This is one reason that I see most tech companies as essentially a net negative for society at large, as the goal is nearly always to control a large monopoly (and this is fully admitted by many tech leaders, e.g. Thiel) which the Internet makes possible. Pre-Internet you would see the same dynamics, but usually on a much smaller regional scale. I think that many of the growing problems in society today are fundamentally attributable to the extreme concentration of wealth and power that modern tech enables.
Politicians are people just like everyone else, they're just responding to incentives created by a majority vote. Tech companies are just like any other company, except a lot more people are willing to pay for their goods and services. If Carlin were alive, he'd say that the problem isn't the tech companies, it's their customers.
I'm actually far from convinced that tech companies are a net negative for society. Amazon makes billions because everyone wants competitively priced goods delivered to their doorsteps. Google makes billions because they provide free access to a large portion of humanity's information.
My theory is that if you're extremely pessimistic about technology or politics, you probably won't like anything that happens when large groups of humans make collective decisions. There's an air of let's go back to the good old days when we were hunter gatherers to the whole thing. Personally, I've accepted that it's always going to be messy and chaotic, but a lot of good things are going to come out of it as well.
I strongly disagree. On the contrary, I see the arch of many technological advancements in that, in the beginning, they solve a crucial need, but then once they solve that problem they attempt to hijack the positive feedback systems of humans (e.g. addiction systems) to stay in power.
Consider the food industry. Many people were under pretty constant threat of starvation through much of human history. So in the 19th and 20th centuries we essentially solved that problem in the Western world with the modern food industry. But we didn't stop there. Once people had all they needed to eat, food companies had to figure out how to get them to eat more, and they were highly successful. Saying that much of modern food science is a net negative for humanity doesn't mean I think we should go back to being hunter gatherers, but at this point every new "innovation" in the industry is really just an attempt to try to get people to eat/drink more.
I think much of the modern Internet/Web has been on that "net negative" slide for at least the past 10 years. Are people at large to blame for this? In one sense, sure. But I have no problem laying the blame at tech leaders who are essentially in the role of drug dealers for much of the industry. I mean, sure, drug users are ultimately at fault too, but we look down pretty harshly at drug dealers for their role in the process.
In tech this is done by controlling people's information and collecting their personal data
Combine the centralization with control and privacy intrusion with authoritarianism in government and you have a worse than 1984 future
It's all RIGHT THERE. Turnkey. Ready to go. And all the cultural institutions in government, the popular those of the ultra rich, the populist desperation of the poor, disappearance of the middle class, is leading to authoritarianism.
The rich don't give a shit. They're comfortable in their position. It's the uppity doctors, lawyers, techies, and everyone else with an office job that need to feel like they're better than the plumber, line cook and brick layer.
Every idiot who lives in a good school district with manicured lawns and reads the nutrition facts on the frozen dinner they're buying at Target thinks they're saving the world by telling the politicians to ban fireworks and menthols.
Yeah I know that's a broad brush, don't care.
I don’t get why you say this. Almost everyone has a need to feel like a good person, justified, etc, and the easiest way for someone with a several hundred million plus net worth to feel that way is to believe that they earned it, are special and that normal people are too stupid to do the same thing. There’s lots of other options for justifications but none of them are particularly flattering to the have-nots.
Not all, just some of them. It's pretty obvious which ones when you actually look at how they design and market their products.
It doesn’t matter that you don’t know who Peter Theil is when you buy a pizza. It matters that he somehow makes money from that pizza and if he can, he will extract more value than the pizza guy.
I mean, companies optimise for profits and at some point people fall for it in excess which is the point OP made.
It kinda makes sense, because the means the companies employ are psychologically advanced plays on people who don't know the spelling of psychology.
I'm probably manipulated into scrolling more than I wanted to or buying more than I wanted to on an everyday basis.
Yes, of course they are. Left unregulated they will form cartels. As Adam Smith said, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
They will try to raise barriers to entry as well, to limit competition. They will try to increase sales by many means.
They may be ethical enough not to do all that, but the potential is definitely there.
If anything, cartels thrive under heavily regulated and dirigiste economic systems, where as in an unregulated market a cartel would eventually lose to a competitor or succumb to infighting.
Capital gains tax that increases progressively with gains, and decreases progressively with duration i.e. incentivize significant investors to create long term value instead of chasing quick exits.
Edit: I wasn't accusing everyone who is critical of tech of being a Luddite. The attitude that nearly every tech company is a net negative for society goes quite a bit beyond criticism.
You need to be completely out of touch with reality to read an article on 5 companies dominating a global market and your take from that info is that there are no anticompetitive practices because 5 is more than 1.
You don't care. That's fine. It's not like there is a retirement to be informed before commenting. Sit this one out and let everyone who do express their concerns.
This seems to rest on the mistaken belief that a corollary of monopolies being bad is that more competition is always better than less competition. If everyone was a competitor in the restaurant food delivery market we'd all starve to death as no one would be growing food. An efficient economy wouldn't waste resources competing over less important things like restaurant food delivery over something more beneficial.
Is it, though? I mean, can you present a coherent argument supporting the idea that a global market being dominated by 5 multinational corporations does not flag a risk of anticompetitive practices?
> Competition? Meh. What for? So that I can watch the smaller guys blunder their way to the top?
Is this what you have to offer to refute the idea you're completely out of touch?
If by coherent you mean "using only facts and opinions that I accept at face value within my world view" then no.
Personally, I think 5 is way too little. But there are probably some markets for various products and services where 5 is fine. I don't think the number matters so much as that there be potential for a long tail of upstarts who could potentially displace a big player quickly. Whether 95% of the market is captured 2 or 22 players doesn't matter, they gotta know that someone is waiting to take their place if they screw up.
This is the definition of competition according to Wikipedia: "Competition is a scenario where different economic firms are in contention to obtain goods that are limited by varying the elements of the marketing mix: price, product, promotion and place."
Yes, sounds like competition to me. Network effects are not anti-competitive.
This argument is meaningless because you can always make it. There's a quasi-monopoly? Yeah but you're still allowed to make a new company so it's not really a problem is it? You'll fail, unless you're backed by even more powerful venture capital, but I don't care about that because I get to keep making the argument that it's a free market.
The reality is that the only way you can compete in this market is to already be a billion dollar company, or have the backing of one. That's not a free market by any reasonable definition.
What it is, is a clear case of technofeudalism.
China (basically) only has didi. Not much the USA can say here.
Southeast has Grab, and within each country there are at least 2 local competitors (Be, GoJek, Bolt, Line Man, Bluebird, etc). I believe Doordash just bought Deliveroo, making it the only American competitor in SEA.
In Europe, the main players are local food panda / Delivery hero and Just Eat.
India's winning food delivery is Swiggy.
What countries have both the talent to build a food delivery app and the USA is the dominant player?
I don't think it makes sense to focus on the US when three of the five companies in the article are from Germany, Netherlands and China. The problem is not America per se, it's the pattern of large and often (but not always) foreign companies extracting wealth from what used to be hyper-local operations.
It's not about "talent" these are utterly pedestrian apps that anyone mediocre team can fart out in a quick amount of time. It's about capital for massive scale, massive advertising, literal VC-subsidised dumping, takeovers of the competition, etc.
Sure, go to each country and check what food delivery companies operate in them, get a list of companies operating in the market that are not controlled by the big 5 mentioned in the article.
In Europe there were a few companies operating in the sector which were taken over by these global companies. I recall the Glovo takeover by Delivery Hero. You mention Foodpanda but you seem to be unaware this is a brand from Delivery Hero, and Just Eat is a Prosus company too.
> What countries have both the talent to build a food delivery app and the USA is the dominant player?
