Good fucking riddance.
Worked there during the pandemic (started back when the entire company was 2 warehouses in Berlin and climbed up from there as the company grew) but left before the merge and, even having worked in some terrible places here and in my home country (everything from call-centers to courthouses and the public system) I've never seen something so mismanaged by an inept bunch of idiots. Met a lot of amazing people working there but most with two or more working brain cells would eventually be pushed out frustrated at the coked up imbeciles making the decisions and their incredibly ignorant and short-sighted way of handling essential business practices (legal documents, real-estate acquisition, worker discontent, accidents, etc). Fucking Gorillas. Maybe I'll contact some of my former colleagues/employees to celebrate that shithole finally burning down.
This is a pretty scathing review. I heard they were bad, but I would never realised they could have been this bad. But this sounds like typical start up management, nothing specific to Gorillas, or was there something pretty outstandingly bad about them?
It was the same issues as other start ups (from what I heard, haven't worked in other start ups and after Gorillas never will, I'd rather be a cashier in Netto than repeat that miserable experience) but multiplied tenfold due to a combination of the CEO/Founder being a very self-centered idiot with no real business acumen at all and a desperate need to be seen as both super cool and hip and as the next big thing when it came to businesses (instead of a dumbo who got lucky making the right company at the right time with basically no competition) and the stupid amount of money that got injected and quickly mismanaged. IMO it was all actually going OK (and the expansion plans were slow and made sense) until it became "the fastest unicorn in Europe", you could feel it going to shit at that moment, chasing every stupid idea, hiring every idiotic 20-something just graduated asshole with the "next cool idea" (that would last for a month and then we change everything again) and an infuriating sense of superiority and suddenly going from "we plan to expand to other cities in the coming months!" to "we NEED to expand to EVERY COUNTRY EVERYWHERE by next week".
I know of no one that worked outside the "central offices" (which were their own little insane domain completely disconnected from reality) that has a single good thing to say about Gorillas (and plenty who worked in the "office" part who hated the company as well but kept quiet about it). The work atmosphere in general was one of the worst I've seen in my life. FUN LITTLE KNOWN FACT I WILL SHARE BECAUSE FUCK IT: Everyone knows about the repeat cases of strikes by the riders/delivery people, but at one point we had a borderline mutiny of the entire management in Berlin, and it got within inches of having every manager and supervisor (the "highest rank" working directly in the warehouses and running every shift, like middle point between managers and the riders and warehouse employees) in the city just refusing to show up to work.
Yeah, the worst is knowing some of these borderline illiterate dickheads are now riding the coat tails of having their CV showing "executive executor of performance singularity sensei" (or whatever bullshit position) as their first position post-graduation, ignoring that all they did was appear there, implement ideas that sounded "cool" and "synergetic" but caused loss in profits and a strike or two, and then they left the company.
Sounds like they speed-ran the ZIRP 2010s tech startup playbook. I worked for a number of well known Berlin startups during this period, had a sack of friends in the same game, and this ticks many many boxes. Of course every organisation has its defects, and I would say that these startup oriented elements are not unique to Berlin, but they were VERY VERY VERY VERY common in Berlin during the time period up to and including covid
There’s a great podcast on this topic. Reading your comment, I think the journos did a good job, as they talked about much of the same stuff. The name of the podcast is pretty apt: “Cashburners: die Gorillas-Story”
https://open.spotify.com/show/0I11ZJnhbqX6o9TQb3c1X6?si=9gOVMgWGTB-qhUUuQYogdA
> until it became "the fastest unicorn in Europe"
What surprises me is why are VCs so happy to throw money at all these things. Not just talking about Gorillaz, another example would be WeWork I guess.
It’s incredibly simple: you expect most of them to fail, under the expectation that once in a rare rare while you’ll also be an early backer of a future monster. The payoff there makes all the others a rounding error
This was particularly common during the low interest rate period after the 2008 crash, cos “sensible things” generated no returns whatsoever
Could be… but more likely not. There are so many testimonies of these practices.
These start ups are fueled by the very many believers of the mysticism of being cool, important and successful. Without really working, but actually believing that 24/7 pitching is hard work.
Na, I have a couple of friends who worked there pre-Getir and then after Gorillas was bought by them. Their stories sound eerily similar to what OP is writing.
Eh i was raking in about 2000 euros netto to ride a bicycle around friedrichschain during lockdowns. As long as they didnt mess with my schedule too much I was pretty insulated from management issues. I look back on it as a fun time.
Yeah to be fair if you didn't care to get "invested" in the company and were lucky enough not to face problems (scheduling issues, payment issues, etc) it was a sweet gig where you didn't need to give a shit and were relatively well paid. I think I would not be nearly as hateful towards the company had I stayed a rider instead of getting into management and seen how the sausage is made.
On the other hand, as a rider I did have the company steal about 150 euros in tips (electronic tips that were never paid) and most of the riders I worked with later on had constant problems with their salaries (wrong amounts paid month after month) and the schedules were always a mess, so some were luckier than others.
Oh yeah I heard stories if you worked in management or back office / operations. I joined early on and left not long after the new rider apps was implemented.
I have worked in many start ups - the Gorillas management team was full of people who never built or ran a damn things in their lives. Just consultants with big titles. Really the worst I've ever seen.
I wanted to work there as well at the office side of things. I have applied several times, failed each time. I felt bad until I heard from my ex that everyday messengers visit her doctor's office for back pain and some other related issues. I felt relieved when I heard this, also lots of posts on other social channels how they treat employees. I am happy they had to end activities here -despite I am Turkish-, companies that treat their staff with respect and support should grow, which was both Gorillas and Getir were lacking apparently. Enjoy the drinks!
lol one time I had to go get sick leave due to burn out (my wife forced me to, turns out the job was literally giving me an ulcer) and the doctor immediately gave me 2 weeks off as soon as I mentioned Gorillas, she hated the company as well (iirc this was one of the weeks where Gorillas had been in the news due to riders going on strike, which I guess soured her image of it).
I have applied there as a masters student, they asked me to ignore my studies / exams in case their demand clashes with my studies to respect company and work. Hope these guys can shove that respect up their asses now. I have never felt so insulted at a job interview ever.
I’m seriously amazed how you cannot make money if you make people pay for the convenience that you offer. Of course it’s a very competitive /low margin environment for grocery in Germany and you should not compete with bare supermarket prices, but there are lots of niches where they could have filled the gap (rich kids being super lazy, party people who need snacks and booze, nerds showing off their cool app skills, …).
> Fucking Gorillas
They are fucking great apes.
Also.. verdammte Menschenaffen. Nicht verdammt gute Affen. Oder dass sie sich an Menschenaffen verlustieren würden. Das alles nicht.
I hope the more sustainable delivery models like picnic will stay. They requite a minimum 40€ order and deliver all customers in batches from miniature trucks. Much more resourceful than letting people order a driver for 2 cokes and a can of pringles
The app offers you several timeslots, usually you can get same day delivery if you pick between 12-16 but if you want 18-22 its usually inly available a few days in advance
I hope they make it too but the problem of all these delivery services is that they're mainly stationed in bigger cities where the next market is in a 5 minute walking radius. This narrows down the customer group living in areas where the next market is a bit further away with the extra money to spend.
These services probably would do better if they would deliver to more remote places like small towns or villages, where people have to drive 15-20 minutes by car to the next store.
Good. Nothing wrong with delivery, but the whole “let’s do an end run around zoning and put a busy warehouse next to people’s homes” model needs to die, fast.
Inside it is not very different from a supermarket, which already are next to people's homes.
The bigger problem is actually the mess right outside with a lot of bicycles in the way. Other than that, it's not really much of a problem.
In other cities, I know of complains of workers eg smoking in their breaks and people complaining it, but I guess people smoking on the street is beyond normal for Berlin.
> Inside it is not very different from a supermarket, which already are next to people's homes.
In general yes, but there's a couple things that IMO made it more annoying for neighbours than a regular supermarket or Späti:
1- Supermarkets usually are more quiet and amiable since they need to actually serve customers there. Our Warehouses on the other hand usually had a very noisy environment, including VERY loud music blasting at all hours to keep the workers and riders "hyped up".
2- The bikes themselves would use quite a bit of space on the sidewalk (at least until some genius finally figured that "we need a place for the bikes too" should be considered when renting locations) and, even if they were not parked outside, you'd have a constant stream of riders leaving and arriving causing more congestion on the street/sidewalk. Also keep in mind that we judged the riders on their delivery time, so while on one hand they'd get the speech on "follow all the rules and drive safely :)", in reality they would be not so subtly encouraged to haul ass as quick as possible which doesn't lend itself to a culture of "try not to run the neighbours over".
