Chicago will now require food delivery apps to disclose itemized cost breakdown

https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-will-now-require-food-delivery-apps-to-disclose-itemized-cost-breakdown/2270630/

by akersten • 6 years ago

230 180 6 years ago

nbcchicago.com

troydavis• 6 years ago

Here's the official policy: https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/dol/rulesandr...

imgabe• 6 years ago

"Stop believing you are supporting your community by ordering from a 3rd party delivery company," Badalamenti wrote. "Out of almost $1,100 of orders. Your Restaurant you are trying to support receives not even $400. It is almost enough to pay for the food."

Then why even have your restaurant on the app?

More and more, it seems like "restaurant" is not a viable business. They already don't pay their employees, offloading that on to customers via tips. Where does all the money go? Rent, I guess.

awinter-py3• 6 years ago

https://medium.com/@joelleparenteau/why-are-restaurants-so-f...

it wasn’t always this way — margins used to be double, if not triple, what they are now. But for the past couple decades, while menu prices should have been rising to keep up with things like inflation and rapidly increasing rent, price wars instead drove them down ($1 value meal anyone?). All this eroded margins til restaurants were left with nothing but bread crumbs. This failure to manage expectations has simultaneously obliterated margins, all the while skewing and reinforcing our perception of what food should cost.

chongli• 6 years ago

reinforcing our perception of what food should cost

It's supply and demand. Our perception of what food should cost has nothing to do with it (and this argument is an unhelpful culture war framing). Food is in extremely abundant supply. Same goes for cheap restaurant labour (which is often dodging labour laws). What is scarce in this equation is real estate in high traffic locations. That is why rent goes up and margins go down.

During the virus lockdown, restaurants are trying to operate a low margin business (food service) while paying high rents for valuable real estate they aren't benefitting from, at all. You don't need a fancy restaurant in a high-traffic urban location to prepare orders for delivery. You'd do just as well with a commissary kitchen in a warehouse somewhere.

JAlexoid22• 6 years ago

Honestly? Common food has become so good that only a few restaurants can produce food and provide experience to justify paying what they ask for it.

I can only count one restaurant that surprised me with quality, while a few Michelin star places disappointed here in NYC.

But that's a result of food production becoming better and more efficient, while mid-range and high-end restaurants are standing mostly still. I still get the same service and same quality of food from Milos today as I got 20 years ago... and prices only went up. Meanwhile Popeyes and McDonalds have improved dramatically in the last 4 years alone!

Unfortunately it took this pandemic for restaurants to start feeling the burn from their conservativism.

fennecfoxen• 6 years ago

Restaurants pay expensive rent, then pay their employees extra to pay expensive rents too (sometimes in the form of a higher minimum wage).

To help with this+, big US cities have for the past several decades set about making building competitive housing stock more expensive. Because some hope to escape this through a commute, these cities have also been spending more and more money than ever to build increasingly less-effective transit systems!

(+ To help make it worse)

Some cities have mandatory health coverage too, and some restaurants cover that without a mandate, but the increasing cost of health care is a snafu that goes all the way up to the federal level, and discussing that will be far less productive.

fzeroracer5• 6 years ago

Yes, that's about right. More and more of money in general (and not just restaurants) is being absorbed by rent seekers. That's partially a function of how our economy is functioned around housing and real estate as an investment rather than a place to live, which means said investments are being bought up by the hyper-wealthy and then sat on to earn money or sold at a premium.

This is one of those free markets that is directly at odds with the freedom of other markets to operate. Unfortunately I don't see us fixing it any time soon.

malandrew9• 6 years ago

If you're providing a service (discovery+delivery), you're not exactly a rent seeker. Rent seeking implies charging rent on some asset. What's the asset in this instance?

haram_masala• 6 years ago

Many restaurants are still "profitable" because the restaurateurs use the business as a tax shelter. For sure, this isn't the only type of small business that does so, but based on my observations, it's far more rampant in the food service industry than elsewhere.

Spivak2• 6 years ago

So but really though. Why even list on these apps if they aren’t profitable? What leverage do delivery apps have if a restaurant tells them to go away?

