Someone please convince me that DoorDash has any feasible path to profitability. I'm begging you.
Let's not reinvent the wheel here. DoorDash has the same two options that any other company has to stop burning dough like a daydreaming baker: lower costs or raise revenues. Lowering costs THAT significantly seems improbable; wage protection laws like the one passed by the New York City Council last week are going to continue putting a floor on what DoorDash must pay its drivers, and we don't appear to be any closer to solving the Last Mile Problem than we were when the phrase was invented. On the raising revenue side, even if the future for delivery services looks unquestionably bright, the COVID-19 pandemic threw DoorDash a perfect storm for proving the viability of its business model when demand for delivery skyrockets, and the results were still shaky at best. Total orders were 3x higher in 2020 than 2019, but net loss fell by only 30%.
I don't think DoorDash is on life support yet, but it certainly won't be easy to justify the business model much longer. Then again, I would've said the same thing about Uber five years ago, and we're still in the middle of that grand experiment, so play on.
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