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So it's interesting. These appear to be pre-made items (limited selection each day). As far as I can tell, it's only $3 per delivery, no matter how many items you order. And the listed prices look competitive, though I couldn't find a restaurant that had any of the Uber items on the actual menu. I'm assuming they are custom specials.

I've used and liked Favor, but once you add in a tip, and pay their percentage, it can get expensive quick ($5 per, plus 5% plus 20% or so for tip). So that can be $7.50 in delivery charges for a $10 sandwich. The upside is that anything can be ordered custom.

Does anyone know the logistics? For example, are the drivers stocked with inventory in their cars to avoid returning often to the restaurant? Do food delivery drivers ever also pick up passengers?

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Ike's Menage-a-trois is $12.21 on menu, which is actually $1.21 more than Uber (although comes with chips, so that evens out).

As far as logistics, I would bet dollars to dimes there are drivers with a large stock of all/many of the items; having them return to a restaurant ad hoc for each order would make this financially unworkable. Sprig, Bento, and Rocketspoon all work this way -- drivers are simply given a next destination to go to and dish out in-car inventory.

It's a good interview question. Here's how I would answer it:

At scale there would be drivers dedicated to filling up at only one restaurant, and then delivering to multiple customers before refilling. The more popular restaurants would have a multiple drivers, leaving every N orders. Less popular restaurants would be grouped geographically to "share" one driver who would alternate food-pickup between the two restaurants on schedule.

In NYC, all the uber eats "drivers" are either on bikes or on foot. They usually have a hot storage bag and a cold storage one, and they're stocked with all the items available for the daily menu. Pretty good experience, generally, though I've found the caviar fast bite experience to be generally better (it's exactly the same idea as Uber eats, they partner with many of the same restaurants, same delivery model).

The Austin menu is really strange. Gordoughs, our famous blow-your-gut Donut burger place has one item available and it's not even a burger. It's a tiny dessert item. I use Favor, Eat24, etc all the time. If the menu is this minimal I doubt I'll ever use uberEATS.

the difference is delivery times though -- uberEATS / caviar fastbite and friends deliver in < 10 minutes