This article will cover the reasons why some restaurants hate on-demand food delivery services like Uber Eats, Doordash, Postmates, Toasttab, and Grubhub. The services provided by food delivery services can sometimes be difficult for restaurants to calibrate with in various ways. This could lead to restaurants eventually getting fed up with their services and ultimately discontinuing their usage in their restaurants.
The problem lies behind communication, trustworthiness, integrity, pricing, and customer experiences. All of these factors and more can end up with restaurants pulling the plug (literally) on their services. The reason why restaurants except on-demand food delivery services to begin with is to ensure more profit and make hassles less for them as a business.
However, sometimes this isn’t what happens. It has to do sometimes with the fact that restaurants don’t know enough about the technology set up with Doordash, UberEats, and other services set up in their restaurants. When their services disconnect or aren’t working on their end, it can result in missing orders, or orders that were supposed be ready 30 minutes ago, just now popping up on the restaurants end.
Communication
Usually the orders taken directly from the food delivery services have no direct communication with the restaurant itself after a restaurant decides to work with an on-demand food delivery service. The orders are taken from a online site with information that comes from the restaurant about their menu. Many times, customers are left with picking only what is available before their eyes on the screens, on their phones, or computers before them.
Of course, these menus are available from the third-party food delivery service. Basically, the food delivery services are handling everything done at the beginning all on their own. The only thing restaurants have to do is make the food and sometimes finish the payment. The payment is done either during the ordering process online, or once the delivery driver arrives at the restaurant to pick up the food. The driver pays for the food themselves and delivers it to the customer. This is a convenience for a restaurant, but it can later cause problems.
The more that the on-demand food delivery service tries to do on their own as a whole by acting as an automated system for the restaurant, the less the communication is between the restaurant and that business. However, this is what is expected since this is how most food delivery services of this nature work. As stated, it is supposed to be designed as a convenience to the restaurant and the customers.
This lack of communication usually is the main reason why restaurants end up hating these services, and end up choosing to not use them any longer. Restaurants rely heavily on communication directly with their customers to ensure that they get their orders right. It is difficult for a restaurant to know sometimes what a customer wants when the customer orders through an on-demand food delivery service.
The food delivery services have tried to fix this by allowing an option where customers can type in what additionally things they want done for their orders, but it doesn’t allow the restaurant to make an immediate response back to the customer when it is done this way. This means that restaurants may end up scratching their heads trying to interpret what that customer wants when it appears on their ticket.
Phone numbers to the person ordering is usually listed to call the person directly if problems like this do occur, but most of the time they are too busy to call them, as the restaurant still has to deal with orders that are coming in that need to be cooked and made for their immediate guests.
Also, this problem can become even more of a hassle when there is no way for a customer ordering from these third-party menus of knowing on whether or not certain things on the menu are available at the time of ordering. Sometimes restaurants will run out of certain ingredients to make certain dishes, so they simply cannot make the order. This means that the restaurant has to try and call the person ordering the food directly, or wait for the on-demand food delivery driver to come to the restaurant and handle the problem.
Loss of Profit
Customers using the means to type in additions for their orders or specific changes can cause a loss of profit through these services too. Customers can unknowingly think that the place to put in additional information for their orders is a place to pit on extra toppings or changes that would otherwise cost extra. This could end up being a loss of profit for the restaurant.
Usually this isn’t a problem if these options just simply aren’t available on the online menu for this reason, but the section allowing customers to put detailed information about their orders could mean a delay on the order, or the order being made anyway to avoid the hassle. This option could be an inconvenient irritation to the restaurant at times.
Trustworthiness and Integrity
Because of the lack of communication on both in ends for the restaurant when dealing with the customer ordering and the food delivery company, it can lead to a lack of trust. It isn’t always as simple as a driver picking up the food and taking the order to the customer. Some (not all but some) drivers aren’t necessarily seen as trustworthy in the restaurant’s eyes. It happens sparingly, but some of them do try to swindle free food from the restaurant during these third-party encounters.
Some have used tactics of trying to speak on behalf of their guests that are ordering the food through the on-demand food services. This means that after the food has been ordered, the person picking up the food may try and use schemes to make the food undeliverable so that they can eat the food for themselves. If this happens, then restaurants are put in a situation where they have to remake the food to be sent out again.
These schemes can include tampering with the food before it reaches the customer after it is picked up, by removing some of the ingredients in the food. The customer is then told to check their order, which would be incorrect after this is done, and then the restaurant is notified that the order was made wrong. The fault of course would be placed on the restaurant. Restaurants aren’t allowed to take the food back, so they are left with remaking the order.
Also, the food can be delivered, but be claimed to be ‘missing’ an item that the restaurant knows that they definitely put in the bag before delivery. Restaurants do often forget to put certain items in the bag, but usually if they know that they did through failsafe methods, then they will know that someone took the items out of the bag before they reached the customer, or something else unusual has occured.
Another example of this scheme is a delivery driver claiming that the order has been changed after the customer has ordered the food through the third party services. This causes confusion on the side of the restaurant, because of the lack of communication directly with the customer. However, this can sometimes be solved by the restaurant by simply calling the customer directly through the number provided and confirming that there has been a change in the order, instead of trusting the delivery driver.
This scheme causes a huge problem, especially if the customer ordering the food is a kin to, or a close friend to the delivery driver. Both the customer and the delivery driver can be in on it and claim that the order was wrong or missing items when it was right, which puts the restaurant in a tough situation in this type of swindling.
If the food delivery service’s driver’s integrity is in question, and repeated similar occurrences happen that other food delivery service drivers aren’t experiencing, then it could however lead to the termination or deactivation by the food service company of that driver.
Customer Complaints
Sometimes when restaurants use on-demand food delivery services, the customer complaints will also rise. This could be from food taking too long to reach its destination, which could be the fault of the delivery driver or the restaurant. Some restaurants have experienced this when using certain services. It is not as easy as pinpointing which service is the slowest and simply picking a faster on-demand food delivery service, as it depends on what the restaurant is doing and what the specific driving was doing when the order was received.
Usually the customer complaints are placed on the restaurant and not the food delivery services delivering the food. The restaurant usually takes the blame for all customer complaints for food being too cold, food items missing, messed up orders, and long waiting times. This eventually leads to restaurants possibly hating to use on-demand food delivery services, which could lead to the restaurant’s corporate eventually refusing to work with them.
Complaints of cold food and food getting old before it reaches the consumer, can also cause a loss of profit for the restaurant that could leave them better off without the service in some situations.
