This is not at all surprising when the business model does nothing to encourage drivers and restaurants to cooperate. If these places had to service their customers directly with drive-through/drive-up they would not be able to sustain themselves.
As it is, the delivery driver usually ends up being the customer's punching bag for any issue whatsoever. Do delivery drivers have any leverage whatsoever against restaurants who provide this kind of terrible experience?
I live next door to one of these (mentioned in the article) and I think it's an improvement to my neighborhood. This article seems like a huge over-exaggeration of some minor issues to me.
It's nice to be able to have a ton of food options in your neighborhood where you can go and pick up as well.
The article specifically mentions Cloud Kitchens, and my understanding is that they do not allow for pickup. Is your experience different with your local Cloud Kitchens location, if so, how do you order pickup (call/text in)?
In Doordash at least, I click pick-up instead of delivery, and just go to the address given. When I get there, there's a tablet, and lockers, and I follow the instructions to pick my order of food. Everyone else there is picking up for Doordash/whatever.
Your understanding is not correct. You can either a) schedule a pickup using any app or b) stroll in and place an order off the menu. A) is way more convenient so I haven't done B) in more than a year though.
The picture of that car-snarl leading that article implies it's a lot of cars (lots of scooters and bikes in the UK too - I doubt the cost of fuel and keeping a roadworthy car in general, makes cars economical for it here, not to mention the need for a licence which you don't need on most small bikes).
One of the other things is that a lot of the food delivery people don't actually live in SF, so they drive from out of town and do Uber things and then go home. So that also makes it harder to support more sensible logistics.
This is the real reason for them using cars. In NYC, those delivery guys on e-bikes and scooters live within a reasonable distance (via bike or public transit) of where they’re delivering.
I also wonder if transporting multiple sandwiches changes the equation, and whether the multiple sandwiches being for one person or multiple people would have an effect.
This is true. What works in Bangkok can't necessarily work in Los Angeles. It's usually American cities that lack the critical density by design for the automobile that results in an inability to support efficient local logistics.
I always thought that the places with the high local transportation costs are the cities with narrow streets and no room for parking whose growth mostly predates the automobile.
Except that doesn't preclude other forms of transportation, i.e., bicycle, motorcycle, or Vespa. Good luck reengineering the suburbs of America to discard the automobile.
1. Cars are more expensive in those places, generally, but
2. You don't need a car as much, so there's fewer cars and they're not driven as far.
In practice this tends to mean lower transportation costs in those areas, even if on paper it may look like it's more expensive because owning/operating a car there costs more.
When we moved to Munich, we ditched having a car entirely. If we still had a car and had driven it just as much as in the states, then sure it would've been more expensive. We just didn't need to do that. (As soon as we moved back to the US we got a car again of course)
There is no "proper" but a small urban core that doesn't contain the greatest part of the population for enough hours a day. It's mostly urban sprawl from shore to desert that isn't effectively reachable by bike messenger.
Not sure what you're talking about. Almost all of LA is plenty fine density-wise for biking, it's just a matter of the infrastructure being bad.
Would certainly be helpful to also upzone for mixed-use, so you could get more shops in places closer to where people live, but it's not absolutely required.
Always seemed a shame to me that megacities didn't lean into Mail Rail-style[1] logistics. Arterials of goods from depots outside, feeding into local hubs within the city via light rail or narrow-gauge and then last-mile dispatch via small vehicle, bikes etc from there. So there are sort of "wellsprings" of supply throughout the city. In my factory-builder-rotted mind's eye some kind of semi-automated AS/RS kind of system shuttling small-ish containers like those that go into planes now onto and off trains.
Of all the things to wish to automate away, driving 40 tonne vehicles with notoriously poor sightlines (though they have imposed safety minimums in London[2], but not after many, many deaths), often with steering wheels on the wrong side, down urban roads seems one of the better ones.
I remember watching this, and just skimmed it again at 3x. The video spends about half its time on the phenomenon of restaurants that are all relabeled versions of the same core concept --- that's, like, annoying, like I would feel taken if I ordered from a "restaurant" and really it was just one of 7 interchangeable labels for the same place, but it's not materially damaging in any way.
It then talks about health inspections, but doesn't really make a strong case for how ghost kitchens make health inspection harder; about the most it has to say is that it makes allergenic cross-contamination harder to evaluate, but that's not really something health inspections catch anyways!
