Popular food delivery services cause concern among some local Columbia restaurants
Before the coronavirus pandemic closed restaurant dining rooms across South Carolina, Columbia’s Casa Linda restaurants did perhaps 10% of their business through delivery orders.
Now, it’s roughly half their business, with the other half being takeout, said Victor Villegas, whose parents have owned Casa Linda on Beltline Boulevard for nearly three decades, along with a second location in Irmo.
Casa Linda relies mostly on third-party delivery services — DoorDash, Bite Squad and Grubhub — to get its food to customers who can’t or don’t want to come in to pick it up themselves. They’re thankful for the delivery services, Villegas said, but truthfully, those deliveries aren’t making any money for the restaurants.
“They’ve been a huge help. I won’t knock them on it,” Villegas said. “As far as profiting off of those, we haven’t really profited at all. ... We’re pretty much cutting even. We’re not making money, but we’re able to keep a good bit of our staff employed by rotating them and still able to pay the bills.”
In some respects, third-party delivery services are being hailed as a lifeline for struggling restaurants as they suffer through indefinite closures to help slow the spread of COVID-19. But many Columbia-area restaurants, like Casa Linda, wish you’d just order directly from them.
Food delivery services have been in booming business for several years, well before the spread of coronavirus, which now has caused many people to stay home as much as possible. Their upsides include getting restaurants’ food to customers who don’t want to — or, more and more these days, can’t or shouldn’t — leave their homes for a meal.
“The younger generations prefer the homing instinct and prefer to have people over and order food in,” said Robin DiPietro, a professor at the University of South Carolina’s College of Hospitality, Retail and Sport Management and the director of USC’s International Institute for Foodservice Research and Education. “I’m sure there’s a downside ... but I also think there’s a lot to be said for exposure of the (restaurant) brand to people who may not necessarily have come in and sat in the restaurants.”
But local restaurants say the downsides of third-party delivery are numerous: Commission fees ranging from 15-30% or more, which cut into already slim profit margins for restaurants; extended wait times from when food is prepared to when the customer receives it, which can mean diminished food quality; and sometimes unreliable drivers who aren’t vetted by the restaurants themselves.
‘I’m not too thrilled with it’
Mohammed Saadedden’s Mediterranean restaurant, NoMa Bistro by Al Amir, uses Bite Squad for delivery, but he has complaints about the service and would not recommend it. Saadedden said he sometimes turns off the restaurant’s availability on the platform so he doesn’t have to deal with it.
Saadedden has had to raise prices on his Bite Squad order menu to keep from losing money on those orders — “I don’t want to do this.” And he’s been concerned about the reliability of Bite Squad drivers, too. He said he’s turned away some who’ve come to pick up delivery orders.
“I’m just using it, to be honest with you, as an option. I’m not too thrilled with it,” Saadedden said.
To Saadedden’s somewhat surprise, NoMa Bistro’s volume of sales through Bite Squad has actually dropped by about two-thirds during the month-long dine-in closure. Most of his customers are coming in themselves for pickups, he said.
Like some other restaurant owners, Saadedden is mainly concerned that his customers are the ones feeling the negative consequences of third-party delivery, such as higher prices, incorrect orders or cold food. And complaints about those consequences can fall back on restaurants and hurt their reputation
“When a customer calls us and orders food from us, it’s very personal,” Saadedden said. “I feel responsible for that food, even though I’m not delivering it. You get it to them in the best manner. But are (delivery services) going to take it to the customer in the same manner?”
When he can, he encourages customers to order directly through the restaurant rather than through Bite Squad.
The State has reached out to Bite Squad for comment on the concerns raised.
Without restaurants’ permission
Multiple local restaurants have complained of a particular delivery service, Postmates, posting their menus online without permission.
For Silver Spoon Bake Shop, which has been closed for over a month and is offering only a limited selection of items for pickup once a week, unwitting online customers have placed impossible bakery orders through Postmates.
Postmates delivery people have showed up at recent Silver Spoon pickups seeking orders for items such as croissants that are not even being baked. That’s how Silver Spoon owner Erin Nobles discovered her bakery’s regular menu had been posted on the Postmates website without her permission. It’s caused confusion and disappointment for some customers that Nobles worries could reflect negatively on her business through no fault of her own, she said.
After emailing Postmates last week and threatening legal action, she said, her menu was taken down from the service’s website.
Efforts by The State to reach Postmates for comment have been unsuccessful.
Nobles highlighted her frustration in social media posts on Facebook and Instagram, which drew echoing complaints from several other local restaurants that said they’ve had similar issues with Postmates.
One of them was The Local Buzz cafe, which has been closed due to the pandemic but has still gotten calls from people saying they’ve seen the menu online and want to order a sandwich, owner Stephanie Bridgers said.
Before the coronavirus shutdown, Bridgers said she’d been confused and concerned to see Postmates people come into the cafe saying they had an order to pick up. She would tell them that her restaurant is not signed up for any service with them. But with Postmates, she said, that doesn’t matter. She contacted the service to have her menu removed from its website, she said.
Bridgers said she doesn’t like to see delivery people show up to her restaurant because, as a small business owner, she’s had no interest in taking on the costs of takeout food packaging or paying commission to any delivery services. And, she said, takeout and delivery do not fit the relationship-oriented atmosphere she’s cultivated at her small community cafe.
Surviving in the future
Postmates problems have happened to Kiki’s Chicken and Waffles, too. Owner Kiki Cyrus said her two restaurants had issues such as a delivery person putting in the order wrong or food getting cold by the time it was delivered, and customers would call the restaurant to complain.
“We’ve called and let (Postmates) know plenty of times about it,” Cyrus said.
Besides their issues with Postmates, the restaurant’s relationship with another delivery service, Bite Squad, has been positive, Cyrus said.
Kiki’s Chicken and Waffles is operating only one of its two restaurants, on Parklane Road, during the coronavirus shutdown. That location is doing takeout only, no delivery, Cyrus said.
The restaurant team is trying to plan ahead now, Cyrus said, wondering how the business will look as things start to slowly reopen.
“We’re wondering how this will affect the restaurant business in the long run — how we will protect our staff when they’re serving guests. How many people will be allowed in the restaurant at one time?” Cyrus said. “It’s a lot to think about and prepare for.”
The same goes for Casa Linda, which is working to develop an in-house online ordering and delivery platform so it can soon rely less on the third-party services, Villegas said. He hopes that will help the restaurants better adapt to whatever business looks like in the uncertain future.
“If you can get it directly and if you can pick it up ... those (few) dollars mean a lot to a small business trying to survive,” Villegas said.
This story was originally published April 27, 2020 at 11:01 AM.
