I agree and disagree. Doordash have opened up deliveries from restaurants that would have never hired their own drivers. On the other hand their delivery mechanism sucks. Almost every other order is messed up. Yesterday, after a 2 hr delay, in which time there was to way to contact customer service, my deliver was abruptly cancelled. Imagine a toddler at this time. Also, most of the time the food arrives cold or there are items that are incorrect. It is bizarre
Let’s see: someone other than the restaurant usually inputs the menu, the menu can change, and prices change whenever costs go up.
Not every business owner necessarily wants to maintain a Doordash page because they have work to do, the same work they’ve been doing for 30 years, and every other Silicon Valley company wants to “partner” with them. Yelp wants them to advertise and maybe put those asinine digital wait lists out. Doordash wants them to maintain their online menu, them and 47 other delivery startups, most of whom also want to send you and iPad loaded with their own delivery receipt system. Google wants you to maintain your Maps listing and a million “SEO” whorehouses will spam call you to death to try and maintain it on your behalf. FiveStars would like to stick a little loyalty kiosk right on your counter, and all of this while juggling suppliers. Then there’s the random new credit card processors that pop up every now and then, staffing companies, job boards, et cetera and all of this is just the tip of the ice berg.
When I used to work in a café, I saw that someone listed our menu on Doordash. Every now and then a deliveryman would walk up to the counter and shove a phone in my face, and after making it clear to them that this is bad etiquette, I proceeded to point out: 1. The prices are all wrong, 2. Some of those things we don’t even have anymore, 3. Also they selected two types of bread because for some inexplicable reason, there was a separate bread and roll category, 4. Occasionally we would be out of a particular item, because oftentimes suppliers run out of things as well, or we decided to replace it with a different item. They would then try to call their customer, the customer would reject the call, and I would improvise with what was left. In a regular situation, I could talk to my customers directly, and deliver a good customer experience, but I couldn’t do that when there’s a middleman, a middleman who often didn’t speak English very well and was more often than not, shoving their phone right under my nose while I’m in the middle of making sandwiches for customers that were sitting in the store.
There is your primer on Doordash and also Postmates if they’re still kicking. I recommend you order from places that have setup a real pipeline for deliveries and have changed their business to accommodate it rather than assuming they did just because Doordash exists.
I currently work in a restaurant with doordash. While I rarely have to take to-go orders and doordash orders, I see my Coworkers who hate taking doordash orders.
First of all, there's no tips for doordash orders. On a busy night our Togo person makes ~50 in tips, so they just don't pay as much attention to the door dash orders.
Second, no matter how long we quote the order, the driver always shows up immediately and gets in the way of the servers and bussers and other customers (its a fairly small restaurant with no waiting area) so usually we are rushing to try and finish the order to get them to leave.
I don't know a single person in the restaurant except the owner who likes the doordash system, but as long as people keep ordering it'll stay
You missed the point. No one at the restaurant is getting a tip. The same person who would package up the food if you picked up in person (and who you would customarily tip) is the same person packaging up DoorDash orders, but with no incentive. The person getting tipped is the delivery service employee.
I am surprised that to-go orders are tipped in the first place.
Aren't waiters tipped because the law allows them to be paid below minimum wage?
AFAIK, behind the counter service people get paid commensurately, so tipping them doesn't make sense.
On the west coast waiters make minimum wage and there is still a tipping culture. Because of this, being a server or a waiter can be a very high paying job. To-go orders usually get tipped, but closer to 5-10% as opposed to the standard 15-20 for a sit down restaurant.
