If they are older maybe they were afraid of the contact since you had to go out to them.
Deliveroo, the UK’s equivalent of DoorDash, just posted its financials ahead of an IPO ($10bn valuation mooted). It managed to lose GBP 224m last year. It’s really hard to see how this is a viable business model if they can’t even make money when restaurants have no choice but to use them.
It isn’t a viable model, and won’t be until these services start taking an even higher percentage of the food bill, which is crazy when you consider they already take 20%+ just for the “privilege” of being listed.
I have started to message my local restaurants that do not yet have a independent online ordering system. I want to give my money to the restaurant, not to these things, but that is hard when the only ordering option is through DD/GH/etc that tack on an absurd markup (or essentially force the restaurant to mark up to cover the fees).
Implementing an in house ordering option is not hard these days, so when I hit “order online” at a restaurant and it takes me to GH, I get ornery.
It isn’t?
One that works with as slick an interface as UberEats or DoorDash, including realtime order updates and GPS tracking? One that gets orders from the customer to food prep in the kitchen seamlessly the way these services are able to?
I’m extremely dubious that there’s anything easy about it. And especially dubious that it wouldn’t be a pretty big cost outlay if they tried.
BTW, between DoorDash (which I don’t use at the moment) and UberEats, apparently I’ve ordered from them 131 times in the last 3 years.
I think I’ve had three orders in that time where I had to ask for a refund or some sort of credit. That’s a pretty good hit rate.
We’re now up to 94 orders since the pandemic forced us permanently home (first mid-pandemic order was 3/18/2020), or a bit more often than once every four days. Seven orders that warranted a refund in that time, plus one so delayed they automatically gave me a coupon, or about 8.5% of the time. Pretty dire here in Raleigh, I guess!
I bet they’re better in the really big cities. More customers, more consistent drivers, etc.
I’ve had problems ordering several times, no useful customer support on those issues at all, multiple severely late orders, including one that eventually they called and were like “yeah, the restaurant didn’t take the order because their payment processor is busted but we didn’t know until the driver got there, sorry, here’s a refund”, a driver that delivered someone else’s unidentified order to me but not mine, order mixups…basically it’s been a blazing trash fire of an experience…and that’s with Doordash, who have treated me relatively well. I quit using Bite Squad because they were worse.
Oh yeah, we did get some random person’s food once. The driver eventually came back and dropped off our actual food, but didn’t ask for the other stuff back, and our actual food was frigid by then, but we didn’t want to get the driver penalized so we didn’t complain / ask for a refund. But that brings us up to at least 9/94 with issues.
Maybe more now that I recall that night. We as a rule don’t rate gig economy drivers / shoppers / etc anything less than a 5 unless they do something actively dangerous (like the Uber driver who blew through like three red lights bringing us to a tiki bar in Indianapolis during GenCon 2019), since even a handful of 4s can massively impact their income on some of these platforms.
Which, like, hey, good self congratulations to myself there for being so magnanimous, but it does mean I don’t do anything to pull bad drivers out of the system. But I still think the vast majority of the issues I’ve run into have been on the restaurant end, not the drivers.
Absolutely. There are market regions where this seems like an idea that will work pretty well. And there are regions where maybe that’s “less well”. And then there are swathes of the country where it just cannot work at all, as currently built.
I’ve never used any of these services. Does the tip go to the delivery person or the restaurant? Or the slimy platform middlemen?
Honestly I have never had a problem with any of these services that I could clearly identify as being the driver’s fault, so I just don’t worry about it. I complain if I need to to get my food and maybe a credit for it being late and let the service sort out who caused the problem.
The delivery person, there are also unspecified fees that go to the slimy middleman, and I’m told that they driver is often paid a default rate that any tips are subtracted from. The restaurant only gets your order money and not even all of that.
I split my orders pretty evenly between seamless/grubhub and doordash. Seamless metrics are pretty easy to extract; I order an average of 7 times per month with an average order size of $23. Double the count to include doordash orders.
