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I prefer Grubhub/Seamless in NYC. They're typically on bicycles or scooters and will bring the order up to your apartment door. Uber Eats people usually want you to come down outside so they don't have to double-park.

I'm not giving you a $10 delivery tip to drive my Five Guys order eight blocks.. You gotta get out and come up the stairs to my door.

or you could, ya know, walk 8 blocks and keep the restaurant in business, but hey, we all have our limits.

This is what I don't get. As soon as I started reading about all the unfair business practices by delivery companies, I just started picking up my food. Gets me out of the house, removes the middle man, supports local business while cutting out the larger business that funnels wealth to the top echelons. What's not to love?

If it's hot outside or whatever, it's still a small price to pay for doing the right thing.

Are United Statesians addicted to convenience?

Pretty much. Though one factor is in the US there's really dumb zoning concepts that basically led to longer drives to get to business areas. This is why bicycles never really caught on as a major mode of transport in the US, a 5 minute bike ride is one thing to get lunch, a 20 minute ride without any dedicated paths and often restaurants being placed in a shopping hub like area designed around highway access is a different story. It's all a sort of hassle so many people may prefer just ordering in, but yeah otherwise we are pretty lazy lol. Also, on 'doing the right thing'.

Have you seen who we picked as president?

wait... this comment is confusing. how is he not contributing towards "keeping the restaurant in business" by ordering delivery vs picking it up in person?

When you order through a delivery service, the restaurant is generally paid less than their normal menu price, and none of the tips go to the kitchen staff.

In addition to charging the restaurant, the delivery service charges the customer a higher price than the restaurant would. They add delivery fees and service fees. On top of that, the online menus in the delivery service apps often have higher prices than the restaurant’s “real” menu.

Restaurants often negotiate special deals with the delivery services, so all these details can vary. However, delivery app margins are much lower than carry out or dine in margins.

Yes, but a restaurant wouldn't be entering into these special deals if it wasn't beneficial to them as well. Even if the margins are much lower, it could be offset by the increase in number of customers/orders.

I've talked to people who run restaurants and in their words uber eats is not worth it economically. They just do it, barely breaking even, as a marketing thing, hoping people will like the food and go to the real place.

Bingo, plus if they don't do it, their competitors will and then nobody comes to them.

If all that's true, then it does seem like it's worth it economically. Economics in business goes well beyond the simple transaction-level view.

So... By spending more into the economy you're being selfish? Since when is giving people money for their services considered selfish?

Where did they say "selfish"?

This wouldn't be a problem if it was a case of choosing between A) paying $15 to the restaurant or B) $15 to the restaurant plus $5 in delivery.

However, in reality you're choosing between paying A) $15 directly to the restaurant or B) $12 to the restaurant and $8 for delivery.

Hopefully the added volume of orders makes up for the $3 (made up numbers by the way), but I'm not so sure.

When I go pickup food on my own, there’s still no tip money flowing to the kitchen (or anyone else).

Restaurants handle this issue in many different ways. I have been to several who explicitly state that all tips are divided & shared among all employees, and I think this is a good model. I've also seen one with a separate tip jar for kitchen staff, which may be a better option in some places. Really, why should the server make more than the cook or the dishwasher? Are they actually working harder? [I know, their wages are often structured differently, but I question whether they should be.]

At least it still avoids all the other problems, not to mention the domain squatting, misrepresentation of search results, and of course the upcharge on your end and the downcharge on the restaurant's end.

Often these delivery services take around 20% off the top of the restaurant's pay in addition to the 'fees and taxes' they take out and 'delivery fee' and 'driver tip', plus specials and discounts generally come out of the restaurant's cut too, plus door-dash and the like also take out cuts on advertising.

But let me take this a step further because you're not just screwing the restaurant...

The delivery driver is ALSO being screwed by the nature of all of this!

