If it’s Friday, the topic is food here on the screed. This week, it’s the food delivery services I suspect many of you have been using to support your favorite restaurants during the time we’re supposed to stay at home. Food delivery is not a new phenomenon. I know a lot of folks, myself included, who used it before all of this when they had nothing planned or bought for dinner and couldn’t bear the thought of pulling themselves together to go out.
What’s different with these services is that they’re third parties. One of my first jobs back in the day was as a food delivery guy (before I graduated to cook) for a local pizza place. Who hasn’t ordered Chinese food and had it delivered? But I worked for the pizza place and the kid making the Chinese food delivery was generally the owner’s son from the place I frequented. These services – Grubhub, Seamless, and others – are a relatively new business. For restaurants that didn’t do a large enough takeout business to hire a delivery person, they opened up new revenue streams. Of course, they come with a cost.
First, there is a human cost. These services pay very low wages and don’t make tipping mandatory (don’t be that guy – tip well, ok?). Then they charge exorbitant, often hidden fees to the restaurants. You might have read about one restaurant owner’s experience. In March, she got 93 orders through Grubhub, totaling to $6,626 in revenue. From that, GrubHub took $1,208 in commission, a $592 delivery fee, and $230 in processing fees, totaling to over 30% of the revenue. In an industry where margins are often low double digits, that’s not sustainable.
We could continue the discussion beginning with why restaurants don’t hire their own delivery people but the point I want to make today which might just apply to your business is about using third parties, especially third parties who end up owning the customer relationship. What is to stop Grubhub from promoting another restaurant to someone who is looking at your menu? Do a search on Yelp for a specific restaurant and you’ll usually see a couple of other promoted alternatives first in the listings. I don’t know what data the restaurant sees when an order comes in via one of these services but at a minimum someone else is privy to a portion of your customer base, their preferences, addresses, etc.
You might have heard of third-party cookies. Third-party cookies are created by domains other than the one you are visiting directly, hence the name third-party. They are used for cross-site tracking, retargeting, and ad-serving. They’re what makes it possible for you to see an Amazon ad for a product you just searched Amazon for on another, unrelated website. They’re going away, in part because of privacy concerns and, I believe, in part because marketers are waking up to the fact that having someone else own data that you help to generate so that they can sell it back to you as well as to your competition is silly.
Industries outsource all the time. Generally, this is because they don’t want to deal with solving a particular problem themselves for whatever reason and it becomes easier to let someone else deal with it. That’s often shortsighted, particularly when it ends up with someone else owning the customer relationship. After all, in business, that’s probably the most important relationship you have, right?
Consult Keith 