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| Angelika/Mike Schilli |
NEW NEW NEW: San Francisco Urban Hikes Collection
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Michael Hardly any powermum has the time anymore to cook meals for dinner, and that's why new kinds of delivery services are mushrooming in the Bay Area. And it goes without saying that today's hipster families won't order profane dishes like burgers or pizza anymore, but instead they insist on produce grown by happy farmers, whole foods that are both sustainable, gluten-free, and detoxicating, if that's indeed a word. Since not every family-owned diner restaurant has the resources to get an order web site up and running, which is also compatible with the latest smartphones, or manage hoards of rabid bike messengers, a new breed of middleman entered the landscape offering exactly these kinds of services.
Take Doordash, for example, a company that delivers dishes from restaurants that don't want to run their own delivery service. Or Sprig.com, which cooks healthy meals with broccoli and less fat and delivers them to your doorstep in environmentally friendly cardboard boxes.
And what fascinates me personally about these companies is that their web pages and apps were apparently developed by people who actually know what they're doing. Ordering is easy and even from a security standpoint they're state of the art as well. If you compare that with, say, apps by the German news magazine "Der Spiegel", it seems as if Germany's IT sector work force consists of former shopping cart retrievers, who were retrained by the unemployment agency from complete amateurs to write smartphone apps in no more than two weeks time. Such slipshod work and couldn't-care-less-attitude would be unthinkable in the U.S., as the ubiquitous competition would simply crush companies with such bad employees.
Nowadays, to reserve a table in a restaurant, there's no need to call them. Instead, their web site usually directs guests to a service called Open Table. Five buttons appear, labeled 5:00 pm, 5:30 pm, 6:00 pm, and so forth, from which you simply select one and then let the smartphone auto-fill in your name and phone number. That's it! Recently, we were on a hiking trail in Point Reyes and were planning on having lunch soon after, so we booked a reservation for an hour later right there on the trail. After we had finished the hike and arrived back at the parking lot, we drove to the restaurant and were seated immeditately, even though there were other people waiting in line. Open Table is free for guests making reservations, and the restaurant pays a fixed price of $199 per month plus $0.25 per guest if they came through the restaurant's website, and $1.00 if they came via Open Table's own site.
And of course the local restaurant scene here also sports a small share of naysayer dinosaurs, complaining that allegedly, Opentable isn't worth paying for. But seriously, if you don't generate enough revenue to expense 25 Cents per Customer, you're already in a downward spiral and better prepare to shut down your restaurant soon. Which, ironically, the previously mentioned restaurant owner has done recently. Well, it's common knowledge that running a restaurant in San Francisco is a relentless dog-eat-dog competition, and what's most surprising is the sheer number of people who think they can beat the odds. Most keep flushing down their money down the toilet for a year or so before they finally realize it's not for them and give up. I hope whoever reads this will do their homework ahead of time and avoid that costly mistake.
Another opportunity for a newly invented service industry came about because unfortunately there's a bunch of bums scouring our neighborhood during the day, stealing packages casually "delivered" by mail carriers who simply leave them on people's doorsteps (Rundbrief 12/2014). Recently, a young entrepeneur grasped the opportunity. He previously pitched his idea in the the TV show Shark Tank and has launched Doorman, a package delivery service with more flexible operating hours than established companies like the US Postal Service, UPS, or Fedex. Instead of having online orders shipped to a private residence, people now simply ship to Doorman, receive a message when the package arrives and can then schedule delivery between 6pm and midnight. Doorman charges $3.99 per package or $19 a month for unlimited packages. Great idea, and I'd hop on it if I hadn't perfected shipping to my workplace and hauling stuff home on the bus at night.
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