Am I missing something? Uber eats needs to pay a driver. Let's assume 20 minutes per delivery for a driver. At $15/hr your at $5 cost per delivery. Plus no need to tip a drone. Also, a drone could operate 24/7 so at 4 oclock in the morning if there was only one delivery in an hour it pays for itself. Plus the licensing happens at the federal level, so you don't have to deal with local laws.
If I hear a drone flying by my window at 4 in the morning (I live on the 8th floor in a very congested city) I’m 99% sure I’ll just open the window and try to take it down with any means possible (potatoes, socks filled with soap, whatever else is available). Even now I have to restrain myself not to throw tomatoes or eggs on top of motorcycle riders who do their own very noisy stuff at 2AM.
The drones still have pilots monitoring them, so they're probably not going to run 24/7, and the pilots probably need training so they make more than $15/hr. But the license allows multiple drones per pilot so overall labor costs per delivery are lower.
So justification for drones is, in order: "no need to pay a human"/"shifting assets from labor to capital", "customer can't pay a human either", "???" (human labor can operate 24/7 too) and "it's a way to work around local regulations" (i.e. wishes of the local citizens).
My lips mouth "antisocial", but I guess it's business thinking as usual.
The drone still needs a pilot. Someone certified will still need to do a preflight inspection to make sure there aren’t cracks in the prop, loose wiring, issues with the frame, that the batteries aren’t exhibiting any dangerous behavior (Puffed lithium cells), etc. Nothing in the mechanical world is perfect and you’re going to need some oversight of that.
