People think they're calling restaurants directly but Grubhub is getting a fee

> Restaurants and mom and pop grocery stores/convenience stores are very low margin, super long hours, and stressful.

Sorry to hijack off of your comment - none of what I say is meant as a negative about you or your parents.

I've seen two types of people start these:

1. People from low income backgrounds who don't have many other options and don't have the means to gain good knowledge. I sympathize with them.

2. People who are somewhat wealthier (have a good degree, work for an engineering company, etc) who complain about how poorly people are running restaurants and how poor the food is and know for certain that they can run a restaurant that makes the food really well and everyone will come to their restaurant and business will be good. Very common for this to be about ethnic restaurants but doesn't need to be.

I have little sympathy for this group. They really should know better. I've talked to them about it before they put a huge chunk of their savings into starting a restaurant. They typically do no background research. They don't ask other business owners. They have no idea about the margins (hint - the other restaurants who make food poorly do it for an economic reason - not because they can't find good chefs).

Recently one of them opened a restaurant near my home. And their food was great - I would put it in the top 2 of their category in the city. But their prices were too high. Normally I order this type of food once in a while when I don't want to cook or am busy. But the price was beyond that threshold. I went there only when special friends visited me in town and took them there.

And not many people went there. The reviews everywhere (Yelp, etc) were awesome. But people didn't go there. Partly because of prices, but partly because of the location. Why did they pick that location? Because there's a big company in the neighborhood. Surely there are plenty of well paid people there who would come for lunch? Yes there are and no they won't. Over the years living there I know this plaza well. It's a graveyard for restaurants - most of them likely relying on employees of that company eating there. All these guys had to do was spend time in the restaurants in that plaza prior to signing the lease to get an idea. "Ah, but they don't go to those restaurants because their food is crap!" Yes, the food is crap. No, that's not the reason.

And then there's the food. Great food they made. But they weren't making a profit. So did they revise their menu to focus on items that would give good margins? No. They raised the prices. Fewer people came. They raised the prices again. Even fewer people came. This spiraled out of control. Within a year they had shut down. One of the co-owners told me there wasn't a month where they made a profit. I asked "Did you talk to any restaurant owners for their advice prior to opening?" Nope. If the food is great, people will come.

These guys work (or worked) pretty good jobs prior to opening the business - sometimes in senior management roles. Is that how decisions were made at their companies?

> No its the landowners who can hold them over the barrel for their highest overhead: rent. And those same landowners are able to do that because they have enough wealth to wait on the next person who will initially pay the high rent.

Yes and no. There are landowners with a lot of wealth. The majority of landowners have less wealth (and will always have less wealth) than a typical FAANG engineer.

I started looking heavily into real estate last year and got to meet many of these people. The average commercial plaza in most cities? Not owned by a wealthy person - and indeed some of the business owners on the plaza are wealthier. A lot of these owners don't make enough out of it to make a living and still have a full time job.

They do it because it's passive income - almost no effort. Plaza owners typically don't pay for any maintenance. They don't pay property taxes. All this is passed on to the businesses in exchange for relatively low rents. As long as he collects enough rent to pay the loan, and has some extra left over, he's happy. It's free money.

(And 90-99% of land owners don't own the property free and clear. The majority of them owe more than half the value to some bank or other. That should tell you who really is making the money).

> Just FYI, the menu photos on Yelp are not guaranteed to be up to date, either

That's true, but rare. If there are no recent photos of the menu, then there's a good chance not many people eat there.

In any case, Grubhub menus are probably more likely to be inaccurate than those photos.

Most Grubhub and Doordash restaurants don't do delivery.

When I say "they don't do delivery", I mean the restaurant doesn't do delivery. DD or GH provide the service to you. But if you call the restaurant directly, they'll tell you they don't do it on their own.

Which was the context of this conversation ("Why don't people directly call the restaurants instead of using GH?").

Credit card, I pay when I pick the food up?