> The video spends about half its time on the phenomenon of restaurants that are all relabeled versions of the same core concept --- that's, like, annoying, like I would feel taken if I ordered from a "restaurant" and really it was just one of 7 interchangeable labels for the same place, but it's not materially damaging in any way.
There's a restaurant on Polk St that does this with Ubereats. I know their address based on seeing it a few times and have learned not to order from it.
Here's a list, I won't add links because they're too long, but you can find them all on Ubereats. This restaurant from the outside is "Fresco Pizza Shawarma", here's nine storefronts they have on Ubereats.
- Ma's Meatballs
- Big Daddy's Wings
- Chateau Shawarma
- Angry Chicken
- Uncle Sam's Pizza
- Polk St Pizza
- Wingman Co.
- Little Italy's Calzones
- Little Italy Pasta
They probably have more too this was just a quick search. It's spammy and I've learned to check the address of restaurants to see if they're a "ghost kitchen". I suspect a lot of "real" restaurants with just one authentic storefront get drowned out in the "ghost kitchen" spam.
Easy to fix by UberEats's starting to charge a monthly fee for each storefront. UberEats gets a new revenue stream, and the customer experience improves.
No? I mean, in the sense that it's a dense urban area, sure, but nobody is really walking from Noe to Soma or whatever just for a meal? Basically every restaurant in San Francisco is, in Chicago terms, in everybody's delivery radius. You can walk to some places, but not all of the places.
Also: Manhattanites basically kicked this whole Internet restaurant delivery thing off with Seamless. Sometimes people just don't want to go out.
Not Noe to Soma, but there are a ton of restaurants (and other businesses) in easy walking distance in SF. That was the only thing I liked about living there.
The existence of ghost kitchens is why I stopped ordering food online entirely in favor of going to the actual restaurant to get my food. You can't trust online food delivery at all anymore.
Not online. It's becoming more common for online ordering from real restaurants to be actually serviced by ghost kitchens rather than the restaurant.
I don't know about calling them, but I expect that's no different. If a restaurant is outsourcing their cooking for online orders, it would make sense for them to do so with phone orders as well.
Why do you care? I absolutely get not wanting to order from a "restaurant" that is nothing more than a brand name applied to a totally generic delivery concept run off interchangeable people and food-service supplies; that is a real problem with DoorDash listings. But (to take a nonexistent example) if Small Cheval in Chicago wants to sell burgers out of a "ghost kitchen", I don't know why I'd want to prefer the "real" location; you're still getting the same product.
> Why do you care? ... you're still getting the same product.
My experience has been that food from ghost kitchens has been incredibly subpar when compared to the same food ordered from that same restaurant's brick-and-mortar location.
The problem is when the ghost kitchen is hiding the fact that you're ordering from a restaurant you don't actually want to order from. You might be 100% certain you want pizza, and you don't want Dominos. But, you see "Master's pizza" and you give it a shot, without realizing it is just a ghost kitchen operated by Dominos.
Yes, I'm saying, that "Master's Pizza" problem is straightforwardly avoided: order from restaurants you know exist. That's good for the restaurants, too! Wherever you are, there's a local restaurant scene, and operators are hoping you'll plug into it and have a sense of what's around; that's how they get business.
The other commenter is saying that there are "-To-Go" versions of some restaurants in your local scene, and those "-To-Go's" are served out of ghost kitchens instead of the restaurant itself. I know that does happen, but it hasn't been my experience that there's a major quality difference between the two; unsurprisingly, since good restaurants are reluctant to sabotage their own reputations just to expand their incredibly low-margin delivery options.
I don't doubt there are restaurants that do use ghost kitchens badly; I'd say: probably stop patronizing them altogether.
Sure, you can avoid it, but it's nice to be able to discover new restaurants you may enjoy without fear of being duped by a ghost kitchen in a restaurant you know you don't enjoy. There are over 1200 restaurants that doordash will deliver to me in NYC(UWS), it would be nice to be able to sample from them, without doing some google snooping for every restaurant you consider.
How do you know? I've found at least three restaurants, non-chain, in my neighborhood that have ghost websites and phone numbers set up. I don't know whether the restaurants know/agree/have licensed, but I suspect not, and suspect it's a larger/legally cautious place, because I have called to order and heard very precise/specific phrasing:
"Hello, I can take your to-go order for Restaurant!"
