You don't have to have an absolute monopoly. Microsoft was punished for anti-competitive actions in the 90s when it bundled its Internet Explorer browser into Windows.
Even though other browsers existed, like Netscape Navigator etc, Microsoft was still found guilty of violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and guilty of anti-competitive action, both in the US and elsewhere.
Microsoft was forced to create a version of Windows without IE bundled, and other corrective actions.
Has nothing to do with monopolies, having the market slowly condense into one mega company does not create competition and results in higher prices for the consumer.
I just paid $20 for a $15 McDonald's order with the annual subscription. It all depends on the restaurant too. I also haven't gone grocery shopping since 2020.
I literally order from all of those companies as do 10s of millions of people if not more.
Food/grocery delivery should be a municipal service like garbage/recycling with no tipping and service provided by full time government employees with good benefits and use of city vehicles. Many, many new jobs, and a public service that everybody would love.
But DoorDash has a patent on giving you a deal if you combine your order with another restaurant, and giving you a higher price unless it determines that pisses you off and then backing off a little. Those contributions to humanity must be protected.
Grocery deliveries for the elderly and disabled are an excellent public service. But it's a hard sell to make everyone pay for stoners to get a $30 burrito delivered at 2am.
Many cities already fund taxis. The city of Sunnyvale provides a taxi service under the name of Beam for $3.50 per ride. It does not seem like a big stretch to extend this to food and grocery delivery. If you don’t want to be taxed for some service, you can always choose to vote to get rid of that service or move to a place without that service. I welcome more experimentation in municipal services.
personal chauffeur to work and back home for $7 everyday? Not a bad deal. Google says insurance is $180/month(higher end) or $6/day. Add gas, registration, maintenance and this is a good bargain.
I think the argument here is if you allow delivery to become a local monopoly like other utilities then just make it a utility. However as-is, there's little barrier to entry on adding delivery to any business and it should probably stay that way.
Is it necessary? No. Unfortunately I don't think would be great as a utility because quality of service matters and unlike the actual utilities, there's a lot of arbitrariness to quality of the service.
Availability of vehicles for delivery purposes is an interesting proposition. Charge doordash a tax or fee to maintain a fleet of vehicles that would open flexibility in the job market. (Consider this for ride-sharing as well... basically just reinvented the taxi medallion system but maybe with less restriction).
I think the best idea would be a free and open source Doordash clone. The local government would contract a local company to handle logistics, so it would still be a private company (like garbage collection), but ideally lots of them spread out through the country. Each local government would decide if it's fully paid for by taxes, subsidized by taxes, etc (like garbage collection). City vehicles repaired/maintained by mechanics like school busses, etc.
Are you kidding me? I don't use these services because I can save a lot of money by driving, taking public transit, or (gasp) walking to buy groceries or food myself. 100% do not want to be taxed to pay for some lazy individuals food delivery.
I basically want to socialize the costs of just about everything if people find it to be a useful public service. I'd like a single-payer streaming service like ITV, too. It gets very annoying to be gouged on all sides by corporations that don't care if the service is good or not, only how much money they can extract from people regardless of their station in life.
So TV licenses are not gouging, but a Netflix subscription is?
You live in a fantasy land if you think streaming services are not competitive and providing better value for money than public broadcasting companies.
We're socializing the costs of everything else. I'd much rather my tax dollars go to pizza delivery (and single-payer healthcare) than lining the pockets of tech monopolists and the military-industrial complex.
In my area, garbage collection is not done by the city, you pay a quarterly subscription to a private company if you want pickup. If not, you take it to the dump yourself. Some of my family live somewhere there are 3 of these pickup companies operating (which also pick up on different days).
Just saying, city run trash is far from universal.
I'm talking about local governments and not state or federal level, which is out of the scope of this conversation. I agree FWIW, but anyone with any degree of capacity for critical thinking would agree.
Is this satire? It sounds exactly like what someone would say if they were trying to parody a big government liberal. The idea of turning an expensive, optional convenience into a government-run service and touting job creatoin is a bit too on the nose.
It's not an optional convenience for some people. And no, not satire. We should be using local governments to drive competition as frequently as possible in my opinion. I believe in municipal broadband and cellular service as well.
I'm not going to pay taxes for a service I think shouldn't even exist! Let the (strikeout expletive) people who want this luxury pay for it - I don't want to subsidize them one bit.
(And I'm a pro-socialist who believes university education should be almost free, and we should have universal healthcare).
For the few who really, really can benefit (e.g. disabled), fine - they need to qualify and I'm happy for the city to subsidize them. For those who just don't want to go out and do groceries? No. Way.
