Why It's Time to Delete Your Delivery Apps

Food & Wine's restaurant editor Khushbu Shah has an urgent message for everyone living in the Great National Lockdown right now: Delete your damn food delivery apps.

Why? Because the apps have refused to cut commissions for beleaguered restaurants, allowing them to profit from the surge in takeout orders.

"For too long, these apps—middle-man tech companies with millions, if not billions, in funding—have long frustrated the restaurant industry," she writes. "Their predatory practices include typically take a 20 to 30 percent commission from restaurants on each order, asking restaurants to pay for promotions the app is offering to customers, and adding restaurants to the app without the restaurants' consent... This behavior has only gotten more egregious as the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the entire restaurant industry, leaving millions of restaurant employees out of work and chefs and owners scrambling desperately to find any way to save their restaurants in an industry with already razor-thin margins."

Still want to support your local restaurants? Do something remarkable like picking up the phone to make an order. Yep, crazy times.

Read Shah's full takedown here.