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.<p>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.
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.<p>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?
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 Every single one has some combination of crappy auto playing music, terrible pictures, and out of date menus that were impossible to read (on mobile) PDFs or bad fax copies.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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I feel for this guy. I have never used a delivery app.<p>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.<p>I guess that's why they are restaurateurs and not economists.<p>*excluding fast-food
“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.”<p>I don’t blame him. People should be supporting local businesses, and siphoning off 30% isn’t a good way to do that.
Are they delivering? No? Then sorry, I won’t delete it.<p>For a point of comparison, of the places I use Door Dash for, <i>none of them deliver</i> food. And perhaps rightly so, since there’s a pretty hefty cost associated with hiring delivery drivers.<p>The delivery service is just worth that much to me.
I understand that 30% sounds like a lot, but this is a bit of "pie slicing" thinking, instead of "pie growing".<p>The 30% that Doordash/Uber Eats charge pays the cost of delivery and customer service. It's not free to provide food delivery.<p>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.
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.<p>Things like Bitcoin and Ether would really help to make that a reality.<p>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.
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.
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?
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.
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.