To people who don't know, part of the core of Costco's business model is curation, which leads to customer trust. I know that almost any product that I buy at costco is going to be high quality. I know that anything with a kirkland brand on it is going to be so high quality and so cheap that it feels like I found a cheat.
What's funny about costco is that their in store experience is so good that they have seemingly ignored any sort of online presence. Yeah they have a website, but it doesn't seem to actually have a comprehensive list of everything they sell. You have to go to the store and check out what they have (and get a hot dog or a piece of pizza while you're there)
If there was a delivery app that curated restaurants, I would absolutely love it, and I also think it would be really successful.
That was Caviar. DoorDash bought them at the start of the pandemic. It still runs, it's just DoorDash with a demographic tweak now.
"Caviar’s platform architecture created value by focusing on a niche market that would drive a critical mass of users with only a few restaurants, allow for exclusivity to reduce multi-homing, and provide ancillary services for restaurants to reduce the barriers to entering the delivery business.
Caviar launched with a relatively limited, curated assortment of restaurants that had loyal customer bases among food enthusiasts. With only 30 restaurants, Caviar had a small selection compared to its competitors, offering around one vendor per cuisine. Despite this, Caviar’s value proposition of “hype” restaurants attracted a different customer base that were willing to pay a premium to get delivery from these crave-able restaurants, many of which had never been available before on delivery. In addition, by onboarding restaurants new to delivery onto its platform, Caviar was able to sign exclusivity with many of its partners to reduce the multi-homing and creating stronger network effects with its users."[1]
I loved caviar in NYC. Cost a bit more, but in general higher quality restaurants (that did not list on other platforms). After they sold out it became DD with more bugs.
Back in ~1999 there was a site called KOSMO.com, and, in San Francisco it was basically "doordash" and sought to employ a ton of urban bicycle delivery folks. I bought my first on-line delivery from KOSMO and it was delivered to me by bike messenger within an hour. That thing was the movie DVD "RAN" by Kirosawa....
so shorlty after this, I was on a flight back east and was talking with a guy sitting next to me, and we were talking about KOSMO, and I said to him "You know what would be great, would be a heat-map of restaraunts that are within my radi of travel modes (like whats within a five minute walk and is indian food"
I described this whole model I wanted from these new ways to deliver, order, pay....
Turned out the guy sitting next to me was one of the founders of KOSMO.com.....
--
They went under pretty quick and never developed tech for "whats near me now", so that sucks.
and to this day, with maps.FAANG everything and online order/delivery service Unicorns, I still dont have the perfect "map of shit thats near me as a heat map, based on what I am looking for and my mode of either transport/delivery"
Maps are really good, but they are still simply "maps"
I'd like a 'sentiment' layer on top of maps.
---
An example would be:
Show me the neighborhood [indian/mexican/whatever] restaurant, but show me traffic to and from, based on the radius of its customer-base
So basically you can see how many people are flocking to a place.
> basically you can see how many people are flocking to a place.
This has been tried many times and is basically illegal now so you will never have it. It always gets litigated for racism and shuts down. The best you will ever get is busy/not busy.
Its also the same reason google will never direct you away from a very unsafe area in an unfamiliar place.
Its the same reason no real estate site provides a crime stat overview.
Litigated for racism? I genuinely do not understand how this could be possible. These services aren’t showing the race of the people attending, are they?
The reality is there is a great deal of overlap of races and socioeconomic status. High crime areas for instance tend to be not white.
I've been involved in a business that was sued for discrimination simply because the target market was low income. Which happened to mean the majority of customers were not white even though we didn't track any customer demographics. They won the suit based simply on that fact. Literally zero proof of any bias occurring. They couldn't even come up with how the business were exploiting them and what the benefit was to the company. Simply that there were a disproportionate amount of customers that are not white is good enough.
The DA(district attorney) kept asking for our racial data and would never accept that we didn't have any. I had to sign so many things saying that I was indeed providing all the data we had and that in fact we did not keep racial data on customers.
Eventually you will start locating places that have racial bias. For instance a heavily ethnic restaurant. That means its customers will be by default mostly a minority. You are now tracking and exploiting minorities/protected class.
See my other comment on this comment thread for a personal anecdote.
>>This has been tried many times and is basically illegal now so
Except for when its fucking CCTV surveillance bullshit.
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This is the thing with me and surveillance.
--- >>NOTE: *I've built shit that both surveilled AND KILLS PEOPLE. Not Happy about it.*
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I am tired of not having recourse AGAINST the surveillance planet.
One way streets (of authoritarianism) Are unsustainable and the people I detest the most in the tech world are the bitches that build shit without qualms.
For example PALANTIR. FUCK THAT COMPANY *AND* their primary investors.
The idea of Palantir (The hint is in the name) is fine.. but the implementation of how evil an "engineer" can be without knowing it is pretty scary.
My Grandfather helped build the fuel for Manhattan project. Brilliant Man. fucking horrendous output. (HANFORD) (nuke designer for GE)
My other Grandfather was a weapons loader for the Enola Gay.
There's "Technically correct" and there is "You're still technically correct but your answer still sucks for the reasoning... and not because I disagree with you, it just sucks that some things suck because that's the way they be"
This is good. I don't want some Gary V disciple deciding to do "retail arbitrage" full time---buying all the relatively cheaper products to sell on line.
I just got back from a trip to Costco and I got a fair bit of stuff. As a consumer I do feel like I can trust them.
A couple of tangents:
1. I have ordered things from the Costco website; one time it was a large TV that was cheaper there than anywhere else I could find it, most recently a couple of office chairs. Their web purchasing experience is similar to others I have used.
> their in store experience is so good that they have seemingly ignored any sort of online presence.
This is my experience with IKEA. Trying to have furniture bought and shipped was so painful and expensive that it was like they didn’t want to be bothered.
I bought a set that was too big for my SUV. $2300. Still wanted $150 delivery, two week notice, and it was ultimately fulfilled by some mom and pop service.
It was like IKEA decided, “we have one prescribed user experience but if you want us to find you a guy with a van to do the pickup for you, we don’t mind.”
That all contributes to its image as a high-class discounter. That's fine, it just breaks apart where you say "Welcome to Aldi. You exist." Or "Welcome to Kroger, we love you as long as you buy the six things on sale, but after that we need to talk."
I don't really understand this, but it might be my local costcos. I hate every minute of my time at costco from entering the parking lot to leaving.
I usually go for gas, since its cheaper. There's always a long lineup, 10 minutes or so. Then I go to find a parking space - which I usually try to cut short by parking far away, but costco lots around me are fairly small for the amount of business going on in the store and crowded.
Every second in the store is torture. A mass of people who are all trying to get to wherever they're going. I dont' care about the little food tasting stations - the food sucks and I don't care about it. Items that were there the week before are suddenly no longer stocked at all, and finding boxes is pretty hit or miss. Some items don't have UPCs even though its required to get through self checkout, so self checkout is sabotaged by their own packaging. The mass of people are constantly in the way.
The best part of costco is getting a hotdog on the way out, but in the last 5 times I've gone the wait for a cheap hot dog was ~15 minutes.
I end up going for cheap gas and wasting an hour in line or trying to get to the few items I want to buy.
If this is a so good store experience I have no idea where you normally shop. Every second of it is torture. Maybe if they had half the people in the store, it would be painful instead of unbearable, but thats not a thing.
I don't really understand why people think its a good experience. It's like shopping elsewhere but with even more people around you and trying to get to the things you're standing in front of while you try to make decisions on what to buy, and longer lines.
I don't know that I have a trust level with costco at all. they're just a store.
> I don't really understand why people think its a good experience.
Sounds like you're still going? That is very confusing reading your write up with multiple complaints and how there are better alternatives and nobody has time to wait to save a bit on gas.
Can even have a better experience by not renewing the membership.
I go for cheap gas. It's a 20 minute drive plus 10 minutes wait for gas. after spending a half hour to get gas, not going inside seems like a waste. but I hate every second of the experience from driving on the lot to leaving, so i don't understand the people who crow about how good an experience costco is. It's a horrible experience.
I get Costco via Ubereats, I always order something and underestimate the amount. It took me months to finish one order of Chicken breasts for like 30-40$, each "breast" took days to consume. It really is amazing and the quality like you said has never been bad.
Also, you can order random thinks like TVs or a tent via Ubereats. Fellow humans, I think we are at the peak of Capitalism.
Companies like Unilever have been doing this for far longer than anyone in the restaurant space. Churn out thousands of brands that supposedly "compete" with each other in the marketplace. If one of those brands has a reputation problem, shut it down and replace it. Rinse and repeat.
If the practice is distasteful, then change the law, but beware the lobbyists.
There is couple of fundamental difference to Unilever example:
1. Similar sounding names to existing brand is trademark infringement. Here this particular entity is deliberately copying the restaurant names to mislead people into selecting them (when original restaurants are closed).
2. Assumption is Unilever creates different brands with same exacting manufacturing standards, and it stands behind them (packages will follow federal labeling guidelines). It is for A/B testing of brand collaterals (name, packaging graphics, colors, copy etc.).
Here obviously that is not the case.
It is very obvious that deception is the end goal, so really don't understand "why not" remark.
At the core is a more fundamental principle at play: reputation. The law just tries to honor this one way or another.
Reputation is a core concept in building trust in human relations, that we have subconsciously transferred to brands.
Since the dawn of time, both humans and brands are trying to fake their reputation. For instance in the old days, when communication wasn't as fast, con artists used to travel a lot, allowing them to start over after ruining their reputation.
I think for many of us it gives an innate sense of disgust because it goes agains the core of human relationships.
Exactly this. This is the same as the reason to be concerned about counterfeit products — the seller has nothing to lose if the product is dangerous or substandard, since the reputation damage happens to someone else.
Brands used to put “Established 1850” or whatever on their packaging. Now old brands aren’t respected by most consumers who are looking for that new thing they saw on an Instagram ad or learned from a YouTuber
Most brands trashed their own reputations on purpose. For any given brand, I don't know whether I'm getting their solid 2000s quality products, or their now shitty 2020s quality products.
That has happened a lot, but the gp is also correct, there are quality products that are inexpensive simply because they have been around forever, so people think they are boring or outdated. There are some really good deals on spirits for instance, that simply aren't popular, but have always been high quality. Eventually someone writes an article about it and they either raise the price, or it is unobtainable.
Perhaps legally, these nitpicks are valid. Lawyers are nitpicky types. "Deception" defined in a legally functional way, tends to see things differently to average people using common sense.
I agree with the parent, there is a lot of similarity here. You may be right that cloud kitchens are more haphazard and veer into challengeable trademark infringement. Old giants like Unilever tend to be better at legal precision.
Besides that, they're both doing the same thing. They're using brands to obfuscate, artificially manage reputation, or achieve basic marketing goals... not tell consumers who they are buying from. It's all deceptive. Fake choice, fake competition, fake diversity. It's all abusive of trademarks. Trademarks are intended to help consumers know what they're buying, create some reputational accountability. Typical FMCG strategies, like unilever and these cloud kitchens, are all about neutralising this... allow them to enjoy positive reputation while neutralising the negative reputation.