I'm baffled by your comment. Do you believe only the US has "the talent" to put together a food delivery business? Because even if you ignore the fact that 2 out of the 5 dominant players are not US companies, you need to be way out of touch with the reality of both the technology side and business side.
There are also reasons that we continue to exist while our competition pulls out of the region. There are also many reasons why hyper-local delivery services aren't able to compete with global or regional winners: Talent, access to capital, and TAM are big parts of that equation.
If someone that works for a non-american food delivery service provider is out of touch, I wonder what your credentials are that puts you in touch.
Also, in the blog, 2 of the 5 players ARE American (Doordash and Uber). The other 3 are European and Chinese.
That's why we need to also consider the needs of people that aren't American software engineers.
Me too, and I actually AM a Luddite
This shocking degree of negligence has required complicity from both political parties, but there's a deeper issue which is that this stuff is just too arcane to be linked meaningfully to a popular vote in today's democracy. We're talking about a nation where 1 in 5 people are now illiterate and that number is rising. There are two parties and a vanishingly small number of candidates presented to them every couple of years, meanwhile the media bombards them with a dozen supposed crises every day. This system is never going to produce a consensus that the most important priority is enforcing some law from 1914. Popular sentiment is more likely to be expressed through the rise of more guys like Luigi Mangione.
Amazon 38%
Walmart 6%
Apple 3.5%
Ebay 3%
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_bc9cd328-15d3-4047-bde6-d57a...
In fact, it's harder to avoid vendor-lock in in tech; it takes extra work to open things up, possibly a lot of extra work.
Even a well-intentioned open-source program can garner a user base which can't easily migrate off it.
a) is making money off it
b) has a vested interest in increasing lock-in
c) is a singular entity, not a dispersed set of individuals
d) is doing this as part of something specific and organized, rather than just trying to go about their daily lives, buying an orange here and a smartphone there
But I agree with your conclusion. I don't think there are many truly net negative companies/sectors/ideas that aren't either dead or on their way out -- but I'm sure you'd agree we should still hold tech accountable and optimize for our own benefit.
Btw, as a lifelong Carlin fan, I find myself asking what he would think pretty often :)
With that in mind: in what way should we terraform the latent terrain of human psychology to fix this problem? Because breaking up the tech companies seems like a way, but you seem to have a different one in mind.
I think there's a power dynamic that it seems like you are ignoring, that big companies take advantage of. Amazon gets cheap goods to your doorstep, and removes all competition while doing it. You think those goods are going to stay cheap,i don't. This is a playbook that wallmarts followed for years. Amazon also gets sellers, by selling amazon versions of their products. Google makes billions by showing you ads, they got you there with free services, but now they enshittify.
>There's an air of let's go back to the good old days when we were hunter gatherers to the whole thing
I think my concern is not going back to the bad old gilded age days, where wealth inequality lead to most humans having a terrible life while a few had a great life.
The main issue is that in tech and politics it is a small group of humans making collective decisions for all.
On the tech side of things Google has recently been hit by multiple anti-trust lawsuits, and lost them all. That's perhaps even less telling than the evidence presented. They brazenly and actively conspired to kill or buy any and all competition, but they've become so large (and so important to the US intelligence agencies) that they'll get nothing more than the most gentle slap on the wrist, relative to their scale. The moral of the story seems to be don't cheat, but if you're going to cheat - cheat relentlessly, ruthlessly, and take it to an extreme - and it might just become worth it.
Politics has become similar. Politicians have become way better at their jobs in modern times than in Carlin's era. Their "job" of course is just to get elected. It turns out that actually having a platform or popular ideas is far less useful than making people hate and fear 'the other guy' enough. When you rely on hate and fear, people will even actively vote for people they despise simply because 'it's the lesser evil.' With modern politicking even Reagan-Mondale would have still been a 50/50 coinflip and Regan would be an imminent threat to American democracy, and Mondale would want to turn your kids gay. Actually if we reached the modern era of divisiveness and stupidity in Carlin's time, there's a real chance America, certainly as we know it, wouldn't even exist today.
The moral of the story to me is that the government doesn't give a crap what you do so long as it's good for them. Google only got punished, and even then it was a big "show" with no results not because it did wrong, but because it so flagrantly violated the law the government got pissed that it was being made to look a fool. They didn't really want to "punish" google because it was their buddy and they found it useful, they just wanted the appearance.
Plus the market is artificially defined to be small. It excluded companies that do their own delivery (pizza places and others), home food delivery that isn't from restaurants, and the old option of just driving yourself to a restaurant.
There's thriving competition in the industry of getting people food, and lots of options that didn't even exist a decade ago. Crazy that it's being spun as the exact opposite.
Five companies controlling 90% of the market is more than enough to form a cartel or spontaneously self-organise in ways that have the same effect even without explicitly coordinating. (I once read an economics paper that I wish I could find now that said this would happen when the top 4 companies in an industry controlled more than 60% of the market)
I think you are stuck on the definition of the word monopoly rather than the reason behind why we ban/rule against them.
Human nature involves the ability to let different dimensions of our cognitive apparatus cover one another's weak spots. In my view, a lot of what many would consider wise decisions throughout human history have been instances of this, many of them in the form of law, from child-labor restrictions to drunk-driving laws to birth control to incest taboos.
There just seems to be a certain segment of society that for some reason insists that "what the consumer wants" has to be construed in this narrow way as what is in the person's mind at the instant of a decision, and that any attempt to broaden that person's decision-making is somehow unnatural. Well, no. It's good to make changes that create immediate costs if doing so can save us from future costs that we're not good at foreseeing at the moment. It's good for Ulysses to ask his men to tie him to the mast. It's good in many cases for people to deliberately, explicitly, not do things they feel like doing because they will regret those things later. I believe this is often true even from a perspective of self-interest (e.g., people will not like it if a monopoly emerges and raises prices later), but it's even more true if you incorporate a bit of consideration for the well-being of others, and I think plenty of people are willing to do that to some extent.
That's not completely true since there are too many mechanisms built in to limit those incentives
I don't think this is remotely true, and feels like victim blaming. No one is voting for monopolies and exploitation. At most you have people voting for tax cuts and the hopes of improved economies, which are then faced with a bait-and-switch of erosion of legal rights and protection and further anticompetitive practices.
These so-called "food delivery" companies are the worst example possible as they are renowned for the way they exploit employees with blatant violations of basic labor laws. No one voted for that.
> Tech companies are just like any other company, except a lot more people are willing to pay for their goods and services.
No. Their whole business model is based on exploitation to the point some countries had to force them to finally get their riders into actual employment contracts.
> I'm actually far from convinced that tech companies are a net negative for society. Amazon makes billions because everyone wants competitively priced goods delivered to their doorsteps. Google makes billions because they provide free access to a large portion of humanity's information.
You have a far too naive and out of touch view on the problem, much like a few years ago people from colonial powers believed their presence was net positive for natives as that meant they could receive a salary for waiting on them hand and foot. Amazon's example is even more laughable as the company is notorious for exploitative and outright abusive labor practices. I understand you like to receive packages, but I seriously recommend you read something on the topic because their impact on society is far from net positive.
Turning around and blaming consumers for this while pretending it couldn’t be better both is truly a shallow take. Carlin wouldn’t let these people off the hook like you do:
> A person of good intelligence and of sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality - and it's not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing - it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavored dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street
I don't know, but it fees like people are more equal now than back then at least to me. Or more people have a much higher standard of living at least.
Since 1980 pay and productivity have been decoupled in the global north such that the wealthy have continued to grow richer while the median worker hasn’t seen their real wages rise, despite being more productive. In fact much of our rise in standard of living prior to 1980 is not due to the allowing concentrated wealth to run rampant but people fighting the wealthy for things like worker rights, democratic rights, social programs.
