Eli Elza

Media Writing
Opinion Piece
March 8, 2023
Food Delivery Services are Overrated, and Here’s Why
Don’t get me wrong; I understand the convenience of food delivery. Maybe you’re too
drunk or hungover to drive. Or you don’t own a car, and the restaurant is too far of a walk. Or
perhaps you just don’t want to leave your house, yet you’re craving something you don’t have
there. These are all understandable reasons to order delivery. I’m okay with calling for delivery
from a restaurant directly. My issue is with delivery services in particular. Services like
DoorDash, Uber Eats, and GrubHub, for example. Why do I dislike these services? I have two
primary reasons why.
Reason one, the convenience fees are ridiculous.
I understand that these services are, in fact, businesses, so they need to make money
somehow. However, the amount they are charging to be a middleman is ridiculous. Also, every
service has a different fee despite them all essentially doing the same thing. You could look for
the service with the lowest service fee, but the rates are constantly changing. I just wanted to
order food, not do research and math to figure out what app to use. There’s also the fact that if
you find the service with the lowest fees, it might not have the restaurant you want. So you have
to use one of the other services anyways.
Reason two, there are way too many options now.
Most would think having a lot of options is a good thing. However, there are too many
options. Actually, there are more options on a delivery service app than there are restaurants in
your area. This is because of ghost kitchens, a type of restaurant that has no physical location
where you can go to and dine at. You can only order delivery from these kitchens. This is an
issue because, currently, ways of regulating these kitchens are severely lacking. A kitchen that
received a low health code rating can still operate on delivery apps. However, unlike if you
visited a restaurant in person, you can’t see their health code rating through the app. Ghost
kitchens can also dodge poor health code ratings by selling under multiple names on the same or
different platforms.
This uncertainty is why the National Restaurant Association reports that “74% of adults
surveyed said it was important for their food to be delivered from a place with a physical
location that was accessible to the public.” But finding out if you’re ordering from a ghost
kitchen can be difficult. Some delivery services, like DoorDash, label whether a restaurant is a
ghost kitchen, but others do not. This makes finding out if the restaurant you’re ordering from
exists, at least not without research. This negates the convenience of ordering delivery.
Overall both the ridiculous fees and the amount of ghost kitchens make ordering from a
food delivery service a nightmare. I’m going to keep avoiding these services, but there will
always be people who want to take the risk.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/16/the-hidden-cost-of-food-delivery/
https://www.businessinsider.com/virtual-restaurant-ghost-kitchen-doordash-grubhub-uber-eats-
2022-12
https://restaurant.org/research-and-media/research/research-reports/state-of-the-industry/
https://www.mashed.com/426156/the-dark-truth-about-ghost-kitchens/