Support your local restaurants. Don’t let these vampire platform companies enshitify your city’s food scene.
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Additionally, you have to look at it from a pragmatic perspective. When I visit the East and West coast of the US, meal delivery is popular enough that you might think it's a booming business. Everywhere else it's pretty much dead though. In places where the cost of living isn't enough to compensate for a restaurant and their middleman (read: most of the US), you can't even find a driver most hours of the day. It's one of those nonsense businesses like Uber that seems like a great idea on paper but one that falls apart outside the Bay Area economy. Most places in America are not gentrified enough to pay peons gas money in exchange for hand-delivered McDonalds.
Also, nothing you've mentioned really solves your issues. Even with DoorDash, you'll need to pick a restaurant. And DoorDash doesn't solve the problem of someone changing their mind as they are ordering.
And then you still have to wait for the food to be prepared and delivered. And there's no guarantee on when it will arrive. So it winds up being a wash.
Also, there's a reason places that don't do delivery don't do it. The cost doesn't justify it. Then there's the whole "meet me where I am" attitude. They're the ones with the service you want. You have some obligation to meet them yourself.
And if you don't want to, that's fine. We used to manage all of this well enough before
The cashier at the restaurant isn't going to, (nor should they!) wait on hold for that entire hour of mostly not ordering food. Ordering via phone app doesn't care how long it takes after we start, or that we got utterly distracted and came back to it 20 minutes later.
It starts to take too long when it's more than a dozen or two people, though there usually aren't that many. At some point though, it becomes more effective to get people's dietary restrictions and make decisions for everybody, but just ordering a bunch of pizzas is considered a (delicious) failure mode to be avoided.
Doordash's app mostly doesn't help in figuring out which restaurant to go with, though it does say what got ordered last time. and has a rating and $ signs. The process becomes asynchronous. each person gets the phone and figures out what they want, without the rest of the group just staring at that one person until they finish. No one needs to manage orders beyond passing the phone around and eventually pressing checkout. The person who changes their mind just gets the phone back before the checkout button is pressed and edits the order. Doing that verbally via the phone is terrible. It's also understood that there's no changing after checkout is pressed.
To be clear, restaurants don't have to meet me on Doordash, but they do have to meet me at least halfway, which is on the Internet, and that there are local restaurants who do. They have their own webpage, they take orders there, it isn't run by Doordash, and we just send someone(s) to go pick up the food. At least one of them is operated by Square, which also runs that place's PoS system. So I'm not holding restaurants to some impossibly high bar that none of them seem to be able to meet, just discussing the reality of operating a restaurant in the digital age.
Restaurants modernized and installed telephones and credit card machines and now, they also need a digital presence to compete. There are umpteen restaurants competing for my business and if it's too much friction to eat their food, chances are I'm just not gonna eat there and my business ends up at a competitors.
I mean, they don't actually have to. There are some spots that don't have a website and still only take cash and it's word of mouth, and I frequent them infrequently, but that's their business model, so good for them, so long as it's actually working for them.
> And to be frank, many restaurant workers don't have the best English skills and may be in a loud environment, making phone calls more difficult.
Yeah I dunno this argument feels very alien to me, because even people with poor English skills know the names of the items on their menu. It's not like I'm calling them to have an in-depth conversation, I'm just naming items off of their menu. Also I call in for pickup for like half my orders and pick up myself. At a bunch of places the food is cheaper if you just call.
You just have to care and prepare.
They are offloading their responsibilities and then complaining about friction. It is an extremely privileged and shallow take.
Make sure you call the right number. Grubhub (and others possibly) will set up phone numbers[0] and websites[1] controlled by them and forwarded to the restaurant so they can take a cut.
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756878/yelp-grubhub-comm...
[1] https://www.grubstreet.com/2019/07/everything-you-need-to-kn...
Not sure how that makes me shallow but I'm all ears, I'd love to learn.
When I used to order food through Uber eats I would always feel bad about it because the ultimate labor costs are abstracted through those layers of convenience.
If it is helpful, I consider fast online shipping to be unethical, and customer woes are misdirected at the wrong layer of abstraction, often ignoring the intensive labor costs because they are intentionally hidden.
Does that help explain my viewpoint?
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, unfortunately, and we all take our stand where we choose to. I could afford a better phone, but since smarphones have matured, I chose to buy refurbished phones because of the slavery inherent in their creation. Buying refurbished phones minimizes that as best I can while not giving up modern conveniences. Similarly, I'm happy to use a restaurant's app/website instead of Doordash when there is one, but one of my favorite restaurants is only on doordash (Ben's Fast Food, which is delicious healthy food with lots of greens, they just have a terrible name).