Anthony Bourdain does seem like he’d be mean to puppies.
All of these delivery services are awful sometimes. It’s the nature of a gig worker business. I mostly use UberEats when I (used to) travel, because the rewards stacked with my Uber car ride rewards. Ended up getting ~$20 in free money some trips.
Which was almost enough to make up for the 20% service fee UberEats charges on top of the delivery fee and tip.
RichVR
1788
Well… hard to be mean to anything when you’re dead.
In many cases, Grubhub/Seamless just connects directly to the restaurant and their own delivery guys. Not all cases, where Grubhub charges a service fee they’re doing the delivery themselves. Doordash, UberEats, and Caviar exclusively use their own delivery staff for a more consistent experience. You do pay for that, though.
He killed himself in 2018.
Grubhub’s commission and fee structure are outrageous. I’m sure Seamless is the same. If the restaurant has its own delivery guys, place your order with them directly.
Lantz
1792
Always try to contact a restaurant directly. Google maps and searches will try and route you through a delivery service and hide the actual website. Yelp does it too:
A lot of places will give you a discount or a free side or something if you order direct from them.
Grubhub bought seamless awhile back so yes they are identical. I’m not contacting restaurants directly, I don’t want to spread my credit card around, and I’m certainly not speaking to someone on the phone like it’s 2001.
There are various platforms like chownow.com attempting to fix the issue of all the other platforms being evil, and if one of them actually offers a quality experience I’ll certainly switch.
This is a very good point. All else being equal, it’s best to go with whatever the restaurant wants to use, since presumably that’s the best avenue for them.
Various areas are regulating delivery app commissions, and ultimately I believe that is the right answer.
Good. That’s really great to hear.
Everyone has to make a choice. My choice is to not reward techbros who take up to 50% of the revenue of the restaurants they ‘serve’. If that means I have to occasionally phone those restaurants — something that is often unnecessary, btw — then I guess I can manage to work the dial pad.
Agree. But it’s nothing close to universal.
Everybody values convenience differently.
I do think the tide is turning on grubhub and the rest with the lockdown. Hopefully chownow or something similar comes out on top, and if not, regulation would help. If not, I’ll continue giving my business to the most convenient and cheapest service.
It don’t think it’s that; I think people have different notions of what ‘convenient’ means. I’ll add that I spent my career in the travel industry, the last 20 years of which was spent trying to figure out how to keep the booking engine players from pillaging the profitability of individual hotels. Most of those hotels were small businesses — like restaurants — and it is easy for me to see the similarities between the plight of the owners in both cases. Everyone plays with those partners — it can be death not to play with them because of the way they use scale to warp search — but everyone hates their rapacious pricing models.
Travel is super complicated, though. Food delivery is comparably simple at its core. All you’re doing is letting restaurants host their menu on your browsable website, taking orders, processing transactions, and then passing them off to the restaurant. That’s what chownow is offering, and they charge a flat fee (plus credit card transaction fees).
Now what Grubhub, UberEats, Doordash, etc, are trying to do now isn’t simple at all; they’re hiring armies of gig workers to actually deliver the food. They aren’t simple ecommerce websites anymore. That effort may actually be worth paying a commission if you need it, because it means you won’t have to hire and deal with your own delivery guys.
Here in NYC most of the restaurant-hired delivery people are 4 foot tall dudes from Puebla Mexico that don’t speak a word of English and probably get paid $4/hour plus tips. So there’s plenty of exploitation to go around.
I’ve also gotten up to a 15% cash discount. (The only way I figure that works is by tax evasion.)
This is all kinds of food for me.
I hate take-out and always have.
I hate it even more when I need to eat it on my lap in the car because it will be cold when I get home.
It might not be tax evasion, it might just avoiding the fees from the website / payment processors that handle credit cards. I know several local Mom and Pop eatery type places that offer 5% discounts if you call in a pickup order and pay cash vs doing it through a website and paying with a CC. The website/CC route means that the e-commerce provider and payment processor both take their cut so the cash discount means the revenue is the same to the business either way.
Though 15% does sound awful steep, so maybe there is some off the books shenanigans happening.
I was figuring that CC processing fees were typically 4%, so 15% was high enough to mean there had to be something else going on. TBH I didn’t consider website fees because this was a couple years ago and I’d barely heard to Grubhub et al, let alone used them.
Credit card processing fees are almost always 2.9% plus $0.30. I believe AMEX is more, which is why a lot of places don’t take them.
Thanks–I meant to put 3% in the post. But the point is the same.