"Is this Restaurant?"
"I can take your order for Restaurant whenever you're ready!"
as in carefully coached to never actually say, just imply, that they are Restaurant.
It is incredibly difficult and time consuming. Choosing what to eat is already a fraught experience for many. In the Uber Eats app, I find myself changing from Delivery to Pickup so that the UI will expose the address of the restaurant. There are about 3 addresses that are heavily used for ghost kitchens that I want nothing to do with after being delivered heated up trash. I feel bad for the local authentic Vietnamese restaurants around me that are now competing with 10 new pho places.
I just wish there was a filter to exclude them from the options. The more friction I encounter with food delivery, the more likely I am to rethink just making something at home and save me the frustration.
I think the proliferation of fake restaurants in DoorDash is super annoying. But I'm generally reluctant to order from any place without a real-world reputation anyways.
Extrapolating from what OPI is saying, I would guess they mean is something along the lines of being unable to check for secondary proxy indicators of care and quality prior to choosing to order food at all, such as cleanliness of restrooms, the number of critters buzzing/crawling around in the dining area, the quality and cleanliness of tableware, the taste of the water etc. the overall customer facing aspects of a normal restaurant which allow you to get a general sense of how the places you cannot see are run.
While not a completely reliable or quantifiable metric, the dining experience conveys information that is absent entirely with a ghost kitchen. Ghost kitchens are essentially the opposite of an open kitchen dining establishment. Everything about the preparation of substances you're going to put into your own body is hidden from view, and because this is inherent to the model it's not even something that can be criticized or measured. And unlike restaurants with a public facing facility, there is a much greater likelihood that a ghost kitchen that poisons its customers vanishes and reappears under a different name in the very same location. This would be extremely difficult for a regular restaurant, or even a fast food drive-thru, to pull off without strident public blowback at the place of business.
If you agree to eat food from such establishments, there's an implicit acceptance of this blindness to conditions in which the food is prepared. Given the inevitable race to the bottom economics of any food service industry I can understand why this would be a non-starter for a lot of people. Even if you trust people to do the 100% right thing structural forces favor the ones doing the 99% version of it, and then the ones doing 99% of that, ad terminum, ad (literal) nauseam.
Hm okay. I can see that. I think, it's different for me cause I trust the food safety protocols in place here in Germany to make sure the standards for hygiene etc. are guaranteed. So, the only thing I care about is the quality of the food (i.e. how it tastes) and ime, that's one thing you always have to test with delivery. Even restaurants which are good at in-place dining can have a shoddy delivery experience.
Also, when I'm ordering food from a restaurant, I am dealing with real people, seeing them in person, and they see me in person. Eating from a restaurant is about much more than just the food. Ghost kitchens eliminate all of that.
Yeah, okay, I can understand the whole "experience" of ordering in place as a bonus, if you like that. I'm naturally shy (and lazy, I admit it), so going out and talking to people is the worst part of the whole experience for me.
...why? My favorite restaurant is a ghost kitchen, but makes healthy, hearty food that I like, and for a good price. If they had a physical restaurant I'd go there in person and eat there instead, but it's a niche food so I imagine they'd go out of business if they had to have the overhead of in-person dining. As long as I pay for food and I recieve it, why does it matter to you that there's an actual restaurant somewhere?
For two reasons. First, I want my food to come from the restaurant I ordered it from, not from some mystery supplier somewhere. Getting food from a restaurant is about more than just the food. Second, ghost kitchens are mystery kitchens. I equate them with factory food. I also simply don't trust them.
Most restaurants have actual kitchens, with people moving around and making plenty of noise, and you can generally see the food leave the kitchen as it is delivered to your table. Unless you think the kitchen and its staff is a complex and expense ruse, the food served in a restaurant is not from a ghost kitchen.
> Most restaurants have actual kitchens, with people moving around and making plenty of noise
Some of the food may be prepared on-site, but you'd be surprised at how many of the offerings in restaurants (even high-end restaurants) come right off the truck from outfits like Aramark and Sysco.
