In the first-ever season of Sesame Street , in 1970, cast member Bob McGrath appeared in a memorable sketch where he receives a delivery from his local grocer, a grumpy blue muppet. “Did you get everything I ordered?” McGrath asks. “No,” comes the reply, but he’s helpfully supplemented the delivery with other fresh veggies. McGrath breaks into song, a version of the now iconic “People in Your Neighborhood,” to explain to kids the role a grocer plays in the community. The grocer is the bearer of sustenance. A few weeks ago, during Super Bowl LV, “People in Your Neighborhood” got remixed into an anthem for the app-based delivery platform DoorDash to signal to the world that it is expanding from restaurants to convenience and grocery. In a crisp 60 seconds, a tap dancing Daveed Diggs ( Hamilton )—directed by French auteur Michel Gondry ( Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind )—wanders through a hyperrealized Sesame Street urbanscape with Big Bird, Elmo, and Super Grover, pointing out all the great local businesses. His message: Your neighborhood is a bounty of bakeries, grocery stores, restaurants, and smoothie stalls. And in 2021, DoorDash is the bearer of sustenance. For DoorDash, its Super Bowl bet paid off. It informed tens of millions of viewers that DoorDash could bring them everything from both “big shops and mom and pops,” as Diggs crooned. It told investors that the company had a strategic plan to live up to and grow into its lofty valuation. Finally, it put a happy face on what’s a highly challenging, cutthroat business which has yet to produce a successful company built to last. The ad may have cost somewhere north of $10 million to produce and air, including a $1 million donation to Sesame Workshop, but DoorDash’s market cap increased by $10 billion, to more than $65 billion, in the 10 days after the ad debuted. For almost all of DoorDash’s seven-plus years, two things about the company have been true: It has aspired to be a logistics company that did more than restaurant delivery—one of the first articles ever written about the startup, in March 2014, was headlined ‘DoorDash enters food-delivery fray with much grander ambitions’—and it’s been controversial as it’s pursued those dreams. It has been accused of “ swiping “delivery driver tips, and restaurants have sued it for listing their eateries on its platform without their consent. DoorDash has also fielded complaints from the restaurants it aims to serve for taking too fat a slice of their revenues. Finally, it took part in a $200 million-plus campaign last year to convince Californians to legalize the use of contract labor in delivery, via ballot Proposition 22, thereby preventing workers from attaining the protections that come with employee status. So when DoorDash went public just over two months ago and stock-market investors bid the company’s shares up to 92% higher than its IPO price on its first day, the fervor, which valued the company almost four-times higher than its last private fundraising in June 2020, only further stoked the debate around DoorDash.
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If DoorDash wins, what do we lose?