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Restaurants are a lot of things. But lazy is not one of them. Have you ever worked at a restaurant?

I’ve been an AGM and worked the industry six years plus four years adjacent in catering before finishing college and moving into SWE.

Yes an awful lot of them are lazy. I mention him only to mention the scary accuracy of it, but the late Anthony Bourdain has a chapter dedicated to crappy restauranteurs in nearly every book he’s written on the topic of food service as a career (of course his distaste for crappy restaurant owners is poignantly dotted through the entirety of “Kitchen Confidential” to be fair), and I often wonder to this day to hear his voice on the state of affairs in food service during a pandemic, and the micro economy that’s sprung up in food delivery.

Restaurants might not be lazy in their core business functions, but that doesn't make them non lazy on other matters.

You need to find a different word that isn't "lazy".

Perhaps a better way to say this is: restaurants are good at being restaurants, but aren't always good at establishing an online presence. A big part of why these delivery services succeed is that they provide a function that restaurants aren't well suited to provide on their own.

This isn't about being lazy, it's about an industry needing to adapt to the new expectations of the app economy, and often not having the expertise to do so.

> Perhaps a better way to say this is: restaurants are good at being restaurants, but aren't always good at establishing an online presence.

That's the majority of all businesses. And like many similar industries, the razor thin margins don't allow restaurants to properly invest in tech.

A restaurants entire purpose is to provide food for people that’s more convenient than the alternative. If they can’t do that, there is no reason for them to exist. If they can’t survive, someone who can come up with a business model that meets the needs of consumers will take their place.

Times change and circumstances change. Businesses either evolve or get replaced.

The problem now is that delivery services are being subsidized by VC money or however Uber is getting new money after their IPO.

You are right, lazy is the wrong word, irrational perhaps?

I have worked in commercial kitchens and have plenty of friends who run restaurants and have spend time in their operations. They regularly complain about the 30%+ they fork over to grubless. 30% is an insane fraction in a business that barely makes an accounting profit!

In established restaurants, a significant fraction of the orders come from repeat customers. Moving these repeat customers to a 5% friction channel from a 30% channel can be a game changer.

Now when I walk past restaurants, I see banners imploring folks to order from their website. I guess, one silver lining from this pandemic.

The challenge is how they would do that. It requires expertise which itself costs money and time to gain, and it's an ongoing maintenance cost for a small restaurant that may have extremely seasonal revenue.

It's not actually clear to me that every restaurant acting individually can actually recover that delivery service fee. There's no economy of scale for them to exploit.

what OP describes makes sense to me. but you are right, it is perhaps not laziness. it's a case of not knowing how to do it.

i mean why isn't dominos, pizzahut, etc. teaching them how to do delivery?

with everything going on, with these apps not helping restaurants, i decided to stop using these apps and go get my food myself. i only use apps when i get lazy like OP says.

To your point, Dominos is. Their pizza order tracker is open source [1]. The code is now two years old but I thought it was really cool of them to even do this in the first place.

[1] https://github.com/nikolas/dominos-pizza-tracker

(I’m still hunting the original article where this was announced, the first version they released I’m pretty sure was linked here on HN in the mid 10’s?)

oh wow, thanks for sharing!

I think you may be conflating the cooks, waitresses etc. who are certainly not lazy, with the management who tend to be lazy and set in their old ways, not willing to innovate unless absolutely forced to. I suspect the OP had the latter category in mind.

I think they in the parent comment means customers.

OK, complacent then. It doesn't change the argument.

It's very common for businesses of all sorts to view anything not their core competency as a cost to be minimized or a distraction, instead of an investment with return.

a website and online menu is something that they felt they could get away with the bare minimum, no regard for surfer experience. it, along with maybe throwing some money in an seo pit, with a checkbox in a playbook.

> payment processing (3%) + 2-3% overhead.

Is that anywhere near enough to actually pay for a delivery? I have both the Dasher app and the DoorDash app. That delivery I pay $2.99 for leads to the Dasher often being offered $13 on a $30 order with a $4 tip.

Grubless et.al can charge as high as 30% for just order and payment processing, delivery through their network is extra.

I believe that includes marketing as well though?

Yes, marketing/customer acquisition. Promotions are increasingly passed onto restaurants. Restaurants have to opt-in to marketing promotions and then the cost is deducted from the order.

However that delivery is in part subsidies by this.

Definitely not. But the problem is not that delivery realistically may cost $10-15 to pay for itself, it's that it's coming from the restaurant's margins and being hidden from the customer.

If the fees were real, the restaurant wouldn't need to care about pickup vs delivery, but the apps would lose some business because $15 is a good reason to do pickup.

Whose fault is it that restaurants aren’t pricing their services correctly?

The market’s.

How is “the market’s” fault that an individual restaurant won’t price its services correctly? Unlike VC funded startups, they can’t keep losing money and pawn off their business to the public.

It’s a ruthlessly competitive business with single-digit margins. A restaurant that prices its services higher often becomes an ex-restaurant.

And if the restaurant doesn’t make enough money to pay its bills, it also becomes an ex-restaurant.

The answer in a capitalist market is that restaurants will raise their prices to stay in business. As prices go up, people who don’t want to spend money in restaurants will find alternatives, you will have fewer restaurants and they will have a sustainable business model.

I'm amazed that Chipotle hasn't packaged it's online ordering app and licensed it to other restaurants. I've never used such a streamlined, polished, and convenient way to make an order for pickup or delivery.

I’ve found Panera Bread’s online ordering system to also be a well crafted order flow. To your question, I wonder if the exact reason they don’t is because they view their order software as something that gives them a competitive edge in their specific cuisines markets.

