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Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant

nytimes.com

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Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant

#71

Post by vzidex »

cik wrote: post #52

I find the niche answer to this fascinating. With kosher restaurants (captive audience) in my city: 1. They increase their prices on skipthedishes and friends, in order to account for the price difference. 2. They add a piece of paper to EVERY ORDER indicating that if you call or text your food would be 30% cheaper, which includes a flat $3 delivery fee, and no need to tip the driver. 3. Many of them run targeted sub…

#2 is a great idea for them - lets them dodge the UberEats/Foodora/etc fees I guess.

A shawarma place near my last job did the same with Ritual orders, whenever the owner noticed a regular he would ask them to just call the restaurant instead of ordering on the app.

Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant

#72

Post by kube-system »

wil421 wrote: post #12
phillipseamore wrote: post #2

Completely ignores cost of travel and value of time. Factor that in and the additional cost is either comparable or less.

If you had to drive 30 mins round trip in the largest truck with the worst MPGs, you still wouldn’t be anywhere close to 90% of the meal.

30 minutes is easily 90% of a meal, even at city traffic speeds and minimum wage.

57.5 IRS mileage rate * 20 mph average over 30 minutes = $ 5.75

30 minutes US minimum wage = $3.625

Total: $9.375

This would be 90% of a $10.42 meal.

Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant

#73

Post by RandallBrown »

vzidex wrote: post #71
cik wrote: post #52

I find the niche answer to this fascinating. With kosher restaurants (captive audience) in my city: 1. They increase their prices on skipthedishes and friends, in order to account for the price difference. 2. They add a piece of paper to EVERY ORDER indicating that if you call or text your food would be 30% cheaper, which includes a flat $3 delivery fee, and no need to tip the driver. 3. Many of them run targeted sub…

#2 is a great idea for them - lets them dodge the UberEats/Foodora/etc fees I guess. A shawarma place near my last job did the same with Ritual orders, whenever the owner noticed a regular he would ask them to just call the restaurant instead of ordering on the app.

#2 is a great way to get kicked off those platforms as that's almost certainly against the rules of the platform.

Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant

#74

Post by deminature »

SN76477 wrote: post #33

Food delivery in its current form will be short-lived. It is a 4 party system where the company controlling the money is the only one that wins. Restaurants are asked to pay 30% of the ticket. The customer is asked to pay more than expected for their meal, a delivery fee, and a tip. For the customer, this can be nearly double for a simple $10 lunch. The driver that has to deliver it gets stuck with fuel, automatic, a…

Suggesting this model is short-lived is ignoring history. Grubhub has been running this model in the US since 1999 (originally as Seamless in NYC) [1]. It's very unlikely that its going anywhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grubhub

Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant

#75

Post by luckyscs »

apacheCamel wrote: post #31
justanotherc wrote: post #7

This is why I have never ordered UberEats. Plus cold McDonalds is gross. Its not hard to order takeout and run down the road myself. To be honest I don't really get why this whole trend is so popular.

My one and only (and probably last) experience with UberEats was a couple of weeks ago when a driver picked up my order and then proceeded to hang around the nearby airport for ~30 minutes with my food. The airport was sort of along the way to my house but not really. It was almost like he was trying to pick somebody up (for Uber or Lyft I guess) and hopefully get someone near me to drop them off then my food but it…

"Don't contact us when your hangry, please wait until you've finished your cold meal".

Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant

#76

Post by jamil7 »

RandallBrown wrote: post #73
vzidex wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#2 is a great idea for them - lets them dodge the UberEats/Foodora/etc fees I guess. A shawarma place near my last job did the same with Ritual orders, whenever the owner noticed a regular he would ask them to just call the restaurant instead of ordering on the app.

#2 is a great way to get kicked off those platforms as that's almost certainly against the rules of the platform.

Really? I'm not familiar with the terms so those platforms but does that mean you couldn't run your own delivery service as well as being on ubereats?.

Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant

#77

Post by cmauniada »

Izmaki wrote: post #37

Dear NYT: if all I can see when I visit your article is your advertisement and a request to create an account to continue, I'm closing the tab again.

Try this if you are using chrome:

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

I think there is also a firefox addon by the same developer.

Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant

#78

Post by koolba »

chrisseaton wrote: post #67
danShumway wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They add a piece of paper to EVERY ORDER indicating that if you call or text... That's really clever, given that many of these delivery apps work by inserting themselves invisibly in front of the business. Having a communication channel that you know will reach the customer and that you know the delivery app can't block is a way of getting around some of the constant fight of "how do I make my real site show up abo…

Businesses are deluding themselves here. People use the big apps because they don't want to install a billion different special-case apps, set up their payments, set up their address etc etc etc, or literally phoning the restaurant (people don't want to speak on the phone anymore, they find it awkward.) Hotels try to berate you for booking through a third-party but I ain't got time to go poking around on their indivi…

> I try to keep it simple. I don't care if it's 5% better or 5% cheaper - it's 100% overhead compared to a single app and I don't want it.

It’s not 5% though. It’s more like 50-100%. I’d wager you’re in the minority and most people are not willing to pay a premium if they could avoid (or maybe even knew about it).

Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant

#79

Post by RandallBrown »

justanotherc wrote: post #7

This is why I have never ordered UberEats. Plus cold McDonalds is gross. Its not hard to order takeout and run down the road myself. To be honest I don't really get why this whole trend is so popular.

Why is online shopping popular? It takes longer than going to the store, you often have to pay for shipping, and you can't even see the thing you're about to buy.

It's also extremely convenient.

Re: Meals on food delivery apps can be 90% more than if bought from the restaurant

#80

Post by thaumasiotes »

cltsang wrote: post #68

I find it very interesting that, according to my own brief observation, almost the opposite situation is happening in China. In China the dominant food delivery platforms are ele.me and meituan. The food offered there are not marked-up so ridiculously compared to dining in. As far as I understand, this is because 1. The demand is huge. People prefer food delivery, especially for lunch, to save time to either play mob…

Labor costs are lower. Delivery is 100% labor costs.

(It's worth observing in passing, for those who don't know, that the URL ele.me is the mandarin equivalent of "hungry.questionmark".)

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