I ordered dinner online periodically over the past three years (for a family of five.) About once a month for the first two years and then only once every 3 months (very begrudgingly) during the last year. Now basically none whatsoever simply because the quality keeps dropping off.
If you pay attention to local politics and, in particular, zoning variance debates, these are ultra-common, ultra-boring issues that are usually addressed directly by municipalities. It's true that businesses create traffic and traffic safety externalities, which is why well-run cities usually impose limits and extra expenses on businesses that do these kinds of things.
I understand the dunk here, but what I'm saying is that a lot of this is on Bay Area municipalities. This isn't like Uber where an entire new business model created a brand new set of regulatory challenges. This is a bog standard regulatory challenge every city already has to be set up to address, because it comes up every time a new retail business gets put somewhere that wasn't already precisely zoned for it. This is seriously every liquor license kerfluffle ever; just in slightly different form.
(I had a lot of problems with what Uber did with regulatory arbitrage; in particular, for a decent amount of time, Uber managed to recreate the Chicago redlining map with their service areas. It's not that I'm disinclined to regulate; it's that it's not Kalanick's job to regulate himself.)
Even Uber for passengers didn't seem too hard to handle. Almost a drop-in replacement for taxis, except some cities added more loading zones because of the increased riders. Uber Eats, different story.
> At the sites where parking issues have not been resolved, businesses and residents have tried turning to the city for assistance. Koral and her husband and business partner, Dan Perata, contact the city’s 311 line and the police regularly but say nothing is done. (San Francisco parking enforcement did not respond to a request for comment.)
This seems like a problem that can be easily resolved by traffic police ticketing anyone who parks incorrectly. that would disincentivize the drivers to go there, and it should result in the ghost kitchen owners moving to a place with adequate parking/traffic infrastructure.
Send photos to towing companies. They may not respond quickly enough if you call 'on demand', but tell them to hang out near you and they'll get bites, and they might. Plus, the sight of a tow truck might scare people.
Hell, maybe just buy a tow truck and 'patrol' the street.
TLDR: NIMBYs are unhappy about the traffic problems caused by economic progress.
Ghost kitchens are great. Regular restaurants are simply too inefficient to scale. And yet Americans spend about 5% of their waking lives on food prep. One day, making your own dinner could be an occasional hobby, like knitting your own sweater.
The long term promise is especially high with robotics. Your food could be made by a robot, the whole delivery could happen with an autonomous vehicle. And if the food robot is centralized, I don't have to worry about the cleaning and maintenance myself.
Yep, call me a NIMBY but I don't want this kind of business operating in my residential street. There are plenty of business zones where this economic progress can take place.
Also, illegally double-parking isn't fair game. If the police enforce those laws, there are economic solutions to that too, like building more parking. But often times the zoning will mandate spots too because they know a huge business without that is gonna rely on illegal parking.
> Yep, call me a NIMBY but I don't want this kind of business operating in my residential street. There are plenty of business zones where this economic progress can take place.
That's basically the standard NIMBY line. "I don't oppose [thing], I just don't want [thing] near where I live."
>Dear God, why does everything have to be a ghoulish march to "scale".
Scaling makes it possible for more people to enjoy higher quality goods/experiences. You're making this post on a device that exists thanks to "scale". You likely live in a city that exist because of "scale". You enjoy modern amenities like electricity and running water thanks to "scale".
Without name calling the whole argument breaks down, because it's just "I disagree with you, and because you are <name call> you are wrong!". No substance behind it.
(Ghost kitchen can have all the things they've stated as needed for restaurants and still scale. Cause ghost kitchen just means ... kitchen which only delivers. There's zero supporting evidence that they cannot have all the things, but the name calling hides that nicely in the heat of the argument)
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly, and quite badly, in this thread. Can you please not do that? Regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are, it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
>Restaurants of any decent quality require talent, proper ingredients, and time.
You're missing the most critical one: money. You need money to get a restaurant off the ground, and money makes acquiring talent, ingredients, and time easier. Ghost kitchens help on money aspect by not requiring you to lease/renovate prime real estate for the restaurant and not having to worry about hiring/managing FoH staff.
I think even Soylent involved some people at some point, so to be honest there are inefficiencies there that we should aim to scale away from to maintain annual growth.
Is there no ordinance requiring appropriate parking levels for businesses like this? In my Midwestern city, a pick-up-only restaurant has to have 1 parking space for every 400 square feet in addition to bike spaces.