All of this is standard strategy, used often. For example. You are going for a "normal" supermarket experience: Many options for cereal, cheese, detergent, etc. Choice. But, you still want 70% cereal market share to go to vendor A. Maybe it's an internal vendor. So, fake branding. Fake diversity. Create the experience without creating the experience.
As Cloud restaurants become a mature, they'll probably learn to avoid legal trouble. But, the game will still be the game. It's not cheating if you're drunk.
The post, for example, wants to know which brands represent which kitchens. He doesn't want food from the bad kitchens. Tightening up trademark infringement will not help him.
Exactly! Some companies use their brand to differentiate their good qualities from their competition, but other companies use thousands of brands to hide themselves, obfuscate, and confuse customers. If someone publicized that they found rat poison in one of Nestle's products, Nestle would rather people just stop buying that brand and not boycott its entire portfolio of brands. That's obfuscation and deception.
You can find thousands of comments of the form “This is no different from…” which exhibit temporary amnesia about the devil in the details. It’s hard to know if something is a harmless analogue of something else. And too often the precedent isn’t even a good precedent.
>1. Similar sounding names to existing brand is trademark infringement. Here this particular entity is deliberately copying the restaurant names to mislead people into selecting them (when original restaurants are closed).
Can you define that difference? Wingstop and Thighstop for instance are incredibly close and not enough to trigger regulatory enforcement. There is the side note that they are owned by the same entity, but do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?
>2. Assumption is Unilever creates different brands with same exacting manufacturing standards, and it stands behind them (packages will follow federal labeling guidelines). It is for A/B testing of brand collaterals (name, packaging graphics, colors, copy etc.). Here obviously that is not the case.
> Assumption is Unilever creates different brands with same exacting manufacturing standards...
Where did this assumption come from? That's a claim without any backing as far as I am aware. Do you honestly believe they only make different brands because they are testing how the sound of the brands name affects sales? Nothing around compartmentalizing the risk of them causing some backlash by cutting corners or getting people ill, and the ability to just cut off that one brand rather than their entire product line?
>It is very obvious that deception is the end goal, so really don't understand "why not" remark.
It is literally the opposite to me. It feels like deception is the main goal unless they make the "Product of X Conglomerate" a larger part of the packaging than the brands label, and not the minimum size required by law, or if its legally allowed, omitted entirely from the label
I don’t understand your point about Wingstop and Thighstop at all. Of course a company is allowed to “infringe” on its own trademark — in quotes because that’s not actually infringement at all. How do you know for sure it wouldn’t be enforceable if a separate restaurant had been called Thighstop?
If they decide not to pursue action due to infringement then I'd argue they're not really separate entities at all so why have them in the first place. In which case, they're performing some sort of fraud. These things are usually illegal in the context of tax-evasion ("oh he's my nephew and I give him a company car, and full-salary for 'consulting' once a month.")
There isn’t any fraud here. It’s all very normal corporate structure.
Yum! Brands owns both, and Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, etc. The restaurants themselves are owned by franchisees who license the trademarks (and all kind of complicated buy-in and standards).
Yum! Brands made ThighStop to address the wing shortage and keep the association/credibility. It’s actually weirdly transparent: just like WingStop, but thighs. I don’t know if WingStop franchisees got automatic rights to that brand or not. My guess is that it was just a way to keep them afloat.
Now, the fact that WingStop has any cred is gross. I can get better wings from a mom & pop or local chain at any strip mall, or heck, a gas station than wing chains like them, BWW, etc.
I guess America outside the South and Buffalo, NY doesn’t have access to wings that don’t taste like a salt lick. It’s a tragedy.
As far as I know -- and I've double-checked this just now -- Yum Brands does not own Wingstop (which doesn't capitalize the "s", even though we all do it automatically). They own "Wing Street", which is a sub-brand of Pizza Hut. Wingstop is an independent publicly-traded company.
Wingstop created Thighstop as a "digital brand" -- essentially, a ghost kitchen run out of existing Wingstop locations. This is a trick that a lot of chain restaurants started doing since the pandemic. Denny's runs "The Meltdown" as a sandwich shop; Chili's runs "Wings & Things"; you can find others. You can only order from "Thighstop" online, but you can add a thigh to combos when you order from Wingstop if you're so inclined.
(And I have not lived in Buffalo, New York, but I have lived in the South -- and California -- and can assure you there are many "mom and pop" wing shops and local chains that…aren't great.)
Bah! You're totally right and I'm wrong. I flipped them in my head. Thank you for the correction.
Definitely some are not great, I can name 3 within a mile of me I won't go to. And some are "sketchy" but delicious. But that also applies to barbecue, mexican, catfish, etc. around me. Just look where the locals go. If there's a line at an unexpected place, it's probably good. But if it's around a college campus, it may just be cheap :).
It's not fraud, it's pretty clear marketing. When there was a shortage of wings, they stopped selling those and started selling thighs. Thus, Thighstop. This has literally nothing to do with tax evasion - you really are not understanding what they're doing at all.
> If they decide not to pursue action due to infringement
This is kind of a bizarre thing to say... they are the same company, so there is just not universe in which Wingstop would sue itself.
>do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?
The regulator doesn't pursue trademark infringement cases. It is upon the trademark holder to defend their mark via proceedings. So WingstopCo would bring an action against ThighstopCo. In this case, since both marks are held by the same entity, there's no enforcement possible unless the holding entity an exclusive license to one of the marks to another party.
> Can you define that difference? Wingstop and Thighstop for instance are incredibly close..
The author of the blog clearly identified the modus operandi. He makes a very compelling case (he obviously understand the local context, can intuit things based upon the fuzzy dataset which is result of his experiencing the system over time.. etc.).
> Where did this assumption come from? (Unilever has exacting manufacturing standards) That's a claim without any backing as far as I am aware..
> There is the side note that they are owned by the same entity, but do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?
Yes. Yes they do. Absolutely, 100%, regulators know that Wingstop and Thighstop are owned by the same entity. They know this from regulatory and administrative filings, and they know this from the advertising that could not possibly be more clear that these are the same company.
>Wingstop and Thighstop for instance are incredibly close and not enough to trigger regulatory enforcement. There is the side note that they are owned by the same entity, but do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?
Well, yes? Regulators would determine both are owned by the same entity, at which point there would be no enforcement penalty to apply.
> Can you define that difference? Wingstop and Thighstop for instance are incredibly close and not enough to trigger regulatory enforcement
I can define the difference clearly: "whatever a court decides"
The law is intentionally fuzzy, and in the case of trademark, it's whether the names are "likely to cause consumer confusion", which is an obviously fuzzy thing that cannot be encoded in a computer or with a set of string matching rules. Which is fine, our legal system has humans in it.
If the companies are doing so with the specific intent of causing consumer confusion, then it seems like the court would have a relatively easy time at showing that such an occurrence was likely.
What the court decides is different than “similar sounding names”.
My point was that similar sounding names are not automatically infringement because they need a court to decide that the similarity doesn’t matter. I explicitly pointed out two similar sounding restaurant names owned by the same entity because either they were assumed to be IP infringement until a court decided they were not, or courts didn’t get involved by default for similar sounding names.
The whole point was to make a reductio ab absurdum argument that similarity of names did not matter in terms of IP until courts were involved, so bringing it up as a reason that ghost kitchens couldn’t make similar names a silly argument to make sans lawsuits
>Unilever creates different brands with same exacting manufacturing standards
They absolutely don’t. Given brand of laundry detergents can be quite different between neighboring Poland and Germany, with the only visible difference being the set of languages on the label.
what unilever is doing is segmenting the market, and filling each segment with a product offering. cloud kitchens are trying to do the same, but the issue is they're not segmenting on quality at all because they're fundamentally pursuing a (lower) cost strategy. you can't differentiate on quality if you have thin margins, as implied by the cost strategy. they're primarily segmenting on (a select subset) of cuisines, which doesn't get you as far as you might think in such a competitive market as prepared food delivery.
That's not how CPG business models work. Unilever doesn't "churn out thousands of brands" to cannibalize their own portfolio. What they are doing is building brand equity and competing for sales and shelf space vs other CPG brands-- that costs a lot of money and takes years.
The cloud kitchen model is more akin to putting lipstick on pigs...
In theory, this is actually a functional service that can be useful.
I hardly ever eat out because the cost and hassle compared to the food is far, far from being a reasonable trade to me. On a daily basis, I don't want "fancy" plates of food creations, just simple but fresh and relatively healthy food like I would (or, rather, do) make for myself.
However, having a kitchen churning out fresh food, a bit like a canteen but with a delivery step (doesn't have to be direct, a "round" would work too as long as the food stays approximately fresh and arrives within a reasonable slot).
There's no need for this to happen in a restaurant with tables and tills. The most efficient system is probably a big central kitchen and a bunch of electric delivery vehicles. The economies of scale that such an operation could bring over me buying a few portions at a time, slicing single cucumbers and heating my little oven or pans to cook a few items day in day out seem like they could plausibly be favourable to outweigh the downsides (cost of delivery, lack of control over the food ingredients, quality, portion size etc).
Of course such a system, if it became dominant over others would probably very quickly fall victim to MBA syndrome as corners are cut and it ends up being school/prison slop (with a much much more expensive premium option that is basically what we already have).
And I imagine people don't like the idea of a "remote canteen" vs the romantic idea of a chef lovingly assembling a dish and carefully handing it to a courier.
So my options are to do it myself or pay multiples.
That's all nice and well, and I'd go one step further: instead of door delivery, have the vehicle put down anchor (or some temporary vending-machine like container) at some pick-up spot in walkable distance. Great opportunity for WFH isolatees to connect.
But that's all not an excuse to hide behind a fleet of faux-boutique identities. When you do that it's borderline scam. Or not borderline at all, once you accept that most of the money we spend on getting food cooked for is not about the calories and not even about the taste.
Also classic diner food is generally pretty inappropriate for using more than a few times a month because it's not very good for you.
It's more like the backend of a large, decent company canteen[1] stuck to a milk-round front end.
[1] And I don't really mean the ones that are just buying catering trays of food from a wholesaler and heating it. I worked in a factory in China for some time and their food was great. Simple, home style food, cooked right there, from scratch, every day. Lunch for everyone and an option of breakfast and dinner (mostly for residential workers). It's the only food that's not homemade that I could imagine eating daily.
The simpler option is to have a diner/canteen serving daily homestyle food nearby. Japan has neighborhood family-run places like that. Singapore has homestyle food stalls in most neighbourhoods (known as coffeeshops), though traditionally the food is pretty oily and salty.
Its rampant across industries. Hotel chains have sub-brands, sometimes with suspiciously similar names.
