The thing with GrubHub, UberEats, etc... is they are (usually exclusive) marketing services masquerading as delivery services.
What's infuriating is knowing they are charging 30% in addition to the 10% they charge me, the consumer... and still you have to pay the driver.
There's one restaurant about a half mile from me... Uber Eats was going to charge me a $10+ fee for the pleasure of using them (not including tip).
I could literally take an Uber there AND back and it would have been less expensive... screw it I'll walk and reheat my food.
It is a completely backwards model.
Open Table seems to be in the same realm... I can't remember if the figure is correct so I'm loathe to mention it... but our favorite restaurant told us Open Table charges $5/head (to the restaurant).
17 years ago a friend was trying to get me to start a restaurant delivery service with him in Houston. He explained most around the country were mom-and-pop businesses utilizing little technology but be had visited 2 millionaires in Phoenix and LA whose delivery businesses served hundreds of restaurants. He found the guy who supplied Windows software to some of these businesses that handled all the specific bookkeeping and proximity calculations for changing fees based on distance, etc. I was amazed they took a 30% cut from the restaurants but he explained that the restaurants were increasing their capacity beyond the seating they had on-site. I don’t really know how all those restaurant customers felt about that, though. Maybe they were grateful to be able to build new customer relationships, but we never got going since the investors fell through.
Recently after reading about restaurants teaming up to share delivery people, I wondered if providing restaurants with generic back-office apps that allowed them to easily partner with other businesses to make small delivery operations (maybe a half dozen or dozen sharing drivers) would blow the giant VC-backed ones out of the water. Basically some lightweight SaaS solution for a few bucks a month, easy to integrate with their website, etc. Customers should be able to get used to the idea that they can just go to the restaurant’s homepage and look for the Delivery button instead of perusing VC-backed indexes of restaurants.
Tipping and the shaming culture around them is what I believe will ultimately kill delivery apps and a lot of in person dining in a post covid world. There isn't a single person in my age range I've ever met that didn't once work in a restaurant (where the owner under paid them) that thought of them as anything besides a sneaky way of the owner extracting more money from the consumer. If the person is from another country or lived abroad the hatred for tips is even higher. Tipping for older adults was once an optional item for exceptional service to the under paid but it is now just something you're forced to do by the owner for their employee doing their job competently.
I absolutely don't think ghost kitchens are the wave of the future in the city when most people would actually prefer to save five to ten dollars on the delivery plus the arbitrary tip in nearly all situations besides being inebriated.
Usually exclusive? Every restaurant entrance in Chicago has UberEats, DoorDash, Postmates, Delivery.com, Grubhub, Seamless, AND Eat24 stickers. Walk inside and theres a table with ~8 iPads, one for each delivery service.
What's infuriating is knowing they are charging 30% in addition to the 10% they charge me, the consumer... and still you have to pay the driver. There's one restaurant about a half mile from me... Uber Eats was going to charge me a $10+ fee for the pleasure of using them (not including tip).
I could literally take an Uber there AND back and it would have been less expensive... screw it I'll walk and reheat my food.
It is a completely backwards model.
Open Table seems to be in the same realm... I can't remember if the figure is correct so I'm loathe to mention it... but our favorite restaurant told us Open Table charges $5/head (to the restaurant).