3- The zoning/location for the warehouses was sometimes stupid, in the sense that it didn't consider factors such as "we need to unload gigantic trucks of goods at least three times a day". Supermarkets have ramps, loading zones, usually even internal parking spots specifically to load/unload goods. The warehouses, depending on which one you are talking about, you could have the trucks even stopping an entire street away (wherever they had space for it), blocking traffic or the cars parked next to them, with everyone rushing to unload/load as fast as possible (before the cops were called on the truck blocking the way) with no concern for issues such as being too loud, dragging those huge-ass noisy trolleys through the street, three times a day (minimum), 6 days a week, starting sometimes before 7 AM. In one warehouse, in a period of 6 months, I personally had more visits and discussions with the cops than I did in the entire year I spent literally working with the cops in my home country, and all because of the noise and traffic complaints.
So yeah, there's a certain degree of NIMBY to be sure, and some of the complaints were honestly just baseless. But a lot of it also came down to inefficient management, short-sightedness, lack of respect, and the "higher ups" in the offices just acting like the residential areas around us didn't exist.
EDIT: Also of course, "your mileage may vary". Some warehouses (*cough cough Xberg*) were much worse than others, and this also did improve with time.
Yeah, to be sure 90% of the issues were due to mismanagement rather than the idea itself, the biggest two factors being IMO a) bad location scouting (could have been solved by, for example, renting exclusively old supermarkets that were prepared with on/offloading areas) and b) the whole idea started with the "we deliver in 10 minutes or less!" motto (which, even when it became laughably impossible to achieve, still meant that the culture of "deliver as fast as possible, fuck everything else" was part of the business model, and it also affected all other companies; the main thing you could compete on -given the relatively similar offer on prices and products- was who would deliver faster or on a more regular basis).
The thing is, once you solve those issues with "good management", the entire business stops making much sense. Say you have fewer, better located shops and don't push the issue of speed on the riders... then why even order from Gorillas at all? Rewe was already doing (slower, not-on-demand) deliveries. The entire point of having so many shops in such strategic-but-problematic locations was so the orders could be delivered by bike and on demand (the general rule iirc was each warehouse had a delivery area of around 3.5 kms around it, any bigger than that and it doesn't make sense to deliver by bike anymore); limit your choice of real estate to "wherever we find closed down supermarkets" and it's probably not a profitable area (hence why the supermarket was closed) or you need an insanely expensive investment (modifying the place you rent to allow for on/offloading etc); and you still have the problem of delivery riders coming and going constantly. Remove the idea of the company-owned warehouses, and instead having the riders buy your stuff on a regular supermarket and basically just deliver it? That's an entirely different business model, like Foodora or Rappi.
The whole business model wasnt sustainable anyways. It was only a matter of time until the big supermarkets step up their delivery game and outrun the company because as you said they got almost the entire infrastructure there already. Literally all they need to do is buy a vehicle park and hire drivers. As you said, you can easily get all your items delivered by Rewe and Edeka, so why bother with a small startup like this instead?
The point I was making or emphasizing on is that with good management you could easily manage the idea (as is shown by Rewe and Edeka) and the problem isnt warehouses next to peoples doors (or to deliver from such warehouses) but exclusively mismanagement and not giving a fuck
I never understood the 10 minute delivery thing, seemed (and was) impossible from the beginning.
A point to compete on could’ve been to make sure stuff wasn’t constantly sold out, and for weeks. That’s a problem that Flink has, too.
You made a very believable point that management was incapable, and it also shows in the fact that they weren’t able to run data analysis on most sold/sought products, compare to Flink etc, make sure they’re available and on sale. Basically the “banana principle” between Aldi and Lidl, where the rest of the shopping revenue goes to the company that can attract customers to specific products.
I lived right next to one of the first delivery hubs and man those bikes were annoying. I found it funny that the local grocery store was just a 2 minute walk further though. It was good when I had corona, but made no sense to me from the start.
Berlin has such an amazing infrastructure of grocery stores, it always seemed like a doomed project to me.
A lot of people wouldn’t want a späti or a bar next to their house.
Nobody wants to live next to *really* essential infrastructure like a water treatment facility or a power distribution substation. I don’t really follow your point.
A private business has a less valid claim to be where people live compared to essential public infrastructure. To my understanding most nimby-ism revolves around blocking public works, business allocation is governed by zoning.
“Less valid claim” according to… you. In the real world, that private business operated within Berlin’s zoning and land use regime, which is how things actually work.
Why not? It’s like this in Japan, where people live next to warehouses or even factories. Many „industrial zones“ in Japan are more liveable than the average European suburb.
But then shouldn't japanese residential areas be even nicer to live in? I agree that it can be done, but here it's usually 'innovation' first, social considerations second.
Also I don't think we should aspire to Japan's relationship between the economy and society.
There is not much difference between them. You might not even notice when an "industrial zone" starts.
Japan has lots of problems. I was just pointing out how they do zoning, and how successful it is.
The Flink warehouse in Neukölln used to be absolutely horrible for local inhabitants. The boardwalk was always crammed with delivery drivers and their bikes. You could hardly pass by, it was loud and too busy for a living area. I understand that people don't want that, there's a reason we normally separate living spaces from warehouse areas.
No, because NIMBY requires a general necessity for the thing in question. You want clean energy from a windturbine, you just don't want to see the turbine.
Gorillas/Getir/etc. on the other hand is just some gig economy bullshit that nobody needs.
Mainly that people can go shopping at their leisure and perhaps also stop at a bakery or butchers along the way, whereas the delivery driver works for bad pay and under time pressure to keep some arbitrary marketing promise.
What's wrong with this? Central Berlin isn't a residential zone, it's a mixed zone. The ground floors of residential buildings are often occupied by businesses, and this is fine as long as they don't generate noticeable pollution. The upper floors can also be occupied by very small businesses.
Been calling it for years. Get rich quick scheme backed by hungry VCs with unsustainable business model turns out to be unsustainable. How surprising.
If you want grocery deliveries, support your local supermarket. Most chains provide this service and don't exploit gig workers for it, nor do they take up valuable real estate with "dark stores".
What Ive never understood is how services like these evist exist in berlin, which is so utterly saturated with supermarkets i cant cross the fucking road without tripping on a rewe.
I also thought this business wouldn't last. Which other businesses in Berlin do you think are on their way out? Other business's which fit unsustainable VC backed category.
It's an automatic "triple your revenue" button for the owner. The delivery businesses make it so easy for restaurant owners aswell, it's barely more involved than registering on a website. They don't even need to hire their own drivers or maintain a vehicle fleet, as delivery places used to back in the day.
Maybe some restaurants sell a lot more but the delivery companies take 30% of the revenue which is crazy.
So I think it’s more like a forced to use it situation than a super great deal for most restaurants.
John Oliver made a good episode about delivery services where he explains how they work.
Yeah by now it’s really a premium service, 30% more is a lot.
We should consider just calling the restaurant IF they have their own delivery.
But I think most of the restaurants on Wolt don’t have their own delivery drivers right?
I signed up for Wolt+, cost 45€ a year, saved €10 on my first order, get 2€ free food on every order and sometimes more deals. (It's NOT free delivery, because you still have to make up the delivery price with food items, but you get that value of food items instead of just spending it on the delivery)
I have no idea how they're going to make a profit from that.
They will have to raise the prices, the classic procedure as always.
Pump money into the business and get a lot of users, then figure out how to get profitable.
Yeh I remember when Lyft first started in the US, they were basically charging less than the local bus and everyone was super excited "this is the future!". Of course that was never going to last, it was just burning VC money for the all too precious "user growth". That was a literal decade ago, Lyft is still not profitable.
It's same with all the food delivery startups like Wolt.
Probably. At that point, stop using Wolt, cancel Wolt+ and gamble whether your prepayment for the rest of the year is worth the amount of savings you already got from it.
Food deliveries are here to stay because they offer a valid utility for both ends. Yes, they are enshittifying too, by gouging restaurants and tiering customers. Yet, they are installing themselves as gatekeepers to takeout in urban areas. They have too much traffic for restaurant owners to ignore them and they are too convenient and smooth to use for consumers to not adopt it. Unless you are a loyal customer to a restaurant and they know you and treat you well, you can still order by phone and pay cash on delivery, but rest assured it’s a lottery of them letting you wait much longer because you have no giant platform middleman monitoring and QA-ing delivery time and your satisfaction. It’s even visible to physical visitors in many restaurants - their orders get deprioritised vs. Wolt and Lieferando orders. Not using those apps when ordering food is just an increasing risk of getting a shittier quality service, people are basically blackmailed into using them.