If we look at the global south on the other hand since 1980 we see a great rise out of poverty. This has happened primarily due to China’s socialist policies which have pulled 800 million people out of poverty.
Allowing a small wealthy minority to run one’s country is undemocratic as they are able to use their outsized money and power to control the government and further grow their own wealth. It’s precisely why we face problems like authoritarianism, climate change, and austerity - toxic transitions all funded by monied interests.
Does the world really seem like it’s continuing to progress to you? Is our choice really so limited as either ‘hand over the reigns of society to billionaires’ or ‘revert to medieval peasantry’? Consider the improvements in the quality of life we’ve seen in the past century. People came together and fought for those improvements. They didn’t trust and depend on their monied masters to drop crumbs their way. That never happens. They fought for better lives and achieved them.
Quality of life is determined by how well off the poor or average people can live. How "easy" their life is and what luxuries they can afford, how long they now can live etc.
I think the advent of technology and mass commercial farming food production and all that allows the general population to live easier lives than what you had to do to survive hundreds and thousands of years ago in like medieval times or ancient Egyptian times etc.
I think any little regression in quality of life in these last few decades is but a small downward blip in the greater and steady rise during all of human history.
Climate catastrophe is expected to destabilize societies. A natural outcome from that could plausibly be the rise of extreme ideologies that advocate for nuclear conflict for example. It’s plausible human beings face an existential threat in the coming decades.
I think human progress is a chaotic process dependent on human choices, not a determined one. For example some hunter gatherer societies have lived lives of leisure working as little as 15-20 hours per week - quite a lot of ease compared to the modern work week most of us see. Human history is much more heterogenous and chaotic than what one might conclude from a perspective limited to today, medieval peasants, and ancient Egypt.
Luxuries I think should be viewed critically also. The effect of luxuries is unfortunately likely canceled by the hedonic treadmill. In our current society roughly 30% of people are suffering from mental illness like anxiety or depression. This is despite having iPhones instead of landlines.
You are right that longevity has increased over the long term. I think this is a stronger area of your argument. But is longevity alone a good measure for quality of life? I think we should include other factors, like happiness. Unfortunately we just don’t have those statistics over any meaningful horizon.
Overall I think measuring quality of life over the long history of our species isn’t quite as straightforward as you make it out to be. We must be wary of adopting just so stories. Quite a lot of heterogeneous human experience falls under this generalization, and most of it, at the very least, we just don’t have good data for.
In my view, progress that human beings experience is contingent, the result of our choices. Sadly I don’t think there is an arrow of history that guarantees a better future for our species. The risks we face in the upcoming years are immense. If there is a better future waiting for us, I believe it’s one we will have to fashion ourselves. Relying on an abstract concept like the arrow of progress can even be dangerous if it misleads us into forsaking our agency in fashioning our collective future.
Hunter gatherer is the only alternative to a society under total dominance by mega-corps? This reminds me of individual stories from life under communism and brutal dictatorships where the dystopia is so omnipresent you don’t even remember what was before, nor could imagine anything meaningfully different. Instead, you take joy in the little things, like (today) the scraps left over after another market war – ”at least now we have a search engine”, ”I can order a taxi from an app”. I understand it, because it has been such a dominant force in the kind of second reincarnation of neoliberalism since ~80s in the US in particular. This apathy is the perfect wet blanket to prevent systemic change and perpetuate the status quo – no suppression of dissent is needed if there is no imagination or expectation of a better society. A lot of powerful interests are spending a lot of effort trying to convince us that any meaningful change would make things even worse, not better.
In my opinion, the best way to break these cycles is to study the past, other countries and many times smaller local communities. There are countless examples of well functioning systems if you pay attention. And new ones being established all the time. I’ve seen local markets completely flourish in just a decade, because of good policy. Once you see these things, and know in your heart it’s possible, there’s no going back.
I’m intentionally a bit vague here, because what’s meaningful to one person can be inconsequential to another. Which is why it’s so important to discover these things on your own. That’s the way to turn complacency into hope, and hope into organized action.
This is the right conclusion, and I love sharing that video for that reason.
As of 2025 everyone globally has everything they need to make the world a great place for everyone. Instead, people continue to take the lowest energy route for their personal actions, which means they do not even think about the externalities of that purchase from Amazon, the Latte from Starbucks, continuing living in (insert your broken system here), working for some billionaire etc...They just shrug and think "its out of my control, besides I don't have any impact and why should I suffer unnecessarily"
There are millions of examples of individual people who had no education, being actively oppressed and violently attacked changing their situation by either moving or overthrowing their oppressors. Harriet Tubman comes to mind.
It's never been easier to do that, but people would rather not.
The entire "illegal immigrant" concept proves it, people literally spending their entire life savings ($5000) to pay coyotes to smuggle them in horrific conditions so they can be slaves picking strawberries. I know a Houston restaurant owner who did that trek twice from Guatemala, getting deported the first time and he just saved up and did it again. While speaking no english. Tell me again about how it's not possible to do something. Meanwhile the citizens can't be bothered to learn about their own history or you know, do anything.
I've tried to start multiple non-heirarchical anarchist cooperative organizations and the number one challenge is finding people who will put the group ahead of the individual. It just doesn't happen. There are no organizations where that's true. No church, no government, no state, no charity, nothing, nowhere actually meets the test of holistic globally aligned "good."
I read the Medicins Sans Frotiers book long ago, even they were terrible and continue to fight internally [1]. Unions now make most of their money from capital investments [2], which is directly in opposition to their anticapitalist philosophical roots. All of this is because the members don't care and don't have any desire to have less, they all want more forever.
At this point in history, everyone has access to the information they need to make globally holistic decisions. It's not possible to claim ignorance, ignorance is strictly a choice and ultimately a existential personal limitation.
There are no organizations that exist for the benefit of society and they cannot exist because humans fundamentally lack the cognitive ability to think beyond Dunbar's number but their actions have global consequences.
Self elimination is the only possible arc for humanity.
[1] https://healthpolicy-watch.news/inward-technocratic-msf-lead...
[2] https://jacobin.com/2023/02/finance-unionism-union-density-d...
Hey man, at least add a spoiler alert.
We eradicated smallpox and recovered the ozone layer through global coordination, not even a century after murdering each other by the tens of millions in two world wars. We're capable of both.
The ozone layer won't be "recovered" for about a century, assuming everyone plays nicely[1]. It is still diminished from CFCs, and we're still being bombarded with more UV than previously.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2367525-ozone-destroyin...
I could have saved you the trouble if you'd just asked me!
Over 20,000 communes have been started in the US. None have survived. What baffles me is why people keep believing they can work.
Free markets work because it harnesses the inherent selfishness of everybody, rather than trying to override selfishness.
the biggest lie we're constantly being told: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Ostrom.html. this really annoys me, we're not inherently selfish. at least not most people. free markets don't work in any rate. how do you even come to this conclusion?
also, lots of counter examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives
If the answer to any of these questions is "no" (and anyone capable of using HN should realistically be answering them as such), then it's abundantly clear you can't just hold up your hands and say "oh well, everybody is inherently selfish, 'ts just the way it is". Even the idea of everyone being somewhat selfish isn't really true when you consider the countless cases of people literally sacrificing their own lives through history - and not for some kind of post-mortem glory. One can argue semantics over that still being "selfish" as it's done to further a goal of themselves but that's just wasting everyone's time.
Understanding why free markets work takes a lot longer than 3 seconds, as it is counter-intuitive.
