When Teddy Roland took the big step of expanding beyond his taco truck to a six-stool restaurant in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, in late 2014, it was clear that he needed to encourage delivery business. So he not only put a menu and ordering page on his website, he started signing up for a handful of services that collect orders and deliver restaurant food to customers, sites like Seamless and DoorDash and UberEats.
Two years later, he’s having second thoughts. He was fed up with having a half dozen tablet computers from online ordering companies in his shop, all beeping and ringing as orders came in. “My little family shop started looking like a Sprint store,” he says. Worse, his delivery partners typically took a cut of 20 percent or more.
…“That’s complete bullying.”
To fight back, he’s been slipping notes inside his sandwich shop’s delivery orders, asking customers to stop using Seamless and GrubHub and to use the restaurant’s own website instead.