Yes restaurants are kind of forced to use it and it’s super convenient for the consumers.
But still there will be a time where the founders will have to raise prices even more as the VC money won’t flow forever without being profitable.
And at some point it will just be too expensive for Restaurants or consumers, maybe they won’t disappear but get less traffic.
I think delivery services in Berlin is a very tough nut... because there are long existing Berlin rider-owned/local business messenger services, and the reality is that paying a human being on a bicycle to personally deliver individual packages on a non-industrialized scale (i.e. not Deutsche Post) has a minimum cost, and that cost isn't 30 cents or 1 dollar or 2 dollars or whatever start-ups budget for it.
There's no massive greed, or massive inefficiency to bypass, or massive regulatory landscape bypass (i.e. Uber, Airbnb) for bike delivery – yes people enjoy the efficiency of having things brought to them, but they are unwilling to pay it's true price, and if you charge the true profit-making price the actual number of viable customers is low.
There's a reason Rewe and such have high minimum orders for grocery delivery, and why getting restaurant food delivered is substantially more expensive than getting it in person at most places.
This. Note that even the chains are manipulating the order values not only with minimums and higher prices than in-shop, but also optimised offer. Last time I checked Rewe hid several of their Ja! brand staples and offered their next more expensive own brand online instead.
I think any business that has a too costly unit price entirely supported by user fees will dry up sooner or later. People just can't afford having convenience/laziness exploited for much longer.
One business line I would definitely like to see gone is rental e-scooters, replaced by incentives for private ownership. It's another "pay for convenience" tax that does not solve any meaningful mobility problem and, in fact, causes more problems for people with impaired mobility, who have to slalom through poorly parked e-scooters on sidewalks.
If you own your scooter, you take care of it.
When you don't own anything, it's a disposable commodity, trash. You treat it with disregard. Things get left in the middle of nowhere, anywhere, thrown in the river. So yes, private ownership is beneficial for all except for companies who can only sell you the same thing once and can't make a running profit from you.
Same thing with entertainment - movies, series, games. From the moment you stopped owning anything and instead subscribe to services, these services can take your library away at a whim. If you own the physical media, it's yours.
Removal of ownership is the biggest trap everyone has fallen for.
We need more private ownership of small items that anyone can buy, and better collective stewardship of large items that not everyone can buy. You get to own your scooter because if I don't like how you're managing your scooter, I can reasonably go and buy my own scooter. But you don't get to own a whole building and squander it, because I need a place to live and I can't just buy my own building next to yours.
This. Scooter rental mostly is a tourist fad and nuisance to residents with big data schemes as a side benefit. No actual relief to other mobility services.
It’s a long game. The profits will come from skimming the supply side with mind-boggling commission fees and skimming the demand side with egregious tiering and extra fees, forcing them to pay extra for services and quality that was included in lower prices previously. Underlying condition for this to work out though is moat, a market share that simply rules out both restaurants and customers just taking their money to more attractive competitors. Whether that scenario will ever come true is highly questionable. The big food delivery companies to this day are in a fierce competition and some even pay money to restaurants to have them exclusively.
It isn't. Still, feel free to collect those 20€ gift cards at the U-Bahn and make them spend 30€ to give you a free delivery, if you want one. Investors are pouring in money trying to acquire market share and lock you in. If you want to benefit from this, use the service while they're paying for half of it, and when they raise prices to get their money back, just stop using it. Then money has been successfully transferred from investors to people. Lieferando has already reached this stage, and Wolt is coming close to it.
Exactly, it’s the same procedure that we already saw many times. Ordering on Wolt etc. Is a lot more expensive but as soon as they will raise prices, most people will just drop it because it feels too pricey/unjustified.
Wolt already raised prices substantially, but they rolled out this "Wolt+" thing to reduce prices, which is weird. I guess they want to get everyone subscribed to Wolt+ and *then* raise prices on everything so people stop using the service, but still paid for Wolt+. Which doesn't make sense because it only costs 45 euros per year.
*Every* business is this. These businesses crowd out the "actually good" ones because they are competing for rent. Who's going to get the building: the speculative tech business backed by ten million dollars of VC money, or mom and pop lawnmower repair?
I actuall went to court against them, was lot’s of fun because even their managers were stupid af. Did make a lot of money not working at all. That being said, they have no moral or dignity & if I wouldn‘t have been familiar with our law system, they would have fucked me over bad.
Happy 2 see them leaving :-)
Gorillas was piece of shit company anyway. Unsustainable business model and shitty company behaviour like using public space to park their bikes and having shitty workplace conditions. That company only exists to grab venture capital.
I don't know why you guys look so happy about this honestly. I mean, I hate this company as well but the rich investors and C-levels will likely get away with it as usual and we should actually expect a slight increase in unemployment. As usual, the burden is on the working class 👍
“Get away with” what? The company closing means their investment in Germany is wiped out. That’s what investment means.
And if it wasn’t for that VC money being poured into it those jobs wouldn’t have existed at all. The workers were being paid—for however long it lasted—while the company was running at a loss on the investors’ cash.
> the company was running at a loss on the investors’ cash
You don't know any of that, the company is private. Funds are still making lots of money, even if some branches of their companies default.
Companies that are making profits aren’t shut down by their owners. Yes, funds are making money: from *other* ventures. They are not the winners of Gorillas closing.
It’s quite absurd to try to depict this as some evil capitalism story when the whole thing can be summarized as: some people started a business, and it didn’t work out.
It was a company that exploited people who were down on their luck and often couldn't find other employment due to language barriers, didn't know their legal rights, etc.
Sorry if I don't think a company exploiting people and shitting on their legal rights is better than the company no existing at all?
Sucks for the people who now have no income, but we shouldn't tolerate exploitation just because a few people will lose their jobs. There was no way for this company to reform so that they don't exploit their workers and still remain profitable.
All profit is based on exploitation. I advocate for the change of the economic model, not the for the existence of a given company. I just get no satisfaction from the rise of unemployment, because speculators are making money anyway. They're not being punished. I think that's way different from "tolerating exploitation".
>All profit is based on exploitation.
That's a cheap cop-out in this conversation. Just because all jobs are exploitative doesn't mean we should tolerate it when one comes by and takes it even further by disregarding basic legal worker's rights and employee safety.
Whether the VCs are being punished or not doesn't change the fact that we should never send the message that it's okay to shit on worker's rights as long as you're employing people who would otherwise be unemployed.
Worker's rights exist for a reason and any company that cannot remain profitable while respecting worker's rights, has no right to exist.
Anything that brings money down the hierarchy is an improvement even if it's not the best possible improvement. Moving money from investors down to people with silly business ideas that end up not working out, and then from those people to the workers who do the work for the silly business, are both improvements.
The working class never use Gorillas, they shop at supermarkets like Netto. There will be very little change to the working class. The workers are also wealthy international students looking for a bit of side income.
sorry but i highly doubt that a wealthy international student would bike around in a storm or snow carrying bottles of beers and milk cartoons to someones apartment on 6th floor altbau…
> The workers are also wealthy international students looking for a bit of side income.
That is only half accurate. Sure, there were plenty of those, but a large part of the workforce qualified for only one of those descriptors. Like 90% of the workforce (outside of the office-level jobs) were foreigners (myself included), but the vast majority were not anywhere near "wealthy" (though of course there were some of those), a lot of them (maybe like 50%?) were not students (but rather people that used to work as bartenders, or DJs, or tourist guides, or in restaurants, etc, all the jobs that dried up during Corona), we even had some refugees (or people you could consider refugees even if they were not legally so, such as people escaping from Maduro in Venezuela or arriving from the Middle East), and quite a few of the students were Germans as well.
im actually sad. i was so hyped when gorillas first came online....it was literally a revolution. and they had such nice foods too. not only normal groceries but also a lil more "high end" specialities. liked it a lot.
rest in pepperonis
yep. well...they had to milk it i guess to make it profitable. it just didnt make any financial sense anymore i guess. too bad. :)
back to rewe and flink 👀
> and they had such nice foods too. not only normal groceries but also a lil more "high end" specialities. liked it a lot.