This sounds like a total planning failure. That's a huge facility that never should have been allowed to open there without the proper infrastructure in place. They need like 2 or 3 times that many spaces, and there's not really a good way to create them after the fact. I think food delivery in general is pretty wasteful, but making fewer spaces doesn't make fewer cars/bikes required. If you want a huge ghost kitchen, you have to be prepared to handle a huge amount of traffic.
There are far too many cars driving around SF carrying no passengers and just a pound or two of food. I think it makes sense for drivers to switch to mopeds, and the parking situation everywhere will naturally fix itself.
Enforcing the existing laws would fix this. These delivery cars always stop in the middle of traffic or bike lanes because there simply isn't enough space in SF.
Ironically what the parent poster implied is the solution (parking minimums?) only makes the problem worse, by making businesses/neighborhoods even more spread out to accommodate parking lots, which entrench cars even more.
Kinda surprised they haven’t moved ghost kitchens to the next logical step to avoid some of the issues that come with having them in a location: food trucks.
You could have completely elastic kitchen space deployed to different locations all the time. Trucks could be restocked at a warehouse outside of town.
Delivery drivers just get the address of the food truck to pick up from instead of a physical location.
I don't think food trucks can just park somewhere and serve/work there.
As weird as that may seem because why have a roving restaurant if it's required to be in one spot?
Nonetheless I think permits are required, the Senior Sisig truck always used to be next to the Equinox on Sansome St. Other food trucks only ever serve at the "Off the Grid" park.
I took a look into the origin of the food truck once (internet rabbit hole ftw), and originally they moved - some still do these days. Usually serving a different area each day or if you have two areas with non-overlapping break times even midday. But when it got more popular people started to complain that trucks would just stop where they wanted to and cities started to demand permits (I'm not saying they were wrong, just how it is). That made in uneconomical and sometimes even impossible to move around all the time. It's rather hard to just stop spontaneous and serve a crowd if you need a permit for each stop.
So, these days, food trucks are mostly for show (that's the ones you saw) or company events. Company wants to feed all their employees something different than the usual grub, but not leave the campus for the event: Rent a food truck.
Clearly the company needs to do better planning and anticipate cars coming to them, causing traffic congestion is a net negative for the service it is trying to provide.
Seems to me that the problem is less the buildings and more the fact that delivery drivers in the US seem to insist on using cars. Here in the Netherlands they deliver on scooters and bikes and create a lot less traffic problems.
Unfortunately, the US is still set up in such a way that scooter delivery won't provide suitable coverage area. Wish it weren't the case. I feel like we're hemmed in, in so many ways, by the car induced sprawl throughout the nation.
Enough for what, to survive? Not talking about that, but I'll put it this way: I would absolutely never order delivery if e-scooter radius was the limit. Even the restaurants that are good and well-priced near me aren't suitable for delivery.
And delivery is already very rare for me since my wife and I will either cook or go out unless we're very sick or something. Without delivery, we'd just deal with it and it'd kinda suck.
That's some FUD demonizing delivery restaurants with some fear-based labels and emotionally-loaded language.
Although it's my experience delivery service drivers more often than not refuse to follow clear directions and have no chill, I stopped using 2 apps because of the hassles and expensive (services pocketed the money), inconsistent, and substandard results.
Perhaps the problem is a lack of training, minimum livable wages, and healthcare rather than the delivery model.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadAs it is, the delivery driver usually ends up being the customer's punching bag for any issue whatsoever. Do delivery drivers have any leverage whatsoever against restaurants who provide this kind of terrible experience?
It's nice to be able to have a ton of food options in your neighborhood where you can go and pick up as well.
But that's a function of the road/street design. If bikes are well supported then people will probably switch to bikes.
1. Cars are more expensive in those places, generally, but
2. You don't need a car as much, so there's fewer cars and they're not driven as far.
In practice this tends to mean lower transportation costs in those areas, even if on paper it may look like it's more expensive because owning/operating a car there costs more.
When we moved to Munich, we ditched having a car entirely. If we still had a car and had driven it just as much as in the states, then sure it would've been more expensive. We just didn't need to do that. (As soon as we moved back to the US we got a car again of course)
Would certainly be helpful to also upzone for mixed-use, so you could get more shops in places closer to where people live, but it's not absolutely required.
