Waitr

» see waitrapp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Chris Meaux started Waitr in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 2013, and picked up his technical co-founders at a Startup Weekend in Gainesville that October. The company moved to Lafayette in 2016. The strategy was the opposite of the one every delivery startup in San Francisco was running: instead of fighting for the biggest cities, sign up every restaurant in the small Gulf Coast towns that nobody in Silicon Valley could name, and be the only app in them.

For a few years it worked well enough to look like a real business. Tilman Fertitta, who owns the Landry's restaurant group and the Houston Rockets, took Waitr public through his Landcadia Holdings shell in 2018 in a reverse takeover valued at 308 million dollars. Two months later the company bought Bite Squad of Minneapolis for 321 million, roughly doubling its size and putting it into a lot of cities where it was no longer the only app.

That was the top. Even after the acquisition, Waitr held about 3 percent of the US food delivery market, and the other 97 percent belonged to companies with more money than it would ever raise. Small-city delivery has a hard ceiling underneath it: the orders are thin and far apart, and the fee a customer in a town of forty thousand will tolerate is no larger than the fee in Manhattan.

~ the dossier ~

~ the spac ~

Going public through a blank-check company in 2018 got Waitr its 308 million dollar headline without the scrutiny of a real IPO. It also got the company a share price that could be read as a verdict every afternoon, on top of the debt taken on to pay for Bite Squad. Within a year the stock had lost most of its value and the write-downs on the acquisition were larger than anything the delivery business was earning.

The end position was more than 80 million dollars of liabilities against a revenue line that had been shrinking for four straight years.

~ the drivers ~

Waitr's early selling point to restaurants was that its drivers were employees rather than gig contractors, which made the service more reliable and made it far more expensive to run. In 2019 the company reversed that, converting the model and letting roughly 2,300 drivers go in the process. The reliability argument went with them.

The office side went in stages after that. A WARN notice filed with the Louisiana Workforce Commission in January 2023 covered more than fifty jobs in Lafayette alone.

~ paying to lose the name ~

In January 2022 the company stopped being Waitr and became ASAP, as part of a 4.7 million dollar settlement with Waiter.com, which had sued over the name. So a company already losing a fight for attention paid millions of dollars to give up the only word its customers recognized. The rebrand came with a pivot toward delivering cannabis, which is a thing you try when the core business has stopped growing.

Seen from Turkey the whole arc is strange, because ordering dinner from a website was not new here at any point in it. Yemeksepeti had been taking orders in Istanbul since 2001, and by the time Waitr was founded in a Louisiana town, phoning a restaurant was already the old-fashioned option for a Turkish city dweller. Delivery Hero paid 589 million dollars for Yemeksepeti in 2015, three years before Fertitta's shell company put a comparable number on Waitr.

~ the last delivery ~

ASAP announced on 30 March 2024 that it was ceasing operations, and on 2 April Waitr Holdings filed for Chapter 7 liquidation along with every subsidiary. Not a restructuring, not a sale of the app to somebody cheaper: the straight liquidation chapter, where a trustee sells what is left and the company stops. Management blamed lower order volumes in a highly competitive delivery market, which was accurate as far as it went.

The restaurants in Lake Charles and Lafayette still get deliveries. They get them from the two companies that were always going to be there, on terms set in California, from an app that has never heard of the place.

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