were. I love it
Speaker 3: when you're wrong.
Speaker 1: No, you know, in this case, I wouldn't mind it myself.
Speaker 1: Like I'm typically pretty grouchy when I'm wrong, but in
Speaker 1: this case, I'd be kind of happy if I were, like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know that thing you said you were one hundred
Speaker 1: percent off base, Like, hey, if that means people are
Speaker 1: are are being transparent with their their billing methods and
Speaker 1: all those hidden fees are suddenly revealed, I'm all for it, because, y'all,
Speaker 1: I can't. I remember buying a ticket to a concert
Speaker 1: once where the convenience fee was literally more than the
Speaker 1: ticket I was buying.
Speaker 3: Absolutely yeah, uh yeah, whoo. I love that. I love that. No,
Speaker 3: and I didn't think of I didn't think of your
Speaker 3: point at all while I was having a brief moment
Speaker 3: of joy in this life reading that FTC news headline
Speaker 3: about companies like ticket Master and stuff that have all
Speaker 3: of these like what does that fee for? Nobody knows? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: and to at least make it more transparent, to at
Speaker 3: least not hit you with that when you're already seven
Speaker 3: stages into the checkout process, and you know, you know
Speaker 3: that there's a million other swifties trying to get those tickets. Yeah,
Speaker 3: whatever the case may be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm still of the Sohi while again, I'm in
Speaker 1: a privileged position, and I could technically afford a ticket
Speaker 1: to say, the B fifty two's concert that's going to
Speaker 1: happen in Athens, Georgia to open up their new hockey
Speaker 1: arena for the rock Lobsters. That's the name of their
Speaker 1: that's the name of the minor league hockey team in Athens.
Speaker 2: Isn't that great?
Speaker 3: That was a beautiful sentence.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: I literally was looking at tickets and then I started
Speaker 1: seeing the price tag and I was like, I'm still
Speaker 1: I'm still a nineties kid, where I'm like, like, man,
Speaker 1: pan more than thirty bucks to see a band play
Speaker 1: is just a rip off.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: That's how my brain works, because I went to clubs
Speaker 1: in Athens, Georgia in the nineties and if you were
Speaker 1: paying more than thirty bucks and you were getting shaken down.
Speaker 3: I grew up with Depression era grandparents. Man, Like I
Speaker 3: still save my yogurt tubs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh no, listen, our our glassware are Mason Jars,
Speaker 1: so I hear you. Hey, this is Jonathan from the
Speaker 1: Future breaking in on the conversation that Lauren and Jonathan
Speaker 1: had in the past. Lauren's trying real hard not to
Speaker 1: laugh on the other end of the microphone. Right now,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to take a quick break to thank
Speaker 1: our sponsors, but we'll be right back with more grousing
Speaker 1: about this terrible business model. It turns out like these
Speaker 1: app companies, they're taking money from restaurants and commissions. They're
Speaker 1: taking money from customers in the form of customer fees
Speaker 1: that are somewhat difficult to understand. Also, by the way
Speaker 1: I even put down, they have subscription models where you
Speaker 1: can for a monthly price pay a subscription where those
Speaker 1: fees are are reduced or waived. And I love your
Speaker 1: perspective on that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is so this is so mafia to me,
Speaker 3: because it's like, hey, we instated these completely arbitrary fees,
Speaker 3: would you like to pay to remove some of them?
Speaker 3: Like what kind of shake?
Speaker 1: I know?
Speaker 2: Right? Like and of course, like the.
Speaker 1: Benefit to the company is sure, if you're ordering all
Speaker 1: the time, if you're ordering delivery all the time. Then
Speaker 1: maybe a subscription would mean that on a month to
Speaker 1: month basis, you're spending slightly less than you would assuming
Speaker 1: that you would be buying the exact same things in
Speaker 1: either case. But if you're the kind who just occasionally
Speaker 1: buys stuff, if you subscribe to this and the company
Speaker 1: is like awesome, for any month where you didn't order anything,
Speaker 1: you still paid us.
Speaker 3: We still made money, still pay us ten bucks, And
Speaker 3: that's great.
Speaker 1: Now that money still spends the same y'all. But it
Speaker 1: turns out that even though companies have all these different
Speaker 1: methods of generating revenue, they're not profitable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love these evil corporate overlords. Still aren't profitable.
Speaker 2: They aren't. There's they don't make money, y'all. They don't.