In London, Pret used to semi-ghost resupply sandwiches to their tiny stores from catering-like hubs via hand carts.
Of all the things to wish to automate away, driving 40 tonne vehicles with notoriously poor sightlines (though they have imposed safety minimums in London[2], but not after many, many deaths), often with steering wheels on the wrong side, down urban roads seems one of the better ones.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway
[2] https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/direct-vision-standard-and-...
https://youtu.be/KkIkymh5Ayg
It then talks about health inspections, but doesn't really make a strong case for how ghost kitchens make health inspection harder; about the most it has to say is that it makes allergenic cross-contamination harder to evaluate, but that's not really something health inspections catch anyways!
There's a restaurant on Polk St that does this with Ubereats. I know their address based on seeing it a few times and have learned not to order from it.
Here's a list, I won't add links because they're too long, but you can find them all on Ubereats. This restaurant from the outside is "Fresco Pizza Shawarma", here's nine storefronts they have on Ubereats.
- Ma's Meatballs
- Big Daddy's Wings
- Chateau Shawarma
- Angry Chicken
- Uncle Sam's Pizza
- Polk St Pizza
- Wingman Co.
- Little Italy's Calzones
- Little Italy Pasta
They probably have more too this was just a quick search. It's spammy and I've learned to check the address of restaurants to see if they're a "ghost kitchen". I suspect a lot of "real" restaurants with just one authentic storefront get drowned out in the "ghost kitchen" spam.
Also: Manhattanites basically kicked this whole Internet restaurant delivery thing off with Seamless. Sometimes people just don't want to go out.
I don't know about calling them, but I expect that's no different. If a restaurant is outsourcing their cooking for online orders, it would make sense for them to do so with phone orders as well.
My experience has been that food from ghost kitchens has been incredibly subpar when compared to the same food ordered from that same restaurant's brick-and-mortar location.
The other commenter is saying that there are "-To-Go" versions of some restaurants in your local scene, and those "-To-Go's" are served out of ghost kitchens instead of the restaurant itself. I know that does happen, but it hasn't been my experience that there's a major quality difference between the two; unsurprisingly, since good restaurants are reluctant to sabotage their own reputations just to expand their incredibly low-margin delivery options.
I don't doubt there are restaurants that do use ghost kitchens badly; I'd say: probably stop patronizing them altogether.
Exactly, and the way you do that is to physically go to the restaurants.
"Hello, I can take your to-go order for Restaurant!"
"Is this Restaurant?"
"I can take your order for Restaurant whenever you're ready!"
as in carefully coached to never actually say, just imply, that they are Restaurant.
I just wish there was a filter to exclude them from the options. The more friction I encounter with food delivery, the more likely I am to rethink just making something at home and save me the frustration.
Have you ever ordered a pizza for delivery?
Have you ever had catering?
There is no requirement or law to have dine-in patrons or walk-up service to sell food made to order.
Taco Bravo: no.
Ordered delivery pizza: yes.
Had catering: yes.
Why? Is their food bad?
While not a completely reliable or quantifiable metric, the dining experience conveys information that is absent entirely with a ghost kitchen. Ghost kitchens are essentially the opposite of an open kitchen dining establishment. Everything about the preparation of substances you're going to put into your own body is hidden from view, and because this is inherent to the model it's not even something that can be criticized or measured. And unlike restaurants with a public facing facility, there is a much greater likelihood that a ghost kitchen that poisons its customers vanishes and reappears under a different name in the very same location. This would be extremely difficult for a regular restaurant, or even a fast food drive-thru, to pull off without strident public blowback at the place of business.
If you agree to eat food from such establishments, there's an implicit acceptance of this blindness to conditions in which the food is prepared. Given the inevitable race to the bottom economics of any food service industry I can understand why this would be a non-starter for a lot of people. Even if you trust people to do the 100% right thing structural forces favor the ones doing the 99% version of it, and then the ones doing 99% of that, ad terminum, ad (literal) nauseam.
Also, when I'm ordering food from a restaurant, I am dealing with real people, seeing them in person, and they see me in person. Eating from a restaurant is about much more than just the food. Ghost kitchens eliminate all of that.