You see, on average the pay and tip of a delivery actually is less than the cost of car wear and tear + minimum wage + gas! People take this job to have cash now but will often end up stuck with the bill in the end. By supporting these delivery companies you are actually supporting companies that are taking aggressive advantage of people to drive engagement numbers and eventually... ^ $7.3 Billion in investor payoffs for a company that has effectively only built an app and menu directory and did basically none of the work. They classify drivers as 1099s to avoid having to adhere to minimum wage laws, they dodge laws where they can and take zero responsibility when people screw up. All of them are exploiting poor people and while one can argue that that's the driver's fault.. as long as you pay the Doordash or GrubHub's of the world their fees and as long as they take 20% off the restaurant's cut, the restaurant wont be able to afford to pay to hire more employees which helps these delivery app companies get drivers due to unemployment. Should I also note that this same company used to pocket the driver tip?

the alternative is that I don't order from the restaurant at all. it's pretty simple

> Doordash seems to have the most variety but the dashers take their merry time on their way to you (and customer service is nonexistent)

I was picking up sandwiches from a popular sandwich joint last week and the Doordash drivers were picking up multiple orders each time. So most likely the "delay" is really them stopping at other houses to drop off food on their way to you, or vice versa.

Both GH and DD do this now, honestly it feels like a massive bait and switch because you don't know which order # you'll be and the system never clarifies that there can be others ahead of you. Notably, the other orders can be from other restaurants so your driver may have to stop and wait while your food is just in their car. If you don't live in a metro area the total out of the way time can be more than 25 minutes. This means that ordering a small hot meal over GH can show up 20 minutes after preparation or 45 minutes after. There's a very large difference between these two orders but they make you set the tip ahead of time and charge the same fee. I once ordered ice cream, they made a second stop. It was just goop. Just completely absurd.

(This is a strange world where I can say... obviously Uber is more ethical here. The Uber X service is clearly labeled as such and has realistic arrival times and an option to pay for ensured rapid arrival)

> Is it just me or are all these delivery apps pretty much the same thing, just with different restaurants?

They're surprisingly different in both how good the software is and how efficiently they operate. I'll give three examples of my experiences with European apps.

Wolt (Finnish) - Super polished native app. Very accurate to-the-minute ETA predictions, you can see GPS tracking of couriers as soon as they start heading towards the restaurant. The menus are polished and full of pictures. You can rate couriers and food. The app even includes a mini-game on the ETA screen. Payment by card associated with your account.

Bolt (Estonian) - A comparatively new entry in food delivery with an ok native app. ETAs are all over the place as it keeps re-calculating, although eventually the delivery is reasonably paced. GPS tracking starts after the courier has picked up the food. About a third of the food items have pictures. No rating of food or couriers. No mini-games. Occasional crashes. Payment by card associated with your account.

Lieferando (German - owned by Just Eat Takeway, the company buying Grubhub) - Complete dumpster fire. The "native app" is just a webview of some 2010 style webpage. No pictures of food, no GPS tracking. A static "ETA 30min" estimation that never changes or counts down, it's just always 30min. Payment is a per-order giant form of options that's super German, prioritizing cash-on-delivery. I made the mistake of paying by card. The food never arrived at all. The app itself doesn't give any notifications that there's a failed delivery or anything - the ETA was 30min even 48h later. Customer support is extremely hostile and only responds after several days. The iOS reviews are full of people complaining that they got scammed with no delivery. Ended up having to do a chargeback through my bank.

>Is it just me or are all these delivery apps pretty much the same thing, just with different restaurants?

Yes.

However the financial incentive is for these restaurants is to eventually have their own ordering systems.

Why is cold food a problem? It is easy to heat it up in a microwave right?

> Why is cold food a problem? It is easy to heat it up in a microwave right?

I think its dependent on the type of food. As some foods simply don't hold well, and shouldn't be offered as a to-go 'fried calamari,' 'pasta carbonara' 'tempura' or sushi etc... and cannot be re-heated. But, even other things like fries taste pretty poorly when cold and could spoil an entire meal.

Whereas, drunken noodles, pizza or a chiptole burrito can easily be re-heated and taste just as good.

I've ordered Doordash 5 times over that observation period, and all but one time the food was pretty warm, but that's because I tipped $5-10 and the restaurants I ordered from were near by and less than a 4 miles radius from my home. Since it was simply re-heatedable stuff I didn't mind, also, I wasn't really interested in the food so much as data aggregation.