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Originally Posted by SpongeG
I've been to a couple of smaller restaurants recently that used to be sit-down and are now take-out only. The tables are pushed up against the wall and chairs are stacked and the former dining areas are full of supplies now.
I'm not sure if all the delivery ap things work the same but I heard that Skip the Dishes charges a fee and that fee goes to the drivers and then Skip the Dishes gets a percentage of the food sale from the restaurant.
As for the delivery aps, I find a lot of places need to adjust their service counters so that delivery drivers can get their food without pushing past the lineup and yelling out the number they want. Some places will at least have a dedicated person to deal with it but I've seen many times when the order taker person stops dealing with the customer ordering to deal with the driver. Or sit down places it can get crowded in the waiting area when it starts to fill up with drivers.
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And this would be the nub of the problem right here.
It's like adding an extra till or counter to take new orders but not adding the additional cashier or staff person to deal with it and keeping the same number of staff at the back of the house (or even reducing them) to prepare a new line of orders.
And it's been my experience to quite a few places I've been to recently in this post-pandemic era with more people now dining out/going to pick up their meals directly at the restaurant.
At one place I know they have a drive-in window, the normal dining area (admittedly seeing fewer sit-in customers these days) and now an increased number of online-order pickups.
The franchise owner has kept the same number of staff (and possibly even reduced them to cut his overhead and deal with inflation costs), and the result is frequently a mess, as orders get backed up while staff struggle to deal with the increased workload.
Most of their attention seems to prioritize the online orders (I assume because it's easy to just hand the bag off to the driver and you don't have to deal with customers directly customizing their orders or complaining about every small thing or asking for fresh orders), and then the drive-in window, and then the in-store/dining in/pick-up orders - in that order of priority.
So queues build up quickly at the front, as you can imagine, and the staff member who deals with the drive-on window sometimes has to come help at the main counter, which in turn leads to cars backing up outside and drivers leaving their cars to come get their orders in the store thinking it's faster that way only to find out it's not. And to top it all off you have the Skip/UbearEats/Doordash drivers screaming out their order numbers for pick up
It's a mess of a dog's breakfast and you really feel for them (the staff) because you can tell how much they're struggling to cope with it all.
FarmerHaight's post below seems to outline it really well....
Quote:
Originally Posted by FarmerHaight
I used to deliver for Skip when I was in school. The delivery fee and any tip goes straight to the driver. Restaurants pay a flat access fee to be listed on the service (I am not sure if this is a one-time, annual, or monthly fee) and also pay a commission to Skip for each sale. So customers do not pay anything directly to Skip unless the restaurant passes along the costs in the form of higher prices for app orders, which is pretty common.
It's incredibly difficult to serve walk-in and app customers effectively at the same time. Some fast food places are able to do it by hiring an additional employee or two to only focus on mobile orders. Chipotle does this. If you have visited a Chipotle you may have noticed that they still have the full assembly line team for walk-in customers, but they have a separate counter just for the app orders with a couple employees dedicated to that.
For smaller restaurants that only has one or two servers working normally, they may not get enough app orders to justify an additional employee so the preparation and packaging of app orders comes at the expense of good walk-in service. Once you add the cost to be listed on an app it may not be worth it for smaller, local restaurants to do any app orders at all. This is unfortunate because being listed on an app is a great form of marketing. I have discovered several of my favourite local restaurants through initially placing and app order and have remained a loyal customer ever since.
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This is so true.
A lot of what are my favourite go-to places now I only discovered by ordering online during the pandemic through some of those services and apps, and I never would have known about them otherwise.
Now when I can actually go out I do make an effort to try to visit some of them directly to support them directly since I realize how being on those app services can be more of a burden for them than a convenience - even though it's how I, and I imagine many of their current new customers, discovered them.
It's part of that simultaneous boon and curse for restaurant owners of how people are creatures of habit.
Once we find what we like we tend to be loyal and stick to them and very rarely venture out to try out new things (except when recommended to us by people we trust) - which is great for those places we're loyal to, but terrible for new places looking to attract new customers.
And yeah, in this regard, the online ordering model really helps out a lot for places that hope to get more exposure and get new customers.
The restaurant business is brutally rough enough as is, even without the new added post-pandemic challenges - with most new places that start never managing to survive the first year ( I believe the figure is 60% of all new restaurants fail in the first year and 80% within 5 years. So if you make it past the 5 year mark, you've really really beat the odds).
I don't envy them at all.