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DoorDash

September 6, 2019

The Week in Restaurant Tech: More POS Integrations, New Delivery Deals

Fall is just around the corner, which means we’re about to get inundated with headlines about pumpkin-spice lattes. And while the restaurant industry is seeing a bit of a sales slowdown at the moment, something that’s expected to continue through the last third of 2019, the space has no end of tech-centric developments happening week to week. Here’s a look at a few more pieces of restaurant tech news from the last few days.

Appetize Partners With Olo and Others for POS Integration

What’s the solution to having too much tech in the restaurant? More tech, obviously. This week, Playa Vista, CA-based POS maker Appetize announced new integrations with not one but three more pieces of restaurant tech software: Olo, which consolidates orders from multiple third-party channels, Punchh, who handles loyalty programs, and SynergySuite, a back-of-house inventory management solution. According to a press release, these additions will help restaurants to balance the many digital demands in the biz today: third-party delivery capability, loyalty programs, mobile order and payments, and back-of-house duties like inventory management.

Grubhub Launches Perks

Even as more restaurants talk about bringing customer loyalty back under their own roof, third-party delivery companies are countering that by adding new bells and whistles to retain users within their own apps and websites. This week, Grubhub launched Perks, an in-app feature that offers users more ways to earn loyalty points from restaurants via deals only available within the Grubhub app. Since the feature is actually integrated with restaurant loyalty programs, those rewards and points are all redeemable from the same account. However, to access all the free food on offer from the likes of Taco Bell, Red Lobster, and Smoothie King, customers have to use the Grubhub app.

Barclaycard and TouchBistro Join Forces to Improve Restaurant Payments

Another POS company, TouchBistro, announced a partnership with UK-based credit card and payments processor Barclaycard. TouchBistro will integrate Barclaycard’s payment solution into its iPad-based POS system for UK restaurants, making it easier for staff to split checks, and gratuities and process payments. For any restaurant-tech feature involving payments, the biggest benefit is that they cut down the amount of manual calculations and data entry workers have to do, which in theory reduces the risk of human error when it comes to keeping track of the numbers.

New Delivery Deals

In what was just another week in the world of delivery, numerous chains announced partnerships with third-party services. Casual dining chain Village Inn announced it’s now delivering via DoorDash; fast-food chain A&W also teamed up with the service, to deliver to nearly 400 locations across Canada. DoorDash didn’t grab all the headlines this week, though. As we covered in depth, McDonald’s is expanding its McDelivery program throughout NYC and the Tri-State area with Grubhub.

Intrigued? We’ll be talking restaurant tech at this year’s Smart Kitchen Summit this October in Seattle. Grab your tickets here and come on down.

September 6, 2019

McDonald’s Partners With Grubhub, Expands Delivery to NYC and Tri-State Area

McDonald’s struck a major deal with Grubhub this week to expand the burger mega-chain’s McDelivery program in the NYC and Tri-State areas.

McDonald’s ended its exclusive delivery partnership with Uber Eats earlier this year. Then, in July, it added DoorDash to its roster to expand McDelivery further across the U.S. Among third-party delivery services, DoorDash currently holds the number one spot in terms of market share.

But Grubhub is still the top service in NYC and many other parts of the Northeastern U.S., including Boston and Philadelphia. Mired in controversy it maybe be, it’s still McDonald’s best bet when it comes to expanding delivery to as many locations as possible in that part of the country.

In the press release, McDonald’s said the Grubhub-Seamless partnership will expand delivery to 500 locations in the NYC and Tri-State areas, while overall delivery is expected to be a $4 billion business for the company in 2019. As is becoming the norm with major delivery partnerships, Grubhub will integrate its service directly into the McDonald’s POS system to streamline and speed up orders. McDonald’s did not say when exactly the new delivery program will become available.

The aggressive delivery expansion is part of McDonald’s push to transform all of its locations into “Experience of the Future” stores, which emphasize tech initiatives like self-order kiosks, mobile ordering and payments, and AI powering the drive-thru. And, of course, delivery.

Grubhub, meanwhile, has been building more of a presence in the rest of the country. In August, the service announced nationwide delivery with Shake Shack as well as a partnership with Dine Brands, who owns Applebee’s and IHOP restaurants.

September 4, 2019

DoorDash Launches Delivery In Melbourne, Its First City Outside North America

As of today, DoorDash is now available in Melbourne, Australia, the first city in which the third-party food delivery service is operating outside of North America.

