The Most Popular Delivery Item: Malt Liquor?!

RTO is turning retro, Citi Bike's 10th birthday, Scooter IPO

Join Us 6/8 for Mobility & Delivery Happy Hour

Curbivore & Everee present an LA Tech Week happy hour for the brightest minds from the worlds of mobility, delivery, urbanism, foodtech, and govtech at a unique venue on LA’s Westside. Join top founders and funders for drinks and networking next Thursday in Venice. We’re seeing some great VC names on the registration list already (a16z, Crescent Fund, Mobility Fund, UP Partners, General Atlantic…) so we’d recommend you RSVP right now before we run out of these hot tickets!

Digesting DoorDash’s Delivery Order Trends

DoorDash just released some fresh data on what kind of food and alcohol consumers are ordering, and it seems like despite fears about fee-inflation, shoppers are increasingly turning to delivery apps to get the party started. 60% of respondents reported using on-demand alcohol delivery more than the year prior. Unsurprisingly, Friday and Saturday are the most popular days for booze delivery, while six PM is apparently the top boozing hour.

What is surprising, is the particular mix of products getting moved through the streets. In a sentence that gives me a hangover just to write: flavored malt beverages are the most popular beverage type for delivery. Yes, customers are so thirsty for White Claw, Truly, Vizzy and their ilk that humble ol’ beer didn’t even make the top five. I guess all I can add is that if you’re this bad at decision-making, I’m glad you’re letting an app do the liquor run for you!

On the restaurant side of things, the report also found that delivery usage continues to rise. Particularly interesting is the continued growth of third party delivery apps (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, etc) as how consumers discover restaurants near them. That makes a strong case for the 3PD claim that their added fees really do drive value for merchants, by helping hungry customers discover restaurants that they wouldn’t have otherwise considered.

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HOT INDUSTRY NEWS & GOSSIP

You can’t spell “retro” without RTO: As business and civic leaders continue to fret about whether or not workers will return to offices, it’s worth noting that those two groups’ interests aren’t 100% aligned. Cities in particular want foot traffic back in their downtowns, as workers riding transit and shopping / lunching nearby has all sorts of positive spillover effects and externalities. Recent opinion-piece chatter about “Lifestyle Office” seems to miss that, misframing the fact that certain amenity-rich office products have held up well as if that is an optimistic sign for downtowns. If you actually look at the offices that Bloomberg is praising — Hudson Yards, Brickell City Center, a greenfield project in Santa Clara — these are basically all offices intertwined with shopping malls (and occasionally bad works of now-closed public art.)

No doubt that many of these will hold-up better occupancy-wise than real downtowns, much as suburban sub-markets are already performing better than city centers. To look at a few examples, vacancy is 8.8% in the Bay Area’s leafy peninsula, whereas in SF proper it’s a whopping 23.% (Colliers.) The story is much the same if you look at suburban Maryland vs Washington DC, Irvine or Century City vs Downtown LA, etc…

So yes, maybe bosses can coax workers back to their desks if they build a hermetically sealed environment, but much as we learned in the mid-century as we razed downtowns for parking lots, what “works” for the suburbs certainly doesn’t bode well for city centers.

A thoughtful approach to delivery robotics: Learning from a tragic lesson at Uber ATG, Tiny Mile’s founder has built his delivery robotics startup with safety as its core principle. He shares other under-appreciated wisdom, like how shaving off a wheel kept costs in check and why he doesn’t charge customers for deliveries, in a wide-ranging OttOmate interview.

In other bot news: Serve Robotics set to deploy 2,000 more bots under an expanded partnership with Uber Eats. And Ottonomy just scored an investment from Rome Airport’s venture arm.

Delivery ain’t easy: A number of firms, both storied institutions and fast-growing startups, essentially bet their futures on nailing delivery logistics. Now many are faltering, with the WSJ looking at what went wrong for brands like Blue Apron and American Eagle, and Progressive Grocer finding that even lauded retailers like Costco are struggling. This illuminating peek into a DHL delivery center shows the hard work it takes to get things right…

Scootin’ towards an IPO! The market for public listings has been pretty soft, but India’s Ola is hoping its electrified scooter offerings will give the market a jolt. The company is hoping to best its current $5 billion private valuation, with the goal of going public by year’s end.

Speaking of fundraising… Private markets have been cool the past year as well, but the slowdown is markedly different depending on which metro area you’re fundraising in. San Diego and Greater Boston are only down around 22 to 30%, thanks to money continuing to pour into the biotech space, while San Francisco is down almost 60% in the past six months. For markets that fit better for curb-related builders, LA and Brooklyn have held up better than say Seattle and Austin.

10 years of cyclin’: As NYC’s Citi Bike turns 10, a number of the fantastic folks that helped get the bikeshare program off the ground are retelling the tales of what it took to launch what is today the country’s largest shared bike system. Chief takeaways: learn from Paris, avoid hurricane flooding, wonder why your contractor has fired all its software coders, and damn the tabloids.

Curbs get a rethink in Seattle’s second city: Just across the Puget Sound, booming Bellevue has released its roadmap for how it hopes to redo its downtown curbspace, as it anticipates the opening of the East Link light rail extension. As we’ve mentioned before, while we applaud the city for looking to update its curbs for the modern era (currently only 3% of space is devoted to loading, bus, stops, or transit) - it’s important not to skip over some of the basics. As is, some “curbs” two blocks outside of downtown don’t even have sidewalks…

Ride on? Ride Report just released “Rideshed,” a new visualization tool that lets planners see how proposed infrastructure improvements improved scooter and bike usage. This space is getting interesting!

For you grocery heads: I’ll be down in Anaheim for IDDBA 2023 on Sunday. As part of the “What’s In Store Live” lineup of panels, I’m hosting a conversation with Sahil Sharma of Coco and Darian Ahler of Vebu Labs on “A Taste of the Future: What's Next for Robotics & Automation.” Hope to see you there!

Just a few more links this week: Ride with pride! A fun new data visualization maps one of the most noxious use of NYC's curbs - sidewalk sheds. Why car dealers might stand in the way of the EV revolution. But the OEMs charge ahead, with Ford opting to use Tesla’s charging technology. New FedEx tool lets shippers monitor emissions. Wouldn't calling this "order ahead" make it a bit more obvious? Micromobility Europe returns to Amsterdam.

See you in either Anaheim or Venice!

- Jonah Bliss & The Curbivore Crew