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

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

#151

Post by astura »

40four wrote: post #122
noelsusman wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a pretty great experience calling restaurants to place orders. I talk to a human, tell them my order, they repeat it back to me, and tell me it will be X dollars and ready at Y o'clock. I show up at the specified time and the order is ready to go. A couple times I had to wait 5 minutes because they were inundated and couldn't keep up. No stupid app to download. No account to create. No bullshit fees. No mark…

I agree 100% with you. I think the expectations of the parent comment are very misplaced. Restaurant owners are usually not tech people, nor can many of them afford to hire tech people. To expect all restaurants to pay exorbitant amounts of money setup/ maintain online ordering systems is not realistic. Also, I have never had a restaurant ask me for a card over the phone. Order times are a rough guess based on curren…

>Also, I have never had a restaurant ask me for a card over the phone.

If you want to pay for delivery (not pickup) with a credit card and the restaurant doesn't have online ordering then you'd read the credit card over the phone. Of course you have to say the words "I'd like to pay with credit," otherwise they'll assume you'll pay cash on delivery. Really standard before online ordering became big.

Some restaurants even have a POS system that when you've used a credit card in the past to pay for a delivery order with the phone number/address combination your using for your current order they'll ask you "would you like to use Visa ending in 1234?"

As an aside I didn't know it was a thing until I overheard my roommate doing it. This was 15 years ago now.

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

#152

Post by tomc1985 »

cortesoft wrote: post #141
BeetleB wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick up. Probably less than 5% of restaurants do delivery. If you count chains as one restaurant, then probably less than 1% of restaurants do delivery. I, um, take it you don't do this often :-)

I order food 2-3 nights a week, mostly using Grubhub and DoorDash. I occasionally order from some restaurants that aren't on those platforms, too. They all do delivery, and I pay online.

I try not to use those services too often. I don't agree with their dishonest pricing and predatory business practices. As another commenter mentioned, those restaurants don't do delivery -- your postmate or whatever is working for postmates, not the restaurant.

I've been doing a lot of takeout as most days its my only trip out of the house

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

#153

Post by tomc1985 »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #119
a_e_k wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of information already saved, one of my favorite pizza places has my order history keyed to my phone number. Ordering ahead usually comes down to dialing them up, giving my name and phone number and telling them I'd like the same as last time. They read it off to me to confirm, quote me a waiting time, and that's that. Start to finish, the call is probably less than thirty seconds.

It's strange that they have to ask for those details. I wonder what software they use and why it doesn't look up the customer record based on caller ID, as soon as the phone starts ringing.

What's funny is I have started to notice restaurants remembering my name when I give them my phone number. Perhaps their POS systems finally have some rudimentary CRM. So we're almost there!

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

#154

Post by pmiller2 »

BeetleB wrote: post #146
pmiller2 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just FYI, the menu photos on Yelp are not guaranteed to be up to date, either. The only real way to see what the restaurant's actual menu is without going there is if they have it up on their own website.

> 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.

It's more common than you think though. I know of restaurants that change their menus daily or weekly. Most don't, but you will run into it if you eat at enough places, and I highly doubt someone is going to post a new photo of the menu every week.

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

#155

Post by lancewiggs »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #92
MattGaiser wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The due diligence is because the restaurants offer a terrible experience. Most still do not have an independent online ordering function. They want me to call. Most still haven't set up meaningful profiles on Yelp and other review sites. So I would need to root around to find contact information. That is in addition to needing to give my credit card over the phone, not knowing how long the order will take, and needin…

I think the issue is restaurants need a 3rd party platform. They aren't in the tech industry and they aren't going to hire a developer to build their own system unless its a global franchise. What we really need is for someone to build an open source / one time cost / subscription platform that gives restaurants the ease of using a premade system without the expense of having a per transaction fee.

mobi2go.com does this. Flat fee basically.