In a blog post, DoorDash said it has already added “thousands of restaurants” in Melbourne to its platform, including national chains like Nando’s and Betty’s Burgers.

DoorDash joins a competitive food delivery market that includes Uber Eat and Deliveroo, both of which have operated in Australian for years. The latter is even part of Australian airline Quantas’ frequent flyer program. DoorDash will also have to contend with MenuLog a subsidiary of Just Eat, whose recent acquisition of Takeaway.com makes it one of the biggest third-party food delivery companies to contend with outside of the U.S.

As to why DoorDash chose Melbourne as its first overseas market, the company did not say, though Reuters points out that the “city of 4.5 million people has been a popular entry point for global companies in the so-called ‘sharing economy.'”

The Australia expansion comes on the heels of DoorDash’s recent launch in Montreal, Canada, the service’s first non-English-speaking location. Not that the company is slowing down its march across America: Since becoming the first U.S.-based third-party delivery service to operate in all 50 states, DoorDash has been striking deals left and right with major restaurant chains. The company also recently acquired autonomous vehicle startup Scotty Labs and is potentially looking at an IPO.

In August, the company outlined a new policy for its pay structure for drivers, a move largely in response to controversies surrounding the way the service handles worker tips.

In this week’s blog post, DoorDash said it expects to expand “throughout the suburbs of Melbourne, its surrounding regional cities, and Australia broadly” over the rest of 2019 and into 2020.

September 4, 2019

Swiggy Goes Beyond Food Delivery With New Service Swiggy Go, Expands Swiggy Stores

Today, India-based delivery service Swiggy took a few steps beyond the food world by launching Swiggy Go, an instant pickup and drop-off service that will deliver everything from laundry to house keys.

Swiggy Go is similar to another service, Swiggy Stores, which the company launched in February of 2019 for delivering household items like groceries and medicine within a one-hour timeframe. It’s also another example of a food delivery company branching out from restaurant food in an effort to become a kind of delivery superpower that can get any item to any person in major cities.

In India, Swiggy competes most closely with another food delivery service, Zomato, but adding non-food items to its delivery capabilities means it will also now be competing with Google-backed concierge service Dunzo, who operates in a handful of cities in India.

Food tech investment in India in general is heating up. In August, ecommerce startup FreshToHome raised a $20 million Series B round. Amazon said in July it is planning to launch a restaurant-delivery service in the country later this year, and Zomato successfully tested a drone pilot this past summer.

It’s possible Swiggy’s sudden move into non-food items is an effort to stand above the rising competition levels in India and become the go-to service in India not just for restaurant meals but for anything a person could want conveniently dropped at the front door. That may be necessary as heavyweights like Amazon — a name basically synonymous with conveniences — plans its moves in the country.

We’re seeing a similar trend start to take shape here in the States: last week, DoorDash announced it is working with Mercato to delivery groceries in 22 different states. It could be only a matter of time before Dashers start dropping non-perishables at your door, too. The next big question is, Will other third-party delivery services do the same?

Swiggy Go is currently available in Bengaluru. The company said it plans to expand the service to over 300 cities. Meanwhile, Swiggy stores will be available in all major metro areas by 2020.

August 28, 2019

Panera’s Hybrid Approach to Delivery Could Be a New Standard for Restaurants

Panera is one of those increasingly rare restaurant chains that’s not a pizza company and has still managed to successfully keep its delivery program an entirely in-house operation — until now, that is. Yesterday, the St. Louis, MO-based bakery and sandwich chain announced its first-ever partnerships with third-party delivery services.

Customers will now be able to order Panera goods from DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats along with the company’s own website and apps. However, these third-party delivery service partnerships are for online ordering only; Panera will still use its own fleet of drivers to handle the actual delivering of the food from restaurant to doorstep.

Panera has dubbed this the “bring your own courier” model, and the approach appears to be about maintaining quality and brand integrity throughout the whole of the delivery process — an issue more and more restaurants, large chains in particular, are now addressing.

Setting aside the ongoing concerns around commission fees a moment, one of the biggest benefits of working with third-party delivery services is that restaurants get easy access to a highly streamlined online ordering platform. Developing an in-house system that holds menus, processes orders and payments, and gives users status updates on their orders is an expensive, time-consuming undertaking. Third-party delivery services handle this work for the restaurant, and also offer the increasingly popular option of direct-to-POS integration with restaurant systems, where an order from, say, Grubhub, goes directly to the main POS system.

