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

In the past, ordering via a food delivery app was somewhat of a guilty pleasure. There was the feeling that we Doordash food when we’re too lazy to cook ourselves. However, the pandemic may have changed the perception of these services. Instead of connoting laziness, ordering groceries and meals in came to mean caring for one’s neighbors and commun... See more

Yet, despite this new source of e-commerce demand, restaurants have struggled to keep up. The dominant reason is that restaurant demand is inherently “peaky.” It’s even more peaky now that delivery and pick up are turning restaurants into omni-channel retailers. Restaurants have fixed labor costs that do not scale up or down with volatile demand th... See more

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