Nah. I can’t agree. There’s a difference between “Hey this place is new, let’s try it” and “this is Chuck E. Cheese with a different name.”
I’m with you, mostly, but I don’t think I’ve ever tried out a place without checking around about it (reviews and such) first.
Edit: in this kind of situation I mean. Obviously I’ve been driving around and hungry and said “that sounds good” before. But I agree that people don’t “get what they deserve”. Nobody deserves Chuck E. Cheese at home.
I think you underestimate the laziness of some people. I’m sure there are a lot of people who say “Pasqually’s? It’s pizza, how bad could it be?”
I mean, you know what they say about pizza and sex.
You shouldn’t get either from Chuck E Cheese
Get what you deserve may be a bit harsh. But certainly “don’t be surprised if it’s shit”. Most delivery pizza is shit. You find a place you like and you stick with it.
Since February I’ve worked with 3 of the places that I set up for opening and helped them to get up and running with DoorDash (in two places) and Uber Eats in another, and walked them through how to avoid giving away money needlessly and even did hands-on setup work for putting menu choices up with the templates from those services, and operational on-site stuff to make it work for them so they could stay open and stay in business during the lockdown.
So many places on Door Dash just have absolutely disasterous menu listings. And I don’t just mean little places, our local Cracker Barrel’s menu on Door Dash has sides mixed with entrees mixed with sandwiches - it’s damn near unusable.
What I’m saying it, more people should hire you!
Interesting! Do you think there are any fundamental differences between fine dining/gastropubs (which, self-evidently in the case of the first, tend to be pricier) and more, uh, modestly priced restaurants that could make their ability to deal with DoorDash less viable or is it all cosmetic?
The biggest problem that the industry is going to have to contend with regarding 3rd party delivery services is indeed the disruption they’ve caused. But the disruption looks very much to be on the consumer habits side. And that’s not something that’s probably shouldn’t get regulated away.
Here’s what consumers LIKE about DoorDash:
- You can clearly order from any DoorDash restaurant on your computer or mobile device. This is huge. It might be the single most disruptive thing, and you can ask Dominos and Pizza Hut just how big a convenience this is, and how much it can actually drive consumers to your business – people would actually rather order chain pizza from Dominos that they know the order was entered correctly for – than have to call a great pizzeria in their neighborhood and talk to someone who may be trying to field multiple incoming calls, may not transcribe the order correctly, and may not communicate it to the kitchen accurately.
This, more than anything else, is HUGE. As a consumer, I know what food items I ordered, what sizes I asked for, and what quantities were requested. I know what modifier prompts were selected. It’s beautiful (especially when the online menu is set up correctly!)
You would not believe – or maybe you would – how often delivery and takeout is treated as an afterthought in most places. And for most places, that’s probably a smart strategy. Especially in finer dining, the dine-in setting is a big thing, and execution within the four walls is the guiding principle. But…IF you’re going to offer take-out and IF you’re going to try delivery, do it right. Don’t leave it to hosts or counter clerks who may not know the menu or may not know what the kitchen can and can’t do to answer the phone. Don’t put your phone in a noisy lobby or noisy kitchen, either. And while that sounds elementary, 99% of restaurants that try to do their own takeout and delivery fail those basic steps. People are tired of being put on hold halfway through telling their order to someone. People are tired of having to repeat their order umpteen times. It sucks.
And then here’s GrubHub or DoorDash or Uber Eats, and you can clearly and concisely enter and send the whole thing? Beautiful. Perfect.
- Delivery drivers on demand. The folks who should really be squawking about 3rd party delivery services are Dominos, Pizza Hut, and Papa John’s. For decades, they’ve had a monopoly on food delivery driver employment. Now they’re losing delivery drivers to 3rd party delivery services. For the driver, they may not make as much in a short period of time (like a 6-hour shift), but it seems like more and more drivers are willing to be “on call” and simply chilling at home, maybe working some other gig online, and then jumping on DoorDash or GrubHub calls and making money the whole time without having to wear a uniform and hang out at a pizza place waiting for orders to come in.
