Well… I just moved states back in the fall, and my wife and I never did much eating out. Maybe once a month.
We have been ordering from somewhere once a week, and trying lots of new places. So while this may generally be somewhat true, it isn’t always.
This has come up multiple times on Shark Tank. They seem to like it a lot. I think the delivery, taxes and fees and tip approach is ridiculously expensive. I’m only using it now myself because I have a job and my company is paying for the Dashpass. I am dropping it like a bad habit once that is gone.
I gave up on using any of the delivery services (and also on Yelp, which is crap in the way they list restaurants). I use a restaurant’s online app to order (and some are much better than others) but I pick the order up myself. Nothing around here is more than 10 miles away, and its nice to get out of the house.
As a side note: for those of you familiar with Sonic–that restaurant is absolutely designed for a pandemic. Drive through AND pull up stalls. Stay in your car but eat at the restaurant! I wish I had invested before January.
Boy if even a couple of our restaurants had online apps, that would be something. It’s a crapshot that they even have a online menu… or a website / Facebook page. With all this happening, I am kind of hoping some of them step up their game and actually put their stuff online… and update it (yeah looking at you last posted 2010 Facebook pages).
My favorite restaurant.
Others:
Excellent Indian food.
Excellent Thai. Awesome Tom Ka Gai.
I know what you mean - very few places around here have anything of the sort, and I live in a major metropolitan area.
I just call the restaurants direct and get carryout. Parking is never an issue and we have dozens and dozens of options within five miles.
My biggest issue I’m still paying the price of a dine-in experience (minus tip but I always tip for carryout anyway) without getting the dine-in experience, and some foods aren’t as good after they have been sitting for a bit by the time I get them home.
I’m not aware of anyplace that’s handling contactless carry-out well, at least not among my usual haunts. My parents (unwisely in my opinion) have tried that a few times and ended up in much more extended and direct contact than they wanted.
I’ll happily pay a premium to have stuff left outside my door.
I do carryout sometimes, but when I’m using my own two legs as my only means of transport, that doesn’t leave a lot of options.
Individual apps are a terrible solution. I don’t want 100 separate apps on my phone just to order dinner, and I don’t want to give 100 different apps my credit card number. Something like Chownow is the way to go.
I’m not a fan of paying up to 20% extra per menu item just for the privilege of picking up food at a restaurant and bringing it home to eat for using the existing apps either.
An ex Grubhub VP comments:
That’s a nice post there. I feel like these apps are outrageously expensive, opportunistic and exploitative, at the same time… wth restaurant industry, get with the program.
I think you mean: “An ex Grubhub VP says 'Visit my new startup so we can show a VC investor at our 1st round funding meeting next month all the unique visitors we’ve had to our website.”
Yes it does devolve into his new startup at the end.
From what I’ve heard and seen, that doesn’t make his statements untrue. Whether or not he really means to fix anything with his startup remains to be seen. The fees these apps put on their customers, people buying the food, and the fees they put on the restaurants, and the reliance on tips to keep their drivers going and able to get anything out of working… there is something wrong with this set-up, and I mean a big wrong.
What’s wrong is that food delivery simply isn’t a viable business unless it matches one of the three cases below.
a) Backed by VC or an inflated share price, and thus willing to lose money to gain marketshare
b) Exploiting immigrants/poor people to work under minimum wage with the hope of tips
c) In a dense urban area
There’s no way to make money paying gig workers to deliver food if they need to drive/bike over 15 minutes to do it. They’re just too expensive.
It remains to be seen if you can make money paying gig workers to drive people around ala Uber/Lyft’s core business model too. So far they haven’t.
Now it’s very clear the market likes to get food delivered, even outside coronatimes, and Uber/Lyft are very popular services too. So they will exist in some form, and prices can’t go up much because the market won’t bear it. My expectation is these needs will be serviced by self-driving vehicles in the relatively near future.
Except food delivery existed before apps, and yes, not just in big cities. They didn’t have an application skim 20% off the top of the menu prices, add a few bucks for delivery AND another few bucks for tip on top of that. The restaurants that were in the market for delivery had menus catered for it and some, but not nearly enough, were able to move their business online. They’re not Uber. They’re not trying to create autonomous cars in addition to luring people away from expensive taxis. The ongoing 20% in addition to the fees they charge customers of these apps is just too high of a profit margin, and it’s going to be forcefully reduced until only efficient companies can handle that or the restaurants find another solution.
Not much, primarily pizza places. They hire kids with their own cars and pay minimum wage plus tips, and in many cases like Dominos their entire business model was built around delivery, with very small storefronts, no seating, etc.
Chinese also, Jimmy John’s… what are you looking for a list? There is also a host of them that focus on carry-out, put in carry-out pick-up parking spots. You require a list for those too?
Why are you trying to pretend like DoorDash and GrubHub somehow discovered restaurant delivery and pick-up?