Haven’t read the prospectus but I know they sell loans to investors and they are fairly highly rated from a credit perspective. I’m sure they have some debt on their books too though.
If anyone followed the betting odds on election night at one point the prediction markets went from heavy Biden favorite to heavy Trump favorite as he won Florida and it looked like he was ahead in a lot of the swing states, but for weeks pundits had been saying it might look like Trump would be ahead in these states early on due to propensity for conservatives to vote in person on election day and for democrats to vote by mail, which turned out to be true.
if these markets were actually good predictors I don’t think the wild swings we saw overnight would have happened.
Those are two different things. The red and blue shifts from in-person and mail votes were very reasonably predicted before the election. But the reason the probability of a Trump win rose so much was that Florida turned out red by quite a bit compared to the polls and if that polling miss was systematic Trump would have won. It later became clear that the Florida miss was specific to that state, probably because of specific demographics and the probabilities swung in Biden's favor again.
>the prediction markets went from heavy Biden favorite to heavy Trump favorite as he won Florida and it looked like he was ahead in a lot of the swing states
I wonder how much of the "polls were wrong" narrative is due two specific issues: Miami-Dade county being surprisingly pro-Trump and the pandemic leading to more mail ballots and slower counting. That helped establish a narrative early on election night which caused that action on the prediction markets. However if you told someone three weeks ago that Biden would win 306 electoral votes and win the popular vote by some 7 million votes, which seems to be where we will end up, would they think there was any sizable systemic failure? I would guess they wouldn't.
Some of "the polls were wrong" talk started before all the votes were counted, definitely. In certain states (WI most notably) the polls were definitely far off. I don't know if there were more states where polling was inaccurate than normal, though.
Were they really "far off" outside of Wisconsin and Miami-Dade county? Those were the only two results that seemed truly surprising. Results like North Carolina going from Biden ahead by 1% to Trump ahead by 1% or Michigan going from Biden up 7% to up 3% are perfectly normal polling errors. In a normal election, I think there would have been a good chance that the polling miss in Wisconsin would have been an afterthought after Biden was declared the winner late Tuesday or early Wednesday.
Iowa, Texas, and Ohio weren't close and polls had them there. Those were all about 5% off. I don't know how many states end up that far off in typical elections. Maybe Ohio ends up closer, once counting is done there.
(I wasn't surprised by those results and the campaigns didn't act like they were close, so.)
Fair point about those three states. They were often ignored because if they went for Biden it meant there was a huge landslide in his favor. If you click through one of those links in that linked article you get to this[1] article from 2018 that lists the average polling error at 5.9%. Maybe it is just people have unrealistic expectations for these things any miss beyond a point or two is going to be dubbed as "THE POLLS ARE WRONG!".
For the Presidential election, I don't think any other states were too far outside the margin of error, but there were a lot of high-profile downballot races with similarly absurd differences. Susan Collins did something like 12 percentage points better than her polling.
This was the first go for ranked choice voting in that Maine Senate race. I don't think anyone should draw any drastic conclusions from a polling miss there.
Could you clarify this? According to the results I'm seeing, in Missouri Trump got 56.9% and Biden got 41.3%. I can't imagine anyone was predicting 8% less for Trump and more for Biden. That would have Biden winning Missouri, which would have been ridiculous. An 8% different prediction in the other direction also seems implausible. Perhaps you could link to the 538 prediction?
Thanks, that makes sense. I vote in one the hillbilliest locations in the state. When I arrived at 6 AM and saw the several-hundred-feet-long line of people, I knew the Trump vote was going to be higher than I had expected going in.
But what about the residential areas? NYC is very spotty, for example. Residential areas are hopping because that's where people live and work now, and midtown is shuttered. Usual salad and coffee places near the offices have no reason to be open right now.
I’m sure there are broad market Vanguard ETFs out there that won’t have Tesla in it and will make no changes based on this announcement. This is really just ETFs that track S&P 500.
It’s similar to what you see in the broader stock market - I mean we closed at all time highs today.
But Q3 was likely an anomaly since they saw a lot of tailwinds from greater demand for homes in driving distance for easier summer vacations plus Covid was only concentrated in a few hot spots over the summer.
Now Covid is more widespread plus there’s naturally less leisure travel in the winter and still very little rebound in business travel.
Still, I think long term the biggest issue is not rebounding demand, which I think will happen, but regulatory issues. Lots of questions and scrutiny around their impact on local housing and rental prices and safety issues related to home rentals for parties.