Like it would be quite the sales pitch “join our platform and lose money!”

hedora7• 6 years ago

If restaurants don’t pay up, the delivery services provide menus with incorrect, inflated prices to potential customers. They also often screw up orders and let the restaurant deal with the fallout.

This law makes the first part of that illegal.

fragmede• 6 years ago

It's unclear that restaurants are free to opt out. Grubhub "growth hacked" by listing restaurants that didn’t agree to be listed. It becomes a real problem when customers aren't aware, and complain about delivery problems and seek refunds from the restaurant, who didn't agree to do delivery with Grubhub.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/29/21113876/grubhub-seamless....

TylerE• 6 years ago

Yes, but the restaurant can hardly complain if they're receiving full menu price. If they aren't - well, no sale.

cortesoft6• 6 years ago

If the restaurant didn't have an agreement with Grubhub, that has to mean they get the full amount for delivery, right? How is that bad for the restaurant?

coffeefirst• 6 years ago

This is wild. Apparently there's an additional allegation where they're listing restaurants they don't represent as closed.

https://www.law360.com/technology/articles/1272537/bar-says-...

s_dev• 6 years ago

They already don't pay their employees, offloading that on to customers via tips.

DoorDash got in trouble for even taking the tips recently enough!

hedora7• 6 years ago

DoorDash switched to a complicated bidding system that means they pay drivers less if you offer a tip. This is equivalent to stealing the tips, but they’re hoping it is complicated enough to confuse a judge into allowing it.

Tip in cash if you must use DoorDash. I switched to carry out, or delivery direct from the restaurant. It saves a surprising amount of money and helps local businesses.

awinter-py3• 6 years ago

hooray supply chain transparency

consumers are starting to care

JAlexoid22• 6 years ago

And... Do you think that anyone will drop the commission rates? UberEats isn't profitable. GrubHub isn't profitable.

What do you think is going to happen? They're going to charge less?

awinter-py3• 6 years ago

it's a long road

transparency gives consumers the ability to shop on fairness

'we pay our workers better and don't stiff restaurants' isn't a line anyone has every used to sell a product but 'fair trade' has been a real thing for a few decades now without transparency

if adding in the transparency justifies a higher price (big if), the luxury consumer economy changes for the better

mc324• 6 years ago

I hope more localities/jurisdictions do this.

More price transparency in everything, plane tickets, medical care, these third party tack on services that shame people into tipping... Bring it on!

SilasX• 6 years ago

What about regular retail stores? If you buy a box of cereal should Walmart have to say:

Wholesale unit price: $1.40

Retail storage fee: $0.60

rather than

Box of cereal: $2.00 ?

(Not saying that's necessarily a bad idea, just a thought.)

Note: This came up before and I made the same point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18677023

aaomidi3• 6 years ago

This sounds like a great thing

mc324• 6 years ago

Most retail stores aren’t known for inflating prices while adding marginal convenience. They add a service to me and many. The relationship is more symbiotic than parasitic, as I see it.

Looking at this recursively I don’t need the restaurants’ price breakdown, but I think I want to know what the restaurant gets from me if I buy direct vs when we use these services.

Same with Uber vs a regular taxi. I want to know their vigorish.

Same with hospitals and doctors. I want to know if I’ll be paying $100 for a Tylenol when I can go down to their own pharmacy and get one for pennies.

nickpsecurity• 6 years ago

It think it's more helpful when exposing their fraudulent offers. An easy example was loyalty cards that had one purpose but were sold on the lie of big savings. A common trick was to inflate the "regular" price above what was common, offer a card-only "discount," and show the "savings" that came with it. It sounds like they're hooking you up until you go to... any... of the other large competitors seeing similar prices. Even worse, one in my area started adding "You could've saved X dollars" on their fake sales at the bottom of the receipt.

