A few days ago 2GB’s Ben Fordham got stuck into UBER Eats for gouging restaurants, up to 35 per cent of their menu price, for delivering their food to customers.
With the coronavirus forcing many of us into a kind of home detention, home delivery services such as UBER Eats are set to boom. But the more UBER makes the more likely it will send restaurants broke.
In an opinion piece last month about “ticket clippers” I wrote, “While UBER can take some credit for rejuvenating the taxi business, it and others in the game, have severely disrupted the restaurant business, particularly at the mum and dad end, where owners struggle to make a living. At the heart of the problem is that food delivery services such as UBER take a cut of around 30 per cent of the menu price of each meal it delivers and pays the delivery person out of that. It seems reasonable except that most ‘cheap and cheerfuls’ can’t make a profit from a $9 curry take-away in which the most expensive ingredient is delivery.”
Ben went a step further. Not only did he call out UBER on his networked Drive show, he started a petition on Change.org to get UBER to come to the party and halve their take on food deliveries. Naturally, I signed his petition and at last count almost 16,000 others had to.
Well, UBER’s come to the party alright. They have confirmed they’ll would drop service fees on pick-up orders for all Australian restaurants until June 30 – essentially providing food delivery services for free.
Read the whole story and UBER’s full statement on Ben Fordham’s page at 2GB.
Peter Saxon
Subscribe to the radioinfo daily flash briefing podcast on these platforms: Acast, Apple iTunes Podcasts, Podtail, Spotify, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, or wherever you get your podcasts.