> the countless cases of people literally sacrificing their own lives through history
Decades ago, the Scientific American ran an article about this, where a study showed that people self-sacrificing can mathematically be shown to ensure the survival of their genes. For an obvious case, parents sacrificing themselves for their children's sake. This makes it selfish. People are less willing to sacrifice themselves the genetically further away the people benefiting from such sacrifice.
LOL. And the fact that she gets a Nobel Prize for this shows how unworkable it is in general.
> we're not inherently selfish
You're selfish, so am I, so is everyone you know.
> free markets don't work in any rate. how do you even come to this conclusion?
The success of free markets in the US, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, China, Singapore, etc.
Worker cooperatives: A worker cooperative is not a commune. In any case, there are what, a hundred examples listed? What that shows is they are so rare that a global list can be compiled on Wikipedia. Set that against the scores of millions of businesses.
you can ignore the evidence all you want. Doesn't make it correct. Google it for yourself then.
> The success of free markets in the US, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, China, Singapore, etc.
how have they succeeded? enshittification and wealth accumulation is success? what's the metric here? decreased health? decreased lifespan? increased addiction? increased unhappiness?
> Worker cooperatives: A worker cooperative is not a commune.
Let me quote the discussion, which you obviously didn't even understand:
>> I've tried to start multiple non-heirarchical anarchist cooperative organizations and the number one challenge is finding people who will put the group ahead of the individual. It just doesn't happen.
> I could have saved you the trouble if you'd just asked me!
> Over 20,000 communes have been started in the US. None have survived. What baffles me is why people keep believing they can work.
they talked about cooperatives, you answered with communes. I gave proof that cooperatives work.
do better.
Bootstrapping poor people up into the middle class and beyond.
> they talked about cooperatives, you answered with communes
You score that point!
> I gave proof that cooperatives work
So go start one. What are you waiting for?
I was a devotee of Mr Rogers growing up and I’ve seen really successful people start from nothing and help others
40 years of hope in humanity is hard to kill but it finally died so that’s that
It took proving it mathematically to get me there
A lot of them are hybrid models with some capitalism, mixed with the socialism. So I guess it sort of confirms your opinion that these things don't work when pure?
But they do seem to have found a successful hybrid model.
Capitalism can do well despite being taxed to support socialism. The other way around doesn't work.
The Soviets starved until they allowed farmers to have their own private plots of farmland. Collective farms => famine.
The problem is that capitalism mathematically ensures inequality which subverts the concept of survival because it creates extreme imbalances in agency.
What results is that capitalism must always use as reference a forever unchanged “state of nature” mythology which never existed.
Capitalists view themselves as a different species than modern anatomical humans, more enlightened etc… but I have seen firsthand that millionaires billionaires and even “middle class” people have less consciousness than those who have very little capital.
Capital enables alienation by letting the capitalist offload “life” to people who do it for them, leaving them nothing but Vice. It always corrupts
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin...
Never been harder with ubiquitous surveillance.
>As of 2025 everyone globally has everything they need to make the world a great place for everyone.
Disagree. Even if theres enough food being produced, its not produced evenly, and the extra labor and resources to distribute it evenly would screw a lot of this up. Then theres the idea that a bureaucracy large enough to distribute it worldwide would be efficient.
>I've tried to start multiple non-heirarchical anarchist cooperative organizations and the number one challenge is finding people who will put the group ahead of the individual.
The group is made of individuals. Ultimately eventually they will need some reward for their participation. Whenever I have involved myself in these groups theres ultimately some unsavoury character who has positioned himself as leader and siphon off the glory for themselves. Or in one case, it was just an avenue for the "leader" to gain access to vulnerable women. These groups dont work because they get hijacked, not because the people doing the work dont want to work.
>Unions now make most of their money from capital investments [2], which is directly in opposition to their anticapitalist philosophical roots.
Unions are about protecting workers. They dont have to be socialist paragons as long as they meet that directive.
>At this point in history, everyone has access to the information they need to make globally holistic decisions.
Lmao, where to start with that doozy. Local knowledge still trumps the disinfo hose.
>lack the cognitive ability to think beyond Dunbar's number
People just dont trust beyond that number, and with good reason.
>Self elimination is the only possible arc for humanity.
Lmao, there's no reason why we cant keep going like this. An engine built on brutal exploitation. Predicting humanities doom seems greatly premature.
Physics is inviolable. Human tech will never succeed in the fancy things we imagine. No evidence it allows such things naturally. We’ll conjure a bunch of artistic representations, but never harness enough energy to break things.
Hunter gathering is a bit far back. Since none of the geniuses can guarantee 100 generations from now will still care about rockets to Mars, listening to them today about the far future is asinine.
Keep enough food and hardware stores around and give people time back.
I’m anti story mode and that means Sam Altman’s or some notion of future human greatness. Fellow US readers; yeah that’s right I don’t care you exist. You keep me off the hook for your healthcare, good luck. Why would I care when you keep yourself off the hook for my healthcare? Fuck you.
I’m fucking sick of Americans clearly being low skilled useless to themselves exploiters of others for zero in return but a made up story. In all my study of physical science I never come across evidence any of this wanky web tech is a fundamental force. Occam’s razor applied, it’s all just the hallucinations of arbitrary meat people.
you're intellectually lazy, so why would anyone want to discuss with you?
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db522.htm > 105,007 in 2023 heavily picking up since around 2015
At least in the US we had national monopolies that took serious regulation to solve. That regulation, strangely enough, is still in place. Perhaps early on there's fear to regulate a nascent industry and by the time regulators realize the problem they're too afraid of the power wielded by the monopolists.
In any case, it's never too late to break up these monopolies. The problem is that the Robber Barons are too far in the past to serve as a lesson for current generations. And some folks might remember AT&T but not understand why it was such a big deal.
I also disagree that it's a net negative. Technology adds convenience to these markets and as long as the government isn't price-fixing through strict regulations, we also end up with better prices.
We've seen some of the prices increase after the government decided to regulate the hotel markets. They forced many people to stop renting out their places through sites like Airbnb and now the hotels are free to increase prices accordingly.
If it weren't for Uber and Lyft, the Taxi cab unions would have gladly monopolized the industry charging workers $1,000,000+ for a medallion and not keeping up with technology (Taxis were still hailed in person or ordered on the phone before the tech companies decided to compete).
Sometimes you do see more, and it's indeed because regulators are stopping mergers. The airline market is like that. But it's a mistake and the regulators should back off. It's not helping people to have a gazillion undifferentiated brands, at some point it's just wasteful duplication.
The idea that every market would contract to a single player if not for the benign wisdom of the regulators is a trope. Regulators are tiny compared to the number of markets that exist, but competitive markets aren't the exception, they're the norm. You see it even in very sticky locked-in markets where regulators deliberately decided not to intervene, like operating systems and browsers (Justice Dept effort to break up MS was cancelled).
There are very few markets that are both natural monopolies and stay that way for long periods of time. Outside of things that tend to be owned by governments anyway, like road networks, I'm having a hard time thinking of any.
Whilst pure monopolies are rare, my impression is that surprisingly many markets consolidate to an oligopoly, and that this reduces competition and is generally pretty bad for the consumer.
Tech originally preached that it's going to improve/simplify/enrich our lives. Instead tech is farming us like we have never been farmed before while giving us none of the original promise/deal. There is no peace. There is no escape. The improvements in our life are normally marginal and short term. There is no just existing, just constant, continuous farming of you for whatever value can be extracted. And because of how tech scales any extraction is never too small to not be worth going after. At least in the Matrix you weren’t expected to curate your own enslavement and smile and post about it daily.
It is the only possible result of consumptive transactional organizations.
Conquest in all forms is accretion and consumption based, until the organization gets to large to sustain a consistent direction, then it collapses and the people get pulled into many smaller companies.