As far as industries go, the restaurant industry is probably one of the least consolidated in the world. For every chain restaurant, there are a dozen standalone restaurants.
Hotel sub-brands are often (usually?) to differentiate significantly in quality / service / price. I think it would be much more reasonable for a restaurant to decide they want to cater to both fast food and fine dining (or less extreme ends of the spectrum) and to offer two experiences under different brands, than to just chuck up different brands on top of basically the same thing.
>Hotel sub-brands are often (usually?) to differentiate significantly in quality / service / price.
That's the idea anyway. There are also specific traveler personas that they target. For example, Courtyard was originally specifically designed for business travelers. Of course, a huge chain like Marriott has acquired other chains and many of its own brands have morphed over time for various reasons so a lot of the sub-brands end up looking pretty similar to each other. This isn't really hidden from consumers though. Certainly frequent travelers are well aware of the overarching company because of loyalty programs.
This is because, where regulations allow, people will literally set up a small restaurant with two plastic yard tables and a open top grill.
In the US that type of setup is pretty much illegal everywhere. Chains were becoming more prevalent, but recently we’ve basically gone back to the same model with a food truck, which is tiny and takes up a parking spot. Usually taking off the wheels is illegal though.
Cool, this is interesting... What makes the "two plastic yard tables and a open top grill" restaurant illegal? Sanitary requirements or some minimal size mandate?
Otherwise I like the concept of food trucks, to me they are a perfect way for enthusiastic chefs to start their business with low(ish) money investment.
This sounds fun. Let's pick a state that is not known for onerous regulations...how about South Dakota?
>Food employees must clean their hands in a handwashing lavatory and may not clean their hands in a sink used for food preparation or in a service sink or a curbed cleaning facility used for the disposal of mop water and similar liquid waste.
>Food must be stored in a clean, dry location where it is not exposed to splash, dust, or other contamination and is at least 15 centimeters (6 inches) above the floor
>Sufficient refrigeration facilities or other effectively insulated facilities that are conveniently located must be provided to assure the maintenance of potentially hazardous food at required temperatures during storage. Each mechanically refrigerated facility storing potentially hazardous food must be provided with a numerically scaled indicating thermometer, accurate to ±1°C (2°F), located to measure air temperature in the warmest part of the facility.
>Fruits and vegetables may be washed by using chemicals as specified in 21 C.F.R. 173.315, April 1, 1996. Any sink used to wash, prepare, store, or soak food must be indirectly connected to the sewer through an airbreak.
>A ventilation hood system must be provided over all cooking equipment which produces steam, excessive smoke, grease vapors, or odors.
>Perimeter walls and roof of a food establishment must effectively protect the establishment from the weather and the entry of insects, rodents, and other animals.
It would be hard to meet those requirements with a grill and two tables, but the list goes on:
>Food employees must clean their hands in a handwashing lavatory and may not clean their hands in a sink used for food preparation or in a service sink or a curbed cleaning facility used for the disposal of mop water and similar liquid waste.
So a restroom.
>Food must be stored in a clean, dry location where it is not exposed to splash, dust, or other contamination and is at least 15 centimeters (6 inches) above the floor.
A shelf.
>Sufficient refrigeration facilities or other effectively insulated facilities that are conveniently located must be provided to assure the maintenance of potentially hazardous food at required temperatures during storage. Each mechanically refrigerated facility storing potentially hazardous food must be provided with a numerically scaled indicating thermometer, accurate to ±1°C (2°F), located to measure air temperature in the warmest part of the facility.
A fridge and a thermometer
>Fruits and vegetables may be washed by using chemicals as specified in 21 C.F.R. 173.315, April 1, 1996. Any sink used to wash, prepare, store, or soak food must be indirectly connected to the sewer through an airbreak.
This a U shaped a filter on the drain hose, you can self install and cost a few bucks.
>A ventilation hood system must be provided over all cooking equipment which produces steam, excessive smoke, grease vapors, or odors.
A hood a standard in every kitchen.
>Perimeter walls and roof of a food establishment must effectively protect the establishment from the weather and the entry of insects, rodents, and other animals.
Walls and a roof?.
These are sanitary requirements but none of them are extra imo
How many food trucks come with a restroom? Or 4 walls and a roof, assuming that’s required to cover a shelter? Or a connection to the sewer system (which sounds pretty tenuous for a food truck, you need to find a parking space with a open sewer connection?)
They tend to have 4 walls and a roof and facilities to wash your hands: Water tanks exist - I mean, folks use toilets in an RV without them being currently hooked up to sewage, so I don't see how this is an issue. We have the tech. Hand sanitizer is likely available as well. Additionally, in many places, they have to be within a certain distance from toilets.
The sewer note is more about this particular line:
> Any sink used to wash, prepare, store, or soak food must be indirectly connected to the sewer through an airbreak, and a water tank not being suitable.
Which I interpreted as a direct sewer connection for the sink being required.
They didn't say it was impossible, just hard. Do you have a thermometer in your fridge? Did you specially modify your sink to add an airbreak? I agree, they are quite reasonable requirements, and also requirements which one does not meet if they just have a grill and two picnic tables. They would also want to have a small trailer for proper food storage.
More like common sense. I'd really wish any place that prepares my food from scratch would obey at least the ones you listed and more even if it's just a grill.
So that in the event of a clog, sewage will not be able to back up into the food. It'll spill out onto the floor instead, which is bad, but not as bad as contaminating the food directly.
In the US any sort of restaurant establishment is most likely by zoning required to have some amount of parking.
The cost of the land and asphalt for a parking space is $5-10k for a surface spot, $30k for an underground one. Two tables wouldn’t pay the interest rate on that, especially if multiple are required.
The food-trucks seem to be doing pretty well. Within a mile of where I live, there are at least two taco trucks and one barbeque truck, all permanently parked there.
There are a couple of inherent downsides to the model, namely the cost of maintaining a working motor vehicle, and the impossibility of connecting it to electric or sewer (so they all run off pretty dirty diesel generators.)
Maybe we should mandate that in labelling guidelines on consumer products, the name and logo of the ultimate parent owner of the company selling the product should be prominently featured alongside whatever the regular brand is.
Many products already do it eg “TheThing: By TheParentCompany”. But yes maybe consumers should be aware who ultimately benefits from their purchase of a product, and easily be able to decide to buy more independent brands.
>the name and logo of the ultimate parent owner of the company selling the product should be prominently featured alongside whatever the regular brand is.
How do you define "ultimate parent owner of the company"? In the case of Unilever, they own the brands directly, so it's straightforward to determine the "ultimate parent owner". But it's not hard to register a separate LLC for each brand, which makes the "ultimate parent owner" much murkier, especially if the LLC has weird ownership structures.
Is blackrock the ultimate owner? Or the taxpayers of the taxpayer funded pension plans and 401k owners who Blackrock invests on behalf of the ultimate owner?
That is more about sponsorship disclosures. A better parallel would be with disclosure of paid or sponsored material on broadcasts.
But yes, I’d be all for that. If a bill is drafted, all the entities that had input into that draft should be listed. If a politician gives a speech at the request of a compensating entity, that should be disclosed at the beginning: “This speech was paid for in part by Audible. More on them at the end of the speech”
I strongly disagree with the notion that anything profitable and technically legal is fine. The whole premise of this site is that words matter. That communities matter. That applies here too.
That is the naturalistic fallacy. What is natural doesn't tell us what's good, and vice versa. Blind, amoral evolution delivered us to the point where we can make moral judgments about evolution's results, especially as it pertains to human behavior. And on the basis of those judgements, we can make choices about how we treat one another.
I guess we just hope and wish that a restaurant would have a "terroir" for a certain type of food or flavor they are good at or something authentic in any way. My soaps from Unilever will at least be different because the recipes are different, but something tells me those soups from that kitchen all taste the same.
this got me thinking - the photos of the store fronts are basically garages, with few or no tables and chairs, and few or no delivery vehicles. you'd expect in a massive city with 24/7 food services, and a large surface area to nab unsuspecting customers, there to be a fleet of mopeds awaiting outside. but instead the address given is probably just where the businesses are registered. box ticked, nothing checked. the actual "kitchen" and delivery mechanism could be based anywhere. e.g. the nearest/dirtiest friend/family/gang member to the delivery address. are we to trust that the one running this scam adheres to food safety standards? or any standards for that matter
Although they are even worse because they are an example of "vertical integration" -- they own both the manufacturing of many of the major eyeglass frame brands as well as many of the chain eyeglass stores such as Lenscrafters and Pearle Vision as well as being the real owners of the optometry departments found in stores like Target and John Lewis.
witeless brands inCanada is another example. Very often when you are comparison shopping for a cellphone plan you are just checking between the sub brands of 3 companies. No wonder the data plans in Canada are super expensive compared to everywhere else.
It is the same in the US, and probably around the world. I do not see how it could be possible for more than 3 or 4 wireless networks to go around putting redundant towers up all around the country, especially big countries.
It's possible. Indonesia has 7 cellphone carriers with their own infrastructure, and I think 5 of them have national coverage. Used to be more but the number got reduced over time due to mergers and acquisition. I won't be surprised if there would be only 4 major carriers left soon if the largest ones continue acquiring smaller players, which is a bad news because cellular plans used to be very expensive when there were only 3 major carriers and these smaller players brought competition which drastically reduce prices of cellular plans.
You mandate that anyone who puts up a tower has to sell physical space and connectivity for base stations of competitors on those same towers at a fair price.
Charging to recoup the cost of the infrastructure = ok.
Charging more to force competitors out or to build their own, wholly redundant, towers = illegal.
How many base stations can you reasonably fit on a tower, how many redundant networks (even without redundant towers) can the market support? Let's say... 3 or 4?
Like I wrote: covering the cost of establishing and maintaining the tower.
It's essentially a matter of declaring that the towers themselves, and the infrastructure that connect and power them, are not to be a profit maker for anyone. Can be made a condition during spectrum allocation, for example.
There's still plenty of other areas for providers to distinguish themselves.
And there's still an incentive to increase coverage. The only coverage increase incentive lost is the incentive of becoming a local monopoly. Good riddance, I say.
Ultimately the why not will be because the platforms won't tolerate it. Having a kitchen so bad that it doesn't want a reputation listed lots of times isn't helping their customers any.
A few years ago I was ordering a fair amount off Postmates. One night I ordered something that was decently expensive. When it came the food looked nothing like the picture and was so bad it was borderline inedible. I threw it away in disbelief that a restaurant could possibly be this bad and after a bit of research I discovered that this wasn’t a ‘real’ restaurant - it’s one of these converted buildings that operate on a delivery only basis through the apps.
I tried to complain to Postmates but they ignored me, gave me copy/paste e-mail responses and didn’t do anything.
So I never used Postmates again, and likely never will. A lot of these businesses are run to try to make quick profits at the expense of establishing long-term trust and they will ultimately fail.
I just can't believe that aggregator sites would be gamed by bad actors... Shocked, I tell you.
