This isn’t true. I mean, it is true, but one important premise behind it isn’t. There is no real need for any partnership; the delivery service can be just a delivery service, with no menu, no app, and charging a service fee to the customer. I don’t say they like it, but it’s not impossible. It would mean they weren’t “installing themselves” inside the restaurant, and that would mean - o noes! competition!
Well, believe it or not, I agree that that would be the alternative. But that’s not GrubHub, Door dash, or Caviars business model. They justify their high fees, because they (try to) create the seamless order experience.
I think many of those restaurants would be happy to have those apps just act as delivery and to remove those excessive service fee charges for integrating the order and menu. It actually supports the government bill that the primary serving should be delivery, and limiting how much of a service fee those apps can charge. Right now, the app is usually charging a delivery fee and taking a percentage of the order.
2 Likes
A delivery service clearly can’t operate if they can’t pay their employees fairly and still make a profit. And the business is inevitably built around hiring a lot of drivers, because whenever an order is placed, a driver has to be available “right now” or close enough to it. Amazon already has to hire a lot of order-fillers, even though in their business there’s far less immediate time pressure. (They’re working hard, but what they’re delivering isn’t going to get cold if it’s not at the customer’s door in 10 minutes or less, so they can all share the workload.) Hot-food delivery isn’t a shareable workload - it requires immediate individual attention, which means that at delivery time the delivery person must be either doing a job that can be temporarily interrupted (like chopping vegetables or washing dishes), or must be waiting idle. The catch, of course, is that currently being out on a different delivery is impossible to interrupt. Clearly, paying employees to wait idle until an order is placed is not what a business owner wants, but if you want them around, you have to pay them by the hour. (You could pay them by the piece, making them free to desert you at 5:00 on a Friday…)
Maybe the fact that third-party drivers have either nothing to do or are overloaded, and rarely in the “sweet spot” of most working near capacity and a few temporarily idle, is just really hard to solve.
There’s a fantasy/mythical character lurking behind all of this: people who need a job but don’t need money. Delivery services have heard of these people, and are sure they exist. Spoiler alert: they don’t.
