For those who don't know, I recommend the In-N-Out double-double, animal-style (grilled chopped onions & extra thousand island sauce) with toasted bun. Delicious!
Unfortunately there's a reason certain types of foods aren't usually delivered: they're much better fresh. If the delivery isn't extremely fast this isn't going to be very good.
That said, I'm definitely going to try this next time I crave I-N-Out.
Pretty cool marketing tool, but probably not all that practical- no guarantee delivery time (at least not on the front page), and hour-old in-n-out burger/fries/shakes pretty much ruin the in-n-out experience.
The next logical step: you order from burgerexpress.com and they send what amounts to a taco truck to your house. Someone in back cooks the burger en route. Deliveries are scheduled such that each customer's burger is done just as the truck arrives at the customer's address.
Oh, and when some enterprising HN'er gets that working, I also want a Web 2.0 site that will let me create virtual Mongolian BBQ entrees and have them delivered with ingredient choices and quantities as specified.
Takes only about 3 minutes for the experience to be ruined imo. Fries animal style will rapidly form a gelatinous cheese skin that's very unappetizing.
"For a cheaper delivery" -- hah, not exactly. burgerto.me is $10, period. Get It Now may or may not be cheaper -- it depends on how far you are and how much you buy.
This is not to say that Get It Now isn't a good service. I just don't think it's as simple as you're saying it is.
I think I prefer the flat rate, but that's just me.
There's a company in Brighton (England) called "dinner2go" (http://dinner2go.co.uk) that offer this sort of service (a "food taxi") and it's absolutely fantastic. They've been around for a few years now but they don't seem to have expanded beyond Brighton which would indicate to me that it's not a particularly lucrative business.
They charge pretty ridiculous delivery prices, on a $15 meal I pay $15 delivery, and I assume the time that it takes to place the order, collect the order and deliver the order mean they're not making great amounts of money on that $15. They do deliver well though, when my food arrives it's been <15 minutes from McDonalds to me so it's always delicious.
Something I've been wondering for a while is why don't places like McDonalds, Burger King and In-N-Out do delivery? The only conclusions I can come to are that either they make money by upselling extras in the restaurant and someone ordering from home exercises greater constraint (eg: just ordering 1 burger and fries) OR that delivery isn't as profitable. Does anyone here have any experience in fast-food and know why?
Humans are really, really expensive. Even working at minimum wage, the amount of time it takes to get from point A to B in most cities is large enough that the effective human cost (not to mention fuel, insurance, etc) can easily go above $5. Are most people inclined to pay a $5 surcharge on a $10 fast food meal?
Not to mention the costs go up if you demand prompt service, since there needs to be more slack in capacity.
In certain places like NYC they skirt around this by not having on-staff delivery people, and simply contracting the deliveries out piecemeal, on-demand... The trick to supporting this is, of course, lax labor laws (I wouldn't be surprised if most of the delivery people aren't making minimum wage), and an enormous concentration of restaurants to justify the supply of an independent delivery force. This is unrealistic in a lot of jurisdictions.
I drove delivery during high school and college, and did food service work as well. I really enjoyed delivery and did pretty well for a younger person working on tips.
I tried working for one of those 'food taxi' companies, who provide delivery from a selection of restaurants that don't have a dedicated staff. There was a $10 charge or $15 for food from two restaurants. The restaurant staff generally didn't care about moving fast for me as a driver as it was relatively rare. And the customers weren't inclined to tip because they assumed that $10 or $15 they paid went to me, which of course it did not.
After these experiences, I just don't think the people that want fast food delivered would generally tip enough, or be OK with paying any delivery fee that would cover costs + profit for the fast food company.
That said, interested to see how this works. It's a novelty because people love In-N-Out, there's a slick web component, and it targets a relatively well-to-do audience in San Francisco.
It's not really meaningful to try to say whether a single item is profitable, since they are so interrelated, but the fries and soda are certainly very high margin.
Part of it (ironically I know) is quality. McDonalds is really obsessive about french fry quality, and their fries suffer dramatically after about 7 minutes. By the time they would get to your house/apt, they'd be dead. Pizza and chinese food is much more resilient.
In high school, the McD I worked at sold food to one of the local school cafeterias, so we had to cook over 200 burgers and fries all at once. By the time we were done, the oldest burgers were about 5 minutes old, same with the fries. After delivery, the food was a good 30 minutes old. Made me shudder, but the stuff was insanely popular at the school. I guess the cafeteria couldn't cook their way out of a paper bag.
I live in Brighton and the vast majority of people I know use http://www.just-eat.co.uk/ which is basically an online wrapper for ordering takeaways. It covers loads of the local places and you usually get free delivery within a ~2 mile radius for orders over £8 or a ~£3 surcharge for delivery. You can order pretty much any kind of fast food from there, although the big companies (McDonalds, etc) don't deliver.
McDonalds and KFC do deliver in major Chinese cities. The biggest difference is the cost structure. Chinese cities have a very high population density, which makes delivery much easier. They also have relatively cheap labor (although this is changing). And people here ride electric scooters, which are much faster at navigating big cities than cars. McDonalds in Beijing charges a little less than $1.50 USD for delivery.
There's a certain price level where delivery is cost-effective, somewhere around $15-20 or so. Pizza and Asian take-out usually meet that bar, but fast food doesn't necessarily.
I live in the outskirts of DC and the other day at a light at a shopping center in the burbs I saw a Burger King delivery car. It was branded and everything. I have to say I didn't understand the economics of it.
This is the first "single use case marketing package" I've seen from Task Rabbit. Would be awesome if they opened an API for others to create a similar site across different verticals.
It's good to be reminded how fortunate I am here in Shenzhen (China). The vast majority of restaurants have a free delivery service and tipping is not expected.
This had to be on the front page today when both of the following were true:
1. I both really wanted an burger and
2. it's a weekend so they're not delivering.
I'm unfortunate enough to live on the East Coast and only get In-N-Out goodness rarely (I've had Shake Shack in NYC way more). I'd love it if they started spreading out this way!
One small improvement they could make is instead of asking me to click the login into taskrabbit on the top right, why not just popup a prompt to signup / login to task rabbit?
Menu Express was doing this in Nashville 15 years ago and they would pick up practically anything you wanted and deliver it to your door. Drivers had CB radios and everything.
This will last about a month, maybe two, before In-N-Out serves them with a cease-and-desist. It's been tried before. There were several startups that did this at Cal in 2003/2004. In-N-Out shut them down as soon as it found out what they were doing.
In-N-Out has a very strict policy about remote burgering: if you want burgers at your place, you either go through the drive through yourself or you hire a truck to visit your location.
We road' tripped it all the way north, south and east. It was quite common to slam on the brakes and hit the exit at the first sight of a In-n-Out.
This just brings some great memories back. Well done USA.