And if you’re Uber, holy shit do you have an opportunity. If you can get Uber drivers willing to pick up and deliver food in between Uber calls? That’s huge.
And yeah, small companies trying to do 3rd party delivery are going to suffer. But they were already working a failed business model. Places like Takeout Taxi (RIP) and Foodie Cab simply didn’t have access to the driver base that DoorDash, GrubHub and UberEats have.
We tried working with Takeout Taxi at Gilbert’s for a while in the late aughts. And the turnaround from order received (which they had to call in, that’s all they were equipped for) to pickup and delivery to customer was sometimes 2 hours before a customer got the food they ordered. And of course it’d be cold, and we’d get complained to – not the delivery service. Which means…
- Restaurants like the 3rd party delivery services more than the local, smaller places. Honestly, in most cases, an order is an order. And though you probably want to restrict incoming orders during high traffic times if you can (and there are options to do that with 3rd party services now…though no one’s using those options during lockdown!) there’s a lot to be said for knowing as a proprietor that there’s already someone waiting for an order. Typically there’s already a driver waiting as the food is being packed and bagged for delivery. And then it goes, and that’s it.
With smaller services, you’d pack and bag and then a half hour to 45 minutes later someone would show up to take it. And as a restaurateur, I’d just know “This food is going to be shitty.” (OK, I’d probably think something more operationally correct like “This will be far below our standards” but…same thing.) And as a consumer, getting your order delivered within 25-45 minutes of placing it? That’s so, so huge, and it’s a delivery time that smaller independent local services typically can’t touch.
I absolutely see that there will be TONS of growing pains in this arena for a while now. Honestly, it could be that this lockdown is going to accelerate the delivery thing and how restaurants work with them into the next phase, where there’s more all-around satisfaction from everyone for how this is working out.
Yeah, one of my original duties was to set up point of sale order terminals for servers and bartenders at the places I managed. Which is painstaking, headache-inducing stuff. Flow charts are your friends, so that the right side-order choices pop up on a menu, meat temperature choices pop up on burgers and steaks, etc. But…set it up correctly once, and correcting, changing, editing…all much easier.
Oh, and I am SO HAPPY to not do that for a living now, or ever again (knock wood.)
Yes. I refuse to place orders by phone. Haven’t in decades. Never will again. I’d rather order with the restaurant and skip all the middleman fees and faff, but it’s gotta be web based. Pure and simple.
To me the biggest thing is to either use it and lean into it…or don’t.
But if you use DoorDash, make sure that you have someone whose entire job it is to check to go orders and pack them. Make sure you’ve got to go containers and napkins and plastic utensils in stock, and not cheap crap that will leak all over the place. Get bags or boxes to pack orders in that will best preserve the way the entree is supposed to look. (Seriously, there are still pasta places that will set pasta carefully into a hinged to go container…and then the person packing the order sets the damned container on its side to fit it into a bag. A thousand curses on those places.)
The biggest reason for that is that most 3rd party companies will accept at face value a customer complaint and issue a refund to the customer and a charge to the restaurant. That’s how MANY (and I can’t stress this enough, but I didn’t want to use all caps too much to seem like I was yelling :) ) get utterly crushed by 3rd party delivery services. Anything the restaurant operator can do to reduce those complaints is the big hill to get over to making money with delivery services.
Yep. And you’re speaking for the market, really here.
I’d rather the restaurants I love go out of business and the owners have to prostitute their children than call in and provide my credit card number over the phone.
Luckily, services like chownow exist that aren’t evil so they don’t have to pimp their kids.
I don’t mind placing phone orders in principle but it’s undeniably (for me, anyway) a prime source of mismade orders. Just ordered yaki udon from one of my favorite places the other day and when we picked it up and got it home it was regular old udon instead, and when we called about it the answer was, “bring it in and talk to the manager,” which annoyed me so much I might think twice about getting the place again. What kind of answer is that? In the end I fried it up myself (it was good, but it wasn’t of course the same and I was paying someone else to cook it for me, after all, and it was more expensive to boot).