Lol. Now you're getting to the core of macroeconomics within our existing infrastructure. The Fed is cutting (again!) investors are chilling (again!). I don't want to burn money with some sort of hopeful expectation of profit in the future, but goodness gracious money is so friggen cheap right now.
I pretty much only get delivery if I have some sort of promo code emailed to me.
Otherwise I can’t really justify spending $25 to get a burrito delivered. Amazing that people have normalized paying for the insane number of fees plus tip to get one thing delivered.
Based on income/wealth statistics, very few Americans are able to afford a $25 burrito outside of a special occasion. I wonder how big the market really is.
The same people who have a $500 car lease, $900 smart phone, $65/month in subscription streaming services, blah blah blah
The other thing to think about is people are probably just shifting money from eating out, to delivery. I mean you could go to Chili's and spend $50 for two people, or you could get Chipotle delivered for $30.
I would say the same thing about very few Americans being able to afford a $25 per person visit to Chili’s, outside of special occasions, but I understand what you’re saying.
I don’t think “very few” is the right way to look at this - the US is a very wealthy country. In 2019, something like 42 million Americans - not much below the population of Spain - had incomes over $100,000 (the 87th income percentile was $100,478). Almost all of those people are able to afford a $25pp visit to Chili’s outside of a special occasion!
I prefer to use non tax advantaged savings (aka emergency fund amounts) as a more accurate metric for being able to afford luxuries. If you’re living close to paycheck to paycheck , I would say you can’t afford to pay $25 per person per meal, regardless if you earn $100k or $50k.
My overarching point being that if people can barely afford the current VC subsidized food delivery prices, what is the possible market size for non VC subsidized food delivery?
Edit: I don’t see a source for 42M Americans having incomes over $100k per year. This source says 15.5% of US households had incomes over $100k, and at 128M households, that is 20M households with incomes over $100k.
If you’re making $100k but have no savings, maybe your money is being spend on trips to Chili’s. Of course it’s not literally that, but an individual having no savings but high income doesn’t mean that they can’t spend money - it means that they do.
I went to lunch with a girl who worked at a Bestbuy. She spent the entire time trying out figure out how the a group of current BestBuy employees nearby at the restaurant could afford the food (overpriced $20 meal) for such a causal meal.
My former landlord financed everything she ever did, including her damn electronics she would throw away or break in a year. She was a widow, on social security and was cheated out of a pension. I have no idea how her monthly payments weren't thousands per month.
Americans fucking suck at financial literacy and trap themselves in debt pits. Alternatively, people spend themselves silly without stepping back and realizing their savings is staying at $0 by living larger than they should if they want savings to go up.
"Few" in the relative sense compared to other Americans, but "lots" in the sense of raw numbers because America is so large.
There are also the shrinking frugal demographic like me who can afford a $25 burrito, but out of principle would absolutely not pay that much for a bunch of beans wrapped in a tortilla, microwaved for 1 minute.
>> the US is a very wealthy country. In 2019, something like 42 million Americans - not much below the population of Spain - had incomes over $100,000
Yet, 4 out of 5 Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and 3 in 10 have no emergency savings at all.
The numbers will vary based upon what study/report you read, but the message is clear that the majority of people are not making financially sound decisions.
What you're saying is however not in disagreement with the comment you are replying to!
Living paycheck to paycheck can happen even if you're making 400-500k. I've seen people do it.
You can have no emergency savings (at all) and be making $100k+.
It's pretty easy - spend everything you have (often on "dumb" things like expensive takeout for every meal, a lease on a car you don't need, more house than you can afford, refreshing electronics constantly for no reason, etc.).
The reasons usually boil down to lack of emotional regulation and/or bad spending habits, not lack of income - though it is easier to do with low income, as the margins are smaller.
I'm curious as to where you live. Here in the Bay Area, pretty much every casual dining has a wait on Fri/Sat/Sun (pre-pandemic of course). Places like Chilis with an average $25pp and places like Korean BBQ, where it's closer to $40pp.
Same thing in Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, NYC, Chicago, pretty much any major city. Which is also where a lot of economic activity comes from.
They're not always obvious! You need to compare the prices in the app to the restaurant's own takeout menu prices. My understanding is that the restaurants themselves add the markup to offset the fees that DoorDash charges them.
I also balked at it until my credit card gave me free delivery and only 5% fees. The final cost is cost of food + 1 dollar + tip to the driver (which I'm perfectly OK with!).
This comes out to a real marginal difference of about 4-6$, which I don't really care about.
Edit: people keep mentioning markups. I see those much more often on GrubHub (actually, every place is marked up on GrubHub except big chains), but don't see markups my regular set of local restaurants.
