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Ask HN: Why don't more people use GrubHub, Foodler, etc?

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Re: Ask HN: Why don't more people use GrubHub, Foodler, etc?

#11

Post by kevinrpope »

anywherenotes wrote: post #8

I order from restaurants online, if they have the service. And call others. Is there a benefit to using this service? If the benefit is finding restaurants, google can show restaurants near me. I would imagine if you deal directly with restaurant, and they make a mistake, it's easier to solve it than if there's a third party in the middle.

I've had great results when there are issues with a GrubHub order. Their customer service people call the restaurant and get it sorted out, and they usually tack on a credit to my account for the inconvenience.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more people use GrubHub, Foodler, etc?

#12

Post by dreamdu5t »

serialpreneur wrote: post #6

I use eat24hours.com almost every week. Recently I tried GrubHub for the first time too. I love using these services. I have dozens of restaurants nearby to choose from on eat24hours & grubhub in LA. I think this is one of those services which is very hard to scale outside big cities.

eat24hours was here before seamless or GrubHub, has FAR superior restaurant selection, excellent customer support, and doesn't spam my mailbox and bus ads with "BUY USING SEAMLESS RIGHT NOW HERE'S SOME MONEY!!!!"

Love, love, love Eat24.

Also, a personal anecdote... I reported a CSS bug to Eat24 and they gave me $100 in food credit. I'm not affiliated with them in any way besides being a customer.

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more people use GrubHub, Foodler, etc?

#15

Post by 27182818284 »

They don't look farther than the popular-kids-table cities. Look at Berkeley and they list 20 locations. I choose another university that has 66% the student population and they have 2 locations listed. I'd say they're missing the long tail, but it doesn't even feel right to call it that because we're not talking about rural Alabama, but major universities inside of cities :-/

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more people use GrubHub, Foodler, etc?

#16

Post by timjahn »

I assume you have data to back up this claim and you simply forgot to link to it?

I never buy $350 jeans from any brick-and-mortar or online stores that sell such jeans, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean these services are "not so popular" and "don't get much use".

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more people use GrubHub, Foodler, etc?

#17

Post by ibudiallo »

gusgordon wrote: post #9
rosenjon wrote: post #2

Grubhub did raise $50M a couple years ago: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/20/food-delivery-search-engine... While not a direct indicator of success, I assume this means they are posting some encouraging numbers. I think a lot of restaurants don't join these services, because it costs them money on each order, and they have to find a way to deliver the food, which is a distraction. For this reason, these services somet…

I have never seen anyone use them or even heard of them. I mean, they are fairly popular, but it seemed to me that I and people around me should have at least heard of these things.

That's interesting. You know when you don't know something it doesn't mean its not popular

Re: Ask HN: Why don't more people use GrubHub, Foodler, etc?

#18

Post by dfeltey »

I used to use GrubHub all the time when I lived in Chicago and always had a good experience with them. Since I've moved there aren't very many restaurants using these types of services where I live now, but I would definitely use a similar service if it had decent adoption locally.
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