My new years resolution for 2026 was to quit using 3rd party delivery companies. It was annoying at first but I've kept it and life is better without them.
Uber does both food and grocery delivery on top of rideshare.
I wonder if DD is going to make a play for Lyft next, which they’re already in close partnership. The market consolidating to these 2 players (Uber and DoorDash) seems natural(?), for lack of better terms. Either way, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Uber Eats in my area is usually faster than DoorDash. I look forward to the ongoing competition. But, Instacart provides delivery services behind the scenes for Costco and Walmart; having less competition between DoorDash and Instacart will surely lead to higher prices charged to the big box stores. Hopefully Uber steps into the fray to keep them on their toes.
[delayed]
Why? Wha does Doordash have to do with Instacart? How are these even remotely in the category of merging and buying the other?
That should definitely not go through but probably will.
Why shouldnt it go through?
Monopolies are bad for consumers
It's clearly anti-competitive.
It doesn’t seem like they have monopoly here given how big Uber Eats is?
You don't have to have an absolute monopoly. Microsoft was punished for anti-competitive actions in the 90s when it bundled its Internet Explorer browser into Windows.
Even though other browsers existed, like Netscape Navigator etc, Microsoft was still found guilty of violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and guilty of anti-competitive action, both in the US and elsewhere.
Microsoft was forced to create a version of Windows without IE bundled, and other corrective actions.
Has nothing to do with monopolies, having the market slowly condense into one mega company does not create competition and results in higher prices for the consumer.
Aka monopolies...
Isn't that what monopolies are known for??
A duopoly isn't great, either.
A company with 60% market share gobbles up a company with 25% market share.
I have to say I'm surprised GrubHub is so small.. I thought they were basically a clear number two
I’ve literally never ordered from any of these 3 companies.
I do wonder what percentage of their orders are McDonalds. I lived near one and the car traffic of vehicles with delivery placards was significant.
Which makes me wonder about pricing pressure that is often reported re: McDonalds, and yet people end up paying $30-40 for a $15 McDonalds order.
Don’t get it.
I just paid $20 for a $15 McDonald's order with the annual subscription. It all depends on the restaurant too. I also haven't gone grocery shopping since 2020.
I literally order from all of those companies as do 10s of millions of people if not more.
My man, bragging about paying 33~ percent more for a bottom tier burger joint on top of a subscription is not the statement you think it is.
You couldn't torture that out of me.
Food/grocery delivery should be a municipal service like garbage/recycling with no tipping and service provided by full time government employees with good benefits and use of city vehicles. Many, many new jobs, and a public service that everybody would love.
But DoorDash has a patent on giving you a deal if you combine your order with another restaurant, and giving you a higher price unless it determines that pisses you off and then backing off a little. Those contributions to humanity must be protected.
Is this sarcasm? /jks
Grocery deliveries for the elderly and disabled are an excellent public service. But it's a hard sell to make everyone pay for stoners to get a $30 burrito delivered at 2am.
I don’t want to be taxed for someone else’s burrito taxi.
Many cities already fund taxis. The city of Sunnyvale provides a taxi service under the name of Beam for $3.50 per ride. It does not seem like a big stretch to extend this to food and grocery delivery. If you don’t want to be taxed for some service, you can always choose to vote to get rid of that service or move to a place without that service. I welcome more experimentation in municipal services.
Cool I don’t want to pay for those either. Spend tax dollars on mass transit.
personal chauffeur to work and back home for $7 everyday? Not a bad deal. Google says insurance is $180/month(higher end) or $6/day. Add gas, registration, maintenance and this is a good bargain.
transportation is treated as a necessity to a good life. I'm not sure restaurant delivery should be treated the same.
The cool thing about democracy is that it only matters what the majority wants.
no it's not. it's what the politicians and president wants.
The the majority want what you're proposing? I doubt it.
Exactly, evident in how a taxpayer-subsidized DoorDash is a naive techbro pipe-dream and will stay that way, as it's predictably unpopular.
You are taxed by civilization.
What you mean is you want to live in one pond and shit in other peoples because they economicaly immoral.
I think the argument here is if you allow delivery to become a local monopoly like other utilities then just make it a utility. However as-is, there's little barrier to entry on adding delivery to any business and it should probably stay that way.
Is it necessary? No. Unfortunately I don't think would be great as a utility because quality of service matters and unlike the actual utilities, there's a lot of arbitrariness to quality of the service.
Availability of vehicles for delivery purposes is an interesting proposition. Charge doordash a tax or fee to maintain a fleet of vehicles that would open flexibility in the job market. (Consider this for ride-sharing as well... basically just reinvented the taxi medallion system but maybe with less restriction).