But restaurants get little in the way of branding when they’re listed on Grubhub et al. or, for that matter, where they show up in terms of users’ searches. And they get pretty much zero control over the quality of food and customer service once a meal leaves the restaurant in the hands of a third-party driver. For example, they can’t control that one out of four drivers apparently sample your food en route to your home. Sure, the risk of that or of an order being late/cold/incorrect doesn’t disappear when you bring delivery in house, but at least Panera has more control over who to hold accountable in those situations.

Continuing to use its own drivers as well as maintain an in-house ordering program also lets Panera exercise more control over branding and customer service while still giving the company access to a wider user base via Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash.

The nature of this new partnership also makes Panera an early adopter to what could become a major trend among national restaurant chains. Just yesterday, we looked at Toast’s “Restaurant Success in 2019” report, which suggests that having both a robust in-house online order system and a presence with all major third-party delivery platforms “could be a boon to your business” when it comes to major multi-unit chains.

Most brands, however, can’t or don’t want to incur the economic burden of maintaining a driver fleet, which is one reason we’re also seeing reverse versions of this hybrid strategy. Denver, CO fast-casual chain Teriyaki Madness is a good example: the company still works with third-party delivery services, using their drivers, but is trying to originate more orders through its own in-house app. A company called Shift-Pixy, meanwhile, acts as a middleman between restaurant and delivery service and provides its own drivers to drop the food.

Those approaches may help restaurants with brand credibility, but Panera’s approach is so far the only major one to both take advantage of the continued popularity of third-party delivery while still owning that last mile. “We believe this partnership model helps differentiate us from our competitors and will take our already successful delivery business to new heights,” Dan Wegiel, Panera’s EVP Chief Growth and Strategy Officer said in a statement.

This hybrid approach could indeed prove fruitful for Panera, though it would have to be yielding some pretty big returns to influence other chains to go as far as investing in their own drivers in order to adopt similar strategies.

Regardless of whether that happens, the industry will see plenty more of these hybrid approaches to delivery along with many more questions who should really own that last mile.

August 27, 2019

Grubhub’s New Partnership With Dine Brands Intensifies Its Rivalry With DoorDash

Grubhub announced today it has expanded its partnership with Dine Brands, parent company of Applebee’s and IHOP, to over 3,000 U.S. locations across those two restaurants.

Delivery via Grubhub will be available at more than 1,700 Applebee’s locations and 1,300 IHOP locations in the U.S. And while the deal is officially with Dine Brands, Applebee’s and IHOP franchisees who use Grubhub as their preferred delivery provider will get access to more marketing opportunities and better analytics.

According to the press release, Dine Brands and Grubhub are also “working towards” a direct-to-POS integration for these restaurants, which means orders from Grubhub go directly to Applebee’s and IHOP POS systems — an increasingly common practice for national chains striking delivery deals with major third-party services. Grubhub, who acquired digital ordering platform LevelUp in 2018 to assist with such integrations, already has similar deals in place with chains like Taco Bell and Shake Shack. Other third-party delivery services offer POS integrations as well. DoorDash, for example, recently inked an exclusive deal with Chili’s that includes direct-to-POS integration.

Speaking of DoorDash: The Dine Brands-Grubhub deal comes just a couple weeks after Applebee’s announced a nationwide partnership with DoorDash.

The overlap itself isn’t a huge deal — most restaurants these days find it necessary to offer more than one third-party delivery service to attract the widest customer base possible. But Applebee’s is practically synonymous with suburbia, and no one does the ‘burbs like DoorDash. Grubhub, meanwhile, has long ruled New York City and has less of a presence in the nation’s strip malls.

Until now, it seems. As third-party delivery comes under increasing scrutiny, including questions around these companies’ profitability, being King of the Big Apple is no longer enough. Grubhub lost the number one spot in terms of market share to DoorDash earlier this year, and with the latter possibly IPO’ing as early as Q4, consolidation in the third-party delivery world seems imminent. To stay competitive with DoorDash, Grubhub will have to follow its rival out of the urban enclaves and strike more large-scale deals with major chains serving the rest of the country.

