| I don't know how driver pay compares pre- and post-appshare, but on the consumer side, my experience differs from yours. To me, it seems that DoorDash et. al. are delivering negative value to the consumer. My recollection is that most restaurants with takeout also had a delivery option, usually at a smaller percentage cost than DoorDash takes. But, more than that, delivery worked better. Restaurants typically only offered delivery within a few miles of the store. So there was a "critical mass" effect that drivers could learn the territory, and usually had fewer problems finding an address (especially after you ordered more than once). That is especially true if Google maps has the location or entrance pin wrong for your address. Practically, that few mile radius isn't a big limitation for most take-out food because the food will get cold if driven a longer distance than that. Kitchens were also better able to prevent cold food by batching orders to have all of a driver's orders ready at one time. I think these are solvable issues, but, to date, for me as a consumer, DoorDash/Grub Hub/Uber Eats do not deliver positive value compared to restaurants with captive drivers. |
Bandwidth is the biggest problem small restaurants have in managing a delivery service. If you don't have enough drivers to meet peak demand, you have to either decline orders or make customers mad when their order takes >1 hour to arrive (and disgruntled customers don't typically re-order or tip well). If you have too many drivers, they are making less in tips and you are probably spending more to bring their tipped wage up to minimum wage - and if it happens often they are going to quit.
I remember my dad disconnecting the phone at the store when they got too may orders to handle. We ended up using my mom and siblings as the flex/surge delivery capacity. If delivery apps had existed at the time, he would have gladly traded the headache of employing drivers and managing capacity for the ability to make and sell as many sandwiches as he could. In todays' world, if he got 12 orders going to different parts of town at the same time, he could accept all of them and know that if he could make the food, someone would be able to deliver it.
Delivery networks also increase courier efficiency by adding the ability to batch deliveries from multiple restaurants and avoiding the need to round-trip every order back to the restaurant when you are done. Couriers on Eats/DD can drop off one meal and be dispatched another from a restaurant nearby, and don't need multiple people who live near each other to order from the same restaurant at the same time in order to have efficiently batched trips.
There are efficiencies in the network model that can't easily be replicated by individual restaurants with their own drivers. The gold standard is Dominos but they are a behemoth that can't compare to any other restaurant - they are singlehandedly as large as Doordash.