I think the best idea would be a free and open source Doordash clone. The local government would contract a local company to handle logistics, so it would still be a private company (like garbage collection), but ideally lots of them spread out through the country. Each local government would decide if it's fully paid for by taxes, subsidized by taxes, etc (like garbage collection). City vehicles repaired/maintained by mechanics like school busses, etc.
> I think the argument here is if you allow delivery to become a local monopoly
What monopoly? I can barely remember all the companies in this space, GrubHub, UberEats, PostMates, etc.
PostMates was acquired by Uber almost 6 years ago. https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...
Must be trolling -- 80-85% of US garbage service is contracted out to private companies. You want Anytown USA to have a contract with Doordash?
Contracts with as many private companies as possible using something similar to the Doordash app, ideally.
Yes, but the city then gets to dictate the quality of the service.
(And no, I don't want the city involved in food/grocery delivery).
Are you kidding me? I don't use these services because I can save a lot of money by driving, taking public transit, or (gasp) walking to buy groceries or food myself. 100% do not want to be taxed to pay for some lazy individuals food delivery.
You want to socialize the costs of pizza delivery?
I had a similar reaction but after thinking a bit, I can see some merit in the idea.
I wouldn't mind if my mom had access to a free grocery delivery service. She's 80 and has very bad vision.
So why not give your mom (and all moms) cash? Then they can order food delivery if they want, or not if they don’t.
Fairer, simpler to implement, no avenues for corruption.
I basically want to socialize the costs of just about everything if people find it to be a useful public service. I'd like a single-payer streaming service like ITV, too. It gets very annoying to be gouged on all sides by corporations that don't care if the service is good or not, only how much money they can extract from people regardless of their station in life.
So TV licenses are not gouging, but a Netflix subscription is?
You live in a fantasy land if you think streaming services are not competitive and providing better value for money than public broadcasting companies.
I have no idea how much I pay for public broadcasting, but I'd give up all my streaming services before I give that up.
Fantasy land = the United Kingdom?
We're socializing the costs of everything else. I'd much rather my tax dollars go to pizza delivery (and single-payer healthcare) than lining the pockets of tech monopolists and the military-industrial complex.
Those are the only two options of course!
Why would any of these jobs be new? People are already doing them. Would you not just reduce the earning potential by removing tips?
In my area, garbage collection is not done by the city, you pay a quarterly subscription to a private company if you want pickup. If not, you take it to the dump yourself. Some of my family live somewhere there are 3 of these pickup companies operating (which also pick up on different days).
Just saying, city run trash is far from universal.
The US doesn't even have public single-payer healthcare. Maybe revisit that priority list.
I'm talking about local governments and not state or federal level, which is out of the scope of this conversation. I agree FWIW, but anyone with any degree of capacity for critical thinking would agree.
Why?
Is this satire? It sounds exactly like what someone would say if they were trying to parody a big government liberal. The idea of turning an expensive, optional convenience into a government-run service and touting job creatoin is a bit too on the nose.
It's not an optional convenience for some people. And no, not satire. We should be using local governments to drive competition as frequently as possible in my opinion. I believe in municipal broadband and cellular service as well.
No. Freaking. Way.
I'm not going to pay taxes for a service I think shouldn't even exist! Let the (strikeout expletive) people who want this luxury pay for it - I don't want to subsidize them one bit.
(And I'm a pro-socialist who believes university education should be almost free, and we should have universal healthcare).
For the few who really, really can benefit (e.g. disabled), fine - they need to qualify and I'm happy for the city to subsidize them. For those who just don't want to go out and do groceries? No. Way.
My new years resolution for 2026 was to quit using 3rd party delivery companies. It was annoying at first but I've kept it and life is better without them.
Surely any benefits will trickle down to employees and end users.
How much money do this companies plan to extort from restaurants, who will try to pass it to customers, to pay such a big chunk of money?
Uber does both food and grocery delivery on top of rideshare.
I wonder if DD is going to make a play for Lyft next, which they’re already in close partnership. The market consolidating to these 2 players (Uber and DoorDash) seems natural(?), for lack of better terms. Either way, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Uber Eats in my area is usually faster than DoorDash. I look forward to the ongoing competition. But, Instacart provides delivery services behind the scenes for Costco and Walmart; having less competition between DoorDash and Instacart will surely lead to higher prices charged to the big box stores. Hopefully Uber steps into the fray to keep them on their toes.
$17b, thats like 1/2 an Instinct.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50287919