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The Rise Of Restaurants With No Diners As Apps Take Orders (npr.org) 134

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Shannon Bond, writing for NPR: Inside a bright red building in Redwood City, just south of San Francisco, cooks plunge baskets of french fries into hot oil, make chicken sandwiches and wrap falafel in pita bread. If you've been in a restaurant kitchen, it's a familiar scene. But what's missing here are waiters and customers. Every dish is placed in a to-go box or bag. Delivery drivers line up in a waiting area ready for the name on their order to be called. Behind the counter, racks of metal shelves hold bags of food. Each bag sports a round, red sticker with the logo of DoorDash, America's biggest food delivery app. DoorDash manages this building, the drivers, the counter staff -- everything but the food, which is made by five restaurants that are renting kitchens here.

Rather than having to build a physical brick-and-mortar store, we do that on their behalf. And then they move into our DoorDash kitchen and then overnight they're live on the DoorDash platform," said Fuad Hannon, DoorDash's head of new business verticals. He oversees the new kitchen venture. Not long ago, food delivery in many places was limited to pizza and Chinese takeout. But now, thanks to apps like DoorDash, Grubhub and Postmates, customers can summon their favorite dish with a tap on a smartphone screen, whether they live in a city or the far-flung suburbs. "Your customer is just like, at their living room, watching Netflix," said Min Park, an investor in DoorDash tenant Rooster & Rice, a chicken chain with six locations in the Bay Area.
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The Rise Of Restaurants With No Diners As Apps Take Orders More

The Rise Of Restaurants With No Diners As Apps Take Orders

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  • How does a restaurant get a reputation for to go orders, if it never sold them in house? I know, stupid question.

  • NPRvertisement? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Thursday December 05, 2019 @03:30PM (#59488922)

    This is how the vast majority of pizza and other takeout places have operated forever.

    My one order attempt with DoorDash led me to believe that they are sleazy. Their promo was no delivery fee, at checkout a line item was Delivery:$0 yet sneakily in a collapsed section with taxes they had a "service fee". As they are solely delivery company, any fee they charge is inherently a delivery fee. Even outside of this misleading promotion users are paying significantly more than they realize for delivery.

    • From the summary it sounds like DoorDash builds, owns, and maintains the physical properties where the kitchens operate out of, so they're technically doing more than delivering food even though that's the core part of their business. However, TANSTAAFL [wikipedia.org] (or maybe TANSTAAFD in this case) should tell you that it doesn't matter what they call it since you still have to pay for it. If they eliminated this service fee then the additional cost would just be included in the cost of the food. Like anything advertis

      • If they eliminated this service fee then the additional cost would just be included in the cost of the food.

        Then it would be part of the price listed on the menu, and customers would see it up-front before they spent time selecting their choices. That is not the same as sneaking in an extra cost during the checkout process.

        • There is usually a slight difference between these two. If there is a per-order fee, the price per item varies based on the size of the order.

    • So: not great food; badly delivered.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )
      Well, technically, they are a platform that connects diners, drivers, and restaurants. So the "Delivery fee" was what the driver earns for getting your food. The "Service fee" is what the platform charges you to find a driver. So really, they aren't lying, they didn't charge the deliver... fuck I can't even finish that sentence with a straight face.

    • This is how the vast majority of pizza and other takeout places have operated forever.

      Nope. Those places owned their own kitchen and prepared the food in it. The new thing here is renting the kitchen from the delivery company.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luthair ( 847766 )
        Nope. Restaurants very rarely own property and typically rent it.

        • They only rent the space. The actual kitchen (as in the ovens, stoves, etc) are typically not owned nor supplied by the landlord.

  • Here in the midwest they're converting some (long time) Steak n Shake sit down restaurants into Steak n Shake "2 go" places. Essentially they walled off the entire seating area and added a pick up section on the entrance. Service is only via the drive through, online app (for pickup) or from one of the growing delivery services.
    It makes a certain amount of sense I suppose. The place was really only packed at lunchtime (the one near me is in a corporate park) so I presume it did badly during the evenings

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JeffSh ( 71237 )

      i like that you brought up the past. buildings that are nothing but a kitchen and a pickup counter aren't entirely revolutionary. its important to anchor our opinions of the future with an understanding of the past.

    • Re:Steak n Shake (Score:4, Informative)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Thursday December 05, 2019 @04:16PM (#59489126)

      I liked Steak N Shake but every one around here closed because they were managed so poorly and the service was the worst I'd ever experienced. It's basically fast food brought to your table but somehow they managed to fuck it up.

  • how does that work for waste? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Thursday December 05, 2019 @03:41PM (#59488962) Journal

    I'm wondering, how does using services like this long term stack up on waste? I'm assuming (correct if wrong) that the food cartons are not reusable, as dishes and silverware in a real restaurant would be. It seems like a model like this doubles down on food carton waste -- one set to transport the food to the restaurant, and one set to transfer the prepared food to the consumer.

    As our local recycling service is so fond of telling us, no food cartons are allowed in the recycling bins. But who knows, maybe the rules are different elsewhere.

    I know these food delivery services are popular -- I have family members (in another state) who never cook for themselves. It's starting to become a thing, not needing a kitchen. But I wonder if this type of thing is sustainable, or just a flash in the pan, so to speak, when the true costs are exposed.

    I'm genuinely asking. It's possible that the process is completely different from what I'm envisioning.

    • Re:how does that work for waste? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Thursday December 05, 2019 @03:44PM (#59488980)
      At least in the US, we don't pay the real costs for just about anything. We never pay for waste or trash or pollution at all. As long as companies are allowed to make profits and socialize the costs (like the fossil fuel industries, the plastic industries, etc), it'll continue. If I had to bet, I'd say that it'd going to continue indefinitely, unfortunately. But you're 100% right. The wasteful packaging is completely subsidized by the government.

    • Re:how does that work for waste? (Score:5, Informative)

      by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Thursday December 05, 2019 @03:47PM (#59489000)

      The plastic containers are not recycleable. Aluminium trays are. Surprisingly, paper isn't - people often assume that cardboard food packaging is, but the food contamination is really good for gunking up recycling machines. Pizza boxes are the bane of paper recyclers.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Surprisingly, paper isn't - people often assume that cardboard food packaging is, but the food contamination is really good for gunking up recycling machines. Pizza boxes are the bane of paper recyclers.

        Yes, that's true. What's needed is a compost program - food contaminated paper is compostable, not recyclable. Thus instead of going to waste in a landfill, it just returns back to the earth like it should. And the earthworms and bacteria get a tasty snack to go along with the cellulose.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          They go into the green waste here, which is mixed with chicken shit and I assume some sand and composted in these big tubes with a fan blowing air through. Talking to someone at the dump, really nice soil in 3 weeks which they sell and give to the local residents.
          They also have a humongous wood chipper to do the same with lumber, yard waste and such.

    • I know these food delivery services are popular -- I have family members (in another state) who never cook for themselves. It's starting to become a thing, not needing a kitchen.

      Don't forget the carbon footprint angle. It might be greener cooking all food at a central location and making multiple deliveries in one car run. Definitely greener than having multiple diners all driving to a restaurant.

      In fact, in the future, having a home kitchen might be illegal.

      Or at least identifying home kitchen owners as "Planet Killers" . . .

      • I cook my own meals at home, but I never drive to the grocery store to get the items needed for every meal.

        For most people, it's probably a weekly thing, so assuming the worst case scenario of only two meals per day, for only one person, that would still mean 1/14th of a car run per meal. At three meals per day for two persons, we're already at 1/42th of a car run per meal.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          When I was young and lived in the big city, it was pretty normal to walk to the market and buy fresh food.

        • This is where the math gets really tricky. If your neighborhood is a mile from the grocery store, everyone drives 2 miles a week to go get groceries. If you've got 25 houses, that's 50 total miles.

          If they all order online and the store delivers, that's probably less than 3 total miles of driving to deliver to all of those houses, even having to circle the neighborhood to hit both sides of the street.

          Where the math starts to get impossible is that a lot of those people would be going out and combining shoppi

      • I know these food delivery services are popular -- I have family members (in another state) who never cook for themselves. It's starting to become a thing, not needing a kitchen.

        Don't forget the carbon footprint angle. It might be greener cooking all food at a central location and making multiple deliveries in one car run. Definitely greener than having multiple diners all driving to a restaurant.

        I guess I'm wondering if the footprint of the stove component of people cooking for themselves vs a restaurant cooking food centrally is significant, compared to the footprint of food wrappings that must be discarded. I know, it's a "zero point" measurement, where me boiling water on the stove doesn't see the pollution, because my electric stove doesn't have any exhaust. Similar to people with electric cars think there's zero pollution, when it's actually zero *point* pollution, IE, no pollution at the ve

        • I like the question of central cooking being less energy intensive than individual cooking.

          I'd also ask -- is centralized food preparation less packaging intensive than individual cooking?

          I know we're all supposed to be eating fresh foods from the organic coop which we take home in nothing but reusable containers, but the reality is a lot of cook-at-home food comes in packaging -- cans, bottles, boxes, bags, etc. A lot of commercial food comes in giant containers which are probably much less packaging inte

          • That's a possibility. I think it would depend on the type of food being cooked. Some ingredients just don't come in 55 gallon drums. (Hyperbole, but you get what I mean.).

            I have a confession -- am I the only one who puts take-out on real plates and eats it with real metal silverware? I don't like eating out of paper or plastic containers, and I really REALLY don't like plastic silverware. I used to ask them not to include any plastic utensils, but lately, they seem to default to not including any.

            • m I the only one who puts take-out on real plates and eats it with real metal silverware?

              No. I even heat my plates up in the microwave because it keeps your food warm while you're eating it. If you're getting takeout, fine, but there's no need to be a barbarian if you're taking it to your house and the dishwasher isn't broken.

            • I do some work with an organization with a large commercial kitchen and I almost never see food come in anything but big quantities in packaging oriented towards its volume.

              I eat take-out with real dinnerware, but it can kind of depend. For sure always with real silverware if it needs silverware at all, but sometimes the to go container is ideal for eating off of and doesn't need a seperate plate.

      • Don't forget the carbon footprint angle.

        Indeed. Environmentalists often lose perspective. There is a lot of focus on recycling when it makes little difference. It takes about as much energy to recycle a plastic bottle as to make a new one. Recycled glass is a net loss: it is better to throw it in the trash.

        The reduction in fuel consumption from consolidating the deliveries is a much bigger win.

        In fact, in the future, having a home kitchen might be illegal.

        In Singapore, it is common for budget apartments to have no kitchen. Many new apartments in Hong Kong have no kitchen. In both cities, good takeaway

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          There was a time when many glass containers were washed and reused, which seems the greenest.

      • Re:how does that work for waste? (Score:4, Informative)

        by matthewd ( 59896 ) on Thursday December 05, 2019 @05:19PM (#59489346)

        They are already trying to restrict new gas stoves in California.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DogDude ( 805747 )
        In fact, in the future, having a home kitchen might be illegal.

        In the future, having shoes might be illegal.

        In the future, having paper might be illegal.

        In the future, having toothpaste might be illegal.

        In the future, having peanut butter might be illegal.

        • I could see the peanut butter one. You haven't been able to get peanuts on airplanes for some time, and administrators get hysterical if you bring anything with peanuts to a grade school. All we need is a few high visibility peanut allergy tragedies at friends' houses, and a movement will start to ban peanut butter entirely.

          I noticed the other day that the supermarket has renamed the "peanut butter" section to something generic like "seed butters".

          So yeah, sure.

          And paper kills trees, you should be doing t

          • I doubt peanut butter allergies will last more than another few decades. They're already making good progress on retraining the immune system to be less spastic about it. Between that and shit like CRISPR I bet that's one of the things that we're going to be able to take care of in infancy for most kids in developed countries.

    • You order the food, and it's delivered using restaurant dishes and silverware [youtube.com]. When you finish, you just leave it outside your door and the deliveryman comes back to pick it up. If you don't return the dishes and silverware, the restaurant simply adds it to your bill. You get the convenience of delivery, without the waste of take-out. (Granted it works because of the high population density of Korean cities, so the delivery person doesn't have to go that far. But lots of Western cities have similar den

      • See? This is why I asked the question. I did not know that. It eliminates my major concern about the service. (Food container waste.)

        I grew up in suburbia, and currently live in a suburb. But I'm old enough to remember milk delivery in suburbia, and somehow that was made to work without high density housing. The milkman would pick up the glass empties when he made his next delivery, which would be sterilized and reused. If there were enough items, he'd leave a wire basket, which you'd stack with the

    • We fixed the waste problem by going to a restaurant instead of getting a bunch of plastic containers delivered.
      Also, when we're home, we actually cook real food. It's so much better than something sitting in a Styrofoam container for 20 minutes even if the driver doesn't mess with it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jezwel ( 2451108 )
      Where i am, the bags are made of brown paper, the bowls are cardboard, the utensils are wood, straws are single use something. The only plastic is the lids on the food containers, which I'm sure is being looked at.

      All the rest can go to landfill as it will be broken down by various things, and sinks carbon as well. The good landfills also capture methane from when these types of items are digested by various lifeforms.

      tl;dr: it can be pretty good.

      I'd also note that the vast majority of delivery vehicles a

  • One data point does not a "rise" make. And the fact that this featured "restaurant" has the name "Door Dash Kitchens" slapped on the side of the building makes this sound more like a PR item than an actual story.

    The real question is - other than the injection of these new middlemen like GrubHub and Uber Eats, how does this differ from what some businesses have done forever? Here in the Pacific Northwest, there are companies like Ingallina's which existed before the web was a thing and whose entire business

    • Sometimes the middleman does make a real difference. For one, it makes it a lot easier for people to switch their meal to a new kitchen offering a different type of food without the perceived risk of doing business with an unfamiliar company who may or may not be trustworthy or dependable.

    • The usually term you will see in the restaurant is the ghost restaurant. this article is really more an advertisement for door dash, like you commended
      But here is an article about them from an restaurant management site:
      https://upserve.com/restaurant... [upserve.com]

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday December 05, 2019 @03:47PM (#59488994)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Compact, re-usable and pocketable utensils do exist, you know.
      All these places need to do is add a (big) surcharge for disposable utensils and give a lecture on sustainability to those who still want them anyway.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by j-beda ( 85386 )

          You know what would be a game changer? Is if someone created restaurant-grade Tupperware and restaurants started using it for their takeout and gave people a choice between paying an extra $2-$4/box or getting 5% off an order whenever they bring a fairly clean set back.

          What would be a REAL game changer would be if we priced the negative value associated with waste, pollution, CO2 and other such externalities so we could just be fairly confident that comparing based on price was including all of these considerations.

          Bring on the carbon taxes and the disposal fees!

          • Bring on the carbon taxes and the disposal fees!

                Bring on the $200 pizza!

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by j-beda ( 85386 )

              Bring on the carbon taxes and the disposal fees!

              Bring on the $200 pizza!

              Yeah, that would suck, but if in fact it costs $200 to do all the polluting and energy production that making the pizza requires, shouldn't we know about that? Shouldn't the person eating the pizza pay for the production in stead of making the rest of society subsidize it?

              I suspect that if the actual costs for pizza production with all the externalities built in was that high, we would see a fairly quick shift to the construction of solar thermal ovens and less polluting grain production and stuff like that

  • Especially look at application and game developers who exclusively developed on Microsoft Windows in 1990s.
  • They open "restaurants" in shipping containers on industrial estates and deliver on apps like Delliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats.

  • Depressing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Thursday December 05, 2019 @05:15PM (#59489330)
    I see this happening, and I think it's depressing as fuck. It used to be that only people with some serious anti social bent would be shut ins and have eveyrthing delivered. Now it's becoming normal. Wow.

    So people are now paying twice as much as they should for shitty delivery food (cold, soggy, etc), all so that they can stare at some stupid screen while they eat. Jesus Christ people. Put on some pants and go outside.
    • Look if I have 6 friends, and 30 years ago I had to go and get my pizza we either brought it back and enjoyed it as cold as with delivery, OR we eat it locally only to get scolded because we were loud mouth. And if you were a loner buying pizza you nearly NEVER stayed there for the social aspect , don't give me a fucks about it being otherwise that would be mostly a lie. Fast food Restaurants were never a place really to meet and greet new people on a whim , beside outliers. No, as a loner, 30 years ago you
  • I am just in my living room watching Netflix! And I see no reason why I should have to put pants on in order to have dinner! Lately most of my decision making tends to fall to the option that requires the least amount of me having to wear pants as possible, and as it turns out, that's a surprisingly lot of the time! What a wonderful age we live in!

  • No tables or waiters and food is not consumed on site. That's called a factory.

  • App app app app app. I can't be the only person who outright refuses to install an app as a cost of doing business. You don't have the right to my hardware and data, any more than you have the right to my phone number and address if I'm shopping at your store. But I'm saddened by the number of people who bend over for their privacy and hardware fuck for any company that demands it. When you lie down you're not just letting these companies walk all over you, you're encouraging them to walk on everyone. Can

    • Appitty-app (crap crap)!

      I'm the same way ... I'd rather order over the phone and pay cash like a free man, not have my data mined, sliced, diced, and assfucked like a consumer serf.

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