UberEats New Orleans
We've hit a new stage in the continued automation of our consumer society – you can now order food through your phone without having to tip anyone. The digital commoditization has been partitioned such that you don't pay the driver and the driver doesn't pay the store but, somehow, food appears at your house. In my case, it appears at your next door neighbor's house because after all this time Uber can't figure out where my house is and the drivers have trouble locating the numbers above the door. That specific pecularity notwithstanding, UberEats (alternatively UberEATS) New Orleans is some kind of wonderful, and some kind of awful.
The wonderfulness is nearly inherent. It's food that arrives at your house. They'll deliver from anywhere around the city, into Metairie and Kenner. There's a great variety of food options and I've discovered all kinds of great saves. You can get 12 pieces of dark-meat chicken from Fast Stop for $10. You can get pizza delivered to your house at 3AM from Easy Pizza in The Bywater. Many of my familiar Uptown trappings are also represented, like Juan's Flying Burrito, and places with uptown and downtown locations like The Big Cheezy, Dat Dog, and Company Burger. For consumer convenience, it's pretty solid. It's got a huge jump on competition in the market as Door Dash is basically nonexistent here and GrubHub doesn't have the easy name association or as intuitive a user-interface.
The negatives are not plentiful on the consumer side. There is, of course, the downside of enabling laziness and physical complacency, but those are personal problems indirectly enabled by the product, rather than a direct result. Of course, as we with more vigor endorse these services it eliminates competition and creates a monopoly, but there is a specific, cannabalizing sense in which I mean this.
If you are a producer – not an employer, but a service industry worker – then Uber EATS is almost inarguably awful. I used to work at a different restaurant than I do now, and when we got Uber EATS it was so bad that I felt the need to take the app off of my phone out of sympathy with my colleagues in other parts of the industry. For the purposes of labor, UberEATS is completely unnecessary if you have delivery, unless you are only opening it outside of your delivery zone. Within your delivery zone, you will necessarily cannibalize tips made by your delivery drivers, to say nothing of rapport built between drivers and customers. To that latter point, this is certainly the sort of sterilizing process which removes a human element of familiarity and community from the service market, but I understand that's arbitrary.
Besides delivery, UberEats will also cut-into your normal pickup sales. Now, for ownership, this should be just fine. The price of the food is the same – the discounts Uber gives to new customers come out of the “Booking Fee,” so even then the house isn't losing money. In fact, because of the common practice of cutting front-of-house staff down on slow floor nights, a bump in pick-ups from UberEats can mitigate what would have been lost profit. Now this works out fine for upper management and the other deciders, but for the actual workers, it pretty much blows. Uber Eats drivers don't get tipped, so they don't tip. Not all people that pick up from restaurants tips, but I think most that work in the service industry do (I do) and even if it's only 50%, that's a revenue stream for the bartender (or whomever deals with pickup orders at your restaurant) that takes a huge hit.
Also, beause UberEATS is this digitized commodity with a clean UI and hard, unchanging numbers, it may lead people to unrealistic expectations. At the restaurant I used to work at, I waited tables and I worked in the kitchen, so I tried not to give either side too hard a time when I was working opposite them. It's a team game. UberEATS drivers are without that sort of empathy – the more deliveries they can make, the more they get paid; they're not concerned about being cold or rude with the people at the bar or the people in the kitchen because it's not their workplace; it's just their money.
There was a night when, despite a rather quiet show on the floor, the kitchen was swamped – delivery orders running amock for the Sunday night football game, a relatively unbroken flow of regular pickup orders, and additional UberEats orders. The biggest problem with UberEats is probably that the system doesn't take into account that there are other orders ahead on the ticket line. Let's say for instance that an UberEats order takes 50 minutes from a given location, in a vacuum, if everything goes right. If the oven is full and there's a packed house and some combination of normal delivery and normal pickup orders ahead, time has to be added.
The only alternative is people sitting in the restaurant being skipped their turn by people that aren't contributing at all to the wellbeing of labor. This is not a hypothetical. It is something that I have witnessed firsthand. If delivery gets tipped and the bar gets tipped and the floor gets tipped, then eventually the kitchen gets a cut. If delivery doesn't get tipped and the bar doesn't get tipped and the floor doesn't get tipped, you've got a labor force making some variance between $2.13 (standard waiting) and $8 (standard bar) having their money pool dilluted and the people that make a better standard wage (though almost invariably not a living wage) not getting cut into it either. In essence, you create the efficiencies and inefficiencies of a fast food restaurant at otherwise higher-end establishments. To clarify, higher-end here is specifically relative to fast food. Casual dining is higher-end than fast food.
On the whole, UberEats is a very efficient service for customers, and it's a terrific way to discover new eateries near and far from your home or your workplace. Be that as it may, the responsibility rests with managers and ownership to insulate their front-of-house labor from taking a financial hit as best as they can. UberEats can be a very helpful service if you need food in a pinch, and it's an effective way to build your brand and spread word of your restaurant. However, if you run a restaurant and you offer delivery, it's in your longterm best interest to keep it outside of your delivery zone. Otherwise, you're probably wasting money having delivery drivers. At the very least, you're wasting their time.
It increases trade, which is good for the economy. More money changing hands more time - more gas being bought, more wholesale from Restaurant Depot to the restaurants, more produce from farms across the country. Perhaps this creates more prosperity for the society. It inevitably helps the people at the top, and in a very real way cuts out the middleman. But this is New Orleans, a service industry town - it's made-up of middlemen.