Speaker 1: I mean they make money, but they don't make more
Speaker 1: money than they're spending. So they're operating at a loss.
Speaker 1: Like the sobering thing I saw in all the granted
Speaker 1: this was from twenty twenty three, but the sobering thing
Speaker 1: I saw was that door Dash has never had a
Speaker 1: twelve month period where it made a profit. It made
Speaker 1: a profit one quarter where it was like a pandemic
Speaker 1: boom where they made a profit in one quarter, but
Speaker 1: otherwise they're spending more money than they're bringing in. And
Speaker 1: yet you have investors pouring money into these companies. I
Speaker 1: guess hoping that in the long term, once they do
Speaker 1: hit that sweet spot of scale, they're going to be
Speaker 1: printing money like it's nobody's business, and the returns are
Speaker 1: just going to come flowing into the coffers.
Speaker 3: This is so all right. So, year over year from
Speaker 3: April of twenty nineteen to April of twenty twenty, sales
Speaker 3: were up on these apps by one hundred and sixty
Speaker 3: two percent because a number of things happened in April
Speaker 3: of twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Yes, but.
Speaker 3: Like and sales are still up year over year for
Speaker 3: these for most of these companies, but by only by
Speaker 3: like seven to eight percent. And when you take that
Speaker 3: to your shareholders, yeah, you know, they're like, what.
Speaker 2: Right, Like everybody eats.
Speaker 1: But again, the operating costs are incredibly high, and they're
Speaker 1: variable costs that are impossible to predict from quarter to
Speaker 1: quarter or even week to week. And if your variable
Speaker 1: costs are that variable, you know, where you can't plan,
Speaker 1: then how the heck do you forge a path to profitability?
Speaker 1: Like if I don't know how much it's going to
Speaker 1: cost me to do business next month. I can't be
Speaker 1: sure I'll be in business two months from now. And
Speaker 1: that's how all of these app companies are operating. I
Speaker 1: also looked at an article in the Motley Fool, which
Speaker 1: typically I don't look at because I'm not an investment
Speaker 1: kind of person, and I find a lot of their
Speaker 1: stuff impenetrable to me because I'm like, number go up that.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't I'm dumb when it comes to that.
Speaker 1: But the Molly Pool had this great bit about door
Speaker 1: Dash in particular, So this is a this is a
Speaker 1: quote about door Dash quote. The company has large variable
Speaker 1: costs on every order, making up fifty percent of revenue
Speaker 1: in the first quarter, and spends twenty five percent of
Speaker 1: its revenue on sales and marketing to attract and retain
Speaker 1: its customer base. Add on research and development costs and
Speaker 1: general administrative overhead, and door Dash posted a one hundred
Speaker 1: and seventy one million operation loss in Q one. That
Speaker 1: was in twenty twenty three, so that is a year old.
Speaker 1: But that's that's not unusual. That is sort of a
Speaker 1: typical experience for these these companies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the thing is like those administrative costs include
Speaker 3: all of this work. Like the amount of scrabbling that
Speaker 3: these companies are doing like little crabs in a bucket
Speaker 3: is a lot. Like they're wrangling these big partnerships. For example,
Speaker 3: DoorDash has offered free trial memberships, which you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 3: for customers of like Roku and Chase. They launched a
Speaker 3: co branded Chase credit card. They're offering exclusive access to
Speaker 3: different retailers, like like Costco is only through Uber, CBS
Speaker 3: is only through door Dash, and they're negotiating. Also, I
Speaker 3: didn't know this exclusivity agreements with small local restaurants.
Speaker 1: So in that case, you're like, oh, you can only
Speaker 1: get delivery from this place if you go through this
Speaker 1: one specific.
Speaker 3: App and so on a contract level. Like that's that's
Speaker 3: wild to me because you have these huge corporations going
Speaker 3: to you know.
Speaker 1: Billy Bob's barbecue boutique, yeah or whatever it may be. Listen,
Speaker 1: no hate on Billy Bubs. They make a mean smoked turkey.
Speaker 1: Leg I had to come up with something I would
Speaker 1: actually eat be a second.
Speaker 3: It was like a lot of barbecue stuff off limits
Speaker 3: for barbecue, Like why did I say barbecue.