> food + 1 dollar + tip to the driver (which I'm perfectly OK with!).
In many cases there's a markup on the food over the restaurant's prices. There's delivery fee that's generally $2-$3, a service fee that's hidden in the "taxes and fees line item", not to mention a small order fee etc on some orders.
And, of course the tip. This I do not understand. It went from tipping the waiter a bit more because you were well taken care of at the restaurant dining experience, to pre-paying a tip to the driver before knowing if the food's good or if the delivery is late etc. The restaurant doesn't get any of the tip. Anyway, a subsided food delivery that you got is not sustainable.
To be honest I do not understand the tipping culture at all. Its expected to tip a restaurant staff if you eat at the restaurant, but not if you get the food delivered. But, expected to pre-pay a tip the driver who delivered the food (irrespective of quality of food or delivery) but not the USPS/UPS/fedex driver who delivered anything else even if he/she carries a heavy package over a flight of stairs. Its expected to tip a uber/lyft driver even on a shared ride with other folks but not a bus/metro/train driver. None of it makes sense to me :)
I think it has less to do with any culture, and just how the pay structure works for all the different things you mentioned. USPS/UPS/Fedex/bus/metro/train drivers all make livable wages and have benefits.
I'm not defending the tipping pay structure, but it's certainly not some confusing mystery.
I prefer to order food from the restaurant directly and pick it up, so that they get the maximum $. Door dash is convenient to see what's out there, but not very good to the actual business of the restaurant. Plus you are paying for that convenience. I also don't see how DD will ever be cash positive as the fees would have to go up, which seems bad business.
I can attest to using Chase sapphire reserve getting DoorDash and American Express platinum getting Seamless (from Lyft Pink) and Uber Eats. Agree with the parent, with these faux discounts and ordering for more than one person makes it well worth it. I say faux because the fees are negotiated and paid with the credit card membership fees invisible to us
Seems like free DashPass is valid only for a year.
> Complimentary DashPass Subscription for Chase Sapphire Reserve and Preferred cardmembers: Your Chase Sapphire account will receive one complimentary DashPass subscription from DoorDash for at least 12 months when the subscription is activated by 12/31/21. After the DashPass discounted period ends, you can choose to continue to be enrolled and charged the then current monthly DashPass rate
They also have an offer for the Freedom and Slate cards (which have no annual fee) albeit free DashPass only for the first 3 months and a 50% discount for the next 9. So, still a good deal overall when compared to paying $9.99 every month. Thanks!
How long does it take to go to a restaurant and pick up the food yourself? 10 minutes each way at most + 5 minute wait seems the maximum reasonable estimate to me
Not only the fees, but also just a completely substandard final product. Every time I have used one of these services (pretty much only when I get a promo code) it arrives late and cold. I would be furious if I spent an extra $5-10 on my meal for that to happen.
On a side note, I've noticed that most restaurants around me will add $3-4 per dish when using Uber Eats vs. just calling them directly.
The fees are not as apparent if you don't live alone. Imagine living with 4 roommates, all of whom want to order together. The fees and tips are divided among the 4 and become almost invisible.
YMMV but my 3 housemates and I order a lot of delivery and have maybe coordinated 1 delivery to split fees despite having similar schedules, food tastes, and getting along pretty well. Food delivery is about getting the exact food you want when you want, and with a group of people that won't line up very often.
Sometimes groups will order, but in my experience they do not.
I'm really in the same boat. Grocery delivery is a bit less insane (tip + fee = ~13% premium) because your average order size is bigger (at least for me - I usually do 200ish bucks every 1.5-2.0 weeks). I can stomach a 13% premium for delivery when I have 2-under-2 (years old) and I really don't want any of us to get covid for a variety of reasons (I can't afford (emotionally more than financially) to be down a caretaker and partner right now, can't afford (emotionally) to have either an infant or a toddler to have covid, etc etc).
Doordash is really hard for me to justify, I only use it when given gift cards etc. It can literally double the price of a meal (a $20 mcdonalds order becomes $35-40). Even during covid I still generally do curbside because that feels like a very minimal risk.
Post-covid, I'll probably use instacart/shipt maybe once or twice a year - I'm 100% sure there will be times where for whatever reason I just can't get out and the world will end if we run out of milk for the kids. But when there's not a pandemic on, taking the kids to the grocery store knocks out so many birds with one stone:
* kids get to get used to the grocery store experience
You might want to go back and re-calculate. Pre-covid, I did a comparison between in-store, Instacart, and Shipt. I did my normal groceries in store, then took the receipt and re-created it in Instacart and Shipt. It wasn't just the delivery fee + tip. Shipt and Instacart both increased the prices of each individual item; sometimes by a lot. IIRC the total was about 12% more BEFORE taxes, fees and tips. On a $150 shop, it was considerable. This was a while ago and things may have changed, but its worth looking into. You don't even need an in-store receipt; just download your store's weekly flyer and compare those prices with Shipt's and Instacart's.