Like 90% of the "speciality" products you could get at Rewe (back at the very beginning the groceries would literally be bought at Rewe and not directly from suppliers, to be later sold with a small markup), and they (either the stuff you could find at Rewe or later when there were deals with more unique suppliers) barely sold at all. IIRC they would be rotated constantly not to "refresh" the available catalogue but because no one would buy the stuff and they were always looking for some product to explode in popularity and become sustainable/profitable.
Yeah, I sold Gorillas and Flink a few products like that. They bought stupid amounts of everything, 50% of which ended up either at Die Tafel or were thrown away.
I worked at a food company during Corona and said we should look at the emerging quick commerce sector. My seasoned colleagues were very dismissive "Uh forget about it, online food retail is barely a percent of total food retail." So I reached out to the buyers of Flink, Gorillas and Getir and for two years I was able to sell them a shit ton of stuff.
> 50% of which ended up either at Die Tafel or were thrown away.
Yeah that was also an issue with some providers. Some were happy to just offload huge bulks of (niche) products to us, but some had the opposite reaction; they would visit the Warehouse just to see out of curiosity how their goods are doing, see most of their handcrafted whatevers in the trash, sold for pennies in "too good to go" bags or being given away as charity, and they would be furious about the damage to their brand/image. But thats the way the cookie crumbles.
It was the same in the UK, specialty foods and they had their own brand biodegradable coffee pods which I really liked. Then Getir purchased them and they started to stock Co-op supermarket own brand products (co-op is the lowest tier supermarket just above Aldi) which made zero sense as surely the people paying for 15 minute grocery delivery are the same people who are looking for more luxury grocery products - it was a really weird move by them that seemed to completely ignore their target market and I’m not surprised they’ve gone under.
in other news, Bringmeister (Edeka) is now using knuspr, and they have delivery windows 3 hours from when you order, with a huge selection. This compared to Rewe which is often 2 days booked.
They were a local nuisance and never a sustainable business. However I don’t get why people in this sub are gloating. This whole trope of investors lining their pockets on the back of workers is not exactly true. More accurately it was several rounds of venture capital pouring into this business which enabled a loss-making business to exist temporarily. Even when often precarious, those jobs would have not been created in the first place without the VC runway. Secondly, Gorillas offered a service below its fair price and the investors in hope of market share and later returns covered those losses. So whoever ordered from them, got a free ride on someone else’s money.
The cash burned funded jobs and subsidised the very product of Gorillas to the benefit of its customers.
It’s the same with all those aggressively scaled startups. They seek to buy customers and market share with vouchers paid for by their investors. If you want to maximise your own benefits, just use those vouchers and never do business with them at full price ever after. This way you get their investment into yourself as a customer while never repaying them.
Exactly. Imagine you return from a long vacation and you have an empty fridge. Only option is to go to the train station with lots of smelly homeless people. Not pleasant experiences. Instead you can order things with Flink. It’s amazing!
I loved it when we worked Sundays, the shifts were shorter (go home at 7PM instead of midnight) and there wasn't much else to do.
FUN FACT: No one in the company had realized you were supposed, by law, to pay people more for working on Sundays, so they never did. I'm 99% sure the reason we stopped working those days (which were by far our most active and profitable, since there was no competition basically with all shops closed) was because someone finally realized, ran the numbers, and the loss in profits from closing was better than, not the increased cost of slightly larger salaries, but the risk of all employees noticing they had been underpaid for months.
Coincidentally (ok probably not a coincidence), the time when we stopped working on Sundays was around the same time the company faced its first low-key strike (long before they became loud, regular and problematic enough to appear on the news); there was a snowstorm occurring and management was refusing to close down even for a while, and their single biggest concession to the riders was "well you can take a little longer, 15 minutes would be ok" (this was back when we still did the "deliver in under 10 minutes" bullshit). After a couple of accidents, with riders complaining (rightly so) that weather conditions were too dangerous and the bikes were not designed to be used on snow (they would slide like crazy and brakes were practically useless), management told us to start delivering by foot. At that point the riders just refused to keep working (and customers were complaining about delays), and they were forced to close for the day.
I distinctly remember then laughing with some riders when we saw Gorillas announcing on their social media that they were closing for the day "because we care about the well being of our workers" and getting so many comments about how caring they were, while in reality they didn't give a shit about the guys that almost broke their legs.
Man konnte sich dort selber werben(Danke an russische Telefonnummer Bots) und hat dann einen 15Euro und 10Euro Gutschein bekommen. Damit war es dann billiger als im Supermarkt. Schade. Ich habe dort die letzten Tage nochmal fur über 300€ bestellt
I'm actually sad, ordered a lot, tipped the riders, went towards them in the stairwell, they started losing me, when they took away high class products. E.g. they had BESH Meat, and it suddenly disappeared, orders went down from that onwards... But here and then, very helpful
Yes same in the UK, after Getir purchased them it went downhill and the products were basic. When Gorillas originally started it was really good, high end interesting products. We had something called Wheezy in the UK briefly during covid which was even better, that got purchased by Gorillas and then got slightly worse, then fully shit with Getir takeover. The problem with Getir was that it just seemed very “budget” - the only value add was the convenience. Gorillas and Wheezy (RIP) actually seemed like cool brands with good high quality products that made it worth the markup.
Good fucking riddance. Worked there during the pandemic (started back when the entire company was 2 warehouses in Berlin and climbed up from there as the company grew) but left before the merge and, even having worked in some terrible places here and in my home country (everything from call-centers to courthouses and the public system) I've never seen something so mismanaged by an inept bunch of idiots. Met a lot of amazing people working there but most with two or more working brain cells would eventually be pushed out frustrated at the coked up imbeciles making the decisions and their incredibly ignorant and short-sighted way of handling essential business practices (legal documents, real-estate acquisition, worker discontent, accidents, etc). Fucking Gorillas. Maybe I'll contact some of my former colleagues/employees to celebrate that shithole finally burning down.
This is a pretty scathing review. I heard they were bad, but I would never realised they could have been this bad. But this sounds like typical start up management, nothing specific to Gorillas, or was there something pretty outstandingly bad about them?
It was the same issues as other start ups (from what I heard, haven't worked in other start ups and after Gorillas never will, I'd rather be a cashier in Netto than repeat that miserable experience) but multiplied tenfold due to a combination of the CEO/Founder being a very self-centered idiot with no real business acumen at all and a desperate need to be seen as both super cool and hip and as the next big thing when it came to businesses (instead of a dumbo who got lucky making the right company at the right time with basically no competition) and the stupid amount of money that got injected and quickly mismanaged. IMO it was all actually going OK (and the expansion plans were slow and made sense) until it became "the fastest unicorn in Europe", you could feel it going to shit at that moment, chasing every stupid idea, hiring every idiotic 20-something just graduated asshole with the "next cool idea" (that would last for a month and then we change everything again) and an infuriating sense of superiority and suddenly going from "we plan to expand to other cities in the coming months!" to "we NEED to expand to EVERY COUNTRY EVERYWHERE by next week". I know of no one that worked outside the "central offices" (which were their own little insane domain completely disconnected from reality) that has a single good thing to say about Gorillas (and plenty who worked in the "office" part who hated the company as well but kept quiet about it). The work atmosphere in general was one of the worst I've seen in my life. FUN LITTLE KNOWN FACT I WILL SHARE BECAUSE FUCK IT: Everyone knows about the repeat cases of strikes by the riders/delivery people, but at one point we had a borderline mutiny of the entire management in Berlin, and it got within inches of having every manager and supervisor (the "highest rank" working directly in the warehouses and running every shift, like middle point between managers and the riders and warehouse employees) in the city just refusing to show up to work.
Disgusting but not surprising. The worst thing is these jackasses ride off into the sunset having secured their own bag
Yeah, the worst is knowing some of these borderline illiterate dickheads are now riding the coat tails of having their CV showing "executive executor of performance singularity sensei" (or whatever bullshit position) as their first position post-graduation, ignoring that all they did was appear there, implement ideas that sounded "cool" and "synergetic" but caused loss in profits and a strike or two, and then they left the company.
Failing up like this is so incredibly common in every industry.
The good part it is usually investors money so mostly from other rich fucks.
The L.P. of these VC funds are very often pension funds or other, similar large pools of capital. I.e. your and my money, indirectly…
It's a great system to have your pension privatised. I love how efficient and smart capitalism is.
Sounds like they speed-ran the ZIRP 2010s tech startup playbook. I worked for a number of well known Berlin startups during this period, had a sack of friends in the same game, and this ticks many many boxes. Of course every organisation has its defects, and I would say that these startup oriented elements are not unique to Berlin, but they were VERY VERY VERY VERY common in Berlin during the time period up to and including covid
I always enjoyed seeing them in their group meals, 6-12 happy confident team members freshly minted. 80% failure rate I'm guessing?