Speaker 1: Maybe because Fox Brothers is right next door Fox Brothers,
Speaker 1: Fox Brothers smoked chicken wings. Okay, uh, I can't get distracted,
Speaker 1: Actually I absolutely can, but I won't alight. So the yeah,
Speaker 1: this is like just a rough deal all around to
Speaker 1: the point where there are still think pieces being generated
Speaker 1: every year about is this actually a viable industry or
Speaker 1: will the rug get pulled out from under it at
Speaker 1: some point? Will there be a point where these companies
Speaker 1: can do business in such a way where they're not
Speaker 1: killing the restaurants because obviously if they kill the restaurants,
Speaker 1: then there's no delivery business either, and they're not bleeding
Speaker 1: the customer to the point where everyone says, no, let's
Speaker 1: not order delivery, it's too expensive, let's just go there.
Speaker 3: Right, or do without yeah, or do without yeah.
Speaker 1: And the answer to that is still unknown, like we
Speaker 1: just don't know. It really heavily depends on how much
Speaker 1: investor how much risk investors are willing to take on.
Speaker 2: This to me, by the.
Speaker 1: Way, Lauren, is really kind of wild because I think
Speaker 1: about companies that generally speaking, like establish companies that have shareholders,
Speaker 1: how they often will favor short term results over long
Speaker 1: term direction. Oh, like that's usually how we think about
Speaker 1: capitalism these days, right, Like, you know, forget about what
Speaker 1: long term success looks like, we need to make it
Speaker 1: go up this quarter exactly?
Speaker 3: Can it go up next quarter?
Speaker 1: We gotta we gotta grow quarter to quarter. Like, if
Speaker 1: we that number, it's not it's not enough that we
Speaker 1: make money. We have to grow forever. Yeah, yeah, forever grow. Hey,
Speaker 1: we worked for a company called Discovery that found out
Speaker 1: that's really hard to do. Hey, Warner Brothers, Discovery, how's
Speaker 1: things going?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 1: Man, I'm throwing a lot of shade. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: going out, who cares? Like this is where a burning
Speaker 1: tech stuff down? As I leave, I'll tell the new
Speaker 1: hosts it's yours.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: Uh but yeah, it's just it's just super super hard
Speaker 1: to look at and and justify or or to to
Speaker 1: grasp with these two different realities where you have investors
Speaker 1: on one side who expect monthly improvement or quarterly improvement,
Speaker 1: and meanwhile you have these other investors who are making
Speaker 1: the long term bet that one day these companies are
Speaker 1: going to not just be profitable, but be able to
Speaker 1: grow year over year just like other businesses. And it
Speaker 1: seems perhaps Yeah, yeah, so, uh, this has been a bummer.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So interestingly, the industry does have a little bit
Speaker 3: of a solution, but I'm wondering exactly how borkeed that
Speaker 3: solution is.
Speaker 1: I'm yeah, I don't know how realistic the solution is.
Speaker 2: Either, let's let's think it over.
Speaker 1: So one solution that I mentioned already is this idea
Speaker 1: that the whatever the future version of this, however it
Speaker 1: shakes out, like hopefully one the one of the future
Speaker 1: predictions is that there'll be fewer competitors, that these these
Speaker 1: companies are going to further consolidate, because as you mentioned, Lauren,
Speaker 1: we've already seen that like Postmates is no longer its own.
Speaker 3: Thing, right, Yeah, they got bought by someone. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: Uber also bought out Drizzly Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And there were other instances of that too. I
Speaker 1: remember looking and seeing like a couple of others, some
Speaker 1: of which were services I had never heard of, which
Speaker 1: might have been like regional or something. But so that's
Speaker 1: part of it is that when there are fewer competitors,
Speaker 1: then you have less not that I think fewer competitors
Speaker 1: is necessarily good, but it means that you'll have less
Speaker 1: of this wild spending on the corporate front of trying
Speaker 1: to run different promotions in order to attracting keys. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're essentially your undercut is what Lyft and Uber did,
Speaker 1: especially in the early days, where they tried to bleed
Speaker 1: the other one out of a market by severely underpricing
Speaker 1: rides and hopefully just convince the competitor that, oh, this
Speaker 1: region is just not profitable. Let's pick up stakes and move.
Speaker 1: Didn't work out that way. It eventually shook out that
Speaker 1: they just kind of had to cohabitat in most markets anyway.
Speaker 1: The other element is that consumers will be paid more
Speaker 1: like we will we will foot the bill for uh.
Speaker 2: These these.
Speaker 1: Various fees in order to keep the business afloat as
Speaker 1: far as revenue goes without it cannibalizing the entire restaurant industry.