Also, on all of these delivery services I desperately just want a "no cloud kitchens" option. I want to support local businesses — actual restaurants. It's annoying having to research any new place I want to try to make sure it's not operated out of the back side of some warehouse.
(Also: "Curate," don't aggregate. It's a little more expensive and requires actual knowledge, which is why no one wants to do it. But then you actually become a service people can trust.)
Many so-called cloud kitchens are independent restaurants, though. I see ads for ghost kitchen spaces a lot because I was a chef. They're essentially office buildings with commercial kitchen space instead of office space, and a unified ticket/pickup area for customers and drivers. They're often housed in industrial areas that see little negative impact from their presence since they do most of their business outside of business hours, and around me at least, are the cheapest way to break into the "restaurant" business.
The model has been tainted by larger chains (e.g. Chili's, Chuck E. Cheeze) notoriously branding multiple menus to look like indie places for online orders, and bigger quick-serve franchises (e.g. McDonalds) doing standalone delivery-only build-outs in cheaper neighborhoods that could probably benefit from an actual restaurant, but instead just get the traffic and smells. It's too bad because I think the ghost kitchen tenant model is a clever way to share resources for folks just starting out.
Here's one I got a bunch of ads for when they first opened up and I lived nearby.
I live in a place where in-person restaurants are an important part of the culture and community. Even when I order food, I want to support those places.
I respect that operating out of a warehouse might be a way to break into the restaurant business, but it’s also a way to suck money away from more valuable institutions. And I don’t really have the energy to figure out which it is. (And I have had enough shitty experiences with cloud kitchens that frankly I want to avoid all of them.)
Around here if you want to pilot a restaurant idea you get a food truck.
Usually people's motivations for ordering in are entirely different than going out to eat. If their importance was tied to their having neighborhood storefronts, wouldn't their primary competition be other storefront businesses in the neighborhood? Are they not sustainably serving their purpose as such? Why wouldn't you support them in person? Also, ordering using online services probably hits their bottom line harder than any given competing business across town.
Food trucks are as or more expensive to run than brick-and-mortar restaurants. Electricity is a lot more expensive coming from a generator, propane is a lot more expensive than natural gas, legally required commissary kitchens are less expensive to rent than brick and mortar restaurants but offer vastly less for what you pay, you can't purchase ingredients in the same quantity or store the same amount of prepped product because of limited storage in a commissary, lack of full-scale dishwashing facilities on the truck means relying on disposables, local laws and tight commissary access logistics might make it impractical or impossible to use unserved food left at the end of the day on your truck, your cooking schedule is tightly constrained by those who share your commissary and might be unpredictable if some of them do event-based business which is murder for planning and labor, your business is tightly coupled to the weather, etc. etc. etc. You're just swapping one set of operating expenses out for another. Not even in the same ballpark as opening a ghost kitchen.
A pop-up in another restaurant or unused restaurant space with a profit sharing or rental agreement is the only cheaper way to start out, but it's not sustainable, and at that point, you're pretty damn close to a ghost kitchen, anyway.
I think you're aiming your reasonable distaste for corporate entities at indie ghost kitchens when they don't deserve it.
Maybe what we really want is an “independent and locally owned” option on these apps. I’m just as disinterested in corporate ghost kitchen pop ups as I am high end chains that venture capitalists have money in.
I’m still with the OP, though, since I think that option would filter out 90% of ghost kitchens.
It really depends on where you are. About 90% of the ghost kitchens in my city are independently owned because about 95% of the restaurants that offer delivery are independently owned. Also, I've yet to see an actual unbranded corporate pop-up, let alone one that offered delivery. Maybe you mean an alternate menu produced in a corporate restaurant operating under a different brand?
This could be SF specific, but I mean whatever comes out of CloudKitchens [1] and the like, regardless of whether or not CK calls its ghost restaurants “independent contractors” or “small business owners” or whatever.
Whatever comes out is what... Corporate? The tenants highlighted on that page seem independent. Their copy entirely targets independent small vendors. I've seen one or two franchises operate from them but we're talking single digit percentages.
A successful independent restaurant gets a 2 or 3 percent profit margin. Big name restaurants get a lot more than that. They've got a plan, workshopped broadly appealing products, and name recognition that gets butts in seats even in the most competitive, epicurean scenes because they're a known quantity. Many people value comfort and safety over new, fashionable, and refined experiences in their food choices, even occasionally. If a Michelin starred restaurant in the US served a burger at their bar, it would probably be the best selling item they had.
If corporations can tack a few new delivery menus onto their existing kitchen for the price of some web consulting, then sure. If it means shedding all the value they've built over the years to do a no-name pop-up located in an office building outsourcing the technical infrastructure they've already built? Not likely. Even for medium sized local restaurant groups it's probably not a great fit unless they already had the big expansion plan in place.
I think you're subconsciously reacting to the bland, tech-ish aesthetic these places adopt because their uniform online presence is included in the rent and their branding was done by someone on fiverrrr who wouldn't know the difference between the food scenes in San Francisco and Cheboygan if you funded their yacht, let alone for the $60 they bid on the project.
If eat-in restaurants become less viable, they will start to die off until enough are left to bring their viability back up (more people interested in eating per restaurant). We can't keep business open for the sake of the few who want to feel good about them existing, unless they serve a crucial role, which I don't think can be said about restaurants. If people strongly prefer cloud kitchens, there's no economic point to expensive, seat-in restaurants.
That being said, the seat-in scene in London seems to be thriving, though I'm curious if the inflation is hitting them (or us, the diners).
My hack has been searching with the “Pick Up” option selected, which removes any cloud kitchens because one cannot pick up at those, and then switching to “Delivery” when I’m ready to order.
The only caveat I’ve found is that sometimes places that are too far away are available for pick up but don’t deliver that far.
I just tried this on Grubhub, and it worked perfectly. I live in a restaurant-dense area and all the fake restaurants have made the site nearly unusable. Thanks for sharing the tip!
Every ghost kitchen outfit near me offers pick-up. Heck, even the two fake restaurants that run out of Chili's locations around here have their own separate pick-up entrance at Chili's.
Guy Fieri opened up a pop-up restaurant in my town, only available via Grubhub or Seamless or whatever, and my family wanted to try it out. I'm not a Guy Fieri fan so I wasn't expecting much, but at the very least I was expecting moderately good food. What we got was something you would see at a high school cafeteria, and I'm not exaggerating. It was nearly inedible, so bad that some members of my family felt compelled to write a letter to Guy Fieri's company.
This has been my experience with every cloud kitchen "brand" I've dared to try (because it was late and they're usually the only ones still open.)
I think fundamentally the concept just doesn't attract the right kind of business owners. To open a restaurant of your own you must, on some level I assume, be interested in cooking or cuisine. Cloud kitchens as a concept seemed like they were marketed more to investor/vc types as a vertical to invest in. Typically this group would have gravitated towards franchise ownership where some other corporate entity has figure out the "food" part of the equation. It may not be the most healthy or even the best but they take care of making something palatable and most importantly consistent.
> Guy Fieri opened up a pop-up restaurant in my town
Translation: Some anonymous people that know more about spreadsheets than cooking decided to open a business in my town. They realized that making decent food is a slow and expensive way to build a brand recognition, so they entered into a licensing agreement with Guy Fieri instead.
Not anonymous, and that's important. It's Virtual Dining Concepts,[1] who also did the Mr. Beast[2] ghost pop-up, the Barstool Sports ghost pop-up, and the Cake Boss spinoff ghost pop-up, and Steve Harvey's ghost pop-up, and the Kitchen: Impossible ghost pop-up, and Mariah Carey's ghost pop-up cookie shop, and the Five Nights at Freddy's ghost pop-up.[3] Their next step after Fieri was mass-licensing TikTokers and giving them restaurants. Their co-founder is Robbie Earl, one of the OGs of licensed restaurant chaining - he's a co-founder and still CEO of Planet Hollywood, who's using this trend to prop up some of his other restaurant properties.
For instance, some of the Guy Fieri restaurants are run out of Buca di Beppo restaurant kitchens. I'll give you one guess who's chairman of Buca di Beppo.
A person very close to me is pretty darn senior at The French Laundry.
Arguably the best restaurant in the world for a long time (yes it spawned a whole bunch of other restaurants...)
But I have some pretty intimate knowledge about their business, and let me tell you - even though TFL knows a ton about cooking. Their payment to the employees and whatnot is not so great.
For example, one of the things they do is put "Service is included" on their menus and such, which gives the customer the impression that tip is include.
So imagine serving a table that spends $50,000 (yes this is common) on dinner -- and they dont leave a tip, and the servers are making $12 per hour.
> For example, one of the things they do is put "Service is included" on their menus and such, which gives the customer the impression that tip is include.
Did they just translate a european menu without thinking about what it means?
Because that customer's impression would be the correct interpretation.
How would a pop up restaurant have local connections for high quality ingredients? Spoiler: they don't. They use Sysco. A company that specialized in cafeteria grade food anywhere, anytime, cheap as the dirt it is made from..
FYI if you see a Sysco brand truck at a restaurant it means you should never eat there, just go to mcdonalds as its the same quality.
I own a bar and restaurant and while we don't use Sysco, we totally would for some items. You know, frying oil, canned soda. Maybe glassware, knives. Toilet paper, napkins, baskets, ladles, ticket books. Flour, sugar, salt, pepper. Bleach, oven cleaner, simple green, sponges, bar towels.
I'm just getting started, and none of that is really food. We drive ourselves to buy meat and produce.
Getting all that shit into the building is a full time job. It's nice to outsource (some) of it to a truck.
We're lucky to have a local old school warehouse literally next door. They have computers that run dos on green monochrome screens and print on that wide, green-lined paper from the 80s. We use them instead of a truck, but the concept is identical.
> I desperately just want a "no cloud kitchens" option
Me too. I'm simply allergic to the whole idea of it. I've actually stopped using online food delivery services to avoid it, and have gone back to just calling the restaurants directly and picking the food up myself.
I ran an Uber Eats-only toasted sandwich business with my brothers for a month as an experiment - we rented a small room with no shopfront, and while we were popular, realised it was difficult to grow revenue when your only source of orders was via the gatekeeper apps (Uber Eats, etc) that take a high margin, and your at the mercy of their positioning of your shop amongst others.
This makes me think anyone running a cloud kitchen is going to always be under the thumb of the apps/landlord with no way to expand revenue.
> at the mercy of their positioning of your shop amongst others.
Maybe this is why the owner of these restaurants has so many brands. Back when phone books were a thing, you'd see businesses named "AAA Bail Bonds" or "AAA Plumbing" [0] so they would sort first in their classification. Looking at the restaurant names they used, it appears that they want at least one of their brands to appear in every cuisine category - so no matter if you're searching for Biryani, Chinese, Curry, or Kebabs, they'll have a presence on Swiggy & Zomato.