Feels about right to me, ordering every other day or so.
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.
That’s a huge pain in the ass. You have to read out your credit card number over the phone. Also I get delivery not pickup, I live in NYC and don’t have a car.
Deliveroo prospectus was published (not sure if the direct link will work, also Americans may have to pretend they’re not to get in). They seem to be banking an awful lot on growth in grocery deliveries, which seems a tad optimistic given the mark-up and limited selection, though presumably there’s some market for delivered booze and cigarettes even at inflated cost. Checking what it would cost to order something from my nearest express supermarket (about a 7 minute walk), they add a £4.50 delivery fee, a £0.49 service fee, and if you order less than £15, a £5 small order fee. And that’s on top of the mark-up, eg they’re selling Bombay Sapphire at £24.50 vs £17 on the actual supermarket website.
This was interesting, I thought. Pretty minimal growth from existing customers during the pandemic:
Also this disclosure:
Obviously, parallels with the Uber decision in the UK. My reading of that judgment, though, is that it wouldn’t automatically apply to a service like Deliveroo, particularly if their contracts are structured differently. A big part of the Uber ruling is that the licensed entity was not the contracting party (and you needed to be working for a licensed entity to do the job), which rendered the form of the contract less important than the substance of the relationship with the licensed entity.
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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
I trust a web ordering system to get my order right much more than I do a human being listening to my order over a phone call. And then it’s provided to the restaurant in very specific, written down format that is easy to reference. Any fuckup at that point is entirely on them, not the method of ordering. Also what Stusser said about it being a pain in the ass to call. And not wanting to do credit cards over the phone (or to a live human being who doesn’t need access to it when there are automated systems where the humans will never see it). And not having a car for pickup. And almost none of these restaurants do delivery on their own, they do it through Doordash, Bite Squad, or Grubhub (or more than one of those).
I’ll absolutely go through a restaurant’s own website and ordering system if I can, but mostly they don’t have one. And sometimes their website won’t deliver to me when Grubhub or whoever, for the same restaurant, and dispatching their drivers, will. It’s fucking insane.
Let’s talk about this one.
It’s not so weird!
Why would restaurants do this?
Well.
One of the ways a restaurant can actually make money and make the ordering/delivery app model work for them is to fully lean into it. To understand it and its cost structures and then make it fit. Which is absolutely NOT something that a lot of places can do, necessarily. But some places can.
So. When Chili’s sets up a virtual restaurant called “It’s Just Wings” on DoorDash, are they trying to hide that they’re Chili’s? Eh, sure. Maybe. It’s probably part of it.
But what they’re also doing is trying to separate any anti-brand sentiment from folks who’ve had shitty experiences with the order process (I’m not commenting on the quality or lack thereof of Chili’s food here) of making pick-up or delivery orders by phone in the past. An ordering process that didn’t go so well.
These virtual restaurants can be set up as their own cost-structures in the operation. That Chili’s on the corner may only keep the dining room open for very limited, socially-distant seating until 8pm. In many markets, they can’t even do that. No seating, period right now. But these operations have figured out: “Here’s the bite DoorDash takes. Here’s the food cost and labor cost that we incur on sales after DD takes their pound of flesh.” And then they’ve created a little micro-operation in which they hit their COGS numbers and labor numbers for a night just pumping out limited menu items with a smaller kitchen staff of 2-3 people…and it’s bringing money to the bottom line.
Again, not every restaurant operation is capitalized enough to make this fly. But for those that can make it go, it seems to be starting to work at least in limited trials.
I don’t take orders via the phone- all of the above problems listed, plus I’m usually busy cooking. I built a WooCommerce-based ordering system for my operation. It took a day or so. I don’t currently have it set so that customers get texts, but that’s a simple plugin. I may upgrade to that when I get a real brick and mortar and some real staff.
All of the customer horror stories on here over the last week are part of why I want nothing to do with any of the delivery apps. Plus, not wanting to subsidize some tech bro’s unsustainable business model while he bleeds my business dry. Fuck all those guys.