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.
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 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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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...?
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.
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.
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).
> 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).
Readit News
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.
"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]
[1] https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-digit/submission/caviar-foo...
KOSMO.com
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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.....
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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.
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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.
It was awesome to order a single 20oz bottle of coke from them. Sadly they stared a minimum order soon after.
It’s koZmo with a Z btw. Unless we are thinking of different dot.com busts…
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.
The Costco Grocery component of their website is actually pretty impressive. Quick shipping times and decent prices.
Ordering non-grocery from the website still has a long lead time before the item actually ships.
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.
2. There seems to be some evidence that Costco may be perpetrating animal cruelty on a pretty big scale: https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2022/06/23/costco-chicke...
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.”
sorry couldn't help myself...
Costco online is a different story though. They sell stuff like laser hair regrowth helmets and magnetic healing pads.
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.
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.
Also, you can order random thinks like TVs or a tent via Ubereats. Fellow humans, I think we are at the peak of Capitalism.
Consumerist.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The cloud kitchen model is more akin to putting lipstick on pigs...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Lobby to change the law but beware lobbying?
lobbyist: A person who is paid to lobby politicians and encourage them to vote a certain way or otherwise use their office to effect a desired result.
Emphasis on paid.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/lobbyist
https://www.icecreamshopus.com/
Or, you know, use morals and conscience.
This is the same reason why murder us illegal even though most people wouldn't do it anyways.
The branding of the parent entity must be more prominent than any subbrand on any packaging or promotional material.
This applies to pretty much all areas of life:
Food delivery, Web scraping, personal relationships, insider trading, nation building, you name it.
Also intent/appearance of sincerity matters: "When Two Do The Same Thing, It Is Not The Same Thing After All."
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.
Dead Comment
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.)
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.
https://bathfoodco.com/#order
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I Made My Shed the Top-Rated Restaurant on TripAdvisor - https://www.vice.com/en/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-to...
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!
Its the same as yahoo/altavista/google.
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?
EDIT: OK this explains a lot https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32615712
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.
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.
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.
I’d love to hear; why you did it, The pros and cons, the effort vs reward.
I had thought about doing something similar for African food in my area as there is no African food on any of the apps
They were absolutely terrible, like the garbage frozen cookies that SYSCO sells to restaurants. I bet you know how this ends.
Zoomed in on the map where they were supposedly from. And it was a Pizza shop that also sold the same awful cookies.
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.
Googling the address in Daly City shows a "Local Food Hall" https://www.grubhub.com/restaurant/local-food-hall-daly-city...
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.
Good times…
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!
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...?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Pretty sure some of them can only run on IE6.
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
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.
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