Hi Fan Yuan, thank you for taking the time to comment.

Interesting question. For the business case discussed within, there were sufficient drivers that drivers were always early for the pick-up (and we paid for the waiting time), however with growth it would be expected that some drivers are late to pick up food.

Some things that would need to be considered:

• Willingness to pay for waiting time: upon early arrival, your driver will still expect to be paid, but it might be cheaper than the potential risk from needing to refund a customer for a late arrival.
• Parking space: if you arrive too early, you’ll be waiting for the food preparation
• Restaurant readiness: even though the orders are sent well in advance, restaurants and caterers can still run behind, meaning that if you arrive for your 3pm pick-up, the food might not be ready until 3:15pm.
• Food quality: if you’re running late, food will be sitting out and deteriorating in quality, leading to unhappy customers.
• Overcrowding at vendor: depending on the vendor, they might be handling many orders, and if you food is waiting an extra 10 minutes it might cause problems with space.
• Late arrival: lastly, and most obviously, if the driver is late to pick up, they’ll likely be late to drop off.

So with all these reasons, you can see it’s not a straightforward thing to define, and I believe it varies heavily depending on the vendor. For example, for big caterers in industrial areas it’s fine to arrive 10–15m early, the delivery is likely a long distance meaning the increase in waiting time is incremental, there will be ample parking space and they’re likely to be ready on time. On the other hand, for most restaurants, you can’t park very long, they have limited storage space for your food and can easily be 10m late with preparation.

In short though, I would still be weighting heavily towards arriving early, rather than late, since this problem is about high basket size deliveries and the delivery costs are small compared to the refund costs. The choice for a company like Uber Eats or Deliveroo would be quite different.