Food delivery services (DoorDash, Grubhub, Postmates, UberEats, etc.)

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@BennyProfane

I guess I don’t understand why you can’t just pick up the phone and order. That’s what I do with every restaurant around here I place pick-up orders at. I have paper menus, or I look at their menu on the web, but I order by phone, and I go pick up.

Now admittedly that won’t work if you want stuff delivered unless the restaurant also delivers, but even for the ones that do, I pick up anyway, because I don’t want to have to tip a driver or pay an upcharge for delivery. And being on the phone means I can make sure they know what I am ordering, rather than having to trust an online system that is generic to a ton of restaurants.

Let me preface by saying this: if you’ve found a restaurant where this works for you, awesome. Fantastic. But do not assume that calling in your order is portable and will work at every restaurant. Or even any – or many – others.

It won’t.

Here’s what happens when you phone in an order to a restaurant (and more and more, this includes Dominos and Pizza Hut and Papa John’s, all of whom would MUCH prefer you used their apps to order from).

1. A person who has some other very pressing job will pick up the phone. If it is a person who knows the menu well and is efficient, chances are that person has at least two other tasks already going at the same time. He or she can probably spare about 60 seconds to talk to you. 90 seconds if it is a little slow at the restaurant.

2. You are gambling greatly that this person is in a place where they can hear you clearly. Sometimes, that person is in the kitchen. Or in an area where others are talking. Also, hope your phone is pretty clear. Also, hope that you and the person taking the order by phone both are pretty fluent in the language you both understand.

3. The person taking your order by phone – as stusser points out – likely will need your credit card number, expiration date, and possibly your card’s CVV code. You will need to read these numbers over the phone to a person who may have you on a speaker phone.

4. Once you hang up the phone, the person who took your order will have to enter it into a point of sale system so that the kitchen can start preparing it. Here’s hoping they enter your order correctly! Maybe they were doing it as you ordered from them; that would be the most efficient way. But now you’re playing the children’s game “Telephone Operator”. You’ve just given one person a message. Now you are trusting that person to be able to duplicate exactly the message you gave them over a phone. Even if you forced that order-taker to repeat your order back to them verbatim, that’s…no foolproof guarantee they got it right. Especially if you asked for them to go easy on the special sauce, or asked them to put pepperoni on one half of your pizza and mushrooms and peppers on the other or something. This is the process where special orders go to die. Plus, you’re sort of taking it on faith that they’re going to enter your order at some point in the immediate future after talking to you. Which, oh dear.

5. If the person picking up the phone to take your order is not a fairly competent efficient worker at the place you’ve called (which is honestly, about 67% likely), then you can multiply the chances of your order going pear-shaped by about 100-300%. They are likely to not know what you mean if you make a menu item modification, or even know whether they even have certain menu items.

So. There is a reason why UberEats, DoorDash, Postmates and Grubhub were already rising quickly even before the pandemic: they offer a way around these issues. When I go to order from the local pasta place, I can pick and choose exactly what I want from their interface. If the restaurant did their work and set up their menu correctly with the delivery app, if I need a special order modification or change, that can be done from the app. The worker on the phone who didn’t know to ask me what side I wanted with the chicken I ordered doesn’t matter. On these platforms, I’m prompted for the item I want, and if there’s an additional fee for some items or order modifications (extra sauce or extra veggies or something), that can be clearly shown here.

And then my credit card information is encrypted. And when I put my order in and my credit card is accepted by the system, in many cases my order goes directly into the point of sale system at the restaurant and will pop up on the printers in the kitchen and they’ll start prepping my food as soon as they can. No middle man.

And then on my end, the app will show me a little map and tell me that someone is heading to the restaurant to pick up my food. Then that they’re at the restaurant. Then that they’re on the way. Which is helpful.

In short, beyond the delivery service these apps can fill a need on both the consumer side (order accuracy and efficiency) and restaurant operations side (order timing and efficiency). Is there a way to continue to fill these needs with this current pricing/cost to restaurants and consumers model? Obviously, the jury’s still very much out on this. Maybe. Maybe not.

But these services are popular because they are absolutely filling a need and they’ve created a consumer base within the marketplaces where these services work well that is gonna be a thing, I think.