
Maryland restaurant owner: 'Delete all the delivery apps' - spking
https://wjla.com/news/local/maryland-restaurant-owner-delete-all-the-delivery-apps
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meritt
Uhh, wouldn't it be a lot easier for the restaurant owner to simply not
partner with Grub/UberEats/Caviar/etc. Delivery cos can't charge a commission
to the restaurant if you don't have an agreement with them.

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.

~~~
Godel_unicode
This is a thieves paradox problem, if every other restaurant is on GrubHub,
are you going to go out of your way to order from the one that isn't?

Edit: The solution would be transparency in delivery fees, Amazon has made it
pretty clear that "free shipping" will always win though.

~~~
tantalor
Compare the price of the item online versus in store, you will easily see the
actual cost of "free shipping".

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.

~~~
Fire-Dragon-DoL
People keep saying that, but I paid the exact same price in restaurant and
with delivery, since both have people that require a tip and delivery is free
over a certain amount

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Tarrosion
Microscopically, I'm very sympathetic to restaurant owners - especially now
that they have few other options; their businesses and livelihoods are roughly
speaking held hostage. It's not hard to imagine delivery apps choosing big
fees when the restaurants have nowhere else to go and the delivery apps have
market power.

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?

~~~
psswrd12345
The apps may be convenient to the user, but they cause direct harm to
restaurants. They have become a tax. These apps may have value in a world full
of cloud kitchens, but until then, they are a parasite and represent a bad
equilibrium.

~~~
Godel_unicode
How can you possibly know that, without details of restaurant books?

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?

~~~
lidHanteyk
I talk to the local cart and restaurant owners when I pick up orders from
them. The increased volume in orders is nice, but doesn't make up for the
hassle of managing all of the different devices and vendors. One cart owner
has memorably gotten her grandson to artfully arrange her half-dozen different
phones and tablets into a little status panel. One restaurant has divided up
responsibilities, with different people managing different order queues from
different apps, so that Grubhub orders and DoorDash orders might as well be
served from two different kitchens. (But of course it's just one single
overworked kitchen.)

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.

~~~
basch
The industry desperately needs an
[https://www.ecomdash.com/](https://www.ecomdash.com/) for both ends of the
equation. A way for restaurants to consolidate all their orders into one
panel. And a way for delivery drivers to be accessible to multiple apps in one
route. Even better would be the companies working together to trade orders to
reduce overlapping traffic and more efficiently create routes.

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.

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orev
While I really support and empathize with the restaurants, the apps only came
about because there was a need. For DECADES, restaurant web sites have been
absolutely awful. Every single one has some combination of crappy auto playing
music, terrible pictures, and out of date menus that were impossible to read
(on mobile) PDFs or bad fax copies. They always seemed to focus on some
artistic vision of how the chef wanted you to feel about the food, with
custom, hard to read fonts, flowery language that sounded good but actually
said nothing, and daily specials from 6 months ago.

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.

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listenallyall
I feel for this guy. I have never used a delivery app.

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

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jagged-chisel
“A plea from a local restaurant owner is asking customers to stop using food
delivery apps and instead order directly from the restaurant.” ... “ it is an
effort to avoid "25-30% commission rates" they're currently paying.”

I don’t blame him. People should be supporting local businesses, and siphoning
off 30% isn’t a good way to do that.

~~~
dave5104
I once used DoorDash's "order for pickup" option, not wanting to pay the
delivery fees for something that was close by. Got asked very strongly by the
restaurant at pick up to not do that again and instead just give them a call
due to the crazy fees they need to pay for that. I haven't used that "order
for pickup" option since.

~~~
dr_zoidberg
When the quarantine started, restaurants and small groceries in my city have
opened WhatsApp/Telegram/instagram channels of communication. Almost all of
the have asked frequent customers for word of mouth recommendations. As a
customer, I'm more than pleased with the results so far.

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.

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falcolas
Are they delivering? No? Then sorry, I won’t delete it.

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.

~~~
psswrd12345
That's fine, but you should be paying those hefty delivery fees and not the
restaurant. And these fees will only go up now that venture capital is less
likely to subsidize losses.

~~~
falcolas
I am paying those fees, albeit indirectly: the money I pay for the food is
also going to cover those fees. Just as if they have delivery drivers; I’m
paying for their driver’s costs as well when I order delivery.

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.

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marcell
I understand that 30% sounds like a lot, but this is a bit of "pie slicing"
thinking, instead of "pie growing".

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.

~~~
dave5104
> The 30% that Doordash/Uber Eats charge pays the cost of delivery and
> customer service. It's not free to provide food delivery.

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.

~~~
Godel_unicode
The delivery service is a totally separate expense from developers, AWS,
marketing, etc

~~~
dave5104
Yes, which is presumably what the X% service fee goes towards. Every order
made on the platform assesses a fee ("Taxes and Fees" line item) to the
consumer that goes to DoorDash (not your delivery driver), on top of charging
the restaurant a 30% fee.

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.

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ilaksh
I've said this before and been buried, but a decentralized free app can
replace Uber Eats etc. and make the commissions close to or equal to zero.

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.

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dariusj18
What I hate about these delivery apps is the hidden markups. If I order the
food and it says the price is X and the fee is Y, I'd like to be able to trust
that. But if I look online and find out that the price of the dish I just
ordered is jacked up by $2, that's turned me off from using them.

~~~
bluedevil2k
That’s the restaurant jacking up the price for the food delivery services.
Covers their tips and stuff.

~~~
dariusj18
This is part of the problem. The delivery service shouldn't allow a markup,
just like credit card companies of old didn't allow restaurants to pass on any
of the transaction fees by contract. It really helped with adoption by
consumers.

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matz1
Or just put different menu price on the delivery apps. Increase the price to
whatever commission they charge.

~~~
orev
Usually when you think the solution is so obvious, other people actually
thought of it too. In this case, the lawyers already added that to the
agreements so they can’t do that. Same as with credit card companies saying
you can’t charge a different price for cash vs credit (oil companies excluded
because they have the power to refuse it).

~~~
matz1
Usually its so obvious that when people gave a suggestion, they actually
thought it too. In this case there is no agreement that disallow restaurant to
do that.

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robrenaud
Does it have to cost 25%? What are restaurant owners getting from that app-
store like markup? Is it merely access to an hungry market? Can someone simply
come in, make a simple app, and compete on price?

~~~
listenallyall
Perhaps Fedex can start delivering food? I mean, it does cost something to
motivate an uninterested party to drive from point-to-point with your veggie
burger.

Or, you could always get off your butt and go get it yourself.

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prklmn
I wish we had a delivery app where all restaurants on the platform are
partners in ownership, and they cannot deny other restaurants from becoming
partners.

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lazylizard
Do restaurants not get to set prices?

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psswrd12345
These food delivery companies are unnecessary middlemen, and generally
leeches. Their revenue (note: not income, as they still lose money) comes at
expense of restaurants. The economics simply do not work. Please stop using
these apps and deal with the restaurants directly.

~~~
bradknowles
But the restaurants don’t do delivery.

If they did, then I wouldn’t need to use DoorDash or GrubHub, or whatever.

~~~
psswrd12345
And the apps that offer deliver do so at a loss. The economics do not work so
long as people need to get paid. You do not _need_ to use delivery services to
pick up fro trendy restaurants that represent a bad equilibrium to all parties
asides from yourself. This was a market inefficiency enabled by cheap capital.

