Map
Which system each fact comes from, who owns it, and how fresh it is at 23:00:00 CEST.
Markets in this world
world preset europe: shaped after a European delivery-integration platform, with a UAE arm · clock CEST
Public knowledge
- EUR and GBP at the fixed demo rates 1 EUR = 4.27118 AED and 1 GBP = 4.88443 AED (canon/fx.py), so 1 GBP is about 1.14 EUR; the AED is pegged to the US dollar.
- Belgium and Spain keep Central European Time (CEST, UTC+2 in summer), the UK British Summer Time (BST, UTC+1), the UAE Gulf Standard Time (GST, UTC+4, no daylight saving). The world clock is Brussels time.
- Europe goes back to winter time in the night of Sun (in 9 days), after this world ends (Fri 23:00). Brussels, Madrid and London change at the same instant, so their offsets from the world clock never move; the UAE would go from 2 to 3 hours ahead of it. Over the whole history (93 days to Fri) every market keeps one offset: London 1 hour behind, Madrid level, Dubai 2 hours ahead.
- VAT: Belgium 6% on delivered and collected food (12% on meals served at the table, 21% on drinks), UK 20% on hot food, Spain 10%, UAE 5%. All four markets rest on Saturday and Sunday.
- Deliveroo takes restaurant orders in Belgium, the UK and the UAE; Glovo, based in Barcelona, is a large delivery app in Spain; Talabat, Noon and Keeta deliver in the UAE. Restaurants also take orders on their own website or app and by phone.
- Lightspeed, Toast, Square, Zonal, Tiller and Revo sell restaurant POS in Europe (Zonal mostly to UK pubs and restaurants, Revo from Spain); Oracle Simphony is common in large hotels; Foodics and Syrve sell to UAE restaurants. Epson and Star sell receipt printers; Odoo and Apicbase (both Belgian), SAP and Microsoft Dynamics are back-office systems restaurants use.
- Stuart and Gophr run on-demand courier delivery for businesses in the UK; Paack delivers for online shops in Spain; Deliveroo Express (formerly Signature) and Glovo On-Demand send a restaurant's own orders with the app's riders; Lyve, Jeebly, Quiqup and Talabat Express do this in the UAE.
- City and neighbourhood names and their approximate centres are public geography.
- The UAE part (Dubai and Abu Dhabi, its apps, POS vendors and dispatch fleets) is the gulf preset's UAE with far fewer stores.
Assumed
- Every share and probability: which apps a store is listed on and how its demand splits (Belgium: Deliveroo 56%, Other marketplace 38%, a local app 6%; UK: Deliveroo 60%, Other marketplace 40%; Spain: Glovo 66%, Other marketplace 34% of aggregator demand where listed); POS, printer, KDS, ERP and dispatch shares; the cuisine mix.
- The second marketplace in Belgium, the UK and Spain is a generic 'Other marketplace', not a named brand; its share and commission are guesses.
- The Belgian channel called Local app is a stand-in for a third, smaller app (6% of app demand), not a named company.
- Which vendor sells where: Lightspeed in all three European markets, Tiller in Belgium and Spain, Toast only in the UK, Square in the UK and Spain; Oracle on some large restaurants as well as hotels; Paack carrying restaurant orders (it mostly carries parcels); Deliveroo Express as the only dispatch fleet in Belgium.
- Commission ranges and menu mark-ups per app, the order volume per store, and the number of stores per city (London 1,300, Manchester 420, Birmingham 380; Brussels 620, Antwerp 360, Ghent 220; Madrid 520, Barcelona 430, Valencia 200; Dubai 180, Abu Dhabi 70).
- Price levels are set so the average delivered order (app and own ordering, VAT included) lands near 25 EUR in Belgium and Spain and 22 GBP in the UK; menus come from the shared cuisine catalogue converted at the price level, so single items can look cheap or dear for a given city.
- One VAT rate per market: Belgium's 6% is also applied to dine-in orders in this world.
- The hourly order curves (local time; Belgium: lunch 12:00-13:00, dinner peak 19:00-20:00; UK: dinner 19:00-21:00; Spain: lunch 14:00, dinner 21:00-23:00), the Friday-evening lift before the weekend and the summer dips.
- Vendor version numbers, install weights, error rates and token lifetimes, Fresh KDS as the kitchen display, the Lightspeed 5.15.1 release regression, tonight's Deliveroo outage in the UK, the Glovo outage in Spain on Sun, the Deliveroo double-submit day and every other incident are invented.
- Platform fees (subscription, per-order and setup) are the platform's AED list prices converted at the fixed rate, not a European price list.
- Merchant, brand-group and hotel names come from the shared name parts, which lean Gulf (brand groups such as 'Al Marri Hospitality', hotel names such as 'Corniche'); customer success managers are invented people.