When this is over, I suspect I will spend a lot less time eating at restaurants and just cooking at home. This industry as a whole pleaded to the public to help save them, to vote in Acts to help save their employees, to order take out and delivery to keep them floating, and the experience has been piss poor through outrageously expensive delivery services and a well why did you think we would care restaurant industry.
I think we’ll see a lot more ghost kitchens and once the novelty of going out again wears off, the expense won’t be forgotten.
I really don’t think the restaurants are the cause of 95% of the bad experiences with the industry over the last year. At least not around here. They’re not perfect or anything, of course. But it’s really impossible to overemphasize how little control they have over the delivery process or how utterly garbage the delivery services are.
My strategy was to find restaurants that were really trying to stay afloat. If they were just plopping their menu on GH/DD etc at huge markups, without other options (online ordering through their website, at normal prices), without adjusting their menu to items that make sense to travel in a takeout/delivery world, good luck to them. There were a ton of ways to not make the experience suck and expensive for customers, but unfortunately a lot just went LCD with the delivery services and it showed.
Aren’t the restaurants in a pinch though? If you try to search a place it doesnt bring up their website it brings up one of the delivery vendors. I felt like the restaurants were being hijacked especially with covid hitting.
The fact that these services than take a cut of the food price itself is strong arm tactics IMHO.
As far as I know of them tried to change to handle the delivery only approach, several threw up whitev tend grssping at on again and off again parking lot seating and more than a few treated every delivery problem like it was someone else’s problem to deal with and just cut orders and relied on DD refunds for when they decided they were suddenly too busy to bother with second class delivery orders.
I mean this is the same group that pleaded that anyone who could support then to either order or gamble with gift cards…and I don’t really gamble.
It’s been frustrating, and it’s not over either. This county is right at the edge of having all dining shutdown again and that was before Easter services. I’m not hopeful our partial opening will remain and am not really willing to risk it yet.
I feel for almost any industry hit hard by this but man what a horrid year of ordering.
I just realized that these services are missing an easy way to monetize delivery even more: pay extra to guarantee that you are the first delivery on the driver’s list. I’m currently watching my delivery driver go super far away to deliver someone else’s order, adding 20-25 minutes to the drive time for my lunch.
I pretty much get a 100% refund every time they do that to me. I am always last on their triple bundle crap. If i wanted to reheat cold food, I’d reach into the freezer.
No disrespect here. Seriously. But I am amused at the anger that people have for delivery services that they use. You know that they suck. You know that they overcharge. Yet you still use them. Why?
In my case at least, because my partner and I have been taking extreme caution with Covid and basically just not leaving our house + disinfecting the crap out of everything that comes into it.
Which absolutely borders on paranoia.
But come May 6, we’re both 2 weeks+ from vaccination, and I look forward to never visiting doordash.com again.
It gets some money to the restaurants, I’m only in walking range to pick up from a couple of restaurants, I can’t drive, and I’m not gonna eat in the restaurant until I’m fully vaccinated and even then maybe not for a while.
Add “hopelessly overwhelmed by work and childcare” and this is us. That said, we are really sick of the local limited) delivery options at this point, so I suspect we’ll order a lot less in the near future. Now that we can do pickup and go the to store again, there’s strong motivation to do so.
Considering where you live, I’m not surprised you have a plethora of great options. Honestly, there’s merit to traveling to that city for the sole purpose of eating oneself into a coma.
Just ordered a pepperoni and mushroom pizza from Doordash. I had a $10 credit from the order they canceled on me yesterday night and the restaurant had a $5 coupon, so my out of pocket was just over $20. Then the pizza came and they forgot the mushrooms. Contacted support, and they refunded $30 for the pizza and applied another $10 credit.
So on one hand, it was annoying last night’s order was canceled and they got my order wrong. But on the other, they just paid me $20 to eat dinner.
You mention getting credit quite a bit, so curious how often a high volume orderer gets food as expected. Getting discounts for DD or restaurant fuck ups is nice for sure since it sounds pretty automatic, but always wonder what folks tolerance level is for them.
Personal experience speaking as someone who’s used these services for most meals for the past 8 months would be something like:
Order arrives and is at least edibly warm: 70%
Order arrives but is not correct: 10%
Order arrives as ordered but is so cold it needs reheating: 15%
Order just doesn’t arrive: 5%
Mind you, often stuff in the first category still benefits from warming, but it’ll eat as is. Getting something genuinely piping hot is a rarity, and only occurs with places very nearby, but that was true even back when I was picking stuff up myself and bringing it back.
I should clarify that this is using DoorDash. The numbers for GrubHub were considerably worse, which is why we don’t use them anymore.
Order arrives as ordered and is hot: 10%
Order arrives and is at least edibly warm: 30%
Order arrives but is not correct: 20%
Order arrives as ordered but is so cold it needs reheating: 35%
Order just doesn’t arrive: 5%
Averaging about 2/week for the duration of the pandemic, so a little over 13 months straight.