I think you can't reliably generalize that way without some deep research )
Some of the food may be prepared on-site, but you'd be surprised at how many of the offerings in restaurants (even high-end restaurants) come right off the truck from outfits like Aramark and Sysco.
Disregarding regulations and externalities worked well for him the last time.
(I had a lot of problems with what Uber did with regulatory arbitrage; in particular, for a decent amount of time, Uber managed to recreate the Chicago redlining map with their service areas. It's not that I'm disinclined to regulate; it's that it's not Kalanick's job to regulate himself.)
This seems like a problem that can be easily resolved by traffic police ticketing anyone who parks incorrectly. that would disincentivize the drivers to go there, and it should result in the ghost kitchen owners moving to a place with adequate parking/traffic infrastructure.
Hell, maybe just buy a tow truck and 'patrol' the street.
It's not at all like it's a positive feedback loop where one person messing up parking causes downstream effects for the rest of the day...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHSCmQnGH9Q
Ghost kitchens are great. Regular restaurants are simply too inefficient to scale. And yet Americans spend about 5% of their waking lives on food prep. One day, making your own dinner could be an occasional hobby, like knitting your own sweater.
The long term promise is especially high with robotics. Your food could be made by a robot, the whole delivery could happen with an autonomous vehicle. And if the food robot is centralized, I don't have to worry about the cleaning and maintenance myself.
Also, illegally double-parking isn't fair game. If the police enforce those laws, there are economic solutions to that too, like building more parking. But often times the zoning will mandate spots too because they know a huge business without that is gonna rely on illegal parking.
That's basically the standard NIMBY line. "I don't oppose [thing], I just don't want [thing] near where I live."
Ah, yes, restaurants, that flash-in-the-pan, economically unproven innovation.
Dear God, why does everything have to be a ghoulish march to "scale".
Scaling makes it possible for more people to enjoy higher quality goods/experiences. You're making this post on a device that exists thanks to "scale". You likely live in a city that exist because of "scale". You enjoy modern amenities like electricity and running water thanks to "scale".
(Ghost kitchen can have all the things they've stated as needed for restaurants and still scale. Cause ghost kitchen just means ... kitchen which only delivers. There's zero supporting evidence that they cannot have all the things, but the name calling hides that nicely in the heat of the argument)
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You're missing the most critical one: money. You need money to get a restaurant off the ground, and money makes acquiring talent, ingredients, and time easier. Ghost kitchens help on money aspect by not requiring you to lease/renovate prime real estate for the restaurant and not having to worry about hiring/managing FoH staff.
Ones that aren't "flash-in-the-pan" are generally outliers, sometimes extreme outliers in areas that have a lot of competition.
It looks like Cloud Kitchens has ~20 parking spaces for 20,000+ sqft of kitchen? And half of those appear to be for employees with no spaces for bikes/scooters. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Charter+Oak+Food+Pick-Up+-...
This sounds like a total planning failure. That's a huge facility that never should have been allowed to open there without the proper infrastructure in place. They need like 2 or 3 times that many spaces, and there's not really a good way to create them after the fact. I think food delivery in general is pretty wasteful, but making fewer spaces doesn't make fewer cars/bikes required. If you want a huge ghost kitchen, you have to be prepared to handle a huge amount of traffic.
You could have completely elastic kitchen space deployed to different locations all the time. Trucks could be restocked at a warehouse outside of town.
Delivery drivers just get the address of the food truck to pick up from instead of a physical location.
As weird as that may seem because why have a roving restaurant if it's required to be in one spot?
Nonetheless I think permits are required, the Senior Sisig truck always used to be next to the Equinox on Sansome St. Other food trucks only ever serve at the "Off the Grid" park.
So, these days, food trucks are mostly for show (that's the ones you saw) or company events. Company wants to feed all their employees something different than the usual grub, but not leave the campus for the event: Rent a food truck.
And delivery is already very rare for me since my wife and I will either cook or go out unless we're very sick or something. Without delivery, we'd just deal with it and it'd kinda suck.
Although it's my experience delivery service drivers more often than not refuse to follow clear directions and have no chill, I stopped using 2 apps because of the hassles and expensive (services pocketed the money), inconsistent, and substandard results.
Perhaps the problem is a lack of training, minimum livable wages, and healthcare rather than the delivery model.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...