I do not have access to "restaurant books", but I do visit many in my area and I make a point to speak with both the restaurant folks handling take out orders and the loitering individuals running for these apps. The restaurants are universal in saying it is bad for their business, but they have no choice. The deliverers tend to not care -- they are focused on maximizing deliveries. Anecdotal, for sure, but it fits with what has been reported in WSJ and elsewhere.

Making up for losses on individual orders by ramping up volume is a tired and true way to lose even more money.

I talk to the local cart and restaurant owners when I pick up orders from them. The increased volume in orders is nice, but doesn't make up for the hassle of managing all of the different devices and vendors. One cart owner has memorably gotten her grandson to artfully arrange her half-dozen different phones and tablets into a little status panel. One restaurant has divided up responsibilities, with different people managing different order queues from different apps, so that Grubhub orders and DoorDash orders might as well be served from two different kitchens. (But of course it's just one single overworked kitchen.)

Food has aggressive margins. Everybody I've talked to in the business is overleveraged, trying to hold onto their cart or lease, and hoping that they don't get sick because they don't have the cash to pivot or close. The delivery app publishers are rent-seekers; nothing prohibits restaurants from employing their own drivers, as Italian and Chinese restaurants used to do, or taking carryout/to-go orders by default, like just about every food cart. Do not forget that the main appeal of delivery apps is that they effectively are cheap because they don't treat drivers as full employees, but we are hopefully soon exiting that era and as soon as we do, we will have to stop the cheap delivery.

The industry desperately needs an https://www.ecomdash.com/ for both ends of the equation. A way for restaurants to consolidate all their orders into one panel. And a way for delivery drivers to be accessible to multiple apps in one route. Even better would be the companies working together to trade orders to reduce overlapping traffic and more efficiently create routes.

This wont happen because its not in each apps best interest, but they should be relegated to what they actually are. A yellow pages. A middle man that connects a driver and a restaurant, and collects a referral and connection/dispatch fee.

This is one of the places where government intervention could benefit restaurants and drivers. Force all the companies to speak a single protocol that can be received by any compatible pos and dispatch app. Enforce some level of interoperability. Enforced swaps of food runs might be pushing it, but it really would benefit just about everybody except the food delivery apps. If banks can credit default swap, why cant food delivery apps be more efficient on the roads?

Even for the customer, I don't care which delivery app something is on, and its a pita to check them all and compare prices. I would much rather give loyalty to one that listed runs only their competitors have deals with. These food delivery service companies should exist more as a single technical contact a restaurant can call with issues. Outsourced IT, payment processing, service maintenance, troubleshooting, and ad hoc support. Restaurants having to support them all or lose business is ludicrous.

As a side note, I find the Virtual Restaurant concept to be another pollution. One kitchen being able to show up in the results three times because they list themselves as three kitchens. I get why, from a marketing perspective, that it helps to brand yourself as a specific niche, but its really a cheat of the system and limited screen real estate more than anything else.