When people started showing up at her restaurant looking for orders they said they’d placed, Carla Wade Logan got angry. “I wasn’t mad at the customers,” the owner of Carly’s Bistro is quick to point out. “I was mad at the delivery platform I never signed up for.”
Logan isn’t alone in her ire at DoorDash, a food delivery service headquartered in San Francisco. Other local restaurateurs are up in arms about what they say are DoorDash’s lousy policies and unprofessional approach to delivering dinner. Food is being delivered late, some say; DoorDash is publishing out-of-date menus; they’re under- and over-charging for entrees. And then there are the drivers who turn up looking for orders that were never placed.
SASKATOON While delivery services may be convenient for customers, they are costly for restaurants. “The third-party apps, they charge a large commission towards the restaurant,” said owner and operator of Hudsons, Greg Clark. “They charge anywhere from a 15 to 30 percent commission that they are charging on each order.” For a business trying to survive the pandemic, those costs are becoming more noticeable. Due to COVID-19 restrictions around seating capacity for restaurants their delivery sales have spiked. “When we’re highly reduced right now and a lot of our revenues are coming off takeout and delivery it impacts us a lot more to be losing off that bottom line,” said Clark.