Reading this article (which, to be clear, absolutely does support the claims I asked for a citation of [but see end of comment]—my comments below are about a different aspect of the issue), I was slightly taken aback by this bit:
These delivery companies charge restaurants exorbitant commissions off of every customer order, when the only real the value they bring is helping new customers find your restaurant for the first time. When a customer orders again and again, it’s because your staff was friendly, the food was delicious and they had a great experience. Why should you pay Grubhub a 30% commission every time a customer orders?
This does not even begin to match my own experience.
When I use GrubHub, I order almost exclusively from places I have physically been to.
By far the greatest value I get out of using GrubHub is convenience—and that’s huge. At least half of all the times when I’ve used the service, if I instead had to telephone the restaurant, I just… wouldn’t. Nine times out of ten, I would, quite literally, rather go hungry than place a phone order. (Of course, in reality, I’d simply eat leftovers, or cook something quickly, or go out for a bagel, etc. It would be an inferior meal, but I’d gladly pay that price, in order to avoid having to make an order over the phone.)
If I order again from the same restaurant, using GrubHub, it has exactly nothing to do with the staff being friendly. I don’t interact with their staff in that situation—that’s the point! The only thing I’m interested in is (a) food quality, (b) delivery speed, and (c) price.
Then there was this rather appalling bit:
Furthermore, third-party marketplaces like Grubhub and Postmates don’t give restaurants access to their own customers’ email addresses, which makes marketing directly to your own customers virtually impossible. There’s so much value in owning your own customer’s information, so that you can encourage them to order directly from you and not pay marketplace fees time and time again for the same customer.
This is an excellent reason to use a service like GrubHub. If a restaurant wants my email address so that they can market directly to me, they can go to hell. I would avoid patronizing a restaurant like that, on general principle.
… then again, maybe all of this is a moot point. After all, the linked article is, in fact, an advertisement in disguise—an advertisement for ChowNow, which seems to be a company that’s selling a competing product to GrubHub, etc. Can we trust that what they tell us about how online delivery services work, their pros and cons, etc.? We absolutely cannot! Even the true facts they tell us will be framed so as to make their offering look good. The author of this article started with their bottom line.
Does anyone have any citations that come from a neutral source?
I agree that delivery services provide significant value to the consumer for the reasons you describe. I suspect that in the situation where a specific class of restaurant (pizza places) already have their own delivery network in place (fixed costs already paid, domain-specific efficiencies already captured), a bare-bones online order system could easily beat out a full-service middleman like UberEats or Grubhub.
Reading this article (which, to be clear, absolutely does support the claims I asked for a citation of [but see end of comment]—my comments below are about a different aspect of the issue), I was slightly taken aback by this bit:
This does not even begin to match my own experience.
When I use GrubHub, I order almost exclusively from places I have physically been to.
By far the greatest value I get out of using GrubHub is convenience—and that’s huge. At least half of all the times when I’ve used the service, if I instead had to telephone the restaurant, I just… wouldn’t. Nine times out of ten, I would, quite literally, rather go hungry than place a phone order. (Of course, in reality, I’d simply eat leftovers, or cook something quickly, or go out for a bagel, etc. It would be an inferior meal, but I’d gladly pay that price, in order to avoid having to make an order over the phone.)
If I order again from the same restaurant, using GrubHub, it has exactly nothing to do with the staff being friendly. I don’t interact with their staff in that situation—that’s the point! The only thing I’m interested in is (a) food quality, (b) delivery speed, and (c) price.
Then there was this rather appalling bit:
This is an excellent reason to use a service like GrubHub. If a restaurant wants my email address so that they can market directly to me, they can go to hell. I would avoid patronizing a restaurant like that, on general principle.
… then again, maybe all of this is a moot point. After all, the linked article is, in fact, an advertisement in disguise—an advertisement for ChowNow, which seems to be a company that’s selling a competing product to GrubHub, etc. Can we trust that what they tell us about how online delivery services work, their pros and cons, etc.? We absolutely cannot! Even the true facts they tell us will be framed so as to make their offering look good. The author of this article started with their bottom line.
Does anyone have any citations that come from a neutral source?
Here is a neutral (from the perspective of potential competition) source, that quotes industry insiders: https://nypost.com/2016/02/06/tech-giants-start-getting-serious-about-food-delivery/
I agree that delivery services provide significant value to the consumer for the reasons you describe. I suspect that in the situation where a specific class of restaurant (pizza places) already have their own delivery network in place (fixed costs already paid, domain-specific efficiencies already captured), a bare-bones online order system could easily beat out a full-service middleman like UberEats or Grubhub.