I’m curious trigger from your background if you believe that fine dining restaurants will begin adjusting their menus to a take out world. That is, creating different sorts of dishes that are “more durable” for delivery and rely less on presentation but would qualify as “fine”. Or if fine dining will simply try to ride out the storm and hope for a return to the status quo.
But that’s the rub though right. Door dash, yelp, and others don’t care what the owner wants and instead tries to force their hand. They co-opt Google and other listings and cause quality problems and without the business’ consent or even knowledge. This isn’t just “I read a few internet articles bitching about it” but I’ve talked to actual restaurant owners and others in my local area that have complained about this.
If they are not ready to lean into it but Door dash and all the other loss leader delivery services force their hand, what are they to do.
Is there any evidence that it’s possible without becoming a monopoly for these third party delivery services to be profitable at scale? Outside of fine dining people are very price conscious (so much so that they have a hard time not paying a tip but paying slightly extra per entree).
The low margin restaurants would have to raise prices to keep their margins the same while allowing Door dash and the like to be profitable as well, because higher volume doesn’t matter if door dash is taking a 20% commission on every order. That’s substantial figuring that most restaurants are barely profitable with overall profit margins between 3-5% Not only that, but door dash availability might actually hurt revenue because while people may order delivery that would never pick up, people that may pick up themselves will see the lazy solution and just get it delivered for comparable pricing, just lowering the higher margin sales.
It’s also not clear when the whole stack of cards will fall down on the gig worker thing. There’s still a ton of evidence that gig workers are barely coming out ahead after taxes and expenses and normal accounting procedures are accounted for. This is obfuscated by a lot of factors, such as a lot of people not understanding vehicle depreciation and don’t notice that they are paying more maintenance on their car than they normally would, nor taking taxes and things into account on a per-ride basis.
The centralized ordering ecommerce system is very easy and inexpensive to replicate. Chownow charges a flat commission of a hundred dollars per month plus standard credit card transaction fees, and their pricing is right on their website. It’s a great business model, fair to everybody.
What costs money is hiring and managing all the delivery people. Here in NYC there’s an underclass of oppressed immigrants on bicycles that have been doing that for decades. Doordash, grubhub, ubereats, etc, instead use gig workers. Both methods are possible, but I doubt ubereats drivers would be willing to work for $4/hour plus tips.
My feeling is food delivery probably will never be profitable outside major metropolitan areas. NYC, Chicago, and downtown areas of more spread-out cities like LA, Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, etc.
I tend to think that’s probably true which is why, evil or not, I’m profoundly grateful that services like DoorDash exist in the here-and-now. Delivery is literally the only way we’re going to be interacting with restaurants for some time, if these services didn’t exist there’d be no acceptable way for us to do business with anyone outside of local pizza places. We’ve substantially cut down on eating out as it is, we’d have stopped entirely without DoorDash. Services like Chownow don’t even exist around here.
The other thing restaurants need to be doing and should’ve been doing all along is knowing their costs structures. And if that sounds super basic and headslappingly “DUH”…you’d be amazed. :)
So yeah. You wanna work with DoorDash. Great.
- What’s your food cost currently – in lockdown mode?
- What WAS your food cost before lockdown?
- What’s your total BOH (back of house) labor cost, before lockdown and currently?
- What’s your FOH labor cost, assuming you’re not paying any FOH (front of house) labor also before and currently (probably close to zero currently)?
- What’s your op supplies cost on to go packaging, utensils, bags, whatever?
Once you know those things, you can look at your various menu offerings and now figure: “What are my costs factoring in DoorDash’s cut?” What’s your food cost before? What’s your food cost after?
And then don’t be afraid to charge $10.50 or $11 or $12 on DoorDash for that $9.00 dine-in entree. In a lot of markets, you’d be surprised to find that end consumers are willing to pay that premium for the other advantages they can get from a 3rd party delivery service.
What I find fascinating is the advent of kitchen-only restaurants geared specifically for these delivery services. You have one big kitchen that has like 10 different restaurants attached to it and the only people coming and going are delivery drivers.