IMO this is misguided. The reason that restaurants are struggling is because they're unable to provide the value they once did, but they're still bearing a lot of the costs that used to provide it.
All of these restaurants are paying rent on their dining rooms, when they're only using the kitchens. The customer experience, paid for by waiter wages and dining room rent, is now being provided by the delivery companies. The whole customer interaction, from taking the order, to processing the payment to bringing the food to the customer has been taken over by the delivery companies, and that's a huge part of the cost and the value of the meal.
Restaurants can't reasonably expect the delivery companies to just eat all of their substantial costs because the Restaurant has a stranded asset that used to provide that service. Really, it should be the landlords that are taking the hit because all of that prime dining space now has the same value as some tiny cloud kitchen off a back alley.
I disagree - large cuts to delivery services were hurting restaurants long before COVID, and the predatory practices of the likes of Grubhub and DoorDash have been well documented here on HN in the past.
I don't doubt that restaurants are paying big fees to the delivery companies, but the delivery companies are still losing money on every order. The predatory pricing is that they're charging too little, not too much. That's how you get this pizza arbitrage stuff. Now some of the other practices of the delivery companies like setting up fake web pages for restaurants are really objectionable, but I think that what's happening now is a separate problem.
Ultimately though, the problem of the pandemic is that restaurants need customers to pay for both the dining room and the delivery, and that's just too much money. If you're running a cloud kitchen, you don't expect to be able to get the same amount of money for a meal as a sit down restaurant, but the sit down restaurant is now providing the same product as the cloud kitchen.
All of these restaurants are paying rent on their dining rooms, when they're only using the kitchens. The customer experience, paid for by waiter wages and dining room rent, is now being provided by the delivery companies. The whole customer interaction, from taking the order, to processing the payment to bringing the food to the customer has been taken over by the delivery companies, and that's a huge part of the cost and the value of the meal.
Restaurants can't reasonably expect the delivery companies to just eat all of their substantial costs because the Restaurant has a stranded asset that used to provide that service. Really, it should be the landlords that are taking the hit because all of that prime dining space now has the same value as some tiny cloud kitchen off a back alley.