Also noteworthy: Shipt didn't respect any of my store's B1G1 offers. It didn't even appear in their system while shopping (Instacart did). I actually know a Shipt shopper that was getting free stuff all the time because of this.
If you're strapped for time but still want to stay safe and save money, consider stores that have curb side service like Wal-Mart. You get in store prices with no extra fees and no-contact hand off.
The one period I used grocery delivery quite a while back (I was on crutches and I could easily enough go to a grocery store but it was hard to do a full shopping) my big objection was that they'd be out of enough things or did substitutions I didn't want that it was hard to count on getting everything I needed to make a recipe. This was before meal kits so those weren't available as a substitute.
Not sure about prices but I didn't really have a choice.
Hmm I haven't done anything rigorous but a few staples I know the price of off-hand are the same at least, but maybe they're being sneaky. I'll look more closely. Thanks for the tip!
FWIW though I do mainly use instacart, since my amex card counts them as a grocery store/supermarket, I get my 6% cashback.
If you order with any regularity, the $10/month fee makes the overall fees you pay fairly minor. The difference in cost is primarily in the tip.
"Amazing that people have normalized..." something that is ridiculously convenient and comes at a marginal additional cost? I'm no more amazed at that than wash-n-fold laundry or taxi service.
Which the vast bulk of people don't use either. I'm sure there's some market and I've seen market research that suggests grocery delivery is something that will hang around at higher levels post-COVID. (Though the same report also highlighted home cooking, not food delivery.)
I admittedly don't have great food delivery options where I live. But getting most prepared food delivered isn't something I find very interesting at all.
I think the contention is they’re not able to produce margins capable of returning what a VC or public company would need to for investors to make it worth their while.
the fees double the cost of the burrito. maybe the calculus is different if you live in more suburban areas but being in SF it is easy to walk to food places nearby.
I feel like I'm living in a different world than this thread. DoorDash is practically giving away money with their service it's unreal.
DashPass is $10/mo which which turns every delivery into ~$1+tip. The idea that I can buy 30min-1hour of a real human's time and labor for $3-4 to deliver me food is silly.
My usual Indian take-out order is $16 if I spend 40 minutes for the round trip or $18 to get someone to deliver it to me.
It definitely depends heavily on the market you're living in - some are very heavily subsidized, others are not.
As a counterpoint, I recently had a $30 off promotion for uber eats. Ordered a couple of hamburgers, and the food tab came to $29 - which was zeroed out after the promotion.
Delivery fee + service fee + tip meant I still ended up paying $18 for the service. I can't imagine I'd ever be a buyer at the full price.
Last time I used it there were two fees (I don't remember exactly what they were called but it was like a service charge and a delivery fee) and dashpass only covers one.
Also in my experience (in Chicago) the food in the app costed $1-2 more per item (this wasn't listed anywhere, but if you compare the cost with what the resturant charged it was a lot more).
Also there was at least one resturant that I visited that would give you less if you ordered through a delivery app to make up for the fact that they had to pay a fee. This is shady and shitty on the resturant's part and not really DD's fault (although frankly it's kind of predictable) but it was still a thing that happened when I used the app.
I haven't used it for about a year though (because of the above shady practices) so they might have changed.
I had this same experience. Decided to try doordash because I had a $5 coupon in the mail + free delivery on the first order. I was suspicious of pricing so decided to check what the total would be for same order through restaurants site. All of the item prices were inflated on doordash. The $5 coupon + free delivery brought the total down to about the same price if I ordered directly from the restaurant.
I don't like that they inflate prices and will not order directly from them because of it. They should be transparent about how much their service costs rather than hiding the true cost of their service in the item prices. I feel like it's likely their fault and not the restaurants since it seems like every restaurant has inflated doordash prices. My only theory is that they may be charging the business service fees in addition to the service/delivery fees they charge the customer.
They do white label delivery for a fast food restaurant I order from. I've had it take 2 hours to deliver multiple times and even had one order get cancelled by doordash after they couldn't get anyone to pick up the order. Most of that delivery time is made up of it switching between multiple people who they expect to pick up my order. Once someone actually picks up my order it only takes about 5 minutes to get to me.
