One SPAM pizza pls
https://themargins.substack.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage
I knew on-demand delivery was in a bad place, but I didn't realize it was such a clusterfuck.
The article floats the question of "how does delivery pizza work anyways" without answering it. Having delivered pizzas in the early 2000s, I feel like I can shed light on this: it's all about efficiency.
How many deliveries can a pizza driver do in an hour? The key here is that I would take out multiple orders at once, reducing downtime. It took ~10-15 minutes for driving/ringing doorbell, then another few minutes to get back to home base and reload. That all meant ~3-4 delivers/hour (and I was incentivized to go quickly, because the more deliveries I made, the more tips I got).
On top of that, suppose it's a Friday night. You've got multiple drivers, so you organize the deliveries so it's more efficient for each driver. Now you're almost guaranteed 4 deliveries/hour, which lets you guarantee breaking even.
At a 3-4 delivers/hour, charge a $2.50 surcharge and most of the time you've made the driver's minimum wage just through the surcharge alone.
Compare that to Door Dash, where a single person gets a single order. The driver has to spend time getting to the restaurant (whereas I'd already be sitting there, waiting to go out). They take a single order out to a house. Then they have to figure out where to drive next (eating time just distributing the work). It's horribly inefficient by comparison. The surcharge would have to be wildly high, and on top of that, you'd make way less on tips because you're simply delivering fewer times/hour.