Those companies get accreted into a new superset monopolist/duoploist etc... and the bubble grows again and then explodes.
Wash rinse repeat forever at different abstraction levels.
Were “nerds” with coding skills really ever the best ones to be starting companies? How many successful ones were founded without leadership being handed over to “suits” pretty early on?
People genuinely do not care about product quality, doubly so in the world of software (see: Crowdstrike is still in business).
Does baseline competency stop being the differentiator after seed? Series A? B?
I don’t think this is limited to tech companies.
Most industries are controlled by a few companies in those sectors.
Such as Steel, railwood, pharma, grocery, etc.
Cost of goods is lower, overhead is lower in software than in all the items you mentioned and VCs starve out other players by reducing their costs, capturing the market and increasing cost once captured.
However, sometimes there are unpriced externalities like the competitive advantage of removing your own manufacturing waste by dumping it into a stream. That is where governance (whether self or the state) comes in.
We all just need to focus on monopoly in all its forms, instead of letting the politicians continue to separate us using division without difference.
FTFY
> Pre-Internet you would see the same dynamics, but usually on a much smaller regional scale
There's been plenty of national and global monopolies (I mean, that's literally why we had Antitrust laws made in the 1890's) as well as industries with only a couple players in a market.
In fact, if you name any industry, it's probably led by just 3-5 corporations. Mobile service? Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T. Television news? Disney, Paramount, Comcast, Fox, Warner Bros. Liquor? AB InBev, Diageo, Pernod, Suntory, Bacardi. Wine? E&J Gallo, The Wine Group, Constellation. Beer? Ab InBev, Heineken, Snow Breweries. Cars? Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, GM, Ford, Stellantis. Airlines? Delta, American, United, Southwest, Lufthansa. Oil and gas? Aramco, Exxon, Chevron, PetroChina, Shell. Music? Universal, Sony, Warner. Coke, Pepsi, Keurig.
This is what capitalism does. By definition it grows as large as it possibly can, shutting out competitors.
And that is the story of humanity, not any particular classification of society and governance.
US is just following the playbook of IG Farben back in Nazi Time.
1. How much room for innovation is there?
2. How hard is it to substitute the good / service provided by the monopoly?
In the case of food delivery apps there isn't much room for service improvement. A monopoly here probably isn't preventing much innovation. How much better can you get at delivering food from a restaurant?
And there is an easy substitute in terms of driving to the restaurant yourself, so if the monopoly tries to jack up prices too much they will steadily lose customers. The prices now are so high that they have already lost me. I use those apps < 5 times a year.
This can effectively create a barrier to entry high enough that no small company has a chance to beat them. Since insolvency before overcoming the barrier is foreseeable, no one even tries, and the monopoly gets to keep high prices (compared to a competitive market if they weren't there).
Depends how good their moat is. Or how deep their pockets are, because they can often bribe to keep their competitors out (Intel vs AMD). Or just buy their competitor outright.
Edit: ‘this’ in the original parent comment was along the lines of ‘five out of potential thousands of actors’
There are probably areas where these companies operate as effective monopolies or two-company oligopolies.
In a given are there is competition but the local competition is likely to be pushed out by Uber Eats who could undercut them out of business for a while. Or just have better tech / customer experience due to scale (looking at you Menulog)
When well regulated one can have most of the benefits without many of the downsides. Sadly, even the regulators become captured.
Google (search) is an example of the former. Search is a very expensive business to be in, but most of the costs are in scraping, indexing and software development, not actual query execution. The more users you have, the more you can spend while still keeping margins constant, and the more you spend, the better your engine is, which gives you more users.
This leads to the situation where you only have two competing search engines[1], one of which sucks and only exists because it's propped up by Microsoft. However, this is only true as long as Google keeps their quality up. If Bing suddenly became significantly better than Google, people would gradually start switching.
20th century AT&T is an example of the latter phenomenon. It was a monopoly because of US regulations, which made the barriers to entry insanely high. This meant AT&T could set almost whatever prices they wanted, as consumers didn't have a choice anyway.
[1] Engines like Kagi or DDG don't count, as they still fundamentally rely on Google's or Bing's indexes.
What I am asking is what incentive those monopolies have to continue being great. Even if Google did not use Chrome to steer people to Google Search, Google Search is an established habit for most people, and it would have to become significantly worse than any competitor in order for people to consider switching.
You pointing out that a competitor to Google can only exist because Microsoft is pumping huge amounts of money into it, is not the great argument you seem to think it is. If Microsoft does not have a good chance of making money with Bing, what chances does a startup search company have?
The expected result of a monopoly are rising prices and at best indifferent service and quality.
By improving the consumer experience. Better optimizations of which couriers go where and by what routes, faster delivery times (and hence warmer food), menus and restaurant directories optimized to show you what you actually want, better delivery time estimation, no need to talk to a human or re-enter your details for each new restaurant, that sort of thing.
At Uber scale, you have people working on improving metrics, and those improvements translate across all the restaurants that exist across the world. "John's Chicken" won't hire their own guys to do A/B testing on which pictures of their food generate more sales.
we see lot's of examples of how monopolies (or similar) tend to do rent extraction. that's why we're talking about enshittification so much. it's because they only care about profit (and on a small time frame as well), not the product, not the customers, nor the planet.
> extreme concentration of wealth
Big business does not concentrate wealth. What you're seeing is the creation of wealth. This created wealth then flows out into the rest of the economy, via paying the workers and buying plant&equipment, etc.
They absolutely do. If for no other reason than each of their revenue goes to fewer entities.
> What you're seeing is the creation of wealth. This created wealth then flows out into the rest of the economy, via paying the workers and buying plant&equipment, etc.
This is the flawed reasoning behind "trickle-down economics"[0], which was called "horse and sparrow" in the 19th century. It didn't work in the 19th century when labelled as the latter nor in the 20th when reframed as the former.
Any company which has earnings beyond those of operating costs is a concentration of wealth by definition. Whether that wealth is distributed to shareholders, kept as retained earnings, or otherwise transferred to specific entities is irrelevant.
Let's say I buy $20 worth of art supplies, and I paint a landscape and sign it with my moniker, "bright". Since "bright" paintings are very rare and go for a million bucks each, I now have created a million bucks of value. Who did I transfer the wealth from? Nobody. I took nuttin from nobody. Yet I have become wealthy.
Let's say I sell it to you for a million bucks. Did I take your wealth? Nope. I traded a million dollar painting for a million bucks. You are exactly as wealthy as you were before.
Now, if you decide to use my painting as compost (sob!), you are dissipating the million dollar value. That's not me concentrating wealth, it's you destroying your wealth.
If you stole the painting from me, then you concentrated wealth. But we're not talking about theft here.
This is contrasted with economic wealth in which some inputs (capital, labour, raw materials (themselves generally considered as capital) are transformed into some immediately useful consumable product (say, food or fuel), a durable good (clothing, furniture), a service ("immediately extinguished" in the terms of some economists, but still having potential lasting positive value), or capital which can itself be used in future economic activities (machining equipment used in the manufacture of widebody aircraft, or the aircraft themselves).
All else equal ("ceteris paribus"), the result of creating a novel but valued painting would be the same as that of inflating any other durable store of value: the relative prices of competing assets would fall proportionate to the price of the artwork. Ordinarily the drop is small and the bucket large such that this isn't noticed, but it is the net effect.
David Ricardo is amongst the first economists to deal with the economics of collectibles and durable assets of which I'm aware, e.g.,
Ricardo’s value theory applies only to those commodities that ‘can be increased in quantity by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which competition operates without restraint’; it is thus not applicable to ‘rare statues and pictures, scarce books and coins, wines of a peculiar quality [...]’ (Works, I, 12)
From The Anthem Companion to David Ricardo, Edited by John E. King, p. 169.