August 27, 2019

Postmates Adds Group Ordering Feature

This week, Postmates unveiled Group Ordering, a new feature that allows individual members of the same group to choose their own items from their own devices and send them to a single shopping cart. In other words, if you’re getting group delivery among friends or ordering dinner for the family, you no longer have to corral everyone into the same room and pass around a single phone or tablet.

To use the feature, the group “host” creates an order and shares it with other group members, who choose items from their own devices. Hosts can set limits on how much group members are allowed to spend, and also set a tip amount ahead of time. Once everyone’s orders are in, the host can make any final adjustments before placing the order, which is delivered to a single location by a single Postmates driver. If the host has Postmates Unlimited, the delivery fee is waived.

Group Ordering will be rolled out over the next few days to Postmates customers. It joins existing features like Postmates Party, which launched earlier this year and allows users to piggyback off nearby orders and is another way to get that pesky delivery fee waived.

Postmates isn’t the first third-party delivery service to offer such a feature: DoorDash released a group ordering feature for its app in 2017.

What would eventually make such features even better would be the ability for group members to each pay their own tab — more or less the virtual equivalent of splitting the check. While there’s yet no indication such a feature will be added to Postmates or any other app, it’s something these companies should definitely deliver.

August 26, 2019

In-house? Third-party? Why Online Ordering Isn’t One or the Other for Restaurants in 2019

When it comes to online ordering, some restaurants will soon need to offer the functionality through their own apps as well as via third parties like Grubhub.

Restaurant-tech powerhouse Toast indicated that much in its recently released “Restaurant Success in 2019” report, which surveyed 1,253 restaurants and 1,030 guests across the U.S. In the report, online ordering plays a starring role, with both restaurants and guests calling it one of the most important technologies for today’s restaurant experience.

In and of itself, that’s not terribly surprising. Over half of restaurant spending will be off-premises by 2020 and will account for up to 80 percent of the restaurant industry’s growth over the next five years according investment group Cowen and Company. Unless every restaurant in America soon installs a chatbot to answer phones, online ordering via apps and websites will become a must for every eating establishment in the industry.

But according to the Toast report, what that looks like will vary from restaurant to restaurant, and businesses won’t necessarily have to sign their brands away to the DoorDash’s and Grubhub’s of the world to stay competitive. In fact, 51 percent of guests surveyed in the Toast report said they had placed an order via a restaurant website in the past month compared to 38 percent of guests who had ordered from third-party service.

That’s both good news and another challenge for restaurants. Customers ordering directly from a restaurant’s website can save the business some of the fees that stack up when customers order through a third-party service like Uber Eats. The flipside for restaurants is that if you don’t have your own delivery fleet, you still have to pay for drivers and, as the report rightly points out, developing an in-house online order system is expensive and probably not justifiable for independent businesses with only one or two locations. It’s a different story, though, for multi-unit chains, as the Toast report indicates:

Getting an app developed for your restaurant may not be viable for a small restaurant with one location, but if you franchise, it could be a boon to your business. The majority of diners are ordering online a couple times a month and looking for a variety of pickup and delivery options.

Even so, the Toast survey makes it clear that customers still want the option to order via third-party delivery services, with respondents having ordered most from Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash in the last year. (Postmates is completely absent from the list.) According to the report, it’s “extremely important for restaurants to be represented across multiple third-party delivery platforms.”

Despite the continued popularity of third-party delivery services, though, the litany of criticisms lobbed at them grows: commission fees, tipping policies, antitrust issues, and questionable profitability over the long-term. At the same time, companies like ShiftPixy and Olo are becoming more popular with technologies that actually make it easier for restaurants (chains, in particular) to develop and maintain in-house ordering capabilities.

Both those trends, coupled with the constant consumer demand for speed and convenience, will create a fine balance restaurants large and small must strike in the coming months.

August 22, 2019

DoorDash Outlines New Payment Policy for its Dashers

It took just about a month, but DoorDash finally revealed more details about the ways in which the company is changing how it pays its delivery people, also known as “Dashers.”

In a corporate blog post today, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu wrote that the new policy was created with input from customers, Dashers and members of the Dasher Community Council. He also posted the following image that illustrated the changes:

Here are some highlights from his post:

  • Under this new model, base pay from DoorDash to Dashers will increase and will range from $2-$10+ per delivery depending on the estimated duration, distance, and desirability of the order.
  • Dashers will also have the opportunity to earn more through promotions. Promotions will include Peak Pay and Challenge Bonuses that we plan to roll out in the coming months.
  • Every dollar customers tip will be an extra dollar in their Dasher’s pocket, and customers will be able to tip at checkout or after the delivery. The amount DoorDash pays in base pay and promotions will never vary based on the tip amount.

