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

I think you are overselling the worst case scenario there, Trigger. I routinely call in orders to half a dozen places. All of them are local restaurants–none are chains. And I haven’t had a screwed up order in a long time, if ever. They don’t require credit cards–none of them. They take my phone number, and I pay when I get there. I know their menus, and they know their menus… Yes, I’m sure they are busy, but I AM THE REASON they are busy. Me and the rest of the locals who know the best places to eat in town. Whether it is Dragon A, Deli and Brew, Angelo’s, Celadon, etc. they are glad for the business and they get it right. I’m sorry you and others here have had a tough time getting decent food at a good price that is done correctly, but I have just not had that problem.

Edit: I will add one note: the local place I eat at the most is El Charro, but I don’t do carry-out from them, because most Mexican food just doesn’t travel well. So I eat-in at their location. It is the only restaurant I eat in at, and I know the folks there well enough that I’ve helped the owner’s sister get into college and I routinely chat with all of the staff. They’ve done a good enough job with the COVID restrictions that I feel comfortable there–and I guess it is good enough, since I’ve made it over a year now without getting sick, and I’ve gotten my vaccines now. But it is the only place I eat at that I don’t carry out from, and that is just a cuisine issue.

Yeah really disagree with that. No way I’m eating indoors until 2 weeks after my second dose.

At that point, I’m taking an Uber to Peter Lugers and getting the steak for two, for one. Rare. With the thick-cut bacon appetizer. And hash browns. And creamed spinach. And apple strudel with schlag for dessert.

Yeah, I’m sure for pickup it’s fine not to take the card. But, again, pickup is not an option for me. And for delivery, they’re gonna need it. And I’m not gonna do that over the phone.

Indoor dining is supposed to reopen here in mid-May, which is approximately a month after they’re supposed to start vaccinating people like me. Perfect timing, though I imagine it’s going to be a nightmare getting a booking, especially with reduced capacity.

It’s already getting warmer so eating outdoors will very shortly be perfectly fine anyway. But yes I imagine capacity will be an issue once a critical mass is vaccinated and comfortable eating indoors.

Not much outdoor dining in central London.

That’s the city’s fault. Here in NYC we allowed restaurants to straight-up build onto the streets.

Yeah, our so-called Streetspace measures were really half-hearted, with a handful of exceptions. It’s been pretty depressing to see all the car/lorry traffic come back same as before.

Honestly even outdoor dining can be too crowded for me. But it’s a moot point since I’m not eating with anyone and I can’t get to most of the restaurants so delivery just makes more sense for the user case, until I can start doing dine-in again.

Well in their defense, London is an ancient city and there are lots of narrow streets where that wouldn’t be possible. But on larger thoroughfares, you’re just giving up parking in front of the restaurant.

I feel perfectly fine with outdoor dining. Where I don’t feel fine is where they’re entirely enclosed in plastic or even full-on wooden construction, so there’s basically indoors. That technically doesn’t count as outdoor dining in NYC but many restaurants did it anyway because it gets seriously cold here.

NYC’s smartest move was in telling restaurants that the new outdoor dining areas would be permanent. This incentivized them to invest in building them well, because they’ll have that capacity for years to come. In 2022, I’ll be happy to sit “outdoors” in an entirely enclosed heated little area and have a $100 meal.

They did pretty much the opposite here, going out of their way to emphasise that the changes were temporary (and many have already been removed), even if they were in practice just accelerating stuff that had already been planned and consulted on before the pandemic, like new bike lanes. I wonder if it was a question of trying to get funding from central government. Regardless, I think it backfired, especially compared to other cities that have managed to make really meaningful improvements for non-car users.

Yep, that would have the opposite effect. Why spend all that money building out when it’ll just have to be torn down? Stupid.

Hey, Stusser, if you don’t mind my asking, where do you live in NYC? Assuming things get back to something resembling normal eventually, I will be back to visiting the city several times per year again, since my FIL lives there and also BIL/SIL. I know Manhattan pretty well, but not the buroughs at all.

I don’t know them either, I’m around Union Square.

Ah, way downtown then. FIL is at 79th and 3rd, right across from Eli’s.

I like that area down there–you are kinda between East Village and West Village? We go down to NoHo occasionally, and there’s a small farmer’s market over by Washington Square I like.

Yes, more on the east side. Eli’s bread is great.

I assure you, I am not. If anything, I’m underselling it. 27 years in the biz. Been there, done that, got the postcards.

And there have long been delivery services for restaurants. I started seeing them back when I was a waiter and bartender back in the early 1990s. And they were all phone infrastructure, person-to-person voice.

And they all failed.

Every six months or so, some new service would contact me as a manager and want to be able to list us as one of their delivery options. And we’d say “No, thanks” for a whole bunch of reasons. And every time within a year these companies would be dead or dying.

So what changed? Why is this now a segment where tens of billions are being spent in the US alone, even pre-pandemic?

Credit the Big Two national pizza chains for changing the way Americans order food for delivery or pickup. In fact, a huge deal of credit should go to Dominos. They are indeed a tech company that also happens to make food. The Dominos digital ordering model is the one everyone copies now – clear menu layout, easy to navigate UI, specials and coupons laid out prominently that clearly guide the user through their use. Plus order tracking and delivery driver GPS.

And the big delivery services have copied that digital platforming, and then taken it up a notch by giving every storefront that wants it a digital ordering/menu platform. And so there’s a reason that by 2020, pre-pandemic this space had become a place where $30-40 billion in orders are taking place. It’s not just delivery, either. It’s pickup service too. The convenience and accuracy of digital ordering is simply a better mousetrap – and restaurants are lucky enough to be capitalized to take advantage are thriving.

I’m glad picking up the phone and calling in an order works well for you. That’s great! But…your experience isn’t scalable and is rapidly becoming a rare legacy exception rather than the rule for how things will work going forward.

Yup, Trigger has this one. It is great if works great for you and some restaurants, but I bet most of them would much rather take the order online, for the reasons Trigger mentioned.

I have two regular spots that only take phone orders - one is the super fancy sushi place, and that one I get - their menu of flown in daily from Japan fish just varies so much there is no easy way to port that to an online ordering system.

The other one is a nice Cuban joint that has a very standard menu that can easily be ported online, they just don’t for some reason. Because they didn’t, one time I ordered a family sized meal of vaca frita (marinated flank steak), they called that out over the phone, repeated it, and then proceeded to enter ropa vieja (marinated shredded pork) in their POS. I picked it up (with a host of other items and mojitos, the entree was in a giant foil steamer, so I didn’t open it up at the restaurant), brought it home and saw the error. The restaurant then got to deliver to my house the correct family sized item and a bunch of “sorry we screwed up” drinks and desserts. So a $100 dollar menu item got hosed and that restaurant probably lost its entire profit on it, if not more, because one dude pushed the wrong button on the POS system (the bartender has to take the phone orders - wanna bet he was making drinks while trying to type my order in at the same time?). Which never would have happened if I could have pushed the button on my online order.

Does that happen to me, personally, very often? Nope. But I bet any restaurant at scale has that happen frequently.

These guys get it.

The driver shortage in Raleigh has been cleared up, enabling me to order from Five Guys once more. At last, our long national nightmare is over.