Panera and Chipotle are about as far apart as you can get, sandwiches and soups versus burritos and burrito bowls yet where I see some alignment is how they both have amazing online ordering experiences which allow deep order customization that eschews a lot of friction in doing so. I can’t think of another large chain with similar order experience between the two (Edit: Potbelly, perhaps for sandwiches?)

Chick-Fil-A’s app is extremely well done. Just this morning I ordered breakfast from a store, but drove to the wrong one and parked. The app noticed this automatically, asked if I wanted to move my pending order to this store, and after pressing “Yes” my food was walked out to my car < 5 mins later.

Doesn't the Chipotle app just use DoorDash?

The home-grown app in Tulsa will never have the capital for marketing and sales reps that allow it to capture a healthy market share of restaurants.

And if they do somehow make it, once they become the market leader, they're going to start asking for a larger portion of the pie. That's how business works, be it in Tulsa or SV.

You are most probably right. But there are community banks, vanguard, mutual insurance companies, agricultural cooperatives.

These entities are the exception and not the rule but one can always hope. I know, I know, hope is not a strategy ;)

> That's how business works, be it in Tulsa or SV

Um, no. Most businesses seek growth by trying to offer new/upsold products and services rather than trying to squeeze their customers for the same service.

That idea is too much of a reduction of how businesses actually operate.

Most businesses that aren't market leaders have to offer new or upsold products and services to grow because they can't throw around their monopoly power.

If you control 0.01% of the the entire delivery food sales market, and you raise middleman fees 3x, your (restaurant) customers will take a hike and switch to a different, cheaper delivery app.

If you control 75% of the market, your customers might be more willing to accept the increased fees.

Only if there's genuine risk of competition. If there's even the slifhtest whiff of lock-in the executives in any sufficiently large organization start milking their customers to enhance their personal portfolio even at the immediate (not to mention the long-term) detriment of the organization itself. See Oracle.

I think that's about the size of it. This seems like a "bad deal" to restaurants because they aren't really thinking of the problem correctly. Restaurants view having to sell a meal via GrubHub as selling a discounted meal, because the customer pays menu price but the delivery service charges a fee. So the restaurant makes less cash than they would to serve the same food to a table.

And the reason they think this is that when customers used to order "takeout", they'd still pay full price and the restaurant would keep all of it. So it feels like they've lost something.

But that's all wrong, because takeout used to be "improperly" (per a market analysis) marked up. Serving takeout is cheaper: no need for tables and dishes and servers. Lots of restaurants have known this forever and prioritized their takeout business, and done very well.

But now those savings are all being eaten up by another party that is providing useful improved services to the customer, and restaurants don't like it. Well... I guess I wouldn't either, but what they're complaining about isn't so much unfair competition than it is (heh) the elimination of what for them used to be a free lunch.

The market will re-equilibrate. It always does. But yeah, until it does the distribution of changes will not be fair. It never is.

Good analysis on the economics of takeout vs. eat-in. Hence the rise of ghost kitchens which are losing the storefront and all the overhead that goes with it - cutlery, tables, servers etc.

Grubless et.al are really a discovery platform. Once the customer acquisition happens - restaurants need to move to own the customer relationship. There is so much low-haning fruit there - repeat sales, meal subscriptions, boxed lunches.....

Take out customers don’t order high-margin beverages in proportion to dine-in customers. In most of the US, restaurants cannot even sell the highest-margin beverages, alcoholic ones, to go. With the lost beverage margin, increased take out volume is at best a wash for most restaurants.

Then you change your pricing to reflect reality...

One man's "laz[iness]" is another man's efficiency. Think of all the other forms of laziness we have: we don't need to do dishes by hand; the printing press saves us having to scribble letters by hand; we have machines wash our clothes; cars spare our feet and our time; hydraulic excavators let us avoid shoveling dirt with our hands; and aircraft let us save the weeks we'd otherwise waste aboard ships and in rail cars. Is using any of these things some kind of moral failing? Of course not, and neither is using a food delivery service.

People get a lot of value out of delivery apps. If they didn't, they wouldn't use them. You're asking people to forego something valuable on your say-so. How can that be justified?

Every technological innovation is opposed by those used to the old ways or who are financially interested in the perpetuation of inefficiencies from which they benefit. This opposition frequently takes on a moral character, as it has in your comment --- if you use the new thing, you're a bad person making an unethical choice. Well, I reject that.

>Customers are lazy because inspite of all the talk of supporting local, they are too hooked on click-click-click and ordered.

But it's more than that. Centralisation of food delivery also means centralisation of your sign-in details + address + payment.

In the decentralised model, you rely on each of these restaurants to implement these well and securely. In the least worse case scenario they might go with some login with Google/Facebook solution (which is gross for other reasons). Not to mention the friction (and often sub-optimal sign-on flow) on these independent sites because they lack an army of UX A/B testers.

Last time I signed up independently for a restaurant via their app (because they took themselves off Uber Eats) the food took 2.5 hours to come and arrived cold.

For food delivery there is CoopCycle[0] in 10+ cities worldwide. I've been seeing their stickers at quite a few restaurants lately in Berlin, where the local chapter formed after Lieferando consolidated IIRC.

[0]: https://coopcycle.org/en/

This is amazing and I hope it takes off in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if grubhub and uber team together to spend millions in lobbying to ban food delivery co-ops in this country though. Nothing more American than that!

>Restaurants can make a concerted effort to ask regular clients to order from their own websites/apps but rarely do even when they can make an extra 10-15% after giving the customers 10% off.

Ridiculous. This is an assertion made by somebody who has never tried to convince anybody of anything, by somebody who doesn't know the meaning of the word "discoverability," who has no concept of what market dominance means.

Without government intervention, you can't "new business model" your way out of this. Especially not in the middle of a pandemic that is being historically mishandled.