<https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/anthem-companion-to...>
For context, here is the second sentence related to the above:
Whether that wealth is distributed to shareholders, kept as
retained earnings, or otherwise transferred to specific
entities is irrelevant.
> Let's say I buy $20 worth of art supplies, and I paint a landscape and sign it with my moniker, "bright". Since "bright" paintings are very rare and go for a million bucks each, I now have created a million bucks of value. Who did I transfer the wealth from? Nobody. I took nuttin from nobody. Yet I have become wealthy.
This scenario is not relevant to "big business", but instead describes a sole proprietorship with an assumption of a known fungible value. It also does not account for consumable goods and/or transient services. In any event, by your own definition below:
> Let's say I sell it to you for a million bucks. Did I take your wealth? Nope. I traded a million dollar painting for a million bucks. You are exactly as wealthy as you were before.
Either you have not "become wealthy", as you "traded a million dollar painting for a million bucks" or the effectual value of money exceeds the purchase value of the "million dollar painting". Both cannot be true.
Back to my statement of corporate earnings beyond operational costs being a concentration of wealth. I believe we can agree on the following:
- Any for-profit company has as its purpose the goal of accounts receivable (AR) exceeding accounts payable (AP) over time.
- There are a limited number of recipients regarding profit distribution for any given company.
- Those having no direct or indirect ownership of a given company do not receive profit distributions.
If we agree on the above, then the larger the profits, the larger the distributions. Since the set of people qualifying for profit distributions are less than the set of all people having no investment relation to the company, it follows that said profits are enjoyed by fewer entities than those strictly involved in the AR side of the ledger.
Hence a concentration of wealth into the organization.
I became wealthy by creating wealth, not concentrating it. Concentrating it requires it be taken from somewhere else. There is no taking going on, there is creation and exchange.
> I became wealthy by creating wealth, not concentrating it. Concentrating it requires it be taken from somewhere else. There is no taking going on, there is creation and exchange.
The scenario you have described is logically consistent while being representative of a tiny subset of commerce. Revisiting the original use-case:
Let's say I buy $20 worth of art supplies, and I paint a
landscape and sign it with my moniker, "bright". Since
"bright" paintings are very rare and go for a million bucks
each, I now have created a million bucks of value.
A - Businesses having more than one employee.
B - Asset deprecation, such as when purchasing a new automobile.
C - Consumable goods, such as food, petrol, etc.
D - Services such as commercial/residential rent and physical security.
E - Taxes.
F - Stock dividends and/or performance bonuses.
A and E involve direct wealth transfer from the business to relevant parties.
B is a second order effect only realized when the buyer attempts to sell the asset to a third party.
C and D are direct wealth transfers as the seller retains the remuneration for as long as they desire (excluding applicable cases identified above) and the buyer eventually does not have a physical equivalent. Note that this often remains a valuable exchange for both parties.
F is where wealth concentration commonly resides.
We should encourage more Fords and fewer Amazons.
Not all Gen Z, of course. Most of the younger people I’ve worked with have been generally smart about finances. It’s a subset who fall into the normalization of luxury services as a standard cost.
The problem here is not the concept of food delivery, which has been widespread for decades and used to be very cheap. It was not always a luxury service. The problem is that tech companies have become an established middle-man platform and are driving up the prices for a small amount of added convenience. And it's often a net-negative in my experience, having now sworn off Just Eat after some horrendous experiences and negligible customer service.
Looking at economic stats, spending on food and drink outside of the home grew enormously between 1992 and 2004 to overtake spending on food within the home: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-3010...
I found an archived copy of ref ONS2006d "Social trends No.36" here - https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20151014074...
Table 6.2 (p90) says household expenditure on restaurants and hotels went from £167b to $202b between 1991 and 2004.
Table 6.6 (p93) says that households spent an average of £11.60 per week on restaurants and cafes. Not clear if that includes takeaways.
There's an Independent article from 2006 which talks about the study, still not much about takeaways but some interesting nostalgia about the rise of gastropubs: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/britain-spe...
Mumsnet (to the rescue!) with a thread about takeaway frequencies from kids born 60s-80s. A lot of variation from "only on my birthday" to "every Saturday night": https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5031860-did-you-have-many...
I've no doubt that my own childhood was atypical in many respects. Relatively well off, only two kids, dad was a first generation immigrant so perhaps had fewer financial and cultural constraints. When I was a teenager at home from 2000-2006 the data suggests that spending on takeaways and eating out had been surging up to that point.
Either way I will always fondly remember having a donner kebab on a Wednesday evening, sat in the kitchen watching Star Trek Enterprise on the telly on its spinning turntable.
I agree with you about grandparents though. I think the closest mine would ever have gotten was a microwave meal.
> Why is my $8 burger $23 after fees - An average reddit user
As you say, it's a private taxi for your burrito. When you factor in the labor costs, gas/car maint costs, and the amortized cost of providing the service, it's hard to see why anyone would think $15 for an on-demand delivery in a major urban area is abnormal.
Literally the same price for the pizza for in store take away or home delivery.
Always wondered if that was tax or immigration fraud (pay-to-work schemes). Or both.
Other restaurants just aren’t optimized for the delivery business, so it’s more expensive per serving for the customer (no matter who is doing the delivery).
However, I don’t think food delivery is the reason they’re complaining about finances - it’s more likely it’s that every generation above them has been able to buy housing and they cannot.
No amount of penny pinching on everyday spending is going to close a doubling [1] in the cost of buying a house for Gen Z vs _Millennials_ (never mind boomers!). It’s incredibly unfair and Gen Z are absolutely right to complain and be angry about it.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gen-z-mortga...
And the funny thing is I made about $20 an hour (unadjusted for inflation, ~4 deliveries per hour + $5 an hour). Today the drivers still around that amount, the restaurants pay more and the companies operating are often operating at a loss.
Something very strange happened in the last 20 years.
Meanwhile, drivers—now independent contractors—get no hourly wage, no benefits, and absorb all costs (gas, car, downtime). Tech didn’t increase efficiency for workers—it added a VC-funded layer that extracts value.
So despite more demand and better tools, drivers earn the same (or less) in nominal terms, and much less after inflation.
The human brain is wired to go the way of the least resistance short term, no matter the cost long term, so customers pay a lot for that.
I have many pizza places that tell me they still deliver themselves for cheaper: almost nobody takes the option, they use the giant company app.
I ordered Indian food from one of my favorite local establishments. I was home alone so I wanted it delivered. I called the restaurant and placed my order. The owner showed up 20 minutes later in his Mercedes to drop off my delivery.
Some restaurant owners know that they can buy themselves nice things and still provide excellent customer service if they don't give all their profits to a delivery service.
Restaurants get less than 50% of the order total. The only parties winning from this shift are the delivery companies.
Tech companies discovered that the most profitable position to be in was global middleman, at a scale previously impossible before everything was connected by the internet. They undercut a given market until all the alternatives become financially non-viable and then start hoovering up all the margins from both sides (producer and consumer) of the deal.
'nonperishable food' or 'properly packed short travel' (i.e. dairy/frozen) IMO is a fairer niche of 'could be non-luxury with better societal outcomes', except for the 'as close to JIT as possible'. There's ways to optimize the process to where something on the scale of 10-20 homes could get their main groceries delivered two or 3 times a week and the overall cost would be lower than all of them doing so. Yeah you'd need a reefer van or an otherwise replenishable source of cold for dairy/frozen but at that scale the cost of such makes a lot more sense. Biggest problem is getting the right buy-in and mindset from consumers.