A restaurant that specializes in every possible kind of cuisine isn't likely to be good at any of them, and it appears their ratings bear that out. :)
[0] A plot point in the The Accountant movie with Ben Affleck was that he had named his business "ZZZ Accounting" so that he wouldn't get many walk-in customers.
Wasn't Zyxel named Zyxel so that it wouldn't have to compete with "AAA tech" and "1 Tech" for the first page of any catalogue, but would always be found first by people wary of name squatters that would read catalogues backwards?
That guy is brilliant. If I ever have a restaurant to push on Tripadvisor or elsewhere, I know who to call. And the food pictures are just great, now imagine ehat he can do with an actually decebt restaurant!
Why can’t you build an app and pamphlet your local area? Make it
cheaper on your app, or more choices?
Uber hasn’t monoplized marketing.
My online ordering habits are wedded to the restaurant not the middleman.
(Unlike taxi trips where I am loyal to Uber not the driver).
If a restaurant gives you a shit or good meal it is a good prediction model for your experience the next time. You can’t
actually commoditize Pizza as much as you would intuitively imagine.
A blind Pizza from Uber? No thanks. Pizza from XYZ Pizza who I trust via the Uber conduit. Yes please! Via the XYZ Pizza app and save $5. Hell yes!
It's all about discovery.
You like XYZ pizza; how many places did you try before finding them? How did you find XYZ pizza?
Thats where these gatekeepers thrive.
Surely for an individual restaurant a website is a better fit? I’m less likely to download an app to order food from one specific place, but I may well do it via a website…
I'm confused why you have such completely different mindsets when it comes to taxis vs food. In both cases, the quality of the experience depends fully on the person you pick, your only indicator of quality are user reviews and Uber's only regulation is demoting people that get bad reviews or suspending them if they get reported.
So why would you trust any random person that makes an Uber driver account to drive you around, but not do the same for restaurants?
The experience of being taken on wheels from A to B is very easy to make the same. Especially when Uber requires modern cars (reliable) and drivers are chasing 5 star ratings. Everyone is friendly, offers a mint, talks if you want or stays silent if you want, drives safely and finds the destination. It is just a tighter set of requirements and judgements than with food which
is way more subjective.
Repeat business with a driver is really hard. And at least the uber app has strong remediation and selection of drivers.
Restaurants do allow for repeat business, and apps have less remediation and less selection. Less selection is because a bad restaurant causes much less PR damage than a bad driver.
Uber-style ratings are awful for restaurants.
Uber Taxi is basically: you did your job, you get a 5. Any aggregate rating below 4.5 could just be a 0.
Uber Eats... you did your job, I got the right order, and it was delivered. Well that's just expected, you won't get any brownie points for that. What I review is the food. I have used Uber Eats probably a thousand times. I have never given anyone a 5 for their food. I want to use the whole scale. And I'm fine with occasionally eating something that I might score a 3 (using my own scale) if I'm in a hurry. But on Uber Eats (and all the other apps), absolute slop has a 4.7 rating in their app. I don't understand other people. They must be giving a 5 for something that is merely "fine" (I'm being generous here)? I'm sure there is rating manipulation going on, but it can't be that rampant. Apart from times when the order was wrong or something was missing, I stopped rating Uber Eats orders a long time ago, because that rating scale does not map well to mine.
Also, several times I have received a note in the bag saying "I hope the food is to your satisfaction and that you will give us 5 stars!". Big mistake.
I heard some stories of a food enterprise with a bad reputation in Hong Kong does something similar, open a few takeaway only shops under different names. I guess they having a catering supply chain would help the operation a lot
I so want to hear more about this. Mad props to you and your brothers. What a great way to approach life. Do you have an in-depth blog post or podcast or something where we can learn more?
No blog post, but collected some good photos of our setup, perhaps I should write my second blog post (my first was about the acquisition of my podcasting tech start-up, https://andrewda.com/blog/omny-studio-acquired for those who like stories with photos).
As per the EDIT yes one of my two brothers is a professional chef, I also completed a short course to be accredited as a food safety officer/supervisor (a requirement to run even a short term food business), spoke with Uber Eats about the onboarding process, discussed our brand/food options together, found a location in a pocket we thought would do well for that cuisine etc.
If this is of interest perhaps I can put a few little things together.
Was this in America? Can you just do that, open a delivery restaurant on a whim? I'd imagine there would be all sorts of inspections and permits that would need to be acquired first before being able to sell one toasty sandwich.
Great question, this was in Australia, we were able to obtain a temporary food license, one of my brothers is a professional chef, and we both hold the necessary food safety accreditations and had an inspection done by the council to approve the space for food preparation.
In US, it varies but is is typically required. But it’s pretty easy/quick though. Food safety training might have a testing requirement but its a couple days of reading/studying for most. Especially if you just rent space in a already permitted commercial kitchen, that’s usually the biggest hurdle.
Even if you skip it, it’s pretty low risk in short term, just dont make anyone sick/complain!
But there are also commercial kitchen spaces you can rent. They've taken care of the inspections and permits for the food preparation facilities. You pay an hourly rate to use the facilities. Then all you have to do is make sure that your employees have their food handler's permits (a simple matter) and you're good to go.
It seems like a popular strategy is to open multiple "resteraunts" out of the same kitchen. Maybe that makes the algorithm positioning issues more stable in aggregate or something.
It helps even if just because you’re unlikely to order a burger from a pizza or Chinese place, even though their kitchens are perfectly capable of making one.
Yeah, while I don't work in the food industry. As an app developer, I know what it's like to be at the mercy of ASO (for the App Store) and it's not fun.
Perhaps it makes financial sense for an existing (non-ghost) restaurants. They can expand their revenue, keep their kitchen busy, etc. So anyone from your local mom n' pop burger place to big chains (IHOP, Applebee's, etc) can run several ghost kitchen brands to increase kitchen utilization.
This happened to us with late night mac and cheese. There's a pretty awesome local mac and cheese restaurant called Home Room in Oakland and UberEats showed one near us on the Peninsula. It was TERRIBLE. Microwaved mac and cheese sludge still frozen in the center. Nowhere in the ballpark as tasty as the one from the actual restaurant. Turns out a ghost kitchen opened 5 pseudo-locations all over the Bay Area but instead of the actual food from the restaurant it was SYSCO microwaved food.
It was actually shocking to me how and why the original restaurant was willing to dilute their brand name with that sludge. Meanwhile that ghost kitchen location 6899 Mission Street in Daly City churns out a bunch of other brand name restaurant food that aren't actually located there.
Park Mediterranean, a Humphry Slocombe, a Subway and also Dosa all at the same address. And the "Local Food Hall" has locations with other restuarants cobbled together in Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Milbrae and San Jose.
Yep. The old wacky tobaccy will make you do that kind of thing. Back in the ‘80s I managed to go through an entire bulk warehouse sized box of Cheezits in an evening… dipping each crispy cheesy square in a quart sized jar of butterscotch Carmel sauce.
Looking forward to the next iteration of this: Decentralised cloud kitchens.
Do you have a freezer and a microwave? Then you, too can become a restaurant owner - just download our app and register! Once you signed up, we'll send you a week's supply of frozen meals from our selection. You can accept orders from our app, simply reheat one item, repackage it, wait for our delivery specialist to arrive and you're good to go! For a modest 30% fee we'll take care of all the rest!
Change it slightly: choose one of these items, cook them and our delivery guy will come pick it up. If your cooking passes our quality check, we'll start directing orders of this item to you. You only have one job: prepare the same item, 24/7 whenever our app pings you. We'll take care of supply and delivery.
McDonald's cooks its quarter pounders from fresh beef (hasn't been frozen since 2018). Their Roma tomatoes are also, you know, fresh. Just like their lettuce. Their Egg McMuffins are cracked from fresh eggs onto the griddle.
They deep-fry their fries, good luck doing that at home in your microwave.
All their sandwiches are hand-assembled. Buns and english muffins all freshly toasted.
McDonald's is an actual restaurant. They're not just reheating and repackaging. Unless by your standard every restaurant falls under this category...?
McDonald's gives you the franchise, the machines, the contacts of suppliers. Then you run the restaurant, not the McDonald's corporate management. This is how it works, AFAIK.
Of course at that point as an end user, you could just "eliminate the middleman", and go to the next supermarket and buy yourself a bunch of microwave food.
The whole model only works because the end users don't know they are ordering reheated microwave crap. It's deception, nothing else.
McDonald's and other franchisers at least still offer a physical restaurant and food items you wouldn't be able to prepare at home in that quality.
>McDonald's and other franchisers ... you wouldn't be able to prepare at home in that quality.
What do you mean - McDonalds is piss poor quality fast food. It's ok at best but nowhere near close home cooked meal. Even 20min cooking w/o a microwave oven should produce decent results.
It's really not. McDonald's fries are generally held as one of the better french fries available anywhere among food critics. Sure, the burgers are basic and lack expensive elements, but they are a consistent quality and flavor and handily beat what most people can cook these days (especially in a microwave).
I can cook a better breakfast sandwich in a frying pan, but there's simply no chance I could do it in a microwave. And I'm a really good breakfast sandwich cook - I would prefer McDonald's to most of my friends' cooking.
I can cook a better hamburger for sure, but I'll spend a lot more money doing so. And it won't be cooked in a microwave.
When I think of "piss poor quality" I think of improperly prepared food: under/over cooked, stale or spoiled ingredients, etc. McDonald's isn't fancy, but it's certainly consistent. I don't think you can call it bad by any means.
have you seen the goop that chicken nuggets are made out of?
Have you seen the McDonalds chickens and cows? They are estrogen-riddled monstrosities. The chickens can barley stand up because of how giant their breasts are.
"have you seen the goop that chicken nuggets are made out of?"
Sure. I make similar goops at home when I cook. Have you ever made sausage? Haggis? Blood pudding? There's nothing abnormal about this. Your reaction suggests unfamiliarity and makes me wonder if you know how to cook at all?
"Have you seen the McDonalds chickens and cows? They are estrogen-riddled monstrosities. The chickens can barley stand up because of how giant their breasts are. "
They're the same suppliers that stock food in my local supermarket.
I think you're a bit confused about why chicken breasts are bigger. Their larger breasts are a result of breeding, not increased estrogen. Increased estrogen doesn't increase muscle development (wrong hormone). Chickens are not mammals and chicken breasts are not mammaries.
None of this has any bearing on the quality of the food.
No shot you can recreate anything close to McDonald’s fries without a fryer and that alone is worth it. Even say fries and a milkshake. No premade milkshake and fries will touch a real fryer and ice cream machine
Hmm, good point and no question about the fries. I do like their burgers as a guilty pleasure from time to time, but that may just be have been habituation. (And no, I do like "high-end" burgers as well)
They're definitely not anywhere near McDonald's fries, but if you throw Rally's/Checkers branded frozen fries in an air fryer, the result is pretty good. Perhaps better depending on your taste.
Well, milkshake is a terrible idea in my book and something I'd not like entirely. If I wish to drink something it will be beer, wine, espresso or just plain water.
