Little Star Pizza is one, if not the best, pie in the Bay Area. It's very well known and loved. It is surprising that customers wouldn't be willing to order delivery directly from the restaurant, especially if they could pass along some savings.
A post on HN within the past couple of weeks analyzed the take: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36146111
Order directly from the restaurant (same reason I order mac apps from the developer even when I could use the mac app store).
My story about Chipotle and the delivery services: They had a separate production line for the delivery services, and the retail/in-house customers had another, which had less people. And of course, the retail people got less chicken (kinda big in my mind, a chipotle burrito is crap without a heaping spoonful) than the separate production.
And I'm standing there wondering why you're treating these delivery apps where you get maybe 2/3s of the revenue as THE PEOPLE WHO WENT TO YOUR STORE, and probably are ordering fountain drinks as well which are basically pure profit, even remotely as close as the delivery apps.
As a manager, I would instruct workers to be generous for the in-store crowd, or ensure "good" burrito makers are on the in-store line. But... it's fast food, and I should find local burritos besides the rapidly declining Chipotle anyway, which was never that good anyway.
I went to KFC (walk in) for the first time after Covid as I offered to buy lunch for our cleaning staff.
Surprised how much smaller they made the counter space.
3 self ordering kiosks and just one cashier to take cash orders and there was a bigger counter just for delivery orders.
The delivery drivers outnumbered the walk-in customers.
what if doordash and the other apps go the way of groupon?
the landlord probably extracts the vast majority of money from them. why do we give them a pass?
I'm sympathetic to the plight of long-standing restaurant owners, who signed up for a different role in a different environment and didn't get a say in how the ecosystem evolved. But "parasitic" doesn't seem like a reasonable analysis. Food delivery apps offer a wide selection of choices that consumers find valuable. Valuable enough that, as the article describes, they're often willing to pay more than they would if they had ordered directly. Why is it parasitic for delivery apps to satisfy this demand at prevailing market prices?
An argument that this is socially bad would be another thing. I could imagine a convincing article describing how restaurants are in a more precarious state than they used to be, and this has non-obvious second order effects on the quality of food or the general quality of life in a city. I don't understand the idea that there's a general moral obligation for delivery apps to charge their business partners less money.