It's stuff like that which might justify rules for transparent pricing. Then, consumers can just avoid companies playing a lot of games with them. Or choose or be stuck with them due to other reasons. This is just one tool in the toolbox.

cortesoft6• 6 years ago

What about the cost of transportation? The box itself? The ingredients? You could go on forever.

dannyw4• 6 years ago

If everyone had to disclose their margins and we removed this information asymmetry, it could be a great thing for consumers, and a great thing for efficient markets.

There are a lot of grandmas and tech illiterate people buying laptops for incredibly inflated prices, from often smaller and more questionable computer shops. We're talking about 5 year old CPUs, 4GB of RAM, sometimes even a hard drive and no solid state drive.

If they had to disclose that the $999 laptop they're selling only costs $400 and they make a margin of $600 on it, and the consumer takes their money elsewhere and buys a genuinely reasonable laptop, I think that's a fantastic outcome.

refurb• 6 years ago

Indeed! This is a great example of where government regulation can actually promote a healthy marketplace.

JAlexoid22• 6 years ago

I want to know how much restaurants pay their cooks, busboys, waiters and delivery people(if any).

Why only delivery apps are subject to transparency rules?

pkaye• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, this unnecessary and overreaching regulation, issued under the guise of the current emergency, will only lead to confusion and hurt restaurants and delivery workers...

How will this change lead to confusion?

domador• 6 years ago

It will confuse customers as to the virtue these third-party delivery services. They might even question their own decency in using these services and may change their behavior as customers, possibly in restaurants' but not these middlemen's favor.

posguy• 6 years ago

Is there any virtue in these third party services, or is concealing their fees allowing them to extract significantly more value than they would otherwise be able to in an honest marketplace?

malandrew9• 6 years ago

My bet is that is has the opposite effect. It will overload the customer because it's antithetical to the experience the service will provide. People use these services because they want something quick and easy. Instead they are being given more information than they will know what to do with. The smart way for platforms to handle this will be to provide too much detail in a way that it's incomparable to the competition when broken out so things get to the point where people collapse the details and just look at the total because the details just add confusion, not transparency.

End of the day, if you want delivery, what matters is which company, A or B, provides a delivery service that is faster, cheaper and better.

vadym909• 6 years ago

Just not fair /s

More important as Uber tries to monopolize the space by buying GrubHub. These delivery companies are going to encourage fly-by-night/cloud kitchen operators to increase their margins and reduce prices on the already hurting restaurants. Wish a not-for-profit platform for delivery existed that didn't squeeze the maker or the delivery driver.

hedora7• 6 years ago

Yeah. It doesn’t seem hard for a few independently wealthy activists to make a “craigslist for restaurant delivery”, where the restaurants handled the delivery logistics directly, and the website took ~zero cut.

I’d switch to that in a heartbeat.

Spivak2• 6 years ago

This seems like such a weird law. Cool for supply chain transparency and all but it feels super political to target delivery apps when literally everyone does commissions for sales.

Customers should also be confused that…

* Paying $1.99 for an app doesn’t mean the developer receives $1.99.

* Buying a product on Amazon when your browser has a referral cookie means the full cost doesn’t go to the seller.

* Buying a pack of Oreos at Walmart doesn’t mean that Nabisco gets $3.

* Paying $17 to see a movie doesn’t mean the theater gets all of it.

* Buying a game on Steam…

* Buying a flight on a Travelocity…

* Getting a hotel through hotels.com

* Renting an AirBnB…

Like this list could almost literally go on forever.

malandrew9• 6 years ago

I would go even further and suggest that a lot of the high standard of living we enjoyed post WWII can be attributed to all these inefficiencies of cost information. Due to the lack of transparency, pretty much every profession and industry was able to pad enough margin into their business that they could make a decent living.

The acceleration of information diffusion means that no one's margin is safe anymore and why we have Bezos' favorite aphorism "Your margin is my opportunity".

Historically, margin was not the opportunity except maybe between grocery stores or gas stations (businesses where discovery of two or more providers of the same good/service was trivial and all where easily accessible to the customer). Historically, simply providing the customer with the product or service they need was the opportunity. It was only when discovery became easy (first the yellow pages, later the internet) and competition ceased being local (first franchises, later the internet) that margins eroded across the board.

maxerickson2• 6 years ago

Your argument is that higher prices for goods increase standard of living?

