Doordash puts up a listing for a restaurant and siphons off take-out traffic. Once Doordash gets a critical mass they can turn around and "negotiate" with the restaurant.
If I were a restaurateur and caught a glimpse of a Doordash driver in my finest establishment, the first thing I would do is put together a simple online order form and start advertising it in every order. If you just disappear from the app one day, your customers trying to reorder would probably go somewhere else – but if they know they can order on your site instead, they probably will (if your food is good enough and your ordering experience is top-notch, or vice versa).
And now you have hordes of angry customers who can't understand why you have a Doordash listing (that you didn't create and don't want) but won't fulfill orders.
If I were a restaurateur and caught a glimpse of a Doordash driver in my
finest establishment, the first thing I would do is put together a simple
online order form and start advertising it in every order.
Whether it's not wanting to give Doordash a cut, not wanting to sell food that doesn't travel well for delivery, not wanting to crowd out local customers, not wanting Doordash to hijack their brand, not wanting Doordash to crowd out their own in-house delivery, or whatever actual restaurant owners litigated these forced listings because they didn't want to be listed on Doordash.
Yeah, like the restaurant can say “no” to giving a discount, they can say “no” to people wanting their food to get delivered now. It’s just that now it’ll be a bad business decision probably.
Everything is possible. And every choice has its own set of tradeoffs. But no, there’s no time machine to the pre-Doordash world now.