That last one is especially important, given that DoorDash’s treatment of tips was a big reason the company got into such public trouble in the first place.

Xu goes on to outline key principles guiding these changes, which include making customers feel like their tips are, you know, actually going to the delivery person; that Dashers should earn more money now from DoorDash as well as overall; and that Dashers will have transparency about the nature of each order, including pick up and drop-offs so “they can make an informed choice about which deliveries to accept.”

Xu said that the company has been testing the model for the past month, and that it should roll out to all Dashers next month.

The devil is always in the details, so we’ll have to see how Dashers react to these changes as they go online. But at the very least, the move should alleviate a big headache for DoorDash as it looks to potentially go public next year.

August 21, 2019

DoorDash Acquires Autonomous Vehicle Startup Scotty Labs

Tele-operations platform Scotty Labs announced this morning via a blog post it has been acquired by DoorDash. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Scotty Labs’ current platform allows humans to operate autonomous vehicles via remote control. According to the company’s LinkedIn page, advancing autonomous driving isn’t about removing humans from the equation completely, but letting them instead play a more virtual role in the process. The company previously partnered with Voyage to help them deploy autonomous vehicles around retirement communities. It has also tested a self-driving truck on a California freeway, which you can watch here.

This isn’t DoorDash’s first time working with an autonomous vehicle company. At the beginning of 2019, the delivery company partnered with General Motors’ Cruise Automation to test autonomous vehicles in San Francisco. Going even further back, DoorDash worked with Starship in 2017 to test delivery via semi-autonomous wheeled bots.

The Scotty Labs acquisition comes at a time when DoorDash faces significant scrutiny from the industry. The company received a storm of bad press over its tipping policies, which skim from drivers’ tips to pay their base wage. Although DoorDash said it would change that policy, the company has yet to act on those words.

DoorDash is also rumored to be chasing an IPO, and should that happen, the company will likely face the same struggles around profitability its competitor Uber Eats has experienced.

One way to get closer to actual profitability and avoid controversial tipping policies is to not have to pay human drivers. Only yesterday, The Spoon team was internally discussing the future of third-party delivery, wondering aloud if controversial tipping policies, proposed caps on commission fees, and horror stories from the drivers themselves wouldn’t quickly spur companies towards a more autonomous future. It seems DoorDash is already headed in that direction.

August 20, 2019

With Project DASH, DoorDash Uses Logistics to Rescue Over 1 Million Pounds of Surplus Food

Much as restaurants may try to reduce their amount of food waste to cut costs, it’s nearly impossible for them to get to zero loss. Often, whatever perishable food is left at the end of the day — and doesn’t go home with employees — gets tossed in the trash.

That’s because the logistics of donating food is really tricky. In order to get leftovers to a local soup kitchen or hunger relief non-profit, they need someone to physically deliver the surplus food. Restaurants working off of already thin margins usually can’t afford to pay someone more money to do an extra task, especially if it’s cheaper just to chuck the leftovers in the trash.

That logistics disconnect is exactly what Project DASH (DoorDash Acts for Sustainability and Hunger) is trying to solve. Through Project DASH, DoorDash provides drivers that shuttle surplus food from restaurants and other businesses to hunger relief non-profits that have partnered with the third-party delivery service. The service is powered by Drive, DoorDash’s white-label fulfillment platform that lets organizations use the DoorDash fleet to deliver whatever they want, wherever they want. “Basically, DoorDash provides the logistics piece,” said DoorDash’s Head of Social Impact, Sueli Shaw, over the phone.

There are two ways for businesses to access Drive. They can either fill out the delivery details (starting point, endpoint, timing, etc.) via an online form, or they can integrate the Drive API into their own platform. DoorDash drivers will get food rescue assignments the same way they receive any other delivery job. They’ll get paid the same too. DoorDash provides in-kind grants to its nonprofit food rescue partners that cover the delivery fees.

