Devils advocate: they could keep charging a 5% total markup to the customer but once they're dominant they can start making deals with restaurants under the guise of "if it weren't for us, you'd never get this order to begin with" to get a percentage of the regular meal cost? Seems kinda shitty from a moral standpoint but I agree that the current up charge isn't sustainable.
I appreciate the devil's advocate. To be frank, I just made up the 5% figure, it's based on my observations looking at Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and similar apps. Though the theme seems to be the same, a lot of times you'll see they actually match the in store prices, which makes absolute no sense to me.
I had an experience with a Deliveroo driver, who told me the restaurant took an hour to make the food despite saying it was ready and that's why the delivery was almost two hours late. He ended up waiting for one hour at the restaurant for them to make my order. He was asking me to make a complaint against the restaurant because there's not much he can do.
My small order for a single person, costing £7.50, took two hours out of this person's life. Now I'll admit I don't know how the system works and whether the people get paid to wait around doing nothing but I very much doubt it, and actually felt bad that I made some person trying to make a living wait an hour at a restaurant so he could use his own vehicle to deliver a burrito to me, possibly at a loss.
Why doesn’t matching in-store prices make sense to you? You are not taking up valuable table space, so it ends up cheaper for the restaurant. The delivery service is certainly taking a share of that benefit.
The problem with that is that the restaurant business is low margin in the first place. So Uber cutting into the restaurants' margins will quickly make it not worth it for the restaurants.
Kind of like how Groupon and Living Social often made these money losing deals with small businesses. Many of those businesses figured out that the one time influx of customers was not at all worth it, which is why both Groupon and Living Social are shells of their former high-flying unicorn selves.
The delivery companies charge the restaurant, up to 35% of the meal value. In addition to the delivery fee that is shown to the end user.
The figure is probably about 30% on average, can be lowered to 25% or 20% for extremely desirable or high volume restaurants that have brand value and demand.