Speaker 1: And again that that's rough for people who are dependent
Speaker 1: upon this for the occasional delivery, but they're not in
Speaker 1: a income level where that's something they can easily do.
Speaker 1: So that's the solution I've heard. Have you heard any others,
Speaker 1: Laine or are we are we doomed?
Speaker 3: Okay, well, well what if? What if restaurants should even
Speaker 3: have the restaurant part. What if they were only for
Speaker 3: app delivery?
Speaker 2: Oh, you mean if they were like a ghost.
Speaker 1: This is where your American Shadows thing comes into play, right, Oh,
Speaker 1: spooky ghost kitchen.
Speaker 2: I really would.
Speaker 1: Ghost kitchen was something we could talk like, we could
Speaker 1: just do a thirteen Days of Halloween. But it's just
Speaker 1: ghost kitchens. I did.
Speaker 3: I was searching my Google drive for ghost kitchens to
Speaker 3: see I knew that I had made notes about it
Speaker 3: somewhere and I couldn't remember where, and American Shadows outlines
Speaker 3: did come up.
Speaker 2: That's hilarious.
Speaker 1: Ghost kitchens are also sometimes called dark kitchens. You might
Speaker 1: be familiar with these. These are kitchens that technically don't
Speaker 1: have a brick and mortar space of their own. They
Speaker 1: might rent kitchen space in an existing restaurant. They might
Speaker 1: even be a subset of an existing restaurant. It's just
Speaker 1: it almost becomes like a test kitchen where a restaurant
Speaker 1: can can start making cuisines that normally they like. It's
Speaker 1: normally an Italian restaurant, but we're gonna make impanadas or
Speaker 1: whatever it may be, right, And sometimes it's like a
Speaker 1: kitchen that's run out of I ordered one once that
Speaker 1: was a kitchen run out of a church, a local
Speaker 1: church just down the street from where I live. They
Speaker 1: sold very expensive grilled cheese sandwiches.
Speaker 3: Were they good grilled cheese sandwiches?
Speaker 1: I would say they were almost holy because it wasn't
Speaker 1: actually run by the church. It was just in the anyway.
Speaker 1: Almost Yeah, it was church adjacent. It was it was Jesus.
Speaker 1: So I was having a Cheesus moment. Yeah, Lawd's just
Speaker 1: shaking her head to disapproval. Annie would have liked that
Speaker 1: one anyway. An he loves puns.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, so these are our businesses. Sometimes they will all
Speaker 1: coexist in one structure and use the same kitchen equipment
Speaker 1: and kitchen utilities and all that sort of stuff. But
Speaker 1: they'll be like five or six or sometimes eight different restaurants,
Speaker 1: all all represented and.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and so it hypothetically brings down the overhead
Speaker 3: for everyone. Yeah, and you know, like so the basic
Speaker 3: reason for this is that, you know, because of this
Speaker 3: rise of online convenience culture, and also, you know, we
Speaker 3: all had some legit health concerns during the pandemic. Some
Speaker 3: people still do. So digital food orders and delivery has
Speaker 3: been outpacing the growth of dine in traffic by like
Speaker 3: three hundred percent since twenty fourteen. Yikes, and you know,
Speaker 3: and that counts, you know, right, Like even before the pandemic,
Speaker 3: we saw a reduction in in house dining, with chains
Speaker 3: like Starbucks operating drive through only locations. Lots of pizza
Speaker 3: chains have spots that are delivery or pick up only.
Speaker 3: But some of these ghost kitchen concepts are weirder, like
Speaker 3: for the ones operated by the big chains, Like is
Speaker 3: it expanding into a new concept or is it kind
Speaker 3: of catfishing people? Yeah, Like some of these places have
Speaker 3: branded themselves as being part of another chain, like Chili's
Speaker 3: has It's just Wings or Boston Market has Rotisserie Roast,
Speaker 3: And I think that those have pretty prominent branding like hey,
Speaker 3: this is from this place, right, But others have been
Speaker 3: real opaque. I think Chili's only came around to being
Speaker 3: clear about it, Like recently, Applebee's operated one called Cosmic Wings.
Speaker 3: Denny's has a sandwich concept called the Meltdown. I hoop
Speaker 3: had thrilled cheese.
Speaker 1: Man. I need to get a job just naming ghost kitchens,
Speaker 1: like like do you need a do you need a
Speaker 1: lame dad joke name for your ghost kitchen concept called Jonathan.
