Working in food sucks in general. I would know I’ve been doing it for almost 14 years now. You drive to the store. You enter the store. You order your food. If there are any complications with your order you’re told right then and there.
But I’ll never forget the day my job introduced mobile ordering. It immediately made everything worse in almost every way. Customers ordering shit we ran out of, shit we no longer offer, setting the pickup time 5 minutes after placing the order then getting mad when it’s not done on time. All this while we can’t communicate with the customer at all until they arrive to find the order incomplete because we couldn’t contact them to figure out what they wanted to do.
Then door dash became a thing and all those exact problems became even worse. It slows down the entire store to the point of disrupting the customers who came in to order.
Why the fuck would you go through a third party system to obtain food when you can just go get the fucking food
Basically if you use mobile ordering or a delivery service you’re a big part of why food service has done nothing but get harder and more frustrating. And I do hold it against you.
Edit: I don’t think lemmy understands how unpopularopinion is supposed to work…
Edit 2: Considering how many people clearly disagree with me and seeing how few upvotes this post has gotten, lemmy clearly has no idea how unpopularopinion works.
Glad to know the Reddit custom of ignoring that still lives on.
I like your unpopular opinion, here is my take on it:
Don’t fucking offer mobile ordering of it’s such an inconvenience. It’s not like you’re forced to offer it.
Except we are. The people in the store have no control on what corporate tells us to do.
Unless you own the store you have no say on whatever bs they decided to dump on us. Unless you decide to just quit but you’ll just end up at a different store with the exact same mobile/delivery bullshit
Please help me understand. What’s in your opinion the reason why a competitive disadvantage would be this widespread?
Not the person you replied to, but there is a sit down burger bar near me that I quite enjoy. This place is popular with third party deliveries. I like to go, sit at the bar, and have a burger and beers. I stopped going to the place because every time I go the bar is full of delivery drivers waiting on food to be ready for delivery. We’re talking probably 20 orders per hour. I don’t so much mind the delivery people, but they come and go so frequently, they often lurk about because they want to get going, and they distract the bartender so she can’t do her job well.
The business is making more money by having more sales, but the impact on the dine in experience is so terrible that their delivery gains are likely muted by the loss of dine in business. The only thing corporate sees at the end of the day is that there were more sales transactions which means they made more money, they don’t see the business they lost by having a poor dine in experience.
Then they didn’t lose any business they just served a different customer base.
Yeah and who knows, that may be the point. Perhaps the business wants to switch over to take out only and become a ghost kitchen. The thing is that the business is a large brand franchise, built on the dine-in environment. If they sacrifice the dine-in experience they are sacrificing a core element of their brand identity. Ultimately it will have short term gains, but possibly hurt long term brand recognition. Who knows, this could be a franchisee decision rather than corporate.
What I can say is that trying to do both at once created a bad enough experience for me that I haven’t gone back.
Because the companies are still making money off it because even though it’s a complete shit show customers still use it.
It boils down to the customers which is why this was directed at them. If you use these services you’re the sole reason they still exist.
To be fair (and again I can only speak to the UK here so maybe it’s different in the US). If a takeaway place isn’t on these sorts of services, then they’re going to miss out on an awful lot of custom.
But this is directly contradictory to the statement of op saying offering it actually grinds the operations to a halt resulting in LESS customers being served?
Customers don’t see that though. They just assume their food is late and decide to use a different restaurant next time, or just wait a bit longer.
The Korean fast food place close my house doesn’t have their own delivery driver anymore, it was fired. Now you have to go there (no problem for me because is a 3 minutes walk) or use one the third party apps.
Actually some third party companies will list businesses even if the business doesn’t offer delivery, so long as they have online ordering. The only solution would be to not allow take out of any kind.
I don’t drive and live a bit from the city centre; I try not to do it often as I’m a poor, but occasionally order takeaway.
Once I rang a store to ask why certain items from a deal were missing and they said they were not running such a deal and were very fed up with people requesting it. Seems the site (might’ve been justeat but was a while and memory is fallible) had inserted a deal where none existed.
Yeah, spot on. There was a local pizza pub I used to frequent that would always get upset because door dash and grub hub would add their business without permission. The place offered delivery (pizza duh), but hated third party delivery because it took business away from their drivers (you kinda want a critical mass of business to justify having delivery) and they often had customers call in to complain that their order/deal/special was wrong. I remember the manager would look on delivery sites each week and call any that had listed the business without their permission.
Running a franchise must be stressful enough, insane that they have to actively police websites adding them without their consent on top of that.
Or require ID to pick it up….
So would the business just not make the food until you show up with your ID or do they throw away orders for people who don’t have a matching ID? Also, what about people who don’t have an ID at all?
Unless he owns the company in not sure he has a choice.