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Online Takeout Delivery is Back
prostoalex writes "It's like watching e-Dreams and re-living the Kozmo.com experience, only this time it's for real, the New York Times says. SeamlessWeb is here (or rather, in New York, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles and southern Connecticut) to take your take-out orders and deliver the food. All is done via their Web site so no need to look for that takeout menu: "SeamlessWeb charges restaurants a commission of 5 percent to 15 percent, while the business pays a 2.5 percent fee for each transaction. The process for consumers will work much the same, except they will be charged no service fee.""
I've been using CampusFood.com to make my takeout (or pick-up) deliveries for quite some time. Great service. I don't think that online delivery services ever left the internet -- this story is just a shameless plug for some new startup.
I think my principles are reachin' an all time low
That it's a slow news day. :)
Another blatent advertisement gets posted as a story. Yawn.
Kozmo offered video rentals online, with free delivery - as well as things like snack foods, CDs, convenience items, video games, etc. It was impulse-buying to the max. I was so sad to see Kozmo die. This is nothing like Kozmo, it's like all the other online ordering systems for restaraunts out there.
Meh. Call me when Kozmo REALLY comes back.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
It took them long enough, but they finally realized that if you hide the cost of the second business (delivery) in the prices from the first business (food) people can be fooled into thinking they are getting free delivery.
Or, another way of looking at this is that urban prices are so inflated that one can piggyback entire businesses inside the margins. I suppose when a sandwich costs $15, you've got a lot of room to play with your delivery model.
As long as a company stays small and dosn't expect 90% of the population to go for internet-delivered everything this type of thing can be a success. After pets.com people said no one could make money selling petfood online, but actualy lots of people do. They just don't have multi-million dollar ad-campains.
There will always be a few people rich and lazy enough (or in my case, rich and holding a suspended drivers license) to make something like this work.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
A friend of mine drove for takeout taxi and I used to order from campusfoods all the time.
I don't see why this service is innovative. Maybe it does something better than those two companies, but I doubt it's a revolutionary improvement. sixdegrees -> friendster
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Great ideas are great and all, but they still need *really* great execution to fly. ~ria~
>I guess the big question is, what point am I missing here? The point: Dominos (or any big chain pizzeria) makes lousy pizza, regardless of how easy it is to order.
There were a lot of good ideas that came out of the dotcom era, and I think a lot of them will see the light of day again, just not on the same level as before. People today are much more accustomed to using the internet, and there are more people on it than 5 years ago. I think now is the time to start working on some of those dot-bomb ideas... This, in part, is why Google is doing as well as it is.
Ok, here's another one: why are people really happy when they receive big income tax refunds, knowing full well that they've lost a year's worth of potential interest on their money that they could have had if they had filled out their W-4 differently? Look, the government isn't giving you money -- they are giving you your own money back after drawing interest on it! Ok, I'll stop ranting now...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
If they get the delivery logistics right the first and manage to get started without blowing $250 million like Webvan did, I don't see how this would not work. Home delivery is an old concept, but there's always room for improvement in efficiency, and restaurants may decide it works far better to farm out their delivery service rather than try to manage it themselves.
The best thing about Kozmo--and its greatest weakness, businesswise--was that they sold more than just takeout food. They'd deliver a pint of Ben & Jerry's, a Razor scooter, DVDs. The problem is, they couldn't mark these things up as much as a pizza is marked up. A pizza is made out of $1 worth of ingredients and sold for $15. To make a pint of Ben & Jerry's as profitable, they'd have to charge $20 for it. Who's going to pay that?
Often times I find myself too buzzed to drive but fresh out of 40's... and no matter what I offer the Pizza Hut guy, he just won't go pick me up a couple more. How about an online beer delivery service? I think the government would even subsidize the business to keep the drunks (me) off the street... just a thought.
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So we go from a phone system to an internet system and the costs increase by 10% and we call that progress? Every restaurant I've seen already has a computer in the back office that is more than capable of handling the few orders an hour that will come in.
Anyway, I'm not even suggesting the website would have to be at the restaurant. My only problem is with the idea that a company full of people is required for this. At the very most, this should be a $500 software package that the restaurant buys and installs that has a very simple interface and maybe even groks the menu database from their point of sale computer system. This whole thing should be doable for a negligable marginal cost.
If you needed a mechanic to successfuly start your car for you most days or "upgrade" it with new gas, we'd be disgusted with the automotive engineers for their lack of competence, and might even suggest that their shitty engineering were a self-serving nod to the dealers. But nobody seems to mind that computer science research seems to mostly produce jobs for IT people, and not elegant solutions. It may seem like an unfair analogy, but consider the fact that companies need to hire an IT staff to deal with their computers on a daily basis, but don't need to hire a mechanical staff to run the company cars.
Besides, if you're interested in volume, which way would you rather go - your own site with perhaps couple of users a day, or heavily advertised "restaurant aggregator", like this outfit seems to be, where you might get a larger volume just by being listed with them.
I'd rather not have my ordering facility and marketing coupled. I'd wish I could handle my own menu and ordering system cheaply and then spend my advertising money where it's most efficient. These guys are charging a lot for the service of providing an ordering sytem, and they're going to get away with it because no small restaurant can figure out how to do this themselves. And that's a huge shame, and a cost to our economy, and it occurs all over our economy.
- unless you live under a rock with no internet service, you are used to buying things on line so the market's potential size is bigger and more realistically estimated.
- Gas costs $2.10/gal so a little markup in the cost is worth it to the consumer who otherwise not only takes the time to drive to the restaurant but buys some gas to do so.
- tips? no waiters involved but a driver is. Tips are up to 18% [e.g. Legal Seafoods in Boston adds that gratuity to the bill for as few as a party of 6]. You don't tip a delivery driver that much do you?
- driving, parking and being pressed for time have only gotten worse in the intervening 4 years.
- people with the software chops to throw together a web served app that takes restaurant orders are no longer rare and not paid like rock stars.
I wish Boston was on the list of cities where the service is being revived because parking around Boston sucks litter boxes...I get indigestion before I even get to the restaurant.SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.