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

#156

Post by astura »

mikysco wrote: post #121
noelsusman wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a pretty great experience calling restaurants to place orders. I talk to a human, tell them my order, they repeat it back to me, and tell me it will be X dollars and ready at Y o'clock. I show up at the specified time and the order is ready to go. A couple times I had to wait 5 minutes because they were inundated and couldn't keep up. No stupid app to download. No account to create. No bullshit fees. No mark…

Yes! I don’t know why there’s so much apprehension about calling the restaurant. So often I learn more about the dish I’m ordering - does it come with X ingredient yes/no, should I order Y add-on, is rice extra. Simple questions usually omitted from online menus. Makes the experience just a tiny bit more human and that’s honestly enough for me

I have very minor issues with phone orders that make me prefer online ordering.

Restaurants are loud, add in shitty phone signals and heavy accents - the result is communication barriers are common and you have to do a lot of back-and-forth.

Another issue is the person taking the order usually has more job duties than just taking phone orders, so they can be distracted if it's busy and forget to write something down and/or sometimes you have to call back several times until someone has a free hand to answer the phone.

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

#158

Post by vladvasiliu »

MattGaiser wrote: post #19
MaintenanceMode wrote: post #4

It's disheartening that there's so much due diligence required just to conduct the most basic transactions right now. I have a narrow list of vetted restaurants, where I understand the costs and to the business, the delivery model, the safety (food handling and Covid precautions), and I only take out from these particular places. I tried a new place recently, only to find out I had been duped by Grub-hub, even though…

The due diligence is because the restaurants offer a terrible experience. Most still do not have an independent online ordering function. They want me to call. Most still haven't set up meaningful profiles on Yelp and other review sites. So I would need to root around to find contact information. That is in addition to needing to give my credit card over the phone, not knowing how long the order will take, and needin…

I think there are two different things here.

I do notice in my area (Paris, France) that many small restaurants hardly have an online presence. I understand some people don't like calling up restaurants to order (I sometimes am one of those people).

Indeed, in such cases, having some sort of external service aggregating information and maybe even exposing some sort of common ordering platform would be great.

However, I think that people have an issue with GrubHub (and/or others) impersonating the restaurants. They don't come out and say "Hello, this is GH, we'll connect you to XYZ". They make you think you're doing business directly with the restaurant when, in fact, they're covertly routing the order through their platform and extracting fees.

For me the actual issue is their not being open about it. I don't often go to restaurants and I don't know people working there either, but I would think that offering such a service in an open manner would be welcomed by both businesses and clients.

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

#159

Post by stan_rogers »

mataug wrote: post #5

> “If a customer calls to place a coffee order, we’re paying a $6.42 fee — for a coffee.” This is wrong ! Plain and simple. $6.42 is probably more than the cost of the coffee. Here are somethings you as a consumer can do to help, 1. If possible visit the restaurant personally, and order to go 2. Find the restaurant's phone number on their website / Facebook / Instagram / twitter page. 3. Leave a tip I've found that y…

That $6.42 is what the restaurant is paying to GrubHub due to their flat per-order fee, not what the customer is paying for the coffee. It's not like the restaurant is charging $10 for coffee and losing sixty-four percent of that; it's normal coffee at normal coffee prices at the restaurant's end. They're out of pocket every time it happens.

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

#160

Post by arn »

BeetleB wrote: post #149
acchow wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also make no attempts to keep their operating hours on Google Maps or Yelp up-to-date. Especially for holidays. Is keeping this stuff up to date actually difficult. I don't run a business, so I have no idea.

> Is keeping this stuff up to date actually difficult. They usually have a zillion things to do, and this has a very low ROI. The impact to their bottom line is negligible whether they update or not. Not many people will refuse to use their business because they can't bother to update Google/Yelp/etc. They usually do it if there's a permanent change in hours, though.

I don't know about that. Not that it's easy to measure. But I feel that if I go to a restaurant and it's closed outside their normal hours inexplicably... I am definitely less likely to come back.
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