I think that's the main vision behind Travis Kalanick's CloudKitchens since he left Uber. You could order food prep for your week from a choice of menus, and the food would be prepared in an industrial kitchen for you and thousands of other people around you. It's basically restaurant-quality food that you can eat at home and isn't frozen.
Unfortunately for the meal prep market, I believe the break-even point for scale is much more difficult to achieve. Food is like hardware but with a much shorter end-of-life. You would need consistency in ordering to avoid excess spoilage and to operate at scale within small geographical pockets to make the delivery worthwhile. I really believe this could work with the right demographics and in the right geography, it's just much harder than simply delivering takeaways.
When you work from home and cant cook, delivery can happen right now. Or if you are having a small gathering with friends, delivery makes your life easier exactly when you need it.
Of all the things to worry about this is probably the least important.
A quick search will lead to quotes like "Four companies now control more than half of the market in chicken processing (Tyson, JBS, Perdue, and Sanderson), close to 70 percent in pork (Smithfield, JBS, Tyson, and Hormel), and nearly three quarters in beef (JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef)"
Supermarket margins are also very low.
There are absolutely a bunch of acquisitions/ consolidation in that food distribution space, but there are still hundreds of different distributors just in the US. However, most volume does flow through the largest distributors.
For example, I had to build a specific feature to merge distributors after an acquisition happens in the industry, to make the product work properly because that's such a common occurrence. Had the same type of feature for manufacturers (my customers) also, because they kept buying each other.
Wow - I didn't realise bidfood.co.nz was a US chain bidfood.com (Bidcorp).
Food markets keep closing down.
The consolidation of restaurant suppliers really affects the quality of taste a restaurant can get. My ex was a cook and the worse restaurants wouldn't even make their own sauces like Hollandaise - she would tell me what brand it was (often a restaurant supplier brand). It is noticeable when the chef has hand-selected their supplies e.g. tomatoes that have flavour.
The root cause is that consumers tend to optimise for cost.
Quality is harder to give a number to.
We're not completely screwed yet - with time/effort (and moderate means) you can find some amazing places at normal prices.
And there are people willing-enough to spend time/effort plus wealthy-enough but that market is much smaller (more exclusive). And unfortunately there are a lot of expensive places that don't optimise for food quality (because people desire other things for their money e.g. obsequiousness, rent-a-vibe cuisine, gastroflex, mealfluencing, yadayada). Aside: Roget's gets spanked by AI when looking for modern words.
It's actually a South African/UK headquartered group, I believe. But operates in many countries around the world.
Ubereats and the like still dominated the orders even with the 15% upcharge and even after notifying repeat customers that they can save money ordering direct
The convenience of having one centralized app with one account that can summon any food from any restaurant in a 10 mile area is just way too strong.
But I only order food once or twice a month- it's a little indulgence for me.
The majority of people using these apps just want to scroll some restaurants and order something quickly. Saving 10% by going through extra steps, installing extra apps, going to a company’s website, and doing custom orders isn’t what most of their repeat customers want to do.
It’s a convenience thing.
I'm the one who don't bother ordering directly to get better value, but I started noticing less and less restaurants (that I order from) having this option anymore.
They probably saw too little people using it and stopped accepting, sadly.
One benefit of these apps is companies which would never have had a driver now can be ordered, but the cost is all the businesses who did no longer do.
And it’s going to be a hard sell for a small business owner to pay for not employees that are in low demand by the consumer vs the zero fixed cost apps that manage that for you.
You could have the slickest ordering experience in the world and it won’t help you if no one sees it.s
The company that operates their ordering platform is mobihq.com (I have no affiliation with them)
For example Slice is a popular one for pizza. I know a business owner who uses it.
They have an app and optionally an online menu on your custom domain to take online orders and physical hardware for taking orders in your store. Think POS system, register, terminal, printers, etc..
For a business owner that covers you for accepting online and offline orders, and you can deliver direct to your customers.
95% of his online delivery orders go through this system because DoorDash charges him (the business owner) 30% for each order so he raised his prices there to partially offset that. Slice on the other hand is 5% cheaper than his baseline price for online orders for customers so it's a no brainer most use that. With that said, way more people call in or come in person than using the app. Probably a 90% / 10% split.
If not, how many companies does there have to be to have “competition”?
If there were only 1 or 2 companies, that would seem much more of a problem.
Define it narrowly enough, and Firm A buying Firm B might create a monopoly - the regulator cannot approve that.
Define it broadly, and Firm A buying Firm B takes the market from 21 firms to 20 - the regulator is unlikely to stand in the way.
(In practice the market definition question in the US will often happen in front of a judge and the two sides are the merging parties vs. the regulator (FTC or DOJ).)
In this case, is the relevant market “restaurant delivery service via an app” ?
In that case five firms is (likely) moderately concentrated at last. (If you have the market shares of the five firms, you can compute an index called the HHI to get a rough sense of how much more concentrated the market will be before and after a merger.)
However… “app based food delivery” doesn’t seem like a credible market to me. The firms are unlikely to have pricing power either over restaurants or customers.
Candidate competing markets:
- going to the restaurant directly
- making food at home
- delivery provided by the restaurant
Any one of the five firms currently in the market who wanted to buy another would argue to include all three as the “relevant market” in which case their share (both before and after) is tiny.
The regulator will argue for a narrower definition.
When you see commentary on this website about “X is a monopolist” or strong claims like that (which are made frequently!), almost never is there any appeal to a market definition!
Fortunately judges get better input than HN commentators.
Where I live there's only 2 companies really, and I'm guessing in almost every market it'll be 1 to 3.
But it's not at all clear that major deliverers are even a majority of the delivery market. There are no pizza chains on the list. There are certainly no individual restaurants on the list.
> Why is my $8 burger $23 after fees - An average reddit user
Delivery in China (through Alipay, which may or may not be backed by Meituan) is generally cheaper after fees than it would be if you just went and bought the food in person. This might explain why Meituan has so much more transaction value than Doordash and Uber Eats. But it's not something I'd imagine drives a lot of user complaints.
Lina Khan's FTC also successfully sued to block the Kroger-Albertsons merger...
There’s huge room for disruption in this model when a $12 chipotle order costs the consumer $30 after higher menu prices + delivery fees + tip.
We would tell repeat customers they could use our website/app/phone to order directly and save the 15%. Almost no one converted. Convenience really is king.
Actually when I ordered through it I paid $45 instead of $60 via DoorDash/Uber Eats but the order was delivered by Uber.
The reason why I think this version will work is because it’s the same level of convenience in a centralized mobile app so single payment method, single portal to browse restaurants etc.
(I have no association with this company I just was looking into this last week on the train)
Food delivery starts out as this awesome new tech that allows delivery and its prices are cheap for early adoption, lots of small players come to the market to try and ride the hype. The service grows in popularity and becomes steady state, companies start to look to drive further profit, companies consolidate where possible to avoid shutting down altogether. Global markets impact fuel prices, food costs and sees the delivery services grow further in price for all those across the supply chain.
How we have a number of steady state food delivery companies that have the capital, and/or subsidy capacity to run across different markets globally.
Also fun fact, Deliveroo doesn't operate in Australia and had to close due to high costs. Australian Government has been looking to increase rights of gig-economy workers, a cost that smaller player wouldn't be able to handle.
I wish we had more than 3 cell phone networks, this could all be one and I’ll just drive to the restaurant.
Sometimes a market has already ossified five years in. I guess we’ll see.
It kind of makes sense. App delivery is notorious for being pretty terrible service quality and having the food end up worse with more time spent between kitchen and you eating it. Pizza delivery on the other hand has been seen as quick with drivers interested in earning their tip, pizza places being conservative with delivery radius to not overextend their drivers, etc. Customers don't like getting an inferior product or service one day.
