Most restaurant owners would very much prefer it if you called in your order. If you’d really rather order online, see if you can do it via the restaurant’s website.
This kind of explains everything. As bad as Seamless might be, it's a far better experience for the customer than using the average restaurant website.
Explains to me why GrubHub and the like have been able to turn revenue in this space.
There are network effects. Even if some new competitor comes up with a far superior experience for restaurant websites (some kind of Shopify thing) the customers might all be looking on Seamless.
Also I hate talking on the phone.
I dunno. I'm put off by the "% revenue buys place in the list" model, but I have a hard time saying that the online order aspect doesn't add some value.
A GrubHub driver came in and asked whether the GrubHub order had gone through yet; it seemed like he had been waiting. The person at the counter, confused, said that the establishment didn't work with GrubHub and never had. The employee repeated that he had an order, and tried to confirm the details of the order - but there was no such order. Apparently GrubHub had called the restaurant, and when someone at the restaurant tried to explain that it didn't work with GrubHub, the system had ignored them, and placed the order anyway.
Now somewhere there is a customer presumably mad at the restaurant for losing their order, while GrubHub will, for all I know, continue to do this to said restaurant forever. What's an owner supposed to do?
sue?
I read a great book a while ago called "The Middleman Economy" which talks about all the ways that middlemen provide value. Sounds like Seamless isn't providing much value (at least at the time of writing), and those take rates are pretty high for repeat orders.
At the same time, as a restaurant, why wouldn't you pay 20% if you were going to be out of business if you didn't (as one of the quotes in the article mentioned).
As an owner of a restaurant and beer garden - experiencing first hand their unreliable technology, driver dispatch, and support staff - I dropped them after a few months.
We also added notes in all our deliveries as a disclaimer that we did not hire the drivers - and that customers could call us directly for future orders - bypassing Seamless - to help support their beloved local business.
I wonder if a restaurant association could take on the cost of building a competitor that could compete with Seamless; Especially if restaurants manage to convince the public that Seamless is as toxic as Uber, a solution to absolve people's guilt that is just one click away might be successful.
I say this because I hate having to get on the phone.
While none of them exist in my neck of the woods, it seems that all the "successful" 3rd party food delivery companies are only successful because they're running on VC cash, exploiting contracted delivery personnel, and/or making the restaurant give them a big enough discount such that they only break even.
Of course this is money that the large companies could have been extracting in the first place, but they didn't bother because it's not worth it for them on an individual basis - they don't care about the money, they are giving their business to Seamless just for the convenience. I wonder what other similar opportunities might exist?