Isn't the standard argument based on increased productivity?

malandrew9• 6 years ago

On a related note, I would love for all businesses to periodically send customers an email or other notification showing them how much of the money they spent went to taxes on a monthly basis and yearly basis.

People would give a lot more thought to taxes if they added up all the different ways the government nickels and dimes them.

lotsofpulp• 6 years ago

People can already see the governments tax receipts and expenditures on the government websites.

People don’t want to relax by auditing taxes.

dannyw4• 6 years ago

We're talking about knowing how much a middleman is charging here.

To use your example, when I rent an airbnb, yes I absolutely want to know how much Airbnb is pocketing. Airbnb happily discloses this as an itemised "Service Fee", and they charge hosts a fair 3% fee to cover payments processing.

When I hire a cleaner on Thumbtack, I absolutely want to know how much the cleaner is paid. I want to make sure everyone is earning a liveable wage.

And when I order something through a delivery app, I absolutely want to know how much the restaurant is paid.

zaroth• 6 years ago

I think you are vehemently agreeing with OP?

Food delivery is being singled out here because of pure politics.

Your AirBnb example by the way is a perfect example. The 3% service fee is the amount charged to the host by AirBnb. They also have a separate charge which they bill to the renter;

Guest service fee: This fee is typically under 14.2% of the booking subtotal (the nightly rate plus cleaning fee and additional guest fee, if applicable, but excluding Airbnb fees and taxes).

I’m counting a total of at least 5 different line items for taxes and fees. Not all of which will be broken out on the renter’s invoice.

Like when renting a car at the airport, eventually you stop paying attention and just look at the total. You’re only amazed after taking a second look that taxes, fees, concession recovery, environmental etc. fees make up more than half the cost.

kube-system5• 6 years ago

You rarely know what middlemen are charging for basically anything that has middlemen. This is not new territory invented by the tech industry.

When was the last time you bought a product or service and they did tell you what their margins were?

malandrew9• 6 years ago

They are no more a middleman than the grocer or restauranteur is a middleman between you and the farmers. There's an actual value added service being provided: discovery, payment, delivery, order history, etc.

baron8162• 6 years ago

The middleman is providing value, is it not? In the case of the food ordering app (let’s say you’re picking up, not getting delivery), they’re increasing discovery for the restaurant, simplifying payment and the ordering experience, organizing and managing the orders for the restaurant, give you a reasonable estimate on when the order should be ready, and provide decent customer service if something goes wrong. I use several apps custom built by restaurants, and they never come anywhere close to the fidelity of a DoorDash/GrubHub.

I don’t know why you think it’s your business to know who is making what. I don’t need to know the salaries of all the engineers at Thumbtack. No one who works for them is a slave. They can quit if they don’t like their compensation. I don’t need to stick my finger in their business and start making demands when I don’t have an inkling of what their financials and contracts even remotely look like. I hope their clearers make a liveable wage, but for someone with no real competitive skills, just having a job may be all you can ask for. If we fix a certain wage floor, some people could end up without a job at all.

Labor markets are hard to regulate well. There are cases under monopoly or monopsony conditions where it’s desirable to do so, but “I just don’t like that” isn’t cause to interfere with efficient markets. You can’t regulate the world to perfection.

JAlexoid22• 6 years ago

Does this include any monthly fees? Do you have the right to see private party contracts? Also - fun fact, some places pay more to generate higher placements.

I would also like to see how much restaurants are paying their cooks, waiters, busboys and deliverymen. Some restaurants don't deserve my custom.

PS: AirBnB is a shitty example, as host cancellation rates are ridiculous.

bit_logic• 6 years ago

What frustrates me with restaurants (especially the small business mom and pop ones) is that they are not adapting to this situation. When I go to their websites (sometimes they don't even have one), I want to see two things:

* A way to order and pay online.

* Details on their contactless pickup procedure if I drive there. I want them to bring it to my car, then I can unlock my trunk, and they can place it inside and close it.

If they did this, my use of these food delivery apps would drop to almost zero. I don't mind driving to pickup my food, it's even good for my car which has been sitting idle for weeks. But I want it to be contactless pickup. If bringing it to my car is too hard, I might even be ok with waiting outside their restaurant, text them, and they bring it out and place it on a table.

But these restaurants have no plan, put no effort into adapting, then complain about high fees for food delivery apps. I don't like these expensive apps either, please provide an alternative!

BurningFrog• 6 years ago

You may overestimate the tech skills of "mom and pop" restaurants. They're one of the shrinking segments where people without much education and language skills can make a decent living with some hard work.

If they knew how to maintain the web site you want, they'd probably be in a better paying, more academic career.

Disclaimer: This is just my impressions from the outside. I know nothing. But I doubt mom or pop will show up on HN to tell their story.

mydongle• 6 years ago

No, you're right. Many people on HN would scoff at UberEats taking a 30% cut or whatever from orders, but how much would it cost for every mom and pop to try and implement something like that themselves? And have someone to maintain it? Whatever people want to say about it, these are orders (or at least a signficant number of them) that the restaurants would've never received, if not for the app existing. 70% is better than 0%.

And that 30% isn't in stone. Last place I worked at, they were able to negotiate for 15% because of how desperate Uber was.

freddie_mercury• 6 years ago

You don't need to "maintain a website". You can do all of this trivially from within Facebook if you don't want to "maintain a website". In the country I live in, only the hugest businesses have a website. 99% of businesses run off of Facebook (you generally order by just sending them a FB message saying "send me 12 of X" and then you pay Cash On Delivery).

Here's how you add a Menu to your restaurant's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/help/533179700126832

syshum• 6 years ago

All they need to do is watch one of the endless youtube ads for squarespace or wix...

No one needs web developers anymore, you just need to sign up for a wix account it will do everything /s

JCharante• 6 years ago

I expect a restaurant to have a working bathroom, the owner doesn't need to know anything about indoor plumbing, that's why even a mom and pop shop hires a contractor to take care of that. Don't see why web is any different.

impendia2• 6 years ago

Is there some reason you can't (or don't want to) call them?

chrisseaton2• 6 years ago

Many people these days just flat out don't like having to make or receive a phone call.

ikeyany• 6 years ago

The idea here is to avoid contact with human beings altogether.

BiosElement• 6 years ago

Language barrier and awful call quality also come into play. It's sometimes next to impossible to understand them and that's even assuming a strong language grasp. Much of the best food comes from the old dude/woman who's been cooking all their life, but not necessarily the easiest to communicate with.

cortesoft6• 6 years ago

I can re-order my previous orders from Grubhub or DoorDash with one hand on my phone while I chase after the kids or am busy doing something else. Don't have to enter payment info, find my wallet, look at a menu, or worry about the noise level.

JAlexoid22• 6 years ago

Have you talked over the phone to an average Chinese restaurant lady or Taco place? If I had to ask for the menu from my local, one of the best that I had, taco truck - I'd hang myself by the time I got to actually deciding what my order would be.

maccard• 6 years ago

Waiting on hold, handling payment details over the phone, miscommunicating an order, language barriers (not everyone who runs a restaurant speaks the local language fluently, and not everyone living in a place speaks the local language fluently), not having to explain my address.

Then there's the benefits of online - menu is accessible, often they're using stripe/Shopify so my payment info isn't everywhere, it's one click, I get email confirmations and receipts, I can leave free form notes easily, and last but not least, I don't have to talk to a person who may or may not want to talk to me.

cortesoft6• 6 years ago

There is another big advantage that aggregators have; I only have to enter my address and payment info once, and can order from a ton of restaurants. It can save all my orders from lots of places so I can reorder. It can find all the places that deliver to my address.

bsder• 6 years ago

I want them to bring it to my car, then I can unlock my trunk, and they can place it inside and close it.

That's a little excessive given there are lots of customers and only a handful of restaurant workers.

What I have seen restaurants do is that they put your food on the tables (which are idle anyway) with a number. If you tell them who you are when you walk in, they tell you the number and you can pick it up without interacting with people.

techsupporter• 6 years ago

I've seen this as well, at the ~60% of restaurants who will still serve me without my having a car. Walk in, give name from safe distance, get food from spot.

What sucks about the other 40% is half of them are "our door is locked, pay a delivery service" and the other half are "use our drive-thru and if you come in anything other than a vehicle with a license plate we will yell at you." I don't want to do the former because delivery people seem incapable of working out where I live and I can't do the latter.

impendia2• 6 years ago

I've been buying groceries in this manner. (I submit a MS Word document with my order, they call me to arrange payment and double check that whatever substitutions they need to make are okay, and I show up in the afternoon and pop my trunk.)

Probably not practical in big cities, where parking can be haphazard, but many restaurants have parking lots right in front.

yoshamano4• 6 years ago

Out here in the hinterlands of "fly-over country", I just want a phone number, address, menu, and hours of operation. I don't care what form they take be it website, Facebook, a Yelp page, whatever. Something that a search engine can index. Just those 4 things can be something of a large ask from the mom and pop places around here.

What you're asking for sounds like science fiction.

petre4• 6 years ago

Then you won't be buying food from dark kitchens which is what these food delivery apps encourage.

chii• 6 years ago

Just those 4 things can be something of a large ask from the mom and pop places around here.

i bet that there's a way to turn this sort of need into a utility that can be provided with a very simple method. It used to be very difficult to operate a telephone when it was new. Now it's ubiquitous. Calling somebody meant looking up their number in a phonebook. And it is because of standardization.

So i propose that all businesses standardize in describing what they sell - make this a requirement by law, and there will be companies that can provide cheap services to do this task for them. Using this standardization process, online ordering and other (like inventory tracking) can also be "standardized" in such a way that makes it outsource-able.

threatofrain• 6 years ago

Science fiction? What's wrong with the Facebook and Yelp you just mentioned? You don't need a perfect website, right?

ForHackernews• 6 years ago

There's is an alternative, it's called the telephone!

Are you that terrified of making a phone call?

If it's a small restaurant, just ring up and ask them how you'd like to pick up the food!

megablast• 6 years ago

I know, why don’t the waiters just edit the website, the cooks integrate a payment api, the cleaners implement a back of house system, etc....

Crazy.

ulfw• 6 years ago

How's the whole "I can unlock my trunk, and they can place it inside and close it" going to help?

If you're worried about exposure, someone still prepared your food, touched it in the kitchen, brought it out to your car...

lakerz16• 6 years ago

I'd much rather get my food from someone that has not been interacting with the previous 100 customers.

And now every customer after me won't be exposed to me, either.

hedora7• 6 years ago

I’m perfectly happy phoning in an order, walking in and sticking my credit card in a slot. I’m orders of magnitude more likely to catch it at the grocery store, or during a trip to our partially-closed and therefore over-crowded parks.

However, no one in our house is in a high risk group. We’d rather get one of the two strains that are common now (preferably the first one!) than roll the dice with whatever’s common during the second surge later this year.

rickpmg• 6 years ago

Silly.

Why stop there? I want to know how much of my chicken dinner was labor, the chicken itself, and the spices.

The delivery companies aren't cheating anybody. It's not like they change the price after the fact on either the restaurant or the consumer.

Lori is doing this to what... get people to bully the delivery companies?

Suddenly delivery companies are getting accused of being greedy because... they're suddenly in demand?

runako3• 6 years ago

This looks super confusing. So now in addition to presenting me an itemized breakdown of what I am paying, I have to also see an itemized breakdown of what the restaurant is paying?

In the example invoice in TFA, how would they allocate the promotional fee without knowing in advance how many customers the fee will generate?

How would a consumer know what a fair delivery commission is? Was my driver carrying multiple orders on this trip? If so, should I reduce my tip?

Adding this kind of complexity to bills is silly when there are options like ChowNow out there that handle the website + app + booking part for a flat monthly fee. (And let the restauranteurs determine the difficulty of offering delivery themselves.)

dannyw4• 6 years ago

I'd be happy with a rule saying...

* Order total: $34.00

* Paid to restaurant: $16.20

* Paid to Uber Eats: $12.30

* Paid to driver: $5.50

runako3• 6 years ago

Sounds simple, but there are at least two obvious problems with this approach:

1) It does not take into account that driver comp and Uber Eats commissions may both well be on a sliding scale, where the percentages depend on order volume on prior days/weeks.

This will make it difficult for consumers to compare these fees across orders, making the actual numbers less meaningful. Did the driver earn less on this order because it's her first order this month, or because the restaurant doesn't do much volume, or because the driver was carrying 3 orders at the same time and delivery fees scale with mileage or time or some other metric, etc. The calculations may involve more context than is reasonable for a consumer to process.

2) This may reward the richer restaurants. Big restaurants & chains may negotiate better deals and get a bigger "Paid to restaurant" number. Choosing to display information to consumers in this fashion might incentivize people to choose bigger restaurant owners at the expense of small shops like those highlighted in TFA.

3) Doesn't address the invoice shared in TFA, where ~20% of the fee to GrubHub was for a promotion that could be CTA or the like and not directly tied to specific deliveries. So you could implement your suggestion and the restaurant could still post the same invoice & complaint.

badfrog• 6 years ago

It's not obvious that this well help anything, but at least it's better than Jersey City. They put a cap on how much apps can charge restaurants, so obviously the apps just added more fees for the customer.

https://www.nj.com/hudson/2020/05/uber-eats-slaps-surcharge-...

_2d302• 6 years ago

SF did this as well.

bogomipz• 6 years ago

NYC put forth legislation today to cap at 20%:

https://ny.eater.com/2020/5/12/21256244/food-delivery-fee-ca...

JAlexoid22• 6 years ago

And what is that going to achieve?

Dylan16807• 6 years ago

Making the customers aware of how much they're paying in fees is a good thing.

Now delivery services have to compete directly on the fee they charge customers. Before, the customer had no idea if one service was charging a restaurant 20% and another was charging 30%, which is effectively one service subsidizing another.

tzs• 6 years ago

It says they were announced today (May 12th) and go into effect May 22nd, and applies to "all websites, phone apps and other internet services that offer the sale of food or beverages by a dining establishment".

Has this been in the works a while, and the app and site makers knew it was coming, or do the app and site makers really only have 10 days to design and implement this?

cordite• 6 years ago

Why not healthcare while we are at it? It’s been in the complaint list for over a decade now.

fnord77• 6 years ago

including: the menu price of the food,

does this mean the apps have to disclose the amount they're marking up the food from the menu prices in the restaurant?

hedora7• 6 years ago

That’s my reading of the article. If so, this is huge.

I prepared a few DoorDash orders in the past, and noticed that what was normally about $60 for dine in was somehow $110 after a $10 delivery fee and a “50% off delivery” coupon.

At that point I started spot checking prices from menus on yelp. I don’t appreciate gaslighting, and haven’t used DoorDash since.

zhoujianfu• 6 years ago

I ordered kfc on grubhub, one item didn’t come. I marked it as such and they refunded me the cost of the item and the sales tax. They did NOT refund me the pro-rata share of their 12.5% fee or “20%” tip though.

ikiris3• 6 years ago

This is why i stopped using grubhub. If they screw up in any way, they try not to make the user whole, or offer any incentive for their time wasted. Doordash is much better

rootsudo• 6 years ago

Seattle also has locked the price of delivery which is good.

ryansmccoy• 6 years ago

Are hospitals next?

ebalit• 6 years ago

It would be a great way to make this market clearer.

There is 3 visible actors in each order on these apps. The restaurant, the app and the delivery man are all independent and are putting their reputation on the line.

Knowing how much each received is the only way for me to decide if I received the value I expected from each of those actors.

Chicago will now require food delivery apps to disclose itemized cost breakdown

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