Fries - no idea, I can have them but why I'd want fries home is another story; the frozen potatoes in the oven are pretty decent and no extra oil, so that's okay; again not especially enticing. If you have grown an acquired taste for McDonalds fries, so be it. At least where I live I know no one who'd say they wish to go to McDonalds for the fries.
It's pretty hard to get chocolate or cookies wrong but certainly possible. McDonalds doesn't get it wrong though, they have a fun selection of savoury concoctions that taste good.
It should be considered as a treat, like chocolate.
This already exists in India - some ready-to-eat product companies have started these types of kitchens, and even supply to restaurants. And note that this isn't a new model - fast food industry has been doing this for some time now.
I would argue this is making very economically efficient use of spare microwave capacity. So many microwaves these days are languishing, depreciating, with so little to do.
This low-quality shotgun approach (that these kitchens are using) remind me of the recruiting and offshoring plagues of the early 2000s.
Recruiters were onced skilled professionals, but they got replaced by people who spoke almost unrecognizable English and who basically spammed all day to find talent. They didn't even read resumes, so you would get calls (and later emails) for crap that was nowhere on your resume. This basically ruined what was once a very effective way of finding jobs and gigs. It took over a decade for this garbage approach to fade and real recruiters to reappear.
The companies hated it too, because they would get innundated with every resume one of these brainless recruiters would send. Companies couldn't find real talent due to the piles of unqualified candidates. That's not to say the candidates were bad, but they were not qualified for the particular skills the client needed.
Then the offshoring craze developed, and suddenly skilled developers were laid off en masse, with the more senior developers actually being tasked with training their offshored replacements. Predictably, most of the replacements were people with some basic training and absolutely no ability to think for themselves. The end result was about two decades of stalled progress in corporate software development and artificially depressed wages.
This restaurant scenario seems to be just another variation. One must wonder if this is a cultural thing. It seems obviously doomed to eventual failure, and like the other situations I described it will bring the actual good services down with it.
I wonder if something along those lines would work in the traditional job search:
Generate tens of thousands of brand identities (random name + random e-mail address) and mail-merge them onto basically the same resume, maybe with some minor wording perturbations. Flood companies with these resumes and then sit back and wait for one of your brands to slip through their hiring algorithms, and you got the interview. If you eventually get the job and they ask about the name, just say it was an old alias, and you'd prefer to go by [your real] name.
At some point around 2018, I ended up with an alter-ego named "Franklyn."
I'm not clear what the origin was - if I set it up late one night to cause trouble, if someone else did it and tagged it with my email address as a joke, or if some resume scraping software borked something up.
Anyway, Franklyn gets invited to interview for $320k/year roles now.
Hehe, I might have done a thing like this late at night and not remembered the next day (for matters of simple tiredness to some level of inebriation).
Personally it frustrates me when I get an email which says something like "We are very interested in you based on your experience in techs X Y and Z", where X Y and Z are not present on my resume or linkedin. That shows intent to deceive, and I think recruiters like that deserve to live long, unhappy lives (until they learn to act right).
But if a company selects one of your resumes, and you sent many similar ones to each company, then the companies may wonder about remarkably similar resumes and then toss the batch out assuming it's BS.
Of course it would also just make things worse, in that companies already tend to get innundated with garbage (or at least really not well aligned) candidates. This would just add more poop to the swimming pool. Eventually nobody wants to go near it, and the owners of the pool just turn their backs and find alternatives.
This last point is another reason that networking and personal connections are almost always the best way to get job opportunities (often before they even reach the recruiters).
That assumes the company is actually doing that kind of analysis on rejected resumes, or even less likely has a human with judgment reading them all. If you believe (as I do) that tech hiring, at least the initial filter/funnel, is largely an automation-driven random-chance numbers game, then it would be better to give yourself a 1,000/11,000 chance than a 1/10,001 chance.
I'm not sure I yet believe in the "networking and personal connections" mysticism. I feel I wasted a lot of time in my life going to networking events and having networking conversations, and after all those theatrics, when it came time to get a job through this network, the response is often "Cool! Here's the hiring web page--get in the funnel and slug it out." You hear myths about people using their powerful network to bypass the normal interview hazing pipeline, but it's hard to find more than anecdotal examples.
Networking and human connections absolutely 100% matter.
If you know the right people, you know about the need even before HR knows. You get recommended internally. Maybe you even have a meeting with an exec before the position officially opens.
There's no doubt in my mind that a networking and personal connection approach yields 10x or 100x chance results compared to a shotgun resume/recruiter approach.
> The end result was about two decades of stalled progress in corporate software development and artificially depressed wages.
As a younger guy, I've always wondered why there are so many "fossil" legacy critical applications at my company. They can only run on a VM and appear unaltered from their last version in the late 90s / early 2000s.
When someone pitched the idea of cloud kitchens to me a few years ago, the idea was you would have a centralized facility running multiple kitchens each of which was a single restaurant entity. It made sense as a way to run takeout only operations.
It seems like what’s happening now is similar to what happens in Amazon which is the generation of multiple throwaway brands in a bid to flood the marketplace and also farm positive ratings
There's also just a branding/targeting phenomenon going on to some extent. Ghost/cloud kitchens even from high-quality sources often have youth-oriented "cool" branding, websites, names of dishes and so on. They're definitely trying to target a different group of customers, at least in some cases.
The other aspect I've noticed is that most of these things are laser-targeted in terms of what they offer. Though they operate out of a full-service restaurant they'll offer just burgers, or just wings, etc. I think this one has to do with the way that the delivery apps deaccentuate the actual identities of restaurants: they really encourage you to just search/browse for a type of food, so this is sort of a gaming of that system.
This is a huge part of it. People have an idea of what they want and search for that, so a restaurant that appears to specialize in that will get top ranking.
It needs a term. Something in the neighborhoods of spam and fraud. Spam, because it’s voluminous garbage. Fraud, because it’s an attempt to convince the end buyer that something exists which doesn’t (a distinct product/brand/business).
We have something similar here in the US. For certain types of services, every listing you find online (it used to be in the phone book in the olden days), is really the same generic service. In fact, the service you’re calling is some middleman who doesn’t actually perform the service, but instead contracts it out to someone local to you. They often live and operate elsewhere in the country. This is the case for flower delivery, and, I recently discovered, bee removal. I’m sure there are others. But in general if you go to a search engine and type “$service $location” (I.e. “bee removal Los Angeles”), you’ll get tons of these types of listings.
A parasite is an organism that survives by extracting from others.
These are bots or bots designed by mindless individuals and set loose
to do harm. They deserve even less respect than computer viruses that
at least mimic proto-lifeforms. There is no "it" to have a survival
agenda here.
Having done with "Harms", as I research the "Motives" chapter of
Ethics for Hackers I've taken an unexpected dive into criminology and
now see a blind-spot in the entrepreneurial, late-capitalist mind-set of
the "Silicon Valley" hacker space. There's a tendency to see
everything through a rather narrow lens of financial motives. Not
everything is about making a buck (although much is - at the end of
the day).
So for example, some motives out there are purely destructive. Or at
least they are so lowbrow and random in their consideration as to be
indistinguishable from entirely senseless acts.
We look at them and say "What's the business angle here?". Sometimes
there really isn't one. And it's not ideological either, like
championing free-speech, democracy, communism or whatever. Nor
discordian, nihilistic and chaotic.
Boredom, resentment, disrespct, low cost and consequences and "just
because you can" are on the up because of "AI" and automation. I think
we presume certain motives declined after the early years of
trophy-hacking and ego hacks gave way to structured cybercrime in the
90s. But machine learning and "at scale" thinking is unleashing a
different breed of senselessness. Poisoning of public data spaces by
ostensible "advertising", whether as email spam, highly adaptive
link-farms, GPT generated bait-copy and whatnot is a new quality of
threat. Search engines don't seem able to manage it, so the "internet"
(what is left of the Web) is starting to resemble a derelict
neighbourhood with smashed windows, upturned trash cans and graffiti
everywhere as bored and desperate gangs roam.
This is a common scheme with certain predatory "locksmiths" in Germany that charge extortionate fees for lockout calls, and aggressively demand it be paid cash on the spot (legally, you are entitled to pay by invoice for this service).
They extremely aggressively game Maps and AdWords to ensure that their numbers are on top of results.
Most of the guys they send out also I don't think are qualified locksmiths, based on the level of damage they tend to do when gaining access!
When I lived there I simply told my friends to call me instead, I'd get their doors open for a few beers.
Lots of long distance movers work like this, they are just some broker middle-man often based in Florida that just makes the process more complicated and worse.
Most long distance movers aren’t. There’s a local truck and guys who load it, and then everything is offloaded at some central depot and sent to another depot where it’s loaded on a different truck for final delivery.
Door to door locked trailer is more expensive and harder to find unless you do something like pods.
Where "local truck" is "a vehicle that can fit at the location, unlike a semi" and "depot" is "nearby, where their semi is parked", sure. And they do frequently hire local help, rather than cart them across hundreds or thousands of miles.
But it's not like they're going to post office / Amazon / etc "hubs" and changing vehicles along the way - the human labor cost and increased risk would be far too high, though pods might be feasible. The same semi and the same driver does 99% of the distance, and often hires their own helpers. The local shuttling and helpers are entirely reasonable and often unavoidable.
The problem is each mode change is another chance for loss and damage. You’d often be better off palletizing everything so they can forklift it (though that has additional shipment risks).
You can't really palletize a sofa or bed, you'd need to crate it and then its going to be more expensive. If you are moving $100k+ in equipment or art thats the way to go, for home stuff maybe worth a few k$, just put it on the truck or container and hope.
That hasn't been my experience, for a few interstate moves my stuff is on the same trailer at the delivery as it was when it was loaded, although it seemed to be combined with other peoples stuff and made multiple stops for the longer moves. In certain cases when the destination street was narrow it was offloaded onto a smaller truck for the last mile.
Regardless, my experience trying to find movers is that there are a lot of brokers that will arrange either service and don't provide added value.
We also have the Home Advisor variant that just sells your leads. Fill out a form and get 10 phone calls in the next 2 minutes. They also make entire sites to appear as a local business like “Joe the Plumber.com” and advertise those side by side. But it’s the same leadgen bs.
18 offshore leadgen consumers jump on your post, pretend to be calling from local numbers, and offer to broker a call to a local vendor on your behalf.
Then they keep calling for several weeks just in case you don't hate them enough.
I'm sure it's against both's ToS but that doesn't really matter. The concern here is spamming on the third party ordering apps and clearly trying to appear as other legitimate brands. Hopefully the reviews shown in the app will detract people from ordering from them (if it were a popular restaurant then surely a low rating would be a red flag?).
