> I assume this will cause Deliveroo to either increase fees or reduce service which may inspire more restuarants to hire their own delivery people again.
Before Deliveroo (and similar services) restaurants (in UK/Europe since you discuss London) did not offer delivery at all.
Handling the whole order (which these days means online/through an app) and delivery in-house is costly and restaurants use Deliveroo because it makes commercial sense.
Generally the issue is that, on the one hand I don't think that people are willing to pay much for delivery while, on the other hand, delivery is very low productivity and it's not viable to pay delivery drivers much for this.
As someone else commented 20-30% of an order is not crazy compared to the cost of serving on-premises. Moreover, Deliveroo can only charge this to restaurants if they have a deal with them.
Low productivity and cost pressures are also why "dark kitchens" are developing: They save on the cost of having a full-blown restaurant geared for on-premises service and they cut travel times for drivers (they can go to a single location and collect from multiple collocated kitchens).
> Before Deliveroo (and similar services) restaurants did not offer delivery at all.
This is far from universally true, especially Asian takeaways typically hired their own driver, but the practice was also commonplace for many actual restaurants too
I'm not in the US but delivery apps are mainstream here as well, and pretty much every restaurant had their own delivery people (we call them motoboys here). Weird to learn that it's not the case everywhere.
I would be careful with the "learn" bit. I think almost every HN topic involving an internet based service ends up with claims that X didn't exist before X.com made it possible.
In this case it is factually true, certainly in Europe but probably in other regions, too.
I think perhaps many commenters here are very young, so when I say restaurants did not deliver they cannot remember how it was 20 years ago. Order over the phone for delivery was limited to a few types of food places (mostly pizza and fast food made by the same establishments).
As an online platform Deliveroo was perhaps not the first (Just Eat is older, though not as focussed on delivery) but in the UK (and perhaps Europe) they really made that service explode. Note, though that I did mention Deliveroo and similar services in my original comment, not only Deliveroo. I think this is also linked with the rise of smartphone and apps, which, really exploded in 2007 with the first iPhone. The same goes with Uber.
And in France I was starting to see a few local delivery companies, they would own the mopeds and hire the drivers for a few restaurants and pizza joints at the town level. I guess all of these are dead now.
Traditional restaurants (in UK/Europe) did not offer delivery, for them Deliveroo or similar is their first foray into delivery, which is made easy because Deliveroo handles everything.
Delivery for traditional restaurants has become a thing in the last 10 years or so when online services popped up.
In Poland many traditional restaurants did offer delivery through websites such as pyszne.pl and pizzaportal.pl since at least 2010. They hired their own drivers at the time, the switch to 3rd party delivery services happened here fairly recently but restaurant-owned cars are still common.
Before Deliveroo (and similar services) restaurants (in UK/Europe since you discuss London) did not offer delivery at all.
Handling the whole order (which these days means online/through an app) and delivery in-house is costly and restaurants use Deliveroo because it makes commercial sense.
Generally the issue is that, on the one hand I don't think that people are willing to pay much for delivery while, on the other hand, delivery is very low productivity and it's not viable to pay delivery drivers much for this.
As someone else commented 20-30% of an order is not crazy compared to the cost of serving on-premises. Moreover, Deliveroo can only charge this to restaurants if they have a deal with them.
Low productivity and cost pressures are also why "dark kitchens" are developing: They save on the cost of having a full-blown restaurant geared for on-premises service and they cut travel times for drivers (they can go to a single location and collect from multiple collocated kitchens).