Maryland restaurant owner: 'Delete all the delivery apps'
wjla.com
wjla.com
Do they want the free advertising on networks but then disintermediate those same platforms in an effort to work directly with the customers who may have never found them in the first place? I'm all about supporting local businesses but me deleting GrubHub isn't going to stop other people from ordering on it from their restaurant.
Edit: The solution would be transparency in delivery fees, Amazon has made it pretty clear that "free shipping" will always win though.
I was shopping for vanities (very heavy furniture) selling for $300 online as "free shipping". The same item down the street was $150 with no markdown.
If there is a way to simplify app without serious UX damage, and dramatically lower costs, why it wasn't done already by the same players?
Nonetheless, the delivery apps do provide some value: convenient interfaces which let you compare which restaurants are open and delivery ETAs thereof, order tracking, payment security, and so forth. As a user, I'm willing to pay for those features. Are restaurateurs able to price discriminate between different delivery options? E.g. the dish is $10 if you order from us but $12 if you use Grubhub? Or do agreements with the delivery apps of the world prohibit that kind of thing?
What if they are more than making up for the loss on individual orders by having much greater volume of orders, directly made possible by the convenience of all-food-one-app?
Making up for losses on individual orders by ramping up volume is a tired and true way to lose even more money.
Food has aggressive margins. Everybody I've talked to in the business is overleveraged, trying to hold onto their cart or lease, and hoping that they don't get sick because they don't have the cash to pivot or close. The delivery app publishers are rent-seekers; nothing prohibits restaurants from employing their own drivers, as Italian and Chinese restaurants used to do, or taking carryout/to-go orders by default, like just about every food cart. Do not forget that the main appeal of delivery apps is that they effectively are cheap because they don't treat drivers as full employees, but we are hopefully soon exiting that era and as soon as we do, we will have to stop the cheap delivery.
This wont happen because its not in each apps best interest, but they should be relegated to what they actually are. A yellow pages. A middle man that connects a driver and a restaurant, and collects a referral and connection/dispatch fee.
This is one of the places where government intervention could benefit restaurants and drivers. Force all the companies to speak a single protocol that can be received by any compatible pos and dispatch app. Enforce some level of interoperability. Enforced swaps of food runs might be pushing it, but it really would benefit just about everybody except the food delivery apps. If banks can credit default swap, why cant food delivery apps be more efficient on the roads?
Even for the customer, I don't care which delivery app something is on, and its a pita to check them all and compare prices. I would much rather give loyalty to one that listed runs only their competitors have deals with. These food delivery service companies should exist more as a single technical contact a restaurant can call with issues. Outsourced IT, payment processing, service maintenance, troubleshooting, and ad hoc support. Restaurants having to support them all or lose business is ludicrous.
As a side note, I find the Virtual Restaurant concept to be another pollution. One kitchen being able to show up in the results three times because they list themselves as three kitchens. I get why, from a marketing perspective, that it helps to brand yourself as a specific niche, but its really a cheat of the system and limited screen real estate more than anything else.
Learn the menu items that you like. Be comfortable ordering the same thing most of the time. Learn when your body likes to eat. Take a walk to carryout.
Your rewards are simple and obvious. People will learn what you like to eat. They'll also learn your name, your surface affect, and what you broadly do with your life. You may find yourself with the opportunity to enrich yourself by being kind to others.
Macroscopically, I stopped using delivery apps because they didn't know where I lived and their app maps couldn't route to me. A while later, while walking to pick up dinner, I happened to save somebody from being hit by a car. I didn't plan that, but it happened because I wasn't trying to isolate myself from the world. You cannot predict how your choice to be a better community member will affect those around you, but you can choose to have the opportunities and effects.
I think if restaurants engage in more aggressive price discrimination against bad actors in the delivery market, the customers will respond in kind.
The situation is not unlike the restaurant choosing whether to pay more rent for a better location to get more foot traffic, or pay less rent but then need to spend more on marketing.
Online ordering through them is extremely difficult or just impossible. None ever adapted to mobile, even though that’s been around for 10 years. Most still have not bothered to claim their business on Google maps so you can get a good phone number.
The 30% markup can be seen in many ways as the fee for cleaning up their mess and making the menus and ordering actually usable for people.
This may have come off as more harsh than I mean it to be, but much like taxis and Uber, the restaurants left the door wide open by providing such a bad experience, and the apps solved it.
But during a lockdown, restaurants ought to meet customers in the middle. Demand is down significantly, not a surprise when the product is sub-par (no service, semi-warm food, often missing condiments, clean up yourself, no refills, etc). In my experience, very few restaurants* are discounting or lowering prices in an attempt to boost the volume of business, or even passing along a part of the Grubhub fee to customers willing to pick up their own food.
I guess that's why they are restaurateurs and not economists.
*excluding fast-food
I don’t blame him. People should be supporting local businesses, and siphoning off 30% isn’t a good way to do that.
Big stores have handled the quarantine in an apalling way, while the small shops have managed to keep a high quality customer service (I mean, pretty much what they already offered) and haven't even hinted at raising prices -- as the big stores have implied or done already.
For a point of comparison, of the places I use Door Dash for, none of them deliver food. And perhaps rightly so, since there’s a pretty hefty cost associated with hiring delivery drivers.
The delivery service is just worth that much to me.
If the prices being charged don’t yet include those delivery fees, they will soon. It’s no different than how prices went up to cover credit card fees.
The 30% that Doordash/Uber Eats charge pays the cost of delivery and customer service. It's not free to provide food delivery.
The restaurants could attempt to provide the service themselves, but there's no real reason to think they can provide a better service at a lower cost than Doordash. If they could, then Doordash wouldn't exist.
Then what do the $X flat delivery + X% "to keep DoorDash running" fees pay for?
It feels like DoorDash is double dipping if it's simply to pay for the delivery and customer service.
I'm looking now, and I'm being charged a 5% service fee for an order on DoorDash. So DoorDash is charging 35% in fees on that order, assuming the 30% restaurant fee is correct.
Things like Bitcoin and Ether would really help to make that a reality.
You would not even necessarily need a map in the app. Just relay the GPS coordinates and the app can display the distance that the delivery driver is at.
Or, you could always get off your butt and go get it yourself.
If they did, then I wouldn’t need to use DoorDash or GrubHub, or whatever.