What delivery service is best to restaurants and/or delivery people?

December 29, 2019 3:45 PM

If a restaurant offers delivery through more than one platform, is there one that is better (better pay, lets them keep more tips, whatever) for restaurants and/or the delivery people? Is there a good rule of thumb?

Generally I use the restaurant’s own delivery ordering service if they offer it, since I assume that an in-house option maximizes the tips/profit for the actual local place and its employees. However, there are lots of places locally that offer delivery though Grubhub and Postmates and Caviar, and in that kind of situation I’d like to choose the one that is the best (or least-bad) for the people working at the restaurant and/or bringing me food. I don’t care about delivery fees or service fees— I’d rather pay in extra $2 in service fees if that means the delivery person gets an additional couple bucks of my money (vs Grubhub’s CEO or whatever).

Bonus points for tips for being extra-nice to folks who are delivering on holidays or something, especially if it’s something more than “give the delivery person an extra cash tip” (which is the only one I know already).

posted by Kpele to Food & Drink (9 answers total)

Er, available options vary massively by country (and possibly how nice they are does too). Where in the world are you asking about?
posted by turkeyphant at 9:35 PM on December 29, 2019

From the options that the OP mentioned, I think it's safe to assume the US.
posted by dfan at 5:03 AM on December 30, 2019

Unless I was confident that the restaurant in question had really figured out a way to make delivery services work for them and the driver (I’ve got an Indian place near me that is on all the services but does all their own deliveries and they swear that this is better for them than a roll-your-own delivery scheme), I assume that it’s just a matter of degree regarding how badly either the driver or restaurant (or frequently both) is getting screwed. For pick-up, I’ll usually just call and ask if they prefer it done through a partner site or just over the phone (phone wins 90% of the time).

Portland OR, fwiw.
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 8:14 AM on December 30, 2019

Washington City Paper (results may vary on exact location) reported that Ubereats takes 30%, Doordash takes 25% and Postmates doesn't even often bothering with partnering with restaurants.
posted by General Malaise at 9:53 AM on December 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

Based on all the negative PR, I try to avoid Uber services at all possible. They don't care about customers and drivers, I can't imagine they care about how they treat the restaurants.
posted by radioamy at 5:10 PM on December 30, 2019

On the other hand Grubhub's business model involves hijacking restaurants' web presence with phony websites, while Yelp is working with Grubhub to divert phone traffic from restaurants to skim off commissions.

Somebody really should be facing jail time for this.
posted by Umami Dearest at 10:28 PM on December 30, 2019

I use Caviar because they give all tips to drivers, but I had a hard time finding out how they worked as a partner to restaurants. They've been bought by DoorDash so that point may become moot.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:47 AM on December 31, 2019

There’s a simple workaround to some of the problem: tip your delivery person in cash.
posted by spitbull at 8:04 PM on January 3, 2020 [4 favorites]

It looks like you might live in Portland? I just found out about PDX CCC, a by-bike restaurant delivery service. I haven't tried it yet, but it might be another thing to take a look at. I contacted them today because I was three blocks out of their delivery zone and they responded in half an hour to say that they would change their delivery zone for me. So I am going to try them for sure now!
posted by middlethird at 12:12 PM on March 14, 2020 [1 favorite]