Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?

Because they can save my credit card for all restaurants.

This article is misguided, based on a false premise. Food delivery apps are not thriving, if thriving means making big profits.

GrubHub's stock price isn't much different from where it was 5 years ago. UberEats isn't expected to turn a profit for another five years as they continue to lose money on every order.

There are no monopolies here taking advantage of restauranteurs. There's an entire ecosystem of food delivery apps competing with each other.

The reality of the situation is that delivering meals is extremely expensive. It doesn't have meaningful economies of scale the way package delivery does. Both restaurants and customers have to pay these huge delivery fees because that's just what delivery costs. (In fact, many are still being subsidized by massive VC.)

Running a restaurant is always a precarious business proposition in the first place. Adding delivery is another precarious choice -- you can massively increase revenue but only at the cost of massively decreasing profit percentage, and if you don't calculate exactly right it'll seem like a big waste-of-time wash in the end, or you'll even lose money. That's just how it works.

I have tons of sympathy for restaurant owners, but just because it's hard -- not because they're being taken advantage of, because they're not.

But laws that restrict the ability of food delivery apps to charge what the market will bear isn't going to solve anything. They don't have these extra profits lying around they can just moderately reduce. The inevitable result will be them dropping the restaurants that are least profitable for delivery entirely, and reducing deliverypeople so your food will take two or three times as long to deliver. That's just Econ 101 -- if your revenue is reduced to where there's no path to profit, you need to cut quality. End of story.

It feels a bit like reading about the industrial revolution, when masses of destitute workers were exploited by rich factory owners. Their salary was just barely enough to keep them alive and their work perfectly fungible: for any worker that decided the deal wasn't good enough there was a queue of others in wait.

Eventually the workers improved their condition through massive and coordinated strikes that entirely blocked the production and prevented anyone to replace them until their requests were met.

(On the other hand the fact that delivery apps are funded by VC money and don't turn profits either sounds even more ominous: does it mean that consumer spending is fuelled by debt and still not producing profit for anyone involved?)

I think you may be conflating the cooks, waitresses etc. who are certainly not lazy, with the management who tend to be lazy and set in their old ways, not willing to innovate unless absolutely forced to. I suspect the OP had the latter category in mind.

Yes, pizza places had it figured out. Everyone else, not so much. And on Uber Eats or many of their competitors you can order pancakes with coffee, burgers, traditional food, Georgian, whatever.

In Poland, Pyszne.pl is usually better and offers a wider selection than Uber Eats. The delivery is often provided by the restaurant itself, just like you suggest. In fact, I made two orders from Uber Eats today and both are delivered by the restaurant. But even then the intermediary keeps them honest with reviews and access to the platform. It's not pure rent seeking.

Before that, these platforms do a lot of promotion, marketing, and allow for easy discovery. They have greatly expanded the market. Just like Uber did for taxis.