> If Grubhub actually took a stand and showed they not only did not do this sort of behavior, I would actually use it, and I would pay the premium for delivery (to make sure the restaurant makes money and the driver makes money).

You may well faithfully adhere to this promise, but the reality is, most people simply don't know (and it would be generous for me to assume they would care even if they DID know).

So much of the GH/DD/UE model is reducing friction to drive transactions. Click button, throw some amount of money at the company, receive product. Just like Amazon.

Having to stay abreast of the news, the competitive landscape, the various companies' business practices, and then factor that all in when making an online transaction, is probably too much to ask of a consumer when the entire point of the service is not having to know or care too much about the details.

You could even argue one of the features of these services is abstracting away things that people don't WANT to know about- Tipping policies, labor practices, what the parking is like at the restaurant, how pleasant the staff is to deal with, how the owner's doing today, etc.

I'm with you- I almost never order anything delivery, I pick up my own orders on the rare occasion I takeout, etc. This whole delivery gig economy thing makes me pretty uncomfortable. But we're a rare breed. (and I'm not claiming to be better than most people; I order far too much from Amazon than I'd like to admit).

I don't get it, how would the restaurant be losing money from this behaviour? Isn't Grubhub paying the regular takeout price, same as if you order it yourself?

At face value non-partnered restaurants dont lose money, they simply get more customers (essentially, getting some of the services that partnered restaurants get, but for free since partnered restaurants pay fees for each order that goes through the platform)

However, in truth they pay damage in reputation. If the delivery company delivers food slow, or lets it get cold, then the customer will blame the restaurant. On top of that, unpartnered restaurants will naturally get slower delivery times because the order flow involves grubhub delivery people walking in and placing an order (or calling in), whereas partnered restaurants get point of sale systems integrated with grubhub's backend. They get less accurate delivery time estimations. They might pay a much higher delivery fee or service fee. All things add up to a worse customer experience.

People order every day from non Amazon, non Amazon Prime sellers on Amazon. My feeling is end users know what they’re getting into as long as they’re informed the restaurant is non partnered, and your bosses just need to take the 5m to come up with a brand.

I’ve heard many stories about people’s orders taking longer than 2 days to arrive[a] (sometimes even 5+ weeks). When asked, they say they ordered on Amazon and are upset at Amazon for it being late. After you explain that Amazon is also a marketplace, they understand why it’s late (it’s the seller’s fault), but they’re still upset at Amazon for not making it clear enough that it wasn’t going through Prime.

[a]: I.E. non-Prime purchases (ignoring the fact that Prime purchases can also just be late)

That indicates mostly a branding/communication problem and not something fundamentally wrong with the practice of layering services over other third-party services.

People don’t realize that Amazon Prime doesn’t promise 2 day shipping from the time you order. It’s 2 day shipping from the time they fill your order, which could be a week or two later.

It's a bit more nuanced than that. The best way to think of food delivery businesses funded by VCs is to think of them as payday lenders.

Some background reading: https://themargins.substack.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitra...

Be sure to also read this insightful comment left by a former GrubHub employee: https://themargins.substack.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitra...

Grubhub fucks up the order, the customer leaves a bad yelp/google review for the restaurant. (Because the customer was tricked into believing that they were interacting with the restaurant the entire time.)

That's why this is fraud.

Here's an excerpt from their October 2019 letter to shareholders. TL;DR - they're a public company and the markets told them they needed to keep growing in order to survive.

> For restaurant inventory, we will rapidly expand our recent pilots of putting non-partnered restaurants on the platform. For reasons we’ve discussed many times, we believe non-partnered options are the wrong long-term answer for diners, restaurants and shareholders. It is expensive for everyone, a suboptimal diner experience and rife with operational challenges. With that said, it is extremely efficient and cheap to add non-partnered inventory to our platform and it can at least ensure that all of our current and potential new diners have the option to order from any of their favorite restaurants now, even if it’s not the best solution. By leveraging non-partnered options, we believe we can more than double the number of restaurants on our platform by the end of 2020.

> At the same time, because we know that partnered relationships are critical to the long-term success of this business, we will be investing aggressively in our independent restaurant sales organization to support converting as many of these non-partnered restaurants to partnered relationships as quickly as possible and to take advantage of other innovations in the restaurant space, like virtual restaurants.

https://s2.q4cdn.com/772508021/files/doc_financials/2019/q3/...