There are legitimate reasons for a cloud kitchen wishing to run multiple brands/food concepts that are fine and actually very entrepreneurial. For example, someone could wish to run multiple different food concepts (Chinese, Thai, Pizza, Mexican, etc.), each with limited menus and cross use a bulk of the ingredients, and instead of having one huge disjointed menu, you can more accurately cater and be found by hungry eaters who are looking for that specific cuisine. As long as you're providing quality food at good prices then you'll be competitive with other restaurants within your chosen cuisines and be able to cater to more of the demand-side of the marketplace.
I ordered a David Chang burger from (what I didn't know was) a ghost kitchen. It took me 5 minutes wandering around an abandoned parking lot to realize the filthy trailer with no signage was where I was supposed to pick up my food. The trailer smelled like old fryer oil, and the guys working inside seemed... generally unaware...
Is this what will finally take down delivery? There’s also the “one restaurant, thousands of different kitchen” with mr beast opening beast burger locations all over the US thanks to ghost restaurants. It makes zero sense to me but again, I never order delivery because it’s cold, expensive, and less good.
Sorry to be the one to tell you that, but food delivery is here to stay. It is convenient, and at the end of the day, convenience trumps everything. The lesser problems (food being cold, pricing, quality) are simply optimisations waiting to happen, and actually already happening.
What OP describes is an anomaly that should be easy to fix by any platform, and if they are smart, they will fix it - or decay slowly (at least I hope this is what will happen, and that they take Amazon & Google Search with them too).
I think pricing might be biggest stumbling block and is probably the hardest to solve. Platforms want their oversized cuts, delivery is personal service so always have lower limit which is somewhat high. And restaurants themselves already have rather low margins.
Quality is just natural progression. Good food survive and bad food keep being replaced with new restaurants. Just like traditional restaurant industry.
Quality food and drink are extremely sensitive to timing, as in minutes matter, and if you are talking about a developed country keep in mind that consumers are sophisticated and getting more so by year, they are aware about it and pay attention to it and this will be reflected in the market.
If convenience really trumped everything we would all be eating dry instant noodle out of the packaging. Delivery may remain a thing in the suburbs but it would always be a second rate option.
In some ways all restaurants are ultimately fronts for Sysco. It's just way more economically feasible for restaurants to do the finish work while outsourcing as much as possible to someone that can do it in a factory sort of setting.
It's not just low quality crap restaurants that do this. Like anything you get what you pay for. Better restaurants pay for better quality stuff but still mostly prepared by Sysco and finished at the restaurant.
I don’t think people realize just how much of what is sold at restaurants comes from Sysco.
I’ve worked back of house at a “almost michelan star” restaurant (best rated in town!) and even though the chef did actually go to the butcher for meat cuts, we still had a Sysco truck stopping by every day.
I like to think about things in terms of labor input. Like if you go to a restaurant and pay $15 for a plate of pancakes then the entire labor that goes into that is less than an hour.
And that's for everything. Farmer growing wheat/chickens, cook making batter + cooking, syrup, banana growing, spices, clean up, waiter, etc.
Realistically if we're talking about just the restaurant bit there can only be a few dollars of labor and therefore maybe like 5 minutes of labor at most. Only way to achieve that is through scale.
I have friends who do grocery delivery to restaurants in early mornings and he knows which high end places sources most of their sides and even entrees from Sysco.
Food delivery isn't going anywhere. To be honest, there's been months where I haven't cooked in my kitchen. I either eat out or get my food delivered (and when I order food I'll usually order a few servings at a time for dinner or breakfast tomorrow)
Ah, reminds me of a recent experience. Looking for a local, nonchain pizza place and came across a nice Italian sounding place, Pasqually's Pizza & Wings.
Googled for more reviews, and found out it's just the fancy sounding name for the godawful Chuck E Cheese kitchen.
Could this be money laundering? By running 180 separate 'companies' you split any large amounts 180 ways. Anyone who checks if they can order sees that, indeed, each of these businesses is 'real'.
Normal money laundering with cash businesses has the problem that each bit of storefront can only plausibly earn so much money. This seems like a pretty nice way to get around this limit.
No, this is not money laundering (it would be a poor one as this will immediately arouse suspicion on such platforms - after all, if you place an order, the delivery person will appear to your kitchen to collect the order and if there is no food they will report you. For this to be successful both Swiggy and Zomato itself need to be involved in it. And as the author noted, food is available from these restaurants, even if it is lousy food.)
What the author doesn't realise is that cloud kitchens are a part of the business model of both Swiggy and Zomato.
In fact they have many "cloud kitchens" that are run by them. Another business model they have is to identify successful restaurants with huge demand, and contract with them to open a kitchen-only restaurant in another area (they make more profit when deliveries are short distant; so if a far-away restaurant has a lot of demand from a distant area most people don't order because of the higher delivery charges which means disgruntled customers who crib about the high charges). My friend is a chef and he explored the option of tying with them, but dropped the plan as he didn't want a kitchen-only restaurant. I learnt about the contract model when I called up my 2 of my favourite restaurants to complain about the drastic drop in quality of their food - they then told me that was because it was a Swiggy cloud-only kitchen with a new cook nearer to where I live. Like the author, I too was pissed that Swiggy hadn't properly informed me (through their listing) that this was not the restaurant from which I regularly ordered. One of these cloud-kitchen shut down because the original restaurant began to get bad reviews. I believe it was after these kind of issues, that Swiggy and Zomato allowed restaurants to use a different brand for cloud kitchens. And now, it appears, they also allow multiple listings by same restaurants / kitchen-only places too.
I now follow the simple rule of only ordering from dine-in restaurants that I have had food from. Or from old and reputed brands of restaurants in my area.
> No, this is not money laundering (it would be a poor one as this will immediately arouse suspicion on such platforms - after all, if you place an order, the delivery person will appear to your kitchen to collect the order and if there is no food they will report you. For this to be successful both Swiggy and Zomato itself need to be involved in it. And as the author noted, food is available from these restaurants, even if it is lousy food.)
Not only that, but the platform fees will eat like half of your money so this would be an outrageously stupid way to launder money. And then, you’d also need to have large amounts of money split over a large quantity of different credit cards for this idea to make sense.
Yeah you launder with actual restaurants (and I’ve been to a few that I have to believe are such) and record cash from fifty tables when you only actually had two.
in most countries in Europe companies have to publish their accounts publicly. if the same or similar rule exists in India, or if the same or similar scam exists in Europe, company names and revenue could be matched with the food delivery dataset
Thank you so much for this link. Great article, quite appaling ao. It seems the Uber bros now brought the gig economy to the franchising industry... I hate the gig economy with a vengeance, it ia a lazy way for the rich to profit of the poor without taking any tangible risks whatsoever. Even better, you can ignore basically all regulations, those are for the poor peasants anyeay.
Ugh. These Ghost Kitchen jerks have been spamming me for an interview. Not interested in ever working for any business associated with Travis Kalanik, thanks.
A cardinal rule of choosing restaurants is to avoid the ones with huge, unfocused menus. The quality is uniformly terrible and the kitchens are often unsanitary. I imagine that running one of these in the dark is not going to improve on that baseline.
> A cardinal rule of choosing restaurants is to avoid the ones with huge, unfocused menus.
Take Behrouz Biriyani and Faasos in India. These are operated by the same company - and almost always from the same location. However because they have 2 different listings and thus 2 separate menus, they are able to create a relatively cohesive and simple menu for each listing.
So on first glance Behrouz Biriyani, looks fairly straightforward. It serves Biriyanis (with a lot of variants/sizes/combos etc). And Faasos serves wraps, rolls and other related snack foods.
If you did not know that these were essentially from the same place, you would assume that these were separate restaurants with relatively focussed menu, hence passing said cardinal rule.
With physical restaurants, the rule is easier to apply. With deliveries, it's far more difficult as the huge, unfocussed menus get separated into different restaurant listings.
A agree with you but I'm not sure the general public does. For a long time The Cheesecake Factory was very popular and they arguably have a large unfocused menu. I'm not saying they're good but giving how popular they were lots of people thought they were good.
There’s a specific class of “reheat Sysco” restaurants that are quite popular - Dennys, Applebees, etc. their menus are designed to have something for everyone and so are an acceptable middle ground when people don’t agree on where to go.
Same reason you’ll find a burger at the local Chinese/Mexican place, so the kids will shut up (one fo the absolute best burgers I’ve ever had was from a small burrito shop so appearances can be deceiving).
I was evaluating natural text to speech packages a year or so a go. And I was left with the eerie feeling that at least half of the offering must have been fronts for the same company/person, if not also exactly the same software. Nowhere was this more evident than in the sing-up and payment workflows of the various packages that followed exactly same pattern. So either in one corner of that market everyone copied each other there, or somebody just saturated that corner with their offerings.
I irks me that this is a method that is resorted to in any field. I don’t like it at all. It’s a dubious practice at best. I am sure it has some advantages to a profit seeking seller, but it’s ethically pretty shitty in my opinion.
We have a few shitty ones of these, mostly doing pizzas, burgers etc. nearby.
But there is one business [1] that's popped up which is a cloud kitchen by definition, but they bring in chefs, partner with established restaurants and teach them their signature dishes, and open satellite kitchens on food delivery services as a hub in particular neighbourhoods. It's a win for everyone. The restaurants get to expand their brand to neighbourhoods without opening a physical location, the neighbourhoods get some good food in their hoods without having to live in the city, and you can also order a couple of things from entirely different restaurants on the same order, saving delivery.
This is peak RAAS. It's just like all the generic brands on Amazon/Alibaba same company but diversify branding to camouflage yourself among the forest.
For it to truly get to the Amazon level, you'll need to start seeing ghost restaurants with gibberish five- or six-letter all-caps names all reselling identical food from Sodexo and Aramark.
I was baffled by those Q&As on Amazon, particularly the ones that just said something like “Sorry, I haven’t used that feature” until I received an email from Amazon saying something like “Someone has asked this question about a product you bought, can you answer?”
I did what I assume the product managers expected to happen and just ignored it because I didn’t know, but presumably some significant proportion of people will throw some nonsense answer in, and no one at Amazon then checks the question was answered.
Made the mistake of ordering Thai food from a ghost kitchen restaurant from Doordash in Redwood City (they have a kitchen here).
It was the worst Thai food I have ever had by about ten miles. Like, I have never had Thai food that approached "okay" - it's always been at least "good."
The rice was dry, felt like it had been out all day or maybe reheated from the fridge. The chicken was seasoned as if it had been intended for Mexican food (on its own, not bad, but didn't taste like Thai food at all). My pad thai tasted bland. How bad does a pad thai recipe need to be to taste BLAND? Unbelievable.
At least in my area of the Midwest US, delivery before 2020 was strictly for pizza, and the delivery-apps were generally distrusted and harrumphed at. Even Chinese-food-at-your-door was still regarded as an extravagant Larry David plot device. But after 2020, it opened up and burst out of control, and now nobody seems to know or care where they're ordering from, because it almost always just shows up. I walk into restaurants, and they often don't seem to know what to do; they have a growing counterful of takeout orders waiting for the drivers, and two people scrambling around to seat people.