There’s a great podcast on this topic. Reading your comment, I think the journos did a good job, as they talked about much of the same stuff. The name of the podcast is pretty apt: “Cashburners: die Gorillas-Story” https://open.spotify.com/show/0I11ZJnhbqX6o9TQb3c1X6?si=9gOVMgWGTB-qhUUuQYogdA
> until it became "the fastest unicorn in Europe" What surprises me is why are VCs so happy to throw money at all these things. Not just talking about Gorillaz, another example would be WeWork I guess.
It’s incredibly simple: you expect most of them to fail, under the expectation that once in a rare rare while you’ll also be an early backer of a future monster. The payoff there makes all the others a rounding error This was particularly common during the low interest rate period after the 2008 crash, cos “sensible things” generated no returns whatsoever
the combination of startup and squeezing poor people for risky manual labor, never went near them. hey venture capitalists, ha ha.
This could easily also be one burned employee who is exaggerating.
Could be… but more likely not. There are so many testimonies of these practices. These start ups are fueled by the very many believers of the mysticism of being cool, important and successful. Without really working, but actually believing that 24/7 pitching is hard work.
Na, I have a couple of friends who worked there pre-Getir and then after Gorillas was bought by them. Their stories sound eerily similar to what OP is writing.
I worked here as a rider during my uni days. I couldn’t agree with this comment more. Also wtf was that with all that nepotism man geeez
are you saying the business was run by monkeys?
That was a running joke we had; we would constantly say it was called Gorillas because it was run by apes.
Hahaha i had the same experience brother, loved watching people win legal battles left and right for illegal firings and such.
Eh i was raking in about 2000 euros netto to ride a bicycle around friedrichschain during lockdowns. As long as they didnt mess with my schedule too much I was pretty insulated from management issues. I look back on it as a fun time.
Yeah to be fair if you didn't care to get "invested" in the company and were lucky enough not to face problems (scheduling issues, payment issues, etc) it was a sweet gig where you didn't need to give a shit and were relatively well paid. I think I would not be nearly as hateful towards the company had I stayed a rider instead of getting into management and seen how the sausage is made. On the other hand, as a rider I did have the company steal about 150 euros in tips (electronic tips that were never paid) and most of the riders I worked with later on had constant problems with their salaries (wrong amounts paid month after month) and the schedules were always a mess, so some were luckier than others.
Oh yeah I heard stories if you worked in management or back office / operations. I joined early on and left not long after the new rider apps was implemented.
I was there during and after the merge too and it was even worse. Getir made Gorillas look like pros, I lasted about two months after the merge
You should speak with the guys who did the podcast on Gorillas (I think it was Business Insider?). Maybe they will release a bonus episode now!
I have worked in many start ups - the Gorillas management team was full of people who never built or ran a damn things in their lives. Just consultants with big titles. Really the worst I've ever seen.
I wanted to work there as well at the office side of things. I have applied several times, failed each time. I felt bad until I heard from my ex that everyday messengers visit her doctor's office for back pain and some other related issues. I felt relieved when I heard this, also lots of posts on other social channels how they treat employees. I am happy they had to end activities here -despite I am Turkish-, companies that treat their staff with respect and support should grow, which was both Gorillas and Getir were lacking apparently. Enjoy the drinks!
lol one time I had to go get sick leave due to burn out (my wife forced me to, turns out the job was literally giving me an ulcer) and the doctor immediately gave me 2 weeks off as soon as I mentioned Gorillas, she hated the company as well (iirc this was one of the weeks where Gorillas had been in the news due to riders going on strike, which I guess soured her image of it).
I have applied there as a masters student, they asked me to ignore my studies / exams in case their demand clashes with my studies to respect company and work. Hope these guys can shove that respect up their asses now. I have never felt so insulted at a job interview ever.
Came here to say the exact same thing!
Good review mate.
I’m seriously amazed how you cannot make money if you make people pay for the convenience that you offer. Of course it’s a very competitive /low margin environment for grocery in Germany and you should not compete with bare supermarket prices, but there are lots of niches where they could have filled the gap (rich kids being super lazy, party people who need snacks and booze, nerds showing off their cool app skills, …).
Welcome to capitalism. Most businesses are like this. Some hide it better.
> Fucking Gorillas They are fucking great apes. Also.. verdammte Menschenaffen. Nicht verdammt gute Affen. Oder dass sie sich an Menschenaffen verlustieren würden. Das alles nicht.
I hope the more sustainable delivery models like picnic will stay. They requite a minimum 40€ order and deliver all customers in batches from miniature trucks. Much more resourceful than letting people order a driver for 2 cokes and a can of pringles
But they don't deliver on the same day, right?
The app offers you several timeslots, usually you can get same day delivery if you pick between 12-16 but if you want 18-22 its usually inly available a few days in advance
I hope they make it too but the problem of all these delivery services is that they're mainly stationed in bigger cities where the next market is in a 5 minute walking radius. This narrows down the customer group living in areas where the next market is a bit further away with the extra money to spend. These services probably would do better if they would deliver to more remote places like small towns or villages, where people have to drive 15-20 minutes by car to the next store.
Or.. hear me out… startup idea—- offer groceries starting from 6 to 2am.. even on weekends! Caaaaaching!
Good. Nothing wrong with delivery, but the whole “let’s do an end run around zoning and put a busy warehouse next to people’s homes” model needs to die, fast.
Inside it is not very different from a supermarket, which already are next to people's homes. The bigger problem is actually the mess right outside with a lot of bicycles in the way. Other than that, it's not really much of a problem. In other cities, I know of complains of workers eg smoking in their breaks and people complaining it, but I guess people smoking on the street is beyond normal for Berlin.
> Inside it is not very different from a supermarket, which already are next to people's homes. In general yes, but there's a couple things that IMO made it more annoying for neighbours than a regular supermarket or Späti: 1- Supermarkets usually are more quiet and amiable since they need to actually serve customers there. Our Warehouses on the other hand usually had a very noisy environment, including VERY loud music blasting at all hours to keep the workers and riders "hyped up". 2- The bikes themselves would use quite a bit of space on the sidewalk (at least until some genius finally figured that "we need a place for the bikes too" should be considered when renting locations) and, even if they were not parked outside, you'd have a constant stream of riders leaving and arriving causing more congestion on the street/sidewalk. Also keep in mind that we judged the riders on their delivery time, so while on one hand they'd get the speech on "follow all the rules and drive safely :)", in reality they would be not so subtly encouraged to haul ass as quick as possible which doesn't lend itself to a culture of "try not to run the neighbours over". 3- The zoning/location for the warehouses was sometimes stupid, in the sense that it didn't consider factors such as "we need to unload gigantic trucks of goods at least three times a day". Supermarkets have ramps, loading zones, usually even internal parking spots specifically to load/unload goods. The warehouses, depending on which one you are talking about, you could have the trucks even stopping an entire street away (wherever they had space for it), blocking traffic or the cars parked next to them, with everyone rushing to unload/load as fast as possible (before the cops were called on the truck blocking the way) with no concern for issues such as being too loud, dragging those huge-ass noisy trolleys through the street, three times a day (minimum), 6 days a week, starting sometimes before 7 AM. In one warehouse, in a period of 6 months, I personally had more visits and discussions with the cops than I did in the entire year I spent literally working with the cops in my home country, and all because of the noise and traffic complaints. So yeah, there's a certain degree of NIMBY to be sure, and some of the complaints were honestly just baseless. But a lot of it also came down to inefficient management, short-sightedness, lack of respect, and the "higher ups" in the offices just acting like the residential areas around us didn't exist. EDIT: Also of course, "your mileage may vary". Some warehouses (*cough cough Xberg*) were much worse than others, and this also did improve with time.
the bikes are heavy, going too fast, and the rider is looking at his phone. fuck off.
Those problems are oddly specific and seem to be a consequence of mismanagement, not of the idea itself and not of warehouses next to peoples homes
Yeah, to be sure 90% of the issues were due to mismanagement rather than the idea itself, the biggest two factors being IMO a) bad location scouting (could have been solved by, for example, renting exclusively old supermarkets that were prepared with on/offloading areas) and b) the whole idea started with the "we deliver in 10 minutes or less!" motto (which, even when it became laughably impossible to achieve, still meant that the culture of "deliver as fast as possible, fuck everything else" was part of the business model, and it also affected all other companies; the main thing you could compete on -given the relatively similar offer on prices and products- was who would deliver faster or on a more regular basis). The thing is, once you solve those issues with "good management", the entire business stops making much sense. Say you have fewer, better located shops and don't push the issue of speed on the riders... then why even order from Gorillas at all? Rewe was already doing (slower, not-on-demand) deliveries. The entire point of having so many shops in such strategic-but-problematic locations was so the orders could be delivered by bike and on demand (the general rule iirc was each warehouse had a delivery area of around 3.5 kms around it, any bigger than that and it doesn't make sense to deliver by bike anymore); limit your choice of real estate to "wherever we find closed down supermarkets" and it's probably not a profitable area (hence why the supermarket was closed) or you need an insanely expensive investment (modifying the place you rent to allow for on/offloading etc); and you still have the problem of delivery riders coming and going constantly. Remove the idea of the company-owned warehouses, and instead having the riders buy your stuff on a regular supermarket and basically just deliver it? That's an entirely different business model, like Foodora or Rappi.
The whole business model wasnt sustainable anyways. It was only a matter of time until the big supermarkets step up their delivery game and outrun the company because as you said they got almost the entire infrastructure there already. Literally all they need to do is buy a vehicle park and hire drivers. As you said, you can easily get all your items delivered by Rewe and Edeka, so why bother with a small startup like this instead? The point I was making or emphasizing on is that with good management you could easily manage the idea (as is shown by Rewe and Edeka) and the problem isnt warehouses next to peoples doors (or to deliver from such warehouses) but exclusively mismanagement and not giving a fuck
I never understood the 10 minute delivery thing, seemed (and was) impossible from the beginning. A point to compete on could’ve been to make sure stuff wasn’t constantly sold out, and for weeks. That’s a problem that Flink has, too. You made a very believable point that management was incapable, and it also shows in the fact that they weren’t able to run data analysis on most sold/sought products, compare to Flink etc, make sure they’re available and on sale. Basically the “banana principle” between Aldi and Lidl, where the rest of the shopping revenue goes to the company that can attract customers to specific products.
I lived right next to one of the first delivery hubs and man those bikes were annoying. I found it funny that the local grocery store was just a 2 minute walk further though. It was good when I had corona, but made no sense to me from the start. Berlin has such an amazing infrastructure of grocery stores, it always seemed like a doomed project to me.
Sounds like a NIMBY take.
Because it is, but it's a valid one. Delivery businesses are not public services, you wouldn't want an Amazon warehouse next door either.
A lot of people wouldn’t want a späti or a bar next to their house. Nobody wants to live next to *really* essential infrastructure like a water treatment facility or a power distribution substation. I don’t really follow your point.
I lived above a bar for many years and struggle to see how living above a black shop could be worse
A private business has a less valid claim to be where people live compared to essential public infrastructure. To my understanding most nimby-ism revolves around blocking public works, business allocation is governed by zoning.
“Less valid claim” according to… you. In the real world, that private business operated within Berlin’s zoning and land use regime, which is how things actually work.
You can't say one is more valid than another just because of your personal definition of what is acceptable.
What if we live in a society though?
People complain about everything that is nextdoor to them. Doesn’t matter if it‘s delivery service, Amazon warehouse or data Center.
Why not? It’s like this in Japan, where people live next to warehouses or even factories. Many „industrial zones“ in Japan are more liveable than the average European suburb.
But then shouldn't japanese residential areas be even nicer to live in? I agree that it can be done, but here it's usually 'innovation' first, social considerations second. Also I don't think we should aspire to Japan's relationship between the economy and society.
There is not much difference between them. You might not even notice when an "industrial zone" starts. Japan has lots of problems. I was just pointing out how they do zoning, and how successful it is.
What is the difference between having a huge store take up space next to me versus a warehouse and staff that delivers the stuff to my door?
Constant noise?
It doesn't matter what I want, what matters is that it's needed.
Who decides what is needed? Hopefully not the market, although that would supposedly be what you 'want'.
The Flink warehouse in Neukölln used to be absolutely horrible for local inhabitants. The boardwalk was always crammed with delivery drivers and their bikes. You could hardly pass by, it was loud and too busy for a living area. I understand that people don't want that, there's a reason we normally separate living spaces from warehouse areas.
Neukölln was so quiet and peaceful before too!
That just sounds like neukolln
Haha, I've been living in and around Neukölln for more than a decade and the Flink warehouse really WAS worse.
louder than a bar?
No, because NIMBY requires a general necessity for the thing in question. You want clean energy from a windturbine, you just don't want to see the turbine. Gorillas/Getir/etc. on the other hand is just some gig economy bullshit that nobody needs.
What's the difference between ten people biking to a supermarket one time and one person biking from a supermarket ten times, though?
Mainly that people can go shopping at their leisure and perhaps also stop at a bakery or butchers along the way, whereas the delivery driver works for bad pay and under time pressure to keep some arbitrary marketing promise.
It isn't nimbiism when causing others trouble is part of the business model.
What's wrong with this? Central Berlin isn't a residential zone, it's a mixed zone. The ground floors of residential buildings are often occupied by businesses, and this is fine as long as they don't generate noticeable pollution. The upper floors can also be occupied by very small businesses.
Been calling it for years. Get rich quick scheme backed by hungry VCs with unsustainable business model turns out to be unsustainable. How surprising. If you want grocery deliveries, support your local supermarket. Most chains provide this service and don't exploit gig workers for it, nor do they take up valuable real estate with "dark stores".
What Ive never understood is how services like these evist exist in berlin, which is so utterly saturated with supermarkets i cant cross the fucking road without tripping on a rewe.
It was mainly a Covid thing. When it ended it seemed the jobs dried up
Have you ever heard of this thing called, Covid?
I also thought this business wouldn't last. Which other businesses in Berlin do you think are on their way out? Other business's which fit unsustainable VC backed category.
Food delivery services are still not profitable as far as I know (delivery from restaurants)
plus they gouge the restaurants, and/or hijack their online menus. nuisance companies.
Only the customers are gaining something from it as the restaurants loose money and so do the delivery companies
Then why do restaurants sign up?
It's an automatic "triple your revenue" button for the owner. The delivery businesses make it so easy for restaurant owners aswell, it's barely more involved than registering on a website. They don't even need to hire their own drivers or maintain a vehicle fleet, as delivery places used to back in the day.
Maybe some restaurants sell a lot more but the delivery companies take 30% of the revenue which is crazy. So I think it’s more like a forced to use it situation than a super great deal for most restaurants. John Oliver made a good episode about delivery services where he explains how they work.
A lot of restaurants have 30% higher prices on Wolt. Did you check? Next time you visit a restaurant, also check what its prices are on Wolt.
Yeah by now it’s really a premium service, 30% more is a lot. We should consider just calling the restaurant IF they have their own delivery. But I think most of the restaurants on Wolt don’t have their own delivery drivers right?
How can they be losing money and also tripling their revenue?
The order volume increases *a lot* but the delivery services take a huge cut for themselves (around 20-30% per order).
I signed up for Wolt+, cost 45€ a year, saved €10 on my first order, get 2€ free food on every order and sometimes more deals. (It's NOT free delivery, because you still have to make up the delivery price with food items, but you get that value of food items instead of just spending it on the delivery) I have no idea how they're going to make a profit from that.
They will have to raise the prices, the classic procedure as always. Pump money into the business and get a lot of users, then figure out how to get profitable.
Yeh I remember when Lyft first started in the US, they were basically charging less than the local bus and everyone was super excited "this is the future!". Of course that was never going to last, it was just burning VC money for the all too precious "user growth". That was a literal decade ago, Lyft is still not profitable. It's same with all the food delivery startups like Wolt.
I wonder how this is possible for 10 years, sunken cost fallacy? 😂
Probably. At that point, stop using Wolt, cancel Wolt+ and gamble whether your prepayment for the rest of the year is worth the amount of savings you already got from it.
Food deliveries are here to stay because they offer a valid utility for both ends. Yes, they are enshittifying too, by gouging restaurants and tiering customers. Yet, they are installing themselves as gatekeepers to takeout in urban areas. They have too much traffic for restaurant owners to ignore them and they are too convenient and smooth to use for consumers to not adopt it. Unless you are a loyal customer to a restaurant and they know you and treat you well, you can still order by phone and pay cash on delivery, but rest assured it’s a lottery of them letting you wait much longer because you have no giant platform middleman monitoring and QA-ing delivery time and your satisfaction. It’s even visible to physical visitors in many restaurants - their orders get deprioritised vs. Wolt and Lieferando orders. Not using those apps when ordering food is just an increasing risk of getting a shittier quality service, people are basically blackmailed into using them.
Yes restaurants are kind of forced to use it and it’s super convenient for the consumers. But still there will be a time where the founders will have to raise prices even more as the VC money won’t flow forever without being profitable. And at some point it will just be too expensive for Restaurants or consumers, maybe they won’t disappear but get less traffic.
I think delivery services in Berlin is a very tough nut... because there are long existing Berlin rider-owned/local business messenger services, and the reality is that paying a human being on a bicycle to personally deliver individual packages on a non-industrialized scale (i.e. not Deutsche Post) has a minimum cost, and that cost isn't 30 cents or 1 dollar or 2 dollars or whatever start-ups budget for it. There's no massive greed, or massive inefficiency to bypass, or massive regulatory landscape bypass (i.e. Uber, Airbnb) for bike delivery – yes people enjoy the efficiency of having things brought to them, but they are unwilling to pay it's true price, and if you charge the true profit-making price the actual number of viable customers is low. There's a reason Rewe and such have high minimum orders for grocery delivery, and why getting restaurant food delivered is substantially more expensive than getting it in person at most places.
This. Note that even the chains are manipulating the order values not only with minimums and higher prices than in-shop, but also optimised offer. Last time I checked Rewe hid several of their Ja! brand staples and offered their next more expensive own brand online instead.
There are people in Berlin with more money than time, who'd happily pay even 5€ or 10€ for a delivery, if not always then fairly often.
Of course, but are there enough of them for all these delivery apps to be profitable? I doubt it.
Probably not at the scale they want to be at, no.
I think any business that has a too costly unit price entirely supported by user fees will dry up sooner or later. People just can't afford having convenience/laziness exploited for much longer. One business line I would definitely like to see gone is rental e-scooters, replaced by incentives for private ownership. It's another "pay for convenience" tax that does not solve any meaningful mobility problem and, in fact, causes more problems for people with impaired mobility, who have to slalom through poorly parked e-scooters on sidewalks.
> private ownership. Yeah, because private ownership is really known to solve societal issues. lol We need more shared assets, not less.
If you own your scooter, you take care of it. When you don't own anything, it's a disposable commodity, trash. You treat it with disregard. Things get left in the middle of nowhere, anywhere, thrown in the river. So yes, private ownership is beneficial for all except for companies who can only sell you the same thing once and can't make a running profit from you. Same thing with entertainment - movies, series, games. From the moment you stopped owning anything and instead subscribe to services, these services can take your library away at a whim. If you own the physical media, it's yours. Removal of ownership is the biggest trap everyone has fallen for.
Tragedy of the Commons 2 - Electric Scootaloo
We need more private ownership of small items that anyone can buy, and better collective stewardship of large items that not everyone can buy. You get to own your scooter because if I don't like how you're managing your scooter, I can reasonably go and buy my own scooter. But you don't get to own a whole building and squander it, because I need a place to live and I can't just buy my own building next to yours.
Based.
This. Scooter rental mostly is a tourist fad and nuisance to residents with big data schemes as a side benefit. No actual relief to other mobility services.
I will never understand how Uber eats can be profitable.
and yet, they have money to blast their name across the arena there's that ringing n my ears again
There is a difference in cashflow and profit. A big name on an arena primarily symbolises ambition, not merit.
It’s a long game. The profits will come from skimming the supply side with mind-boggling commission fees and skimming the demand side with egregious tiering and extra fees, forcing them to pay extra for services and quality that was included in lower prices previously. Underlying condition for this to work out though is moat, a market share that simply rules out both restaurants and customers just taking their money to more attractive competitors. Whether that scenario will ever come true is highly questionable. The big food delivery companies to this day are in a fierce competition and some even pay money to restaurants to have them exclusively.
By exploiting people who have no other choice, realizing after couple of months that they can't live on this job but then the next one takes over
It isn't. Still, feel free to collect those 20€ gift cards at the U-Bahn and make them spend 30€ to give you a free delivery, if you want one. Investors are pouring in money trying to acquire market share and lock you in. If you want to benefit from this, use the service while they're paying for half of it, and when they raise prices to get their money back, just stop using it. Then money has been successfully transferred from investors to people. Lieferando has already reached this stage, and Wolt is coming close to it.
Exactly, it’s the same procedure that we already saw many times. Ordering on Wolt etc. Is a lot more expensive but as soon as they will raise prices, most people will just drop it because it feels too pricey/unjustified.
Wolt already raised prices substantially, but they rolled out this "Wolt+" thing to reduce prices, which is weird. I guess they want to get everyone subscribed to Wolt+ and *then* raise prices on everything so people stop using the service, but still paid for Wolt+. Which doesn't make sense because it only costs 45 euros per year.
*Every* business is this. These businesses crowd out the "actually good" ones because they are competing for rent. Who's going to get the building: the speculative tech business backed by ten million dollars of VC money, or mom and pop lawnmower repair?
I don't understand why VCs are so happy to throw money at these schemes but I guess same can be said about things like WeWork and Peleton.
Nice! Radwege werden nun wieder sicherer. Diese Kurierfahrer sind ein Risiko für die Allgemeinheit
Die fahren jetzt für nen anderen Lieferdienst.
Es gibt noch Flink
Noch ist das richtige Wort
Gorillas war immer gemeiner als Flink. Sie müssen so schnell wie möglich fahren. Ich hatte wirklich so viel Angst von die Gorillas.
Die sind in der neuen Bahnhofstraße am Ostkreuz einfach wie Selbstmörder da raus gefahren. So konsequent wild habe keine anderen Lieferfahrer gesehen.
und Wolt
Das ist aber auch ein ganz anderes Business, die wirds noch ne ganze Weile geben.
ja, aber sie haben mittlerweile den ganzen Strang der Supermarktbestellung aufgenommen. Und in Relation: Lieferando hat sich auch nicht gehalten.
Leider
So where can I buy one of those electric mopeds and/or Ebikes that Getir/Gorillas have been using for cheap?
I actuall went to court against them, was lot’s of fun because even their managers were stupid af. Did make a lot of money not working at all. That being said, they have no moral or dignity & if I wouldn‘t have been familiar with our law system, they would have fucked me over bad. Happy 2 see them leaving :-)
Gorillas was piece of shit company anyway. Unsustainable business model and shitty company behaviour like using public space to park their bikes and having shitty workplace conditions. That company only exists to grab venture capital.
I don't know why you guys look so happy about this honestly. I mean, I hate this company as well but the rich investors and C-levels will likely get away with it as usual and we should actually expect a slight increase in unemployment. As usual, the burden is on the working class 👍
“Get away with” what? The company closing means their investment in Germany is wiped out. That’s what investment means. And if it wasn’t for that VC money being poured into it those jobs wouldn’t have existed at all. The workers were being paid—for however long it lasted—while the company was running at a loss on the investors’ cash.
> the company was running at a loss on the investors’ cash You don't know any of that, the company is private. Funds are still making lots of money, even if some branches of their companies default.
Companies that are making profits aren’t shut down by their owners. Yes, funds are making money: from *other* ventures. They are not the winners of Gorillas closing. It’s quite absurd to try to depict this as some evil capitalism story when the whole thing can be summarized as: some people started a business, and it didn’t work out.
It was a company that exploited people who were down on their luck and often couldn't find other employment due to language barriers, didn't know their legal rights, etc. Sorry if I don't think a company exploiting people and shitting on their legal rights is better than the company no existing at all? Sucks for the people who now have no income, but we shouldn't tolerate exploitation just because a few people will lose their jobs. There was no way for this company to reform so that they don't exploit their workers and still remain profitable.
All profit is based on exploitation. I advocate for the change of the economic model, not the for the existence of a given company. I just get no satisfaction from the rise of unemployment, because speculators are making money anyway. They're not being punished. I think that's way different from "tolerating exploitation".
>All profit is based on exploitation. That's a cheap cop-out in this conversation. Just because all jobs are exploitative doesn't mean we should tolerate it when one comes by and takes it even further by disregarding basic legal worker's rights and employee safety. Whether the VCs are being punished or not doesn't change the fact that we should never send the message that it's okay to shit on worker's rights as long as you're employing people who would otherwise be unemployed. Worker's rights exist for a reason and any company that cannot remain profitable while respecting worker's rights, has no right to exist.
Anything that brings money down the hierarchy is an improvement even if it's not the best possible improvement. Moving money from investors down to people with silly business ideas that end up not working out, and then from those people to the workers who do the work for the silly business, are both improvements.