Speaker 3: They're all like this to attract your attention on these apps.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've definitely seen them too on door dash, Like
Speaker 1: there are times where I'll look and I'll say, huh,
Speaker 1: that looks like a weird restaurant name. I've not heard
Speaker 1: of it. It says it's a mile and a half away.
Speaker 1: How do I not know of this place?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: It turns out it's a ghost kitchen. And not that
Speaker 1: there's any again, not that there's anything wrong with that,
Speaker 1: but some of them are these sort of spin offs
Speaker 1: of existing brands. Some of them are entrepreneurs who are
Speaker 1: hoping to make a mark in the restaurant space without
Speaker 1: again having the massive overhead like you were talking about, Lauren,
Speaker 1: Like a lot of these kitchens have very few people
Speaker 1: actually working the kitchen itself. So like, I feel conflicted
Speaker 1: about these too, because for the ones that are multiple
Speaker 1: outlets that are all using the same space, it may
Speaker 1: just be a relatively tiny staff that's responsible for making
Speaker 1: the whitest variety Like forget forget the Cheesecake Factory with
Speaker 1: its eight hundred page menu. This is even more variety
Speaker 1: than that, and that gets wild.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I don't know, like, okay, so this is
Speaker 3: this is a fun callback. One of Uber's co founders
Speaker 3: in twenty eighteen bought a controlling interest in a controlling
Speaker 3: interest in this ghost kitchen property company called Cloud Kitchens.
Speaker 3: That Uber co founder and the reason this was in
Speaker 3: twenty eighteen was the guy who made Uber so toxic,
Speaker 3: Calanick kal Nick.
Speaker 1: Yep, yeah, I have never heard a good story about
Speaker 1: Travis Kalanick.
Speaker 3: He and honestly, he looks I'm rewatching the good place
Speaker 3: right now, and he looks like the bad place.
Speaker 1: Dude.
Speaker 3: He looks like the guy who's like who's like, hey,
Speaker 3: how you doing you pregnant?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that guy that's impossible like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, No.
Speaker 1: He comes across with an incredible bro energy that I
Speaker 1: just can't really abide by.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know, there's a lot more we could say
Speaker 1: about ghost kitchens too. I mean the Internet tie ins,
Speaker 1: Mister Beast being a famous one where he used his
Speaker 1: name and his clout to kind of do a tie
Speaker 1: in and try and do this this restaurant, and there is,
Speaker 1: or at least there was like a pop up kitchen
Speaker 1: physical mister Beast place, at least for a short while,
Speaker 1: but they were all mostly places that were doing something else.
Speaker 1: And then on top of that, we're also doing mister
Speaker 1: Beast's stuff. And as you might imagine, because this wasn't
Speaker 1: like a true franchise, there was no like actual standard
Speaker 1: of quality. Not to say that you were necessarily going
Speaker 1: to get a bad experience going from one location to another,
Speaker 1: but it would not be a consistent experience.
Speaker 3: Right, right, which is what we have not been trained
Speaker 3: to expect from a franchise.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: We've been we've all grown up on McDonald's and there
Speaker 3: you know, precise number of fries per containers.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, I'm if I'm going to an outback steakhouse,
Speaker 1: I want to know that bluemin onion is going to
Speaker 1: have that specific spice blend and sauce that's going to
Speaker 1: put me into a cardiac arrest.
Speaker 2: After three mins.
Speaker 3: Slap every time.
Speaker 1: Oh it's so good, but I can never have it again.
Speaker 3: No, you probably shouldn't.
Speaker 1: Well I never should have, but now I can't because
Speaker 1: it would kill me. That's just the truth of things,
Speaker 1: like That's that's my life. Now, That's okay. I had
Speaker 1: plenty of them leading up to that, So.
Speaker 3: I identified the problem I.
Speaker 2: Didn't miss out.