Redmond Washington, home if Microsoft, until Uber eats came along you had only a tiny handful of choices for delivery.
Around 2015 or so I was in charge of driving to pick up dinner for my team when we worked late. It was either that or Pizza.
Do restaurants even have their own delivery drivers any more? I actually ordered from a place recently that didz but it was the first time I'd seen that, again outside of pizza, since Chinese delivery as a child in the 1990s!
I’ve noticed that I think SkipTheDishes, or maybe DoorDash here in Vancouver has some restaurants that are marked as doing delivery themselves. I guess they get a higher cut if they do?
If by "pampered" you mean you don't want to be scammed by some popup kitchen that can easily rename/rebrand itself once it amasses a bunch of negative reviews... then yes, you're "pampered".
Always better to go to a place that has its reputation on the line.
I mean i have been ordering for years from places i have never been and largely had positive experiences. But sure you can skip the convenience and save yourself the 2% of bad experience
To be fair there’s only like ten restaurants near me and not even half are available on the delivery apps, so I’ve been to all of them (even mcdoogles).
I find it pretty hard to trust the ratings in Uber Eats etc. I invariably find that Uber Eats has a high rating when Yelp or Google Maps has a significantly lower rating. Sure the food is only one part of in the restaurant experience but when it’s something like 4.5 v 3 it feels off…
The food delivery scene is culturally different in india. It’s faster and more efficient (not talking about driver exploitation though). Many of the cloud kitchens OP mentioned in the beginning are quite famous now and were places that never existed before these apps. So it gives confidence that you actually can trust new names in apps in india.
For the most part if you’re discerning with ratings numbers when you choose you should be good.
My suspicion on the business model with this scammer is that they go order from other restaurants after getting and order and get it for delivery. The prices in the delivery apps are generally marked up by up to 50% by the restaurants so you can do a good margin by being a shitty middle man.
What are you talking about? How did you get all of that from 'Maybe I'm just pampered'. I think he means, I wouldn't order from a restaurant I have never heard from or been to in person.
I don't know anyone, at all, who does what you are suggesting in this comment.
What was funny to me was the name "Taste of China" and when you look at the menu, none of it refers to common chinese food. All of it refers to indian food.
Not heard Swiggy and Zomato but I guess the moral of the story is don't trust them and don't give them your business.
Just like your don't trust Amazon or Alibabab or any of these other shop aggregators that do not really care what goes on under their name.
Find a good restaurant and call direct. Perhaps make some friends that do deliveries, so you can trust them too.
The free market only really works when their is sufficient competition, rational consumers should avoid big players, if at all possible, because it is never in your interest.
If you are forced to purchase from them take it up with the government that is meant to be keeping the market free.
Not what I was expecting to read by any stretch of the imagination. I was looking forward to seeing some piece about how restaurants have evolved to virtual spaces and delivery first thanks to the pandemic or some such.
I'm sure creative business types hate it when geeks who know how to search stuff profile their weird little approaches to trying to survive in today's economy and act like they clearly must be up to no good simply for having a large number of x, having no real evidence that the food is particularly bad or something.
i feel like i’m the only one not on the food delivery bandwagon. i have ordered delivery food exactly 0 times in the last 5 years. probably even 10. i know i’m an outlier. no i won’t change
i like to cook. i don’t see cooking as inconvenient as i cook a lot so i’m always stocked on things that are easy and taste great. id rather go pick it up because i think it’s faster and less likely to have been sitting out
Reminder every time I see a ghost kitchens story that one of the bigger players in the space, REEF, uses ghost kitchens to harvest data for real estate and came into the angle as a parking vendor that needed to make money from lots that went vacant during the COVID-19 pandemic, and harvested data from parking customers to re-sell as highly geo-specific market and demographic trends. They've fully pivoted to becoming a property management type that will take your unused property and stuff it full of ghost kitchens, still harvesting data from those transactions to re-sell as market/demographic data.
Their next play looks like they're extending the ghost kitchen model to retail storefronts, so get ready to be flooded with non-existent shops that sell drop-shipped garbage using rapid delivery.
For instance, where I live (England, so granted not a gastronomical paradise) the best pizzas in town are from a chain that is only available through the local Deliveroo's dark kitchen.
This absolutely does not matter to me. What does is the product I get.
I don't like the idea, mostly because it means there is a much greater chance of a restaurant where I enjoy something being churned out rather than any puritanical argument that restaurants have to exist in a particular form.
I remember back when I was at university we had a friend who worked for a rather successful artisanal coffee shop. The owner then opened up 2-3 other coffee places under completely different names around the city. I wonder how many people actually knew that their little coffee shop was part of a mini empire.
It's not nearly as bad as large breweries trying to muscle in on the microbrewery scene with a subbrand. That genuinely gets my blood pressure up.
One of the delivery companies here in Spain Globo goes the next step and runs virtual kitchens themselves with virtual brands. I now have to double check if it’s a real restaurant before ordering anything.
Just make it one restaurant with a wide healthy menu, a decent app and a social conscious co-op feel rather than a predatory vibe and you could clean up without all the BS.
I imagine the quality is pretty low with the number of menu items that single batch of cooks is trying to make. When you read about struggling restaurants trying to make a comeback, a common theme is an attempt at simplifying the menu so that they can focus on a core set of high quality dishes, as their menu had gotten bloated and thus the average quality of a dish inevitably declined.
So much work to sell shitty food, if they would have put half that energy & creativity into making their food better they would have had an amazing restaurant.
So many restaurants like that where I live. they serve low quality food (ingredients, recipes, cooking, presentation), then change names regularly. This is even worse than the more traditional fastfoods where at least you know that what you get will more or less stay the same over the months.
UK, ordered Mexican on Deliveroo from a new place, turned up.
QR code on the bag led to a Linktree that just linked 3 delivery services. No other internet presence. Drove past the address from Deliveroo on my way home and it was a row of shopfronts with iirc a delivery pizza restaurant as the only food there.
But the food was so good that my hosts have kept on ordering from there.
In the UK, I've ordered from Deliveroo Editions, which is ghost kitchens with the branding and food of real restaurant chains. It's been OK, unsurprisingly a chain with 150 branches is just reheating something made in a factory, not tasting and adjusting. So by ordering from Deliveroo Editions you get the same thing.
The UK does have the predatory type of ghost kitchen as well and I have never ordered from them. The incentives are skewed towards getting new customers, not repeat ones, and just ripping off as many as you can find.
I been for a while on technical side of one of delivery company.
Fixing electric mopeds for them.
Its a BIG business and it does not really matter if makes money, its the investors corporate funds getting pumped into the food delivery industry.
Even better: Zomato and similar companies are in it just for the money, as are those who operate “cloud kitchens” (sic), and so the result is crap food. Big surprise, right?
Man, India seems like the Wild West. I lived in Vietnam during a brief explosion of internet connectivity and online consumerism -- mild by comparison. This isn't the kind of "democracy" or freedom of speech we would like to export as a civilization. I feel like American consumer/industry has just opened the doors to every kind of scam possible in countries which were not prepared for it. And many of them rebel as if it were a conquest, but it's not. It's progress. It just becomes grotesque when it's left to places without law.
Let me explain.
There is an important turning point, I think, in every country where you develop antibodies against the worst kinds of scams. Scams we may have let loose. But by the 1920s, most Americans would not trust a witch doctor (even if they would have trusted him in 1890). In the case of Russia, their leadership longs for 1890; they reject western modernity altogether and want to reenact a medieval war. For China it's more like: let's take the methods and eject the "false" morals. What they don't realize is that our (possibly stupid) individual morals are the only thing that hold the fruitful methods of capitalism in check for us, in our country. Our so-called morals are not for others; they are the way to restrain ourselves.
To be more specific, Russia has a morality misaligned with successful capitalism - they think rejection and revanchism are the key to prosperity; China has a morality too aligned with it - they do not see that individual freedoms and happiness are crucial; and America has forgotten its meaning altogether, because it no longer cares about individuals or the group, only identity-disordered affinity groups.
So tl;dr capitalism is a big tree that will uproot your house, or it can be tamed into a small tree that provides shade and sustenance; or it can be chopped down leaving you with nothing. The progression of 19th century societies who had no prior history to work from was to go through those three phases and return to a median. The progression of societies just encountering the full brutal force of lying, mercenary, vicious capitalism for the first time will probably be the same trajectory... but it would be helpful if they learned from our mistakes and (legally) stopped these things. The legal system is the best brake on abuses of capitalism; it's the natural counterpart that evolves over the years. If you want to fix this problem, fix the legal system.
I'm from a history of Jews who were all lawyers. Not allowed into universities. Not allowed to partake in the mainstream civilization of Germany or Russia or Ukraine or America... but versed in their laws and the contradictions inherent in their laws. You find this shit, this data that shows horrible mismanagement and crime in your country? Learn the laws better than the ones who wrote them know them. Then, sue the motherfuckers under their own laws. That's how you get a civilized country.
Agreed. I thought the article was really interesting. I don’t know much about how the author got their data, it seems like it’s a Kaggle dataset and I’m not familiar with how that was procured, but the analysis was really fascinating to me. So was the tweet by the person who asked Zomato about the repeated separate instances using the same FSSAI license, which I looked up and here is the link: https://mobile.twitter.com/ManjoBun/status/15331133101066608... : definitely no public follow up by Zomato.
The line chart was great as well showing the huge number of listings for that one kitchen.
I don’t live in India and I wondered what FSSAI is, so I looked that up as well. It’s the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India: https://www.fssai.gov.in/
The author is performing a public service that I feel ought to be done by the authority in question in the first place. I hope the article gets lots of traction and serves as an example for food safety authorities worldwide to prevent this kind of trickery.
I’m leaning towards subscribing to the author’s newsletter; at the end of the article they mention that they were the ones who posted that recent fake IMDB credit article which I also saw on HN, and I’m looking forward to reading the article on the early Indian internet (https://peabee.substack.com/p/15-mafatlal-and-the-early-indi...). (I once had a chance to see Vint Cerf give a talk and while it was a while ago I remember enjoying it.)
Last note: I thought it was kind of funny how the author resorted to using Google maps photos of the kitchens. I thought it would be worth an excursion outside to get more recent photos and see them first hand, but maybe the author has mobility issues or something. I feel it would add a personal touch though.
To people who don't know, part of the core of Costco's business model is curation, which leads to customer trust. I know that almost any product that I buy at costco is going to be high quality. I know that anything with a kirkland brand on it is going to be so high quality and so cheap that it feels like I found a cheat.
What's funny about costco is that their in store experience is so good that they have seemingly ignored any sort of online presence. Yeah they have a website, but it doesn't seem to actually have a comprehensive list of everything they sell. You have to go to the store and check out what they have (and get a hot dog or a piece of pizza while you're there)
If there was a delivery app that curated restaurants, I would absolutely love it, and I also think it would be really successful.