My inbox this week contained two seemingly unrelated data points. The first was a thoughtful newsletter meditating on how the culture of dining out is being systematically hollowed out by the convenience of food delivery. The second was a terse government filing from Washington state announcing the permanent closure of an Amazon delivery contractor, JARDE LLC, and the termination of its 110 employees.
Most would see these as separate stories—one a cultural lament, the other a local business failure. But they aren't separate. They are two outputs from the same equation. Both the neighborhood bistro and the local logistics contractor are nodes in a network architected by a handful of massive platforms. And my analysis suggests the foundational premise of that network is the transfer of all meaningful risk from the platform to the node.
Let’s first examine the restaurant space. The narrative we’ve been sold is one of technological salvation. Platforms like DoorDash and Uber Eats were positioned as lifelines, particularly during the pandemic, connecting shuttered kitchens with hungry customers. The initial data looked like a win-win. But we are now far enough along to see the second- and third-order effects, and the picture is far less symbiotic.
The key statistic, cited from How Delivery Ate the Restaurant, is staggering: nearly three out of every four restaurant orders are now consumed off-premises. Think about that. The core function of a restaurant—hospitality, ambiance, the shared experience—has been relegated to a minority of its business. The dining room, once the heart of the operation, is now an underperforming asset. One restaurateur’s quote sums up the brutal inversion: “Delivery saved us during the pandemic. Now they are killing us.”
This is what Derek Thompson identified years ago as “convenience maximalism”—the relentless optimization for ease and speed, irrespective of the collateral costs. The platforms, fueled by billions in venture capital, didn't just offer a service; they fundamentally rewired consumer expectations. We now expect pizza delivery or pad thai to arrive with the same transactional efficiency as a package from a warehouse.
This shift has turned restaurants into something else entirely. They are becoming ghost kitchens with storefronts, their chefs engineering meals not for the palate but for the 30-minute journey in a thermal bag. The restaurant, once a place of community, is being reformatted into a fulfillment center. It’s a distributed network of production units whose primary interface with the customer is a third-party app. What happens when you no longer own the customer relationship, the menu presentation, or the delivery experience? You become a supplier, a contractor. And contractors are, by definition, replaceable.
This brings us to the WARN notice filed in Washington (a document intended to give notice of mass layoffs). JARDE LLC, an Amazon Delivery Service Partner (DSP), ceased operations on October 31st. The owner, Joseph Otte, stated the closure was due to an “unforeseen and unexpected termination of our service contract by Amazon Logistics.”
I've looked at hundreds of these filings and platform agreements, and the phrase "unforeseen and unexpected" is what I find genuinely puzzling. From a systemic perspective, this outcome is anything but. The entire DSP model is built on this exact precarity. Amazon offloads the immense capital costs of a last-mile delivery network—the vans, the insurance, the direct employment of drivers—onto hundreds of small businesses like JARDE. These businesses get to use Amazon’s branding and technology, but they operate on thin margins and exist entirely at the pleasure of the platform.
The DSP is a shock absorber for Amazon. If demand fluctuates, if a route becomes unprofitable, or if a contractor fails to meet the algorithm's unforgiving metrics, the platform can simply sever the contract. Amazon sheds the liability with minimal friction, leaving the DSP owner to deal with the liquidated assets and the 110 newly created delivery jobs that just vanished. The risk is not shared; it is outsourced.
This is the exact same model we see with food near me delivery. The restaurant bears the risk of rising food costs, kitchen staff, and rent. DoorDash bears none of it. The restaurant pays a commission of up to 30%—to be more exact, often between 15% and 30%—for the privilege of accessing a customer base the platform now controls. It's like a landlord who not only takes a cut of your sales but can also change the locks at any time. How can any small business build a sustainable future on such a foundation?
The JARDE LLC closure isn't an anomaly. It is the model functioning as designed. It’s the physical manifestation of the same force gutting restaurants: a system that presents itself as a partnership while operating with the brutal logic of a prime contractor shedding a subcontractor. Whether you’re packing a meal into a paper bag or a parcel into a blue van, the underlying dynamic is identical. You are a variable component in a system optimized for the platform’s resilience, not yours.
Ultimately, what we are witnessing is not the failure of individual businesses, but the success of a specific business model. The "convenience" we purchase through these apps is a subsidized commodity. Its true cost is paid for by the evaporated margins of a local pizzeria, the shattered business of a logistics entrepreneur, and the precarious wages of the drivers connecting the two. The platforms have become the new middlemen, brilliantly positioning themselves as essential infrastructure while assuming almost none of the associated risk. They’ve built empires not on making things, but on creating and controlling the marketplace where things are exchanged. The question is no longer whether this model is efficient—it clearly is. The question is what will be left when it’s done extracting its value.