Speaker 1: Is what I'm saying is that I got to experience
Speaker 1: the transcendent joy of eating a blumin onion at an
Speaker 1: outback steakhouse listening to Jamaine Clement, a New Zealand performer,
Speaker 1: do the commercials for Outback. So you know, I feel
Speaker 1: like I feel like I'm in a good space. Well,
Speaker 1: I wish we had a nice spin to put on
Speaker 1: the end of this. I mean, I hope that this
Speaker 1: industry does shake out in a way where all the
Speaker 1: various parties involved end up getting a decent like go
Speaker 1: of it, and not have it be something where it's
Speaker 1: an unsustainable business model that is predatory upon the very
Speaker 1: entities that make the business possible, that being the restaurants
Speaker 1: and the drivers. Like it's it's clearly not something that
Speaker 1: can last forever, and the question just is when does
Speaker 1: it all collapse in on itself or when does the
Speaker 1: industry change so that it can support itself, And we
Speaker 1: just don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would love to see it though, because heck,
Speaker 3: it is lovely getting nice food delivered to my house.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and not not having to, you know, go out
Speaker 1: there and fight it. It also would be nice if
Speaker 1: we could find a solution where if we do make
Speaker 1: the effort to go out to brunch, we can finally
Speaker 1: actually eat at those places we've heard about forever but
Speaker 1: can never actually get a table at.
Speaker 3: I think that's just Atlanta. I don't think. I don't
Speaker 3: think we're ever going to have a solution to Atlanta
Speaker 3: brunch culture.
Speaker 1: I want to go to Dell Bar so bad, long
Speaker 1: time I only do walk up. Oh yeah, doh bar. Okay,
Speaker 1: Well that's micro podcasting to like a very narrow audience there,
Speaker 1: narrow casting to the extreme. Lauren, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for coming back to tech stuff to revel in the
Speaker 1: madness and chaos that is the food delivery app business.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, anytime. I love madness and chaos. No, thank
Speaker 3: you so much for having me. It's been it's been
Speaker 3: wonderful being back.
Speaker 1: Please tell everybody where they can find your work.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, sure. If you would like to listen to
Speaker 3: my other podcasts, they are brain Stuff, Savor that spelled
Speaker 3: the American Way as a vo r and uh yeah,
Speaker 3: American Shadows is defunct now. But if you if you
Speaker 3: like true crime, like historical true crime, and I'm kind
Speaker 3: of doing like you know, like my my kind of
Speaker 3: sweaty balls voice. You know, I'm like, real, real serious
Speaker 3: about it.
Speaker 2: Your voice, it's.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, Sorry, that's like a decade's old SNL joke.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I love.
Speaker 1: I listened, I because I was like, oh, I didn't
Speaker 1: somehow I never even knew about this show that you
Speaker 1: had done, Like I don't know how it slipped under
Speaker 1: my radar. I didn't know about it. And then I
Speaker 1: started listening. I was like, uh, she's pulling a Ben Bolin.
Speaker 1: She's she has altered her voice slightly for this because
Speaker 1: of the tone of the show.
Speaker 3: Mm hm. Those and the aforementioned Thirteen Days of Halloween
Speaker 3: oh so good. And then Twelve Ghosts, which was also fantastic.
Speaker 3: Oh I loved working on that one so much. And
Speaker 3: Twelve Ghosts is a wintertime, nice, spooky anthology show. Our
Speaker 3: celebrity host for the whole thing was Malcolm McDowell. I
Speaker 3: technically had lines with Malcolm McDowell. We didn't do them together,
Speaker 3: but you know, but he talks to my character. That's wild.
Speaker 3: I loved it.
Speaker 1: I got to do an episode of season two of
Speaker 1: Thirteen Days of Halloween, and technically I got to act
Speaker 1: against Katheen to Jimmy, although I didn't share physical space
Speaker 1: with her at all or even hear her, I was
Speaker 1: I was acting off of I think it was Matt
Speaker 1: Frederick who had to say her lines to me.
Speaker 3: That sounds right while I was.
Speaker 1: Talking into a human head shaped microphone.
Speaker 3: So weird.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the bine oorl mics. I love those, y'all. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for listening. Hope you enjoyed this epic
Speaker 1: rant of an episode as we railed against the heavens
Speaker 1: and hold out what little hope we can have for
Speaker 1: a SAE future in this industry. Please take care of
Speaker 1: yourselves if you feel the need to order delivery, don't
Speaker 1: have a huge guilt trip over it. But you know,
Speaker 1: being an informed consumer I think is always the right
Speaker 1: way to go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and tip your driver, Tip.
Speaker 2: Your driver, tip your driver.
Speaker 1: And if you find out that the company was using
Speaker 1: it to subsidize their business, flip them off real good. Okay,
Speaker 1: With all that being said, take care of yourselves and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again.
Speaker 2: Really.
Speaker 1: Sin Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts
Speaker 1: from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows,