> It's misleading to say that the pizza costs $20 when $6 of that is actually a hidden delivery fee.
No it's not. While some delivery sites do list higher prices than in-restaurant (arguably misleading), that's not the norm. And as long as they don't, then if a pizza is $20, then if you're eating in-house $6 of that is going to dining space, tables and chairs, plates and utensils, dishwashing, etc. If it's delivery, the $6 is going to the delivery service, which includes listings, website maintenance, etc. All businesses spread their costs out among customers in different ways. There's nothing misleading about it.
And again, "scummy terms" in no way implies lack of competition. Not sure where you got that idea from? Tons of industries are full of scummy terms while competition is thriving. Scummy terms have nothing to do with lack of competition and everything to do with which marketing funnels and pricing strategies turn out to be most effective. It's mainly about consumer psychology.
Yet take-out is also the same price and doesn't require any of that overhead. Although you are saving on a "tip", which is yet another weird fee attributed to a third party rather than waitstaff just earning straightforward wages - cost-responsibility-dodging is rampant in this industry. What's probably driving this dispute over commissions is that restaurants still need to pay for that dining space during Covid, so they're fighting over that "spare" $6.
> All businesses spread their costs out among customers in different ways. There's nothing inherently "hidden" about it.
The restaurant is front and center as being the provider of the food. The delivery service is explicitly stating that this food costs one specific price, and delivery another specific price. Meanwhile this breakdown is false and arbitrary, with a seeming goal of misleading customers about how much getting your food delivered actually costs.
> And again, "scummy terms" in no way implies lack of competition. Not sure where you got that idea from?
Effective market competition generally results in reasonable terms, due to many meetings of minds. A lack of reasonable terms shows there is not effective competition over the relationship. If a restaurant could instead sign up with a delivery service that didn't front-run their customers, they wouldn't take to writing exasperated blog posts about it.
I mean, shipping prices when shopping online also aren't the exact cost of shipping your package. "Free" shipping when you hit a minimum order is still being paid for in the price you pay per-item. Pretty much no prices magically reflect true costs anywhere. Delivery is no different. I don't know why you think delivery deserves to be super-transparently-related-to-costs when literally nothing else is in business except sales tax. (Pizzerias also make a tiny or no profit on cheese pizza but waaaay more on toppings, and cinemas make most of their profit from popcorn and sugar water, not your movie ticket. By your logic, all these are equally misleading.)
And your idea that competition results in "reasonable terms" is just wrong, I'm afraid. You're stating this as fact when it's not. There's tons of competition in airfares and in signing up for credit cards, but they're full of scummy terms. And restaurants objectively have lots of choices of delivery services to sign up with. In fact, there has never been a time in human history when they had more choices for delivery. Those are facts.
Pretty much no prices magically reflect true costs anywhere.
In general, sure. But the combinations generally simplify the transaction rather than obscuring it. Shipping cost can be built into product price. People balk when a product cost gets hidden in the shipping price.
As I said, the specific problem here is a delivery service purporting to charge one price for delivery, while hiding the actual cost of their service within the purported price of the food. That's borderline fraudulent.
Your whole argument is to keep insisting that there is nothing wrong with this. But it's akin to soliciting collections for charity, and then taking 20% of the donations as your administrative fee. Just because some money went where you said, does not mean you're entitled to allocate the rest how you see fit. We've also seen similar play-fast-and-loose-with-customer-money behavior from this industry where tipping a worker caused their wage to be reduced.
Since our argument has consisted of mostly talking past one another, I have to ask - what exactly is so repellent about making delivery companies disclose the actual price of their service?
> In fact, there has never been a time in human history when [restaurants] had more choices for delivery. Those are facts
I'm not disputing your "fact", I'm disputing your framing. If we were talking about orders from a restaurant's own website, being handled by a contracted delivery vendor, it would be appropriate. But the Silicon Valley nouveau-middleman business plan is to become popular and capture entire markets through network effects. It's disingenuous to frame signing up with a given service as some isolated choice, when those services actively work to inject themselves into existing customer relationships.
And sure, there is general competition between services. It's just not competition that results in reasonable market terms. Just like your examples of airlines and credit cards, market failure generally invites regulation, which is exactly what we're seeing here.
No it's not. While some delivery sites do list higher prices than in-restaurant (arguably misleading), that's not the norm. And as long as they don't, then if a pizza is $20, then if you're eating in-house $6 of that is going to dining space, tables and chairs, plates and utensils, dishwashing, etc. If it's delivery, the $6 is going to the delivery service, which includes listings, website maintenance, etc. All businesses spread their costs out among customers in different ways. There's nothing misleading about it.
And again, "scummy terms" in no way implies lack of competition. Not sure where you got that idea from? Tons of industries are full of scummy terms while competition is thriving. Scummy terms have nothing to do with lack of competition and everything to do with which marketing funnels and pricing strategies turn out to be most effective. It's mainly about consumer psychology.