I'm not giving you a $10 delivery tip to drive my Five Guys order eight blocks.. You gotta get out and come up the stairs to my door.
If it's hot outside or whatever, it's still a small price to pay for doing the right thing.
Are United Statesians addicted to convenience?
Have you seen who we picked as president?
In addition to charging the restaurant, the delivery service charges the customer a higher price than the restaurant would. They add delivery fees and service fees. On top of that, the online menus in the delivery service apps often have higher prices than the restaurant’s “real” menu.
Restaurants often negotiate special deals with the delivery services, so all these details can vary. However, delivery app margins are much lower than carry out or dine in margins.
This wouldn't be a problem if it was a case of choosing between A) paying $15 to the restaurant or B) $15 to the restaurant plus $5 in delivery.
However, in reality you're choosing between paying A) $15 directly to the restaurant or B) $12 to the restaurant and $8 for delivery.
Hopefully the added volume of orders makes up for the $3 (made up numbers by the way), but I'm not so sure.
But let me take this a step further because you're not just screwing the restaurant...
The delivery driver is ALSO being screwed by the nature of all of this!
You see, on average the pay and tip of a delivery actually is less than the cost of car wear and tear + minimum wage + gas! People take this job to have cash now but will often end up stuck with the bill in the end. By supporting these delivery companies you are actually supporting companies that are taking aggressive advantage of people to drive engagement numbers and eventually... ^ $7.3 Billion in investor payoffs for a company that has effectively only built an app and menu directory and did basically none of the work. They classify drivers as 1099s to avoid having to adhere to minimum wage laws, they dodge laws where they can and take zero responsibility when people screw up. All of them are exploiting poor people and while one can argue that that's the driver's fault.. as long as you pay the Doordash or GrubHub's of the world their fees and as long as they take 20% off the restaurant's cut, the restaurant wont be able to afford to pay to hire more employees which helps these delivery app companies get drivers due to unemployment. Should I also note that this same company used to pocket the driver tip?
I was picking up sandwiches from a popular sandwich joint last week and the Doordash drivers were picking up multiple orders each time. So most likely the "delay" is really them stopping at other houses to drop off food on their way to you, or vice versa.
(This is a strange world where I can say... obviously Uber is more ethical here. The Uber X service is clearly labeled as such and has realistic arrival times and an option to pay for ensured rapid arrival)
They're surprisingly different in both how good the software is and how efficiently they operate. I'll give three examples of my experiences with European apps.
Wolt (Finnish) - Super polished native app. Very accurate to-the-minute ETA predictions, you can see GPS tracking of couriers as soon as they start heading towards the restaurant. The menus are polished and full of pictures. You can rate couriers and food. The app even includes a mini-game on the ETA screen. Payment by card associated with your account.
Bolt (Estonian) - A comparatively new entry in food delivery with an ok native app. ETAs are all over the place as it keeps re-calculating, although eventually the delivery is reasonably paced. GPS tracking starts after the courier has picked up the food. About a third of the food items have pictures. No rating of food or couriers. No mini-games. Occasional crashes. Payment by card associated with your account.
Lieferando (German - owned by Just Eat Takeway, the company buying Grubhub) - Complete dumpster fire. The "native app" is just a webview of some 2010 style webpage. No pictures of food, no GPS tracking. A static "ETA 30min" estimation that never changes or counts down, it's just always 30min. Payment is a per-order giant form of options that's super German, prioritizing cash-on-delivery. I made the mistake of paying by card. The food never arrived at all. The app itself doesn't give any notifications that there's a failed delivery or anything - the ETA was 30min even 48h later. Customer support is extremely hostile and only responds after several days. The iOS reviews are full of people complaining that they got scammed with no delivery. Ended up having to do a chargeback through my bank.
Yes.
However the financial incentive is for these restaurants is to eventually have their own ordering systems.
I think its dependent on the type of food. As some foods simply don't hold well, and shouldn't be offered as a to-go 'fried calamari,' 'pasta carbonara' 'tempura' or sushi etc... and cannot be re-heated. But, even other things like fries taste pretty poorly when cold and could spoil an entire meal.
Whereas, drunken noodles, pizza or a chiptole burrito can easily be re-heated and taste just as good.
I've ordered Doordash 5 times over that observation period, and all but one time the food was pretty warm, but that's because I tipped $5-10 and the restaurants I ordered from were near by and less than a 4 miles radius from my home. Since it was simply re-heatedable stuff I didn't mind, also, I wasn't really interested in the food so much as data aggregation.
In SF at least Grubhub tends to have some of the more "typical delivery" choices (pizza, chinese food, thai) and decent customer service, Doordash seems to have the most variety but the dashers take their merry time on their way to you (and customer service is nonexistent), Uber Eats is somewhere in between grubhub and doordash in selection and has nonexistent customer service (but at least give you a refund if something goes wrong), caviar has a smaller selection but a lot of unique/higher end things (along with a terrible app but OK customer service), and Tock is targeting the "high end at home" market. There's also postmates which seems more expensive than the others for the same exact restaurants (but seems to have more traction in LA).
At the end of the day, the search is really bad (clicking the healthy category includes deep dish pizza and fried chicken on almost all the apps), the drivers aren't adequately compensated so the customer experience is bad (your driver might make 4 stops on the way to you and your food will be cold), and the apps are slow and buggy.
I'm convinced that significant improvements in search, recommendations, adding proper review support, and finding a way to not piss of restaurants in the process will determine the winner in this battle. The differences in selection are too small (in SF caviar which is owned by doordash and tock being the exceptions) to really crown a winner on that front.