Uber Eats has been calling me every year to sell their platform to some of the stores I work with.
Grocery product margins are about 30 percent in the happy case (specialty foods), usually much lower. Uber Eats wants 30 percent of the basket on each sale they make.
The last salesperson who called, after I gave him that context, suggested this would be a new revenue stream. I remarked that we would lose money on each sale. He clarified that Uber Eats would only take 30 percent of what we sold through their platform, not all of the sales made by the store (how generous of them). I thanked him for clarifying and said I understood that.
He then suggested to me that customers who buy from us on Uber Eats might do so only once, and make the rest of their purchases in store.
I asked him why they would do that, and he uncomfortably said a few words about how Uber is working on something for grocery stores and said they would try back later.
They have reached out to me about once a year since 2016, and pretty much every conversation goes the same, and their pricing is the same.
It's ridiculous to me how they don't bother to understand the customers they engage, and that they train their sales people to continue goad businesses into working with them even after they've made clear they would lose money. Either way, it's very clear to me that this model is indeed going to be short lived. It depends primarily on weaknesses in labor laws and operators being swayed by their bizarre sales pitches enough to act against their own bottom line. In any case I certainly won't be sad to see it crash and burn