Silicon Valley Turned Your Burrito into a Capitalist Nightmare

First of all, there's no tips for doordash orders. On a busy night our Togo person makes ~50 in tips, so they just don't pay as much attention to the door dash orders.

Second, no matter how long we quote the order, the driver always shows up immediately and gets in the way of the servers and bussers and other customers (its a fairly small restaurant with no waiting area) so usually we are rushing to try and finish the order to get them to leave.

I don't know a single person in the restaurant except the owner who likes the doordash system, but as long as people keep ordering it'll stay

Not every business owner necessarily wants to maintain a Doordash page because they have work to do, the same work they’ve been doing for 30 years, and every other Silicon Valley company wants to “partner” with them. Yelp wants them to advertise and maybe put those asinine digital wait lists out. Doordash wants them to maintain their online menu, them and 47 other delivery startups, most of whom also want to send you and iPad loaded with their own delivery receipt system. Google wants you to maintain your Maps listing and a million “SEO” whorehouses will spam call you to death to try and maintain it on your behalf. FiveStars would like to stick a little loyalty kiosk right on your counter, and all of this while juggling suppliers. Then there’s the random new credit card processors that pop up every now and then, staffing companies, job boards, et cetera and all of this is just the tip of the ice berg.

When I used to work in a café, I saw that someone listed our menu on Doordash. Every now and then a deliveryman would walk up to the counter and shove a phone in my face, and after making it clear to them that this is bad etiquette, I proceeded to point out: 1. The prices are all wrong, 2. Some of those things we don’t even have anymore, 3. Also they selected two types of bread because for some inexplicable reason, there was a separate bread and roll category, 4. Occasionally we would be out of a particular item, because oftentimes suppliers run out of things as well, or we decided to replace it with a different item. They would then try to call their customer, the customer would reject the call, and I would improvise with what was left. In a regular situation, I could talk to my customers directly, and deliver a good customer experience, but I couldn’t do that when there’s a middleman, a middleman who often didn’t speak English very well and was more often than not, shoving their phone right under my nose while I’m in the middle of making sandwiches for customers that were sitting in the store.

There is your primer on Doordash and also Postmates if they’re still kicking. I recommend you order from places that have setup a real pipeline for deliveries and have changed their business to accommodate it rather than assuming they did just because Doordash exists.