That's assuming that a real human's time is devoted to you for that period. DoorDash seems to have drivers execute multiple orders concurrently. If someone else in your area ordered from the Indian place around the same time (or another restaurant nearby), the same driver will likely pick up both orders and deliver one and then the other. You're definitely not buying a dedicated slice of that human's time for $3-4.
I'll bite. I tried to order a Taco Bell bean burrito. Small item, so you can throw stones about that, but here's the price:
- $2.03 for the burrito (vs 1.29 in store)
- $2.99 for fees and taxes
- $3.99 for the delivery fee
- $2 for the dash tip??? Is 20% customary? It's the lowest dash suggests.
- $11.01 for your burrito
So, for your $1.29 burrito, the price of the item is jacked up by nearly 60% to start. And slam fees, taxes, tips, and you're talking about a total that's 800% higher than the actual item.
It's ludicrous. They're catching you at every point to extract cash. Yes, a human delivered something to you, but for the cash conscious, this is an absurdly expensive tilt.
Well, you said we could throw stones, so... this is a very unrealistic order. The parent comment is talking about a specific (long term) promotion that makes the decision very reasonable, but a realistic fee might be:
- $15+2 for say, pad thai + taxes
- $4 for delivery
- $3 for tip
I'm not saying that paying 40% extra for food is a reasonable decision for most people, but (a) I can afford to pay $7 to avoid traveling across town for a specific meal I want, and (b) these numbers get even better with a larger order. If you're the consumer that wants a single $2 bean burrito, the market answer is clearly that you should put a dozen in your freezer and microwave them yourself.
I also think the Doordash business model is not super valuable, but it clearly has some value. Restaurants make an increasing portion of their revenue from delivery (especially during COVID), and having to staff, manage, and route a delivery person themselves is not their core competency. Does signing up with Doordash marginally increase revenue? Yes.
Delivery drivers do multiple restaurants at once and some use multiple delivery apps, so it's somewhat more efficient than taking the roundtrip yourself.
Obligatory note that many people order more than one thing, and that some people eat things that are more expensive than burritos. The fees to order a single $7 burrito and 5 x $20 meals are similar in absolute $ terms. And of course, many of the popular services have effectively capped delivery fees at ~$10/mo so ordering once weekly brings the delivery fee down to ~$2.50.
Yes. When you add in the fees + tip, it simply is not worth it. Then add the inconvenience of the driver being 40 minutes late. A lot of these drivers are so lazy, they won't even get out of their cars. I lost track of how many times I had to go out to the parking lot and track them down because they were in front of a different building.
If I'm paying a delivery fee + tip, you better at least get it to my door. That has less than a 50% chance of happening with these services. These days, it's cheaper, faster, and safer to pick it up myself.
What's the difference between getting a burrito delivered and the decades-old delivery option for pizza?
>Amazing that people have normalized paying for the insane number of fees plus tip to get one thing delivered.
By the same token, you can ask why people eat out in restaurants given how much more expensive it is compared to cooking at home. I take your point about the expense though. If you habitually get delivery, it will add up to significant sums .. but then again, so does eating out.
The main difference is that the pizza place hires the delivery person, and all the carryout folks were subsidizing it. The price for carryout and delivery is the same, except I have to tip the driver, and I know the driver keeps the whole tip.
There is no middleman sucking a bunch of money out of my community.
Don't know looks to me like there is still huge upside for Apple. The services revenue has a lot of room to grow, the Apple silicon macs have good potential, even magnetic charger ecosystem can create a lot of revenue. Plus they are slowly adding new products to the mix anecdotal but I know a ton of people planing to buy a whole bunch of HomePod minis.
Everyone expected this for all big tech. Google's came as a surprise as last quarter numbers weren't that good. I am assuming it will start moving now considerably.
Technically it's hard to say that AAPL "beat," because they didn't guide for Q4 2020. They beat consensus analyst estimates, but that's not quite the same thing IMO.
You're right. But management guidance is usually below consensus. If it wasn't beating their own guidance but not the expectations wouldn't be really seen as a "beat". Or maybe that's not what you mean...
"Beating" is about actual results being higher than expectations. I don't think I've ever seen someone before say "beating" with the meaning of "issuing a better-than-expected guidance". (That would be the "raise" part in "beat and raise".)
Investors had certain expectations. Even though these companies had great quarters, investors were expecting that. There were no surprises, hence flat stocks. To phrase it another way, it was already priced in.
Tech companies continue to supplant other businesses though, I can easily see a reason to be bullish if you think they will continue to take over other markets. However, I agree, that broad market US indices will not go down in a multiple year timeline as long as the US government can help it.