Project DASH is currently partnered with about half a dozen food rescue organizations, including Copia and Replate, and operates in 20 states and 90 cities. Shaw said they just hit the mark of 1 million pounds of food saved so far. But the sky is the limit. “We could operate anywhere,” Shaw told me. DoorDash is currently available in 4,000 cities in the U.S. and Canada, and she said the only thing limiting Project DASH’s growth is the reach of their food rescue partners — which they’re looking to grow until they reach a “100 percent diversion rate” for surplus food.

Shaw said that DoorDash isn’t interested in developing its own food rescue branch internally. “There are a lot of initiatives right now in the space which have been around for a long time,” she told me. “I don’t want to compete — we can play a role in supporting them all.”

In my mind, Project DASH is a win-win. Helping reduce food waste and stop hunger is a good PR move for DoorDash, especially since the company has been getting a lot of flack lately for its controversial tipping policy (which it is now changing), and is hurtling towards an IPO. On the restaurant side, Project DASH provides an easy way to get rid of surplus food while providing an altruistic marketing angle.

Project DASH may be a smart PR strategy for DoorDash, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also a smart way to curb waste. It could be an effective piece of the food waste puzzle when used with end of day food discount services like Karma or Too Good To Go, as well as foodservice inventory management tools like Winnow.

Working together, these technologies could help restaurants get closer to the ever-elusive goal of zero food loss.

August 15, 2019

The Proposed Cap on NYC Delivery Fees Could Ripple Across the Rest of the Country

The New York State Liquor Authority (NYSLA) has proposed adding a 10 percent cap on the commissions full-service restaurants pay to third-party delivery companies, according to Restaurant Business Online. While such a move would provide some relief for restaurants, whose struggles with these fees are well documented, it could also put up more road blocks for third-party delivery services as they struggle to reach actual profitability. And the fight probably wouldn’t stay put in NYC for very long.

The NYSLA’s advisory, as it’s called, urges that commissions paid by restaurants with liquor licenses be capped at 10 percent. The reason the NYSLA can make such a call is because third-party delivery services share in these restaurants’ profits, and are therefore by law subject to vetting by the authority.

Rather than prohibit delivery services from charging the current 12- to 30-percent commission fees, the law, if put into effect, would make it illegal for the restaurants themselves to pay more than 10 percent on those fees. Restaurants would then have to reject anything higher than 10 percent, making it virtually impossible for delivery services to charge more.

Grubhub, in particular, has criticized a draft of the proposal, saying it contains “internal inconsistencies, vague language and an apparent attempt by the SLA to go beyond their jurisdiction.” And while Grubhub didn’t explicitly say as much, the “vague language” could potentially open the door to third-party delivery companies sidestepping the 10 percent cap with other charges, like a convenience fee.

The NYSLA urged that the advisory be discussed during a meeting on August 20.

To be clear, the advisory would only impact restaurants with liquor licenses; the scores of food businesses in New York without licenses wouldn’t be able to reap any benefit, at least not now. Mark Gjonah, chairman of the Small Business Committee of the New York City Council, told RB that in regards to these restaurants that are left out, the committee “will continue its work to establish a comprehensive solution that levels the playing field for all of New York’s locally owned restaurants.”

Should these fee changes become law, it will create a scramble for third-party delivery companies to find ways manage profitability — rather a feat, considering these services aren’t actually profitable at the moment. And with DoorDash and Postmates both pursuing the IPO track, that struggle to gain profitability — and long-term investment and viability — is becoming more of a hot-button issue for delivery companies.

In NYC, meanwhile, commission fees are just one of the many griefs lobbed against these companies. Grubhub currently takes the lion’s share of the wrath here, since it still leads the NYC market. The company was not only the center of a June oversight hearing that called into question delivery services’ power, it’s also received accusations of cybersquatting and calls for an antitrust investigation.

The other major delivery players — Uber Eats, DoorDash, Postmates — may not be getting a constant barrage of bad press in the NYC market, but they’ll be subject to the same scrutiny as Grubhub if a law over fee changes were to be enacted.

And if that were to happen, there’s a high chance for a ripple effect to other cities, which could very likely play out the way the fight over the cashless business model has across the country. When NYC introduced legislation that would ban cashless businesses from the city, including restaurants, it was a matter of mere months before New Jersey, Philadelphia, and San Francisco did the same, essentially stifling Big Tech’s hold over local business.

If this week’s advisory advances further, it looks like third-party delivery services are well on their way to facing the same backlash — on an even grander scale.

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