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

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 sometimes have the least common denominator in terms of the restaurants that are willing to deliver (i.e. restaurants that don't get enough real world traffic).

What evidence do you have that these services aren't popular, and how do you define popular?

I think this is a good question. I can tell you that, here in NYC these services do get a fair bit of use (seamless.com, in particular, though I think GrubHub may also be popular). I attribute this to the combination of a large number of affluent people working long hours and the relative difficulty of getting around that big city life presents.

I think the reason why factors like this are important is that, all things being equal, people would rather dine in a restaurant if they're going to pay "eating out" prices. When you go to a restaurant, of course, you are paying for more than the food. You are also paying for (hopefully) a nice atmosphere and a feeling of relaxation and wealth. It's also nice to get out of the house/office.

Oddly enough, I draw an analogy to RSS readers. (Which has been on my mind recently for obvious reasons.) The thing that people overlook about RSS is that the value of a website is in more than just paragraphs of text. Websites are also designed to create a certain kind of experience. The premise that underlies this design work, of course, is that design adds value for the user beyond just the words on the page. But that added value is stripped away when content is consumed through an RSS feed. The question then becomes whether the added convenience (etc.) of aggregation into a feed outweighs the value lost.

Similarly, the question for GrubHub users is whether the loss of the secondary benefits of eating in a restaurant (and add to that, of course, the small additional monetary expense) are made up for by the added convenience. Evidently most people feel that it is not.

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.

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.

Ok, that's a good answer that makes sense for more expensive places. But say, when someone wants to order a couple pizzas, they still call the pizza place rather than use these services. The answer might go along with yours - maybe ordering online feels systematic, like they are just punching numbers into a machine to get a result? Maybe when ordering food, people fundamentally trust a person that they can talk to more than a machine? Maybe with Domino's online delivery, people realize it's a chain anyway so ordering from a computer doesn't make the process seem much more systematic?