They, as you say, organize a list of local menus.
They centralize ordering.
They save payment information.
They broker disputes.
They offer delivery.
They are super value-adding as middlemen go.
They centralize ordering.
They save payment information.
They broker disputes.
They offer delivery.
They are super value-adding as middlemen go.
If they are so "super value-adding" as you claim then why exactly do they have a need to sign up restaurants without even asking those restaurants?
It may be value adding for those companies, but reading all those complaints from restaurateurs there seems to be very little value add for them.
Especially if they're not even asked to be listed.
I think this might be a generational/personality thing. Many younger people seem to like all this. I prefer just talking to someone at the restaurant itself. For me human interaction will always be better than some computer interface.
(I say this as a 36 year old so I'm not a dinosaur, but in this instance I feel like I'm part of the older breed.)
Do they even have delivery services? because most of my favourite restaurants never did until deliveroo/Just Eat came along. think about it, AFAIK you couldn't get KFC or McDonalds delivered in the UK, now they're the biggest players in food delivery. It was really only pizza that people expected to have delivery. So if a big chain like KFC can't manage to do deliveries on their own, how do you expect "Aunt Jessie's diner" to do it?
Now if you specifically want to use delivery services for restaurants that don't want to run their own delivery services, then yeah I guess you'll need a third-party. I tend to pick up so that's never an issue for me, but sure then use these other services.
Anyway none of this is really that important to my main point that I enjoy talking directly to the restaurants. Doing it my way might mean losing certain conveniences like delivery from any restaurant. I'm fine with that. I'd rather speak to a human anyway.
In my experience non-trivial orders given over the phone tend get screwed up more often than the same order via an app.
But as others have mentioned the big win is getting deliveries from places than don't do deliveries. If I want take away pizza from my (second) favorite pizza place, my options are drive down and pick it up my self or ordering via a third party middleman.
In point of fact, I have added some random similar apps that turned out to be local alternatives (other end of the country from SV) and I presume the smarter restaurants are paying them less.