Where does ‘home delivery in 10 minutes’ take us as a society?
I love Deliveroo. I can’t think of anything more satisfying than getting notified that my driver is only two minutes away from my house with a delicious bag of warm food I can scoff without even entering my kitchen. Deliveroo are meeting my demands and more. In a free market economy they are doing just what they should, satisfying an unmet need. I want to eat restaurant quality food at home in my pajamas. Job done.
But are there any other winners in this new ecosystem of VCs, restaurant owners, delivery bikers and hungry customers? I’m not so sure.
Deliveroo takes ~35% of the revenue from the restaurant which pretty much wipes their profits. Yes, restaurants get to use all the food that might get thrown away, and yes they potentially attract some new customers. However, those ‘new customers’ are almost always never eating in their restaurants and buying higher margin drinks and desserts. And why should they when they can click to eat. The overheads of a restaurant are high and their business model is threatened — Deliveroo Editions proves that. Should Deliveroo ever want to run an NPS survey for their network of restaurant owners I’d quite like to know what that score is. Deliveroo keeps restaurants afloat, but never gets them anywhere beyond that.
And then we have the bikers, who are paid a pittance for risking their lives racing around cities to pay the rent. They are only paid when they have a job, so all that time waiting around for a delivery provides them nothing but boredom. They work alone, all day long, with little social connection. They are all on zero hour contracts. If they get sick it’s their tough luck. If a Deliveroo driver delivers 5 orders per hour for 10 hours (that’s 50 in a day!) they can earn up to £187.50. But that would require them to be racing around non-stop for 10 hours without having time to pop to the loo.
I think one can safely argue that restaurant owners and delivery drivers get the raw end of the deal. And don’t even get me started on the chefs and cooks who have to work in those little cabins all day, hidden away from the rest of us. It seems a marketplace model doesn’t always need to have happy customers on all fronts.
The ‘click on demand right now’ generation isn’t going anywhere. We’re now seeing hundreds of millions of pounds being poured into businesses like Gorillas, Getir and Weezy with the promise of delivering groceries in record speed time, as quick as 10 minutes. I myself have seen this in action. Many of my housemates are using these services and loving them. Some people don’t want to pop to the shop 5 minutes down the road to pick up their groceries, it’s a hassle. But where does all this take us. Are we going to have a society where one half are low economy workers racing around cities serving everyone else? Has this already happened? Is this what we want? Just because technology enables consumer demands to be met, does that mean we should do it without considering all the ethical and societal ramifications which result?
The customer has got to pay for ‘hyper-convenience’. If we want drivers racing around London risking their lives we’ve got to pay for their up and down time and give them all the protections that workers deserve. Whilst I use Deliveroo I always tip the driver and the restaurant, knowing that will be the only profit they get from my order. But that doesn’t go far enough. We need marketplaces which are set up to benefit all parties, not just consumers and VCs. If only there were a model in which restaurant owners all co-owned the technology platform as a partnership, and could have control over the fees so they could make a profit. Or if cab drivers co-owned their platform so they could earn enough so they didn’t have to drive 6 days a week for 14 hours a day. There are surely ways these ‘on demand now’ marketplaces could benefit society as a whole, instead of just impatient, hungry consumers and VCs. And if we can’t think of a better way should we really be investing in and/or using these platforms?
