I understand the desire to just get Uber Eats.
It’s been a long day. You forgot to grocery shop like you were supposed to and you failed to prepare or marinate anything that you could grill in time for dinner. The kids are getting hungry and you don’t want to feed them the usual beige shit from the freezer with a side of cucumber slices — and you definitely don’t want to eat that yourself.
So you cave. You order some sushi or thai food for the family and you pay $12,000 just so you can get back to sending a couple more emails before the kids meltdown and the food finally arrives.
It’s time to say, fuck that.
I’m not going to say you should plan better and meal prep, because obviously fuck that, too. Sometimes you just have to order dinner. But instead of opening your phone and clicking away at the pork rolls you like, the next time you realize you’re reaching that criticial oh-fuck-we-need-to-eat time, just walk out the door. Well, consult your spouse and family first, obviously — and then just walk out the door. Figure out what restaurant you and your family would like to order from and then do something crazy and just go and get it.
There’s one immediate and obvious benefit to this: the cost. Restaurants get hosed by services like Uber Eats and DoorDash so they tend to pass the hosing on to you. On a $40 order, for example, a restaurant can pay from $8 – $12 to the delivery service before it pays to prepare the food and pay its staff. They are making way less on mobile delivery orders. So often they increase the price of the menu item as listed on Uber Eats or Doordash to recoup some of that cost. Typically they jack the price by around 20%. So that $40 dinner is now $48.
And then there are your fees. Uber and Doorash slap any number of fees onto a meal depending on your membership level, including a delivery fee, a service fee, a small-order fee, long-distance / expanded-range fees, priority / express delivery fees, bag or environmental fees and even a puffy directing pants fee. To stick with our example, once you add the most basic fees stated by Uber Eats for Ontario (a delivery fee at $3.99 and a service fee at $4.50), the meal that would have cost you $40 in the restaurant is now $56.49 — and that’s before HST and any tip you add. This is, clearly, fucking wasteful.
In fact, it’s more than the cost of a beer. So assuming you have the time and the mobility to physically go to a restaurant, why not use that same money and go have an actual beer? Go to a local restaurant that you like, sit at the bar and order your dinner and have a beer while you wait?
The other equally tangible benefit to getting your own food is that it’s actually perfect little break from the chaos that likely made you unavailable to make dinner in the first place. Work is crazy, you got in late, you had some sort of after school activity — seems like a great time to take a few minutes to yourself and have a beer.
Yesterday I took a 12 minute drive from my house to a local Thai restaurant called Taifoon. I read the bartender my family’s dinner order from the post-it note on which I had dutifully scratched it down, and I added the above-pictured Singha to my order– which was ice cold, fresh, and frankly fucking delicious after a long day.
I didn’t even look at my phone as a I drank it. I actually just sat and watched as probably a dozen various delivery drivers walked up to the side of the bar and thrust an iPhone in an employee’s face as there way of wordlessly asking for the order they were about to drive through the city and back to the suckers paying as much as 18% more than I did.
Just remember, if you have kids, before you rip into that meal (that is still hot because your drove it straight home yourself) be sure to thank your spouse or whomever made it possible for you to take that nice little break.
And let them do pick up next time.