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Discussion (26 points, 3 hours ago, 63 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42127304

Mentions the $650mln they'll pay Just Eat for it, neglects the fact Just Eat paid $7.3bln. Quite the write down. And in just 4 years.

At first blush, this might seem like another silly roll-up. However, I believe in Marc Lore completely and it will be interesting to see what this becomes. This is bad news for DoorDash (imo).

Apparently Wonder is unrelated to Wonder Bread.

I wonder (no pun intended) how much of this is driven by Marc's residual dislike of Amazon?

Amazon currently has a partnership with Grubhub to provide Grubhub delivery as a Prime benefit.

Amazon competed strongly (some might say unfairly) many years ago with Marc's first big startup, Diapers.com, and effectively forced him to sell to Amazon.

He later started Jet.com and sold it to Walmart - in many ways as a second chance to compete with Amazon.

whoa, they own Chai Pani and Fred's Meat and Bread, both of which are _excellent_ fast casual spots in Atlanta. It's just... it's like $28 for a Philly cheesesteak, so I've only been to each twice. edit: ok it's $16 each apparently, but still

But also, they own physical chains, real estate ("food halls" aka bougie food courts) and now... meal delivery? It sounds like the most expensive-to-operate things all squashed into one.

edit: and they own Blue Apron?! I feel like they're going to buy Candy Crush next

It's really hard to see how this is going to work out long-term.

Those weird ghost kitchen things have more than half a billion dollars to spend on acquisitions?!

I wonder how this came to be - did they already have that big of a war chest, or did they hear they could buy a name brand and go back to their investors to finance it?

Silly money, behaving stupidly.

I feel for the restaurant owners: not only were they forced into accepting the likes of Grubhub as a middle man, that same middleman now also owns restaurants that compete directly with them. If the restaurants have any power at all they should stop using Grubhub right now. I don’t know anyone still using it (which is crazy, Seamless used to dominate NYC).

I sincerely hope the entire thing burns to the ground. The last thing I need in my life is for all the restaurants in my neighbourhood to be soulless, VC operated chains.

Ghost kitchens are the biggest scam in the food delivery world. why would anyone pay for an unsanitary kitchen to fry them up some frozen food?

Wonder guy is a trader and I think this is a good trade. The question is who is he going to dump this whole thing to next?

marc lore is underrated

How do these deals work?

I am assuming, and I could be very wrong, that Wonder is smaller by market cap than Grubhub.

Wonder owns Blue Apron too.

Support your local restaurants. Don’t let these vampire platform companies enshitify your city’s food scene.

This part feels like The Onion. 30 private taxis coordinating for your meal. "customers can order from upwards of 30 restaurants in a single order, with each item being made-to-order in a sequenced fashion so that they finish simultaneously and can be delivered to the customer together."

Grubhub has fallen so far it's amazing. They (and Seamless who is the same thing in different regions) had such a big start but had their model disrupted. And while they were being disrupted they were trying to turn a profit as a public company and DoorDash just ate their market as they were in growth mode. Interesting sequence of events that led to them being acquired by Wonder.

Yet another company propped up by private equity. Wonder Group raised $700M during a funding round in March 2024, with a total of $1.5B raised overall [1]

How long until it succumbs to the same fate as other PE funded companies (Foxtrot)? Then the people left holding the bag are the vendors that won’t get paid. Employees don’t get paid. Doors locked up one day with no reason.

Love how it has all of these celebrity endorsements as well to keep the facade going.

At the end of the day, it’s a glorified ghost kitchen.

[1] https://www.inc.com/rebecca-deczynski/wonder-marc-lores-fast...

What the heck is going on here? This feels very ZIRP-ey; private equity chasing disruption in the hopes of the next acquisition.

Is this just a race to the bottom as all these delivery companies burn cash to subsidize their failing model and hope that they can be the last one standing?

[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42127304

"new kind of food hall" sounds much better than ghost kitchen

> [Wonder is] creating the super app for mealtime [...] re-envisioning the future of food delivery [...] pioneering a new category of “Fast Fine” dining.

Press release copywriting is such an artform in ways I'm sure they don't intend for. I don't think I could spin "ghost kitchen ordering app" into that much bullshit. That takes real skill.