Due to the stay-at-home order, the use of food delivery services like GrubHub, DoorDash and Uber Eats has often become the only convenient option to eat professionally prepared food during the pandemic. Many Milwaukee restaurants are not very happy with that.
The reasons why some restaurants don’t want to work with third-party services are numerous. The first of them is the price: Grubhub, for instance, charges commission fees as high as 30%. GrubHub runs the numbers, showing that when a customer purchases a $44 order, GrubHub will help itself to $14 of it, leaving only $30 of revenue to the restaurant. Because of these practices, a class action lawsuit was brought last month by a Manhattan federal court against GrubHub, DoorDash, Postmates and Uber Eats for “exploiting their dominance in restaurant meal deliveries to impose exorbitant fees.”
This is not the only class action lawsuit against GrubHub: In January 2019, the company was sued for allegedly charging restaurants just to reroute customers’ phone calls to them. The restaurants would handle the calls directly, and GrubHub would take commissions simply for acting as a middleman redirecting the call—even when no food was ordered.
Another point that customers should be aware of concerns tips. When you buy food to be delivered and choose an amount to tip the delivery worker, you naturally expect that amount to be given to the worker. You cannot be certain that is the case, however. DoorDash faced widespread outrage a few months ago when an article by The New York Times revealed that the tips were used to offset DoorDash’s expenses. “If DoorDash guaranteed a worker $7 for a delivery and a customer did not tip, DoorDash would directly pay the worker $7. But if the customer tipped $3 via the app, DoorDash would directly pay the worker only $4, then add on the $3 tip so that the worker would still get only $7,” The New York Times published. Although DoorDash promised to change its policy, customers have no way to ensure that their driver will receive their tip, besides directly handing them cash.
GrubHub and other aggregators are also quite infamous for operating regardless of consent from their “partners.” Some restaurants do not offer delivery or takeaway for their own reasons. Some restaurants have their own delivery service and do not want to surrender 30% of their revenue to a third party. Some restaurants have rapidly changing menus or similar quirks that make the online model of GrubHub unworkable. Some restaurants just don’t want to be added to GrubHub. GrubHub just adds them all anyway.
|
|
“To help restaurants drive additional online delivery orders and revenue while giving diners even more options for delivery, we are adding non-partnered restaurants in a number of our markets, including Milwaukee,” a Grubhub spokesperson told CBS when the platform added a large amount of Wisconsin establishments to its platform at once without permission. “Regardless of the formal or informal relationship, restaurants have told us that they’ve seen increased, incremental sales, new customers and improved operations thanks to our ordering apps and delivery services,” DoorDash also said in defense of that practice.
Milwaukee Restaurants
To see that GrubHub is not seeking permission before acting, one just need to notice that they added the option to order food from Kindred on Kinnickinnic Avenue despite the restaurant being permanently closed.
Although the Kindred case is quite extreme, many other restaurants across Milwaukee have had the same issue to varying degrees: The wrong menu is posted online, or GrubHub accepts orders that a restaurant cannot honor, and the customer is unhappy. Unhappy customers then blame the restaurant, rather than the platform that took their orders, resulting in negative publicity and reviews.
“We were one of many area restaurants that were added to [GrubHub’s] site without our knowledge. They posted a three-year-old menu and never placed any of the orders they received with us,” Milwaukee’s Vanguard reports.
“Grubhub put an old menu of ours on their site without our knowledge and without our permission, and apparently people can order from it for food we do not even have,” says a spokesperson of Odd Duck, another local eatery, who called out GrubHub’s behavior as “preying on small businesses.” “We have a menu that changes daily and a teeny-tiny kitchen, so we have never been interested in takeout or delivery since it takes all of our time and effort to make enough food to feed the people who come dine in with us. All of these companies have asked us to be on their site and we have declined… so no, they are not doing us a favor.”
More Predatory Practices
Other local restaurants report the same troubles, such as Five O’Clock Steakhouse, DanDan and many more. They often resort to publicly calling out the predatory practices of third-party aggregators on social media.
Easy Tyger on Brady Street reports the same experience, when their restaurant was added to GrubHub and Postmates without their consent. “Both companies posted old out of date menus without our permission. And they continued to after we contacted them asking them to remove them,” Easy Tyger’s head chef Heather Habram says. “We informed them that we paid to use EatStreet and where happy with the service they provided, but we would continue to have confused Postmates and GrubHub drivers come in with orders.”
“It made everything run poorly, these companies don’t care about food or the people ordering,” she explains. “Because we use EatStreet, we have a terminal from them and we get the orders. With Postmates and GrubHub, the driver would show up for an order that we hadn’t received, so they would give us the order and we would have to make it while they waited—which just isn’t a smooth system.”
She reports that both GrubHub and Postmates ignored the restaurant’s “pretty vocal” request to be removed from their sites for more than a month and a half. In the meantime, “the Grubhub and Postmates orders would take so much longer and left the customer waiting.” She adds, “Most customers didn’t realize that we weren’t affiliated with them. Because you assume if a business is on their platform they want to be.”
Even when confined at home, Wisconsinites should keep in mind that ordering through online platforms might not be the best idea; although it can be convenient, it can also lead to higher prices, longer wait times and decreased revenue for the people who do prepare the food. Although Easy Tyger is currently closed, they will be reopening as soon as the safer-at-home order is lifted, and they will keep using EatStreet. Patrons are encouraged to use each restaurant’s favored method of delivery; calling a restaurant first rather than using aggregators like GrubHub is the best practice. Remember that GrubHub and similar platforms are not the ones actually preparing your food.