Additionally, at least in my experience it's pretty easy to get to where just paying the delivery fee of a pizza place is cheaper than paying for inflated per-item rates.
They're saying that the space these companies are competing in literally did not exist. It didn't in the US, maybe not 15 years ago, but 20 years ago it was nonexistent.
Made me laugh out loud. It's strictly the worst option. Only use it if my job wants to pay, or if very sick.
Cold food. Unpredictable delivery times. More expensive than eating out. Usually less nutritious than cooking yourself. And of course expensive as hell.
Doordash and Deliveroo do not operate in the same markets, so their merger would not reduce competition in any given market.
Prosus is a big conglomerate with its fingers in many different industries. But unless it starts buying multiple delivery companies that operate in the same markets, its acquisition of Just Eat also doesn’t appear to be reducing competition.
If I spent more than 2 seconds I could probably think of others
I've never not ordered from somewhere I was keen on based on their choice of delivery service.
If the consolidation results in price hikes and poor service, what's the lock-in? Why can't the takeaways just go rogue and offer independent deliveries?
Because many of these delivery 'ad-hoc contractors'[0], sometimes even eating cost [1].
Pre-covid, you were often best off as a business either doing something that was 'known' to be delivery offered (i.e. pizza) or your next best option was to aggressively advertise it and have an extra staffer on hand willing to do the deed.
Then, you've also got the other form of arbitrage (or perhaps a cost thereof), of smaller independent restaurants/chains being unwilling or unable to handle the costs of properly covering drivers [2] and their pay when not driving [3].
Some restaurants started doing delivery during covid and kept it going. However most around here dropped because the volume wasn't worth it to them, on top of the 'streamlined flow' (don't need to give a route, the app the person picking up the 'pick-up' order is handling, does that for them.)
I'm not saying I like it but I get how it got here.
[0] - Remember that in the early days some of these companies would do all sorts of weird things like just have someone order on behalf.
[1] - There's an article about this involving 'pizza arbitrage' here https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage
[2] - To be clear, both the startups as well as locals have a checkered history when it comes to proper coverage...
[3] - One can argue that such a person can be made 'useful' during the waiting time, however it becomes a complicated equation between 'what can this person be paid to do' vs 'are they willing to do it for that base'.
DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40806356 - June 2024 (147 comments)
DoorDash and pizza arbitrage (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32086170 - July 2022 (230 comments)
Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216852 - May 2020 (518 comments)
Because delivery is really expensive. To do it well over a large area you have to have a lot of staff. You also want to keep them all busy, so it works better with a lot of resturants. Margins are thin, lots of risk in an area that is very different from the core activity of the resturant.
Its an almost textbook example of a situation where a specialist company makes sense.
AFAIK there’s no well-supported open source order/delivery management software. The companies that were ready during covid took all the extra, enormous demand for building delivery and order online systems built atop a typically antiquated order management system and have stuck around since
Sometimes i’ll get a cheaper delivery/food cost calling vs ordering online, but now some places are just raising their other prices to match online
In the 80s, I delivered pizza with no software. The place had a normal cash register, for pickups.
People would call, order, and we'd write it down. They it'd go on a wire with a clothes pin, until made. Then it went with the driver.
Each delivery was written down before leaving with it.
This worked for decades for everyone in the industry, flawlessly, perfectly, without issue.
Why is software required? Any given reasons are an unneccessary complication.
And here's the thing. Even in Palo Alto I order from companies still doing it this way.
The above system, paperwork wise .. again, is perfect. It's been done forever. It is faster and far less expensive than any unified payment and order system.
Seems to me, they're the smart ones.
the utility of the apps is to distribute the load from multiple restaurants across a shared pool of delivery drivers, so a restaurant who otherwise wouldn't be able to offer delivery can tap into that labour pool for infrequent delivery orders. food delivery apps have greatly expanded the number of places that offer delivery. most restaurants simply didn't offer it before the apps.
But there are so many independents. And they make very good food. And they still do it without apps, and do very well.
I can imagine some type of open protocol that lets them self-host an order service though, or at least an open solution that’s hosted by many providers and many separate apps. That would be nice for everyone
Maybe making the world a better place, means human interaction and less automation.
And phones in particular suck when you involve real-world connection quality and accents.
The only exception was chinese and pizza. Nobody else offered delivery. The current delivery market is much more than that.
For e.g. in my city I can order Pizza from Dominoes or Pizza Hut. Both are located on the same road. Dominoes uses it's own staff, Pizza Hut uses Deliveroo. I've tried both but Dominoes will delivery reliably in 25-35 minutes, and Pizza Hut took over an hour and a half. Guess which one I use still!
I think there will be some sort of socio-economic reckoning from this in the future...
We have a French company, called Delicity, that has been doing just that for the last few years. They have a smart strategy and determined people.
It works, but they have to fight tooth and nail for each city they get a foothold in.
I had a call with the founder, the guy has more dark circles than visible eyes.
So as their is a ready supply of drivers, anyone who can raise an amount of money, and find a niche can enter the fray?
The suppliers (restaurants) are not happy with 30% or so being taken by the giants.
a month ago my wife wanted to order chipotle on a lazy sunday and it was $64 for delivery and only $31 when i went to stand in line and get it. unreal.
But as I write this on the deck of a lake cabin I rented in New Hampshire, I'm reminded how different the world is outside of big cities like my home in NYC. There is one place on Doordash up here.
Early subsidization has led to the position of these firms as middlemen that can extract something akin to rent from their dominant market position. The vig that middlemen collect isn’t a benefit to consumers but something they pay for with every transaction (price mark ups, service fees, narrowed choices).
No, profit isn’t a sign of consumer benefit. Often it’s quite the opposite actually.
Personally speaking, I use it because it allows me to be lazy. Every time I do I say next time I wont.
This is the article's claim, but I'm fairly certain it's of the food delivery aggregator market. There's still plenty of independents.
The last two decades have been a joke in relation to anti-monopoly action.
Now to stand out you need to be dirt cheap or offer something innovative/creative..I guess like with every other industry these days
Shockers, cartel to monopoly power exists in virtually all markets.
Even things like farming whose geographic distribution and commidification maybe monopoly resistant are monopolized in processing, seed, tools,etc by companies like ADM.
I have kids, and can see McDonalds from my bedroom window, so I have more McDonalds points than I care to admit. Wolt is pissing me off every time. The amount of time the McDonalds staff needs to dedicate to Wolt staff is insane. They could easily serve twice the customer in resturante/drive-through if they didn't have to help a borderline incompetent Wolt staffer on a moped. It's actually rude to priorities deliveries over in restaurant customers. For that alone I will never use Wolt. Fortunately every single good pizza place nearby have their own drivers, who are actually polite and competent.
And the real kicker is that of course since this is Germany all the negative reviews have been sued away, including my wife’s very moderate 3 star review. Of course German restaurants will claim it is libel if you write that you had to wait for your food
the food arrives lukewarm, in a smaller portions and costs more
in addition their widespread use hurts the restaurants you like
and drives down wages for society, because the only people who can live on what they pay out to the drivers are illegal immigrants paying zero tax (with the state paying for room and board)
it's all negatives
This is what our actual economic system is all about: a series of market oligopolies whose greed is unchecked by our political establishment and legal apparatus with the complicity of the voting masses. Any attempt to implement measures to palliate the social decay and corruption it breeds will be branded as chinese communism and opposed by the media and the public.
We have collectively decided that the economy shouldn't be in service of the people, canis canem edit.
They do already, google, Microsoft, meta, Amazon all AI defense contractors using their technology to suppress negative feedback to their involvement in military contracts. Police using surveillance to spy on journalists phones. Healthcare approval completely automated by AI and school that don’t know difference between student or AI homework.