The desk lunch is on hold

The most important shift in restaurants in the past decade has been the rise of online ordering and delivery. UberEats, Postmates, Doordash, and a handful of other apps have been knife-fighting (in extremely uneconomical ways) for the privilege of becoming food delivery aggregators. Own enough customer demand, the thinking goes, and not only will r... See more

Postmates and DoorDash were the first to realize that if they could provide the broader group of restaurants that did not do delivery with the ability to do deliveries, they could dramatically increase the number of restaurants that could exist in the marketplace, thereby leapfrogging Grubhub’s selection (and liquidity).

Postmates and DoorDash pursued this growth-at-all cost mindset so aggressively that they listed restaurants and stores that weren’t even signed up for either service. Doing so let both scale supply faster than a sales team would have been able to, but it obliterated the unit economics early on. Because neither were integrated on the backend of the ... See more