[at-fates-hands]

There's been a lot of press about delivery services gouging restaurants now that a majority of them are being forced to use them.

I did see the other day Chipolte is doing their own delivery service now which is awesome. Not sure why more places ditch Grubhub and Doordash and just have their own in house delivery service. It's so much cheaper than outsourcing to companies who've been gouging restaurants and the consumer.

[microcolonel]

There will be an equilibrium between these things, and it's not necessarily just “gouging” if delivery services increase prices, given that the actual supply of drivers (as has been reported here before) is strained.

Basically contract delivery services have a premium to begin with, to take the delivery business off your hands. If you have dramatically more orders per day, it can actually make sense to have your own delivery people; especially since your managers have all the time in the world to focus on delivery now that your dine-in is closed or restricted.

[daveFNbuck]

Even if you have a high order volume, a delivery service should still have more deliveries near a given destination and be able to improve margins by grouping those together for delivery.

I may be the only person in my apartment complex ordering Chipotle for dinner tonight, but there are going to be several others ordering something.

[microcolonel]

That is a common assumption for people to make about delivery services, but it is not that correct with prepared food delivery, where it is unlikely that you will line up even two pickups without compromising the freshness/hotness of at least one of the orders; often this is difficult even if both of the pickups are from the same establishment.

Now, unlikely and difficult don't mean impossible but there's more to it than meets the eye.

[samename]

Chipotle uses DoorDash behind the scenes