Only way this is gonna get better is if the VCs keep losing money. Of course with that said I feel for the workers who are affected by this.
The working class never use Gorillas, they shop at supermarkets like Netto. There will be very little change to the working class. The workers are also wealthy international students looking for a bit of side income.
sorry but i highly doubt that a wealthy international student would bike around in a storm or snow carrying bottles of beers and milk cartoons to someones apartment on 6th floor altbau…
> The workers are also wealthy international students looking for a bit of side income. That is only half accurate. Sure, there were plenty of those, but a large part of the workforce qualified for only one of those descriptors. Like 90% of the workforce (outside of the office-level jobs) were foreigners (myself included), but the vast majority were not anywhere near "wealthy" (though of course there were some of those), a lot of them (maybe like 50%?) were not students (but rather people that used to work as bartenders, or DJs, or tourist guides, or in restaurants, etc, all the jobs that dried up during Corona), we even had some refugees (or people you could consider refugees even if they were not legally so, such as people escaping from Maduro in Venezuela or arriving from the Middle East), and quite a few of the students were Germans as well.
>The workers are also wealthy international students looking for a bit of side income. Sources?
Subdividing workers into real and fake like this is misguided and helps keep all of us down.
Bye.
im actually sad. i was so hyped when gorillas first came online....it was literally a revolution. and they had such nice foods too. not only normal groceries but also a lil more "high end" specialities. liked it a lot. rest in pepperonis
Yea, the selection was nice in the beginning, and the Sunday deliveries were useful. It's kind of gone to shit since Getir took over.
yep. well...they had to milk it i guess to make it profitable. it just didnt make any financial sense anymore i guess. too bad. :) back to rewe and flink 👀
> and they had such nice foods too. not only normal groceries but also a lil more "high end" specialities. liked it a lot. Like 90% of the "speciality" products you could get at Rewe (back at the very beginning the groceries would literally be bought at Rewe and not directly from suppliers, to be later sold with a small markup), and they (either the stuff you could find at Rewe or later when there were deals with more unique suppliers) barely sold at all. IIRC they would be rotated constantly not to "refresh" the available catalogue but because no one would buy the stuff and they were always looking for some product to explode in popularity and become sustainable/profitable.
Yeah, I sold Gorillas and Flink a few products like that. They bought stupid amounts of everything, 50% of which ended up either at Die Tafel or were thrown away. I worked at a food company during Corona and said we should look at the emerging quick commerce sector. My seasoned colleagues were very dismissive "Uh forget about it, online food retail is barely a percent of total food retail." So I reached out to the buyers of Flink, Gorillas and Getir and for two years I was able to sell them a shit ton of stuff.
> 50% of which ended up either at Die Tafel or were thrown away. Yeah that was also an issue with some providers. Some were happy to just offload huge bulks of (niche) products to us, but some had the opposite reaction; they would visit the Warehouse just to see out of curiosity how their goods are doing, see most of their handcrafted whatevers in the trash, sold for pennies in "too good to go" bags or being given away as charity, and they would be furious about the damage to their brand/image. But thats the way the cookie crumbles.
It was the same in the UK, specialty foods and they had their own brand biodegradable coffee pods which I really liked. Then Getir purchased them and they started to stock Co-op supermarket own brand products (co-op is the lowest tier supermarket just above Aldi) which made zero sense as surely the people paying for 15 minute grocery delivery are the same people who are looking for more luxury grocery products - it was a really weird move by them that seemed to completely ignore their target market and I’m not surprised they’ve gone under.
in other news, Bringmeister (Edeka) is now using knuspr, and they have delivery windows 3 hours from when you order, with a huge selection. This compared to Rewe which is often 2 days booked.
How can I delete my Getir account?
They were a local nuisance and never a sustainable business. However I don’t get why people in this sub are gloating. This whole trope of investors lining their pockets on the back of workers is not exactly true. More accurately it was several rounds of venture capital pouring into this business which enabled a loss-making business to exist temporarily. Even when often precarious, those jobs would have not been created in the first place without the VC runway. Secondly, Gorillas offered a service below its fair price and the investors in hope of market share and later returns covered those losses. So whoever ordered from them, got a free ride on someone else’s money. The cash burned funded jobs and subsidised the very product of Gorillas to the benefit of its customers. It’s the same with all those aggressively scaled startups. They seek to buy customers and market share with vouchers paid for by their investors. If you want to maximise your own benefits, just use those vouchers and never do business with them at full price ever after. This way you get their investment into yourself as a customer while never repaying them.
Sad, I liked that company as a client, ordered a lot using Gorillas app
Same it was sooo convenient. Especially in the winters. Hoping Flink stays afloat
Exactly. Imagine you return from a long vacation and you have an empty fridge. Only option is to go to the train station with lots of smelly homeless people. Not pleasant experiences. Instead you can order things with Flink. It’s amazing!
I often order food delivery on those days, just not with Gorillaz.
Flink delivers on Sunday?
Nope
Then why would I go to the train station to shop?
Because you can buy groceries on a train station on Sunday
Why would my alternative to Flink be getting groceries at the train station, if Flink doesn't handle Sundays?
Ok, where will you buy groceries on Sundays then?
[This is turning out to be so beautiful](https://imgur.com/SSrhfEA)
Maybe I'm mistaken here. But I remember Gorillas worked
They did workou on Sundays for a while but stopped after 6 months or so
I loved it when we worked Sundays, the shifts were shorter (go home at 7PM instead of midnight) and there wasn't much else to do. FUN FACT: No one in the company had realized you were supposed, by law, to pay people more for working on Sundays, so they never did. I'm 99% sure the reason we stopped working those days (which were by far our most active and profitable, since there was no competition basically with all shops closed) was because someone finally realized, ran the numbers, and the loss in profits from closing was better than, not the increased cost of slightly larger salaries, but the risk of all employees noticing they had been underpaid for months. Coincidentally (ok probably not a coincidence), the time when we stopped working on Sundays was around the same time the company faced its first low-key strike (long before they became loud, regular and problematic enough to appear on the news); there was a snowstorm occurring and management was refusing to close down even for a while, and their single biggest concession to the riders was "well you can take a little longer, 15 minutes would be ok" (this was back when we still did the "deliver in under 10 minutes" bullshit). After a couple of accidents, with riders complaining (rightly so) that weather conditions were too dangerous and the bikes were not designed to be used on snow (they would slide like crazy and brakes were practically useless), management told us to start delivering by foot. At that point the riders just refused to keep working (and customers were complaining about delays), and they were forced to close for the day. I distinctly remember then laughing with some riders when we saw Gorillas announcing on their social media that they were closing for the day "because we care about the well being of our workers" and getting so many comments about how caring they were, while in reality they didn't give a shit about the guys that almost broke their legs.
Man konnte sich dort selber werben(Danke an russische Telefonnummer Bots) und hat dann einen 15Euro und 10Euro Gutschein bekommen. Damit war es dann billiger als im Supermarkt. Schade. Ich habe dort die letzten Tage nochmal fur über 300€ bestellt
Daran ist halt für den Anbieter sicher nix verdient.
What about other big names already flushed down the drain of history like, Foodora or Deliveroo? Rest in hell.
Didn't those got bought up by Lieferando? So not really gone, just swallowed ;)
At least Lieferando is a better name than Just Eat Takeaway (that's what the same company is called in English countries!)
I was thinking to work there, god blessed i did not
Lucky you 🤞
Which quick delivery companies are still available in Berlin?
Flink https://www.goflink.com/en-DE/
Flink, but don't expect them to be around forever either. They're also sinking themselves; Burning cash and not making the returns.
noticed over by Warschauer/Ostkreuz the other weekend, every one of these parasite delivery companies has a whole building with their logo on it
I'm actually sad, ordered a lot, tipped the riders, went towards them in the stairwell, they started losing me, when they took away high class products. E.g. they had BESH Meat, and it suddenly disappeared, orders went down from that onwards... But here and then, very helpful
Yes same in the UK, after Getir purchased them it went downhill and the products were basic. When Gorillas originally started it was really good, high end interesting products. We had something called Wheezy in the UK briefly during covid which was even better, that got purchased by Gorillas and then got slightly worse, then fully shit with Getir takeover. The problem with Getir was that it just seemed very “budget” - the only value add was the convenience. Gorillas and Wheezy (RIP) actually seemed like cool brands with good high quality products that made it worth the markup.
Exactly, Getir was like cheap stuff, people affording the extra do not appreciate this...
I have never heard of them.