YouSaid · the spoken record

Amadal Yukbur

lines on the record: 27
first: 2021-07-06
most recent: 2021-07-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Because no matter how hard he resists, the consumer needs a lot of education on what restaurants actually want. But a hack can backfire. When Ding was listening through all those phone calls Grubhub charged him for, he found this one.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over a year into his guerrilla marketing campaign, Ding saw massive growth in his direct customers. In an average month, Ding says the majority of his customers now order direct. Ding is also lowering the fees he pays to the apps in other ways. Grubhub offers a somewhat unique option where restaurants pay a lower commission if they provide their own drivers, which Ding takes care of through a courier app called Relay. Ding sets his own delivery fee on relay. He decides how much of it he'll pay and how much he'll pass on to the customer. So Ding gets to prepare the food and fine-tune his customer service while taking home a bigger share of the delivery pie. But given how the app economy works, this is about as far as Dingin pushes hacks. He's not getting off the apps anytime soon. Not even for his other restaurants that don't focus on delivery.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The majority of my orders now come through direct orders after implementing this whole campaign to try to reach out to customers and let them know about why they should order directly. So the majority, like literally the majority of I went from, I flipped it including pickup, including pickup.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've gone out and like professionally printed out double paged flyers that I will staple to every single one of my Grubhub orders that basically says thanks for finding us if you could find it a way to like order directly next time would be a big help to us”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because, according to Ding, a flat monthly fee of marketing should buy more than just exposure. It should mean getting to know your customer base and cultivating those relationships on your terms, getting data, and then using that data to expand the business. But the apps don't typically give data like customer names, emails, or spending habits to the restaurants. Ding was pretty sure if he could just apply that same money to his own marketing efforts, he'd grow organically. So he did just that, started his own marketing campaign.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mafia. Ding brought that up completely on his own the same way Pelgisi did when talking about the commission fees. Ding is particularly frustrated by Grubhub's marketing fee, which it charges as part of the commission. Grubhub defines this marketing fee as services such as customer acquisition, social media, and email marketing. But Ding, he feels like he's just paying a fee to be listed online.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, remember that little note stapled to my order from the hand pull noodle at the beginning of this episode with the deal? Andrew Ding is the mastermind behind that note because he also co-owns the hand pull noodle. And while Ding is passionately critical of the delivery apps, the handpull noodle is actually designed to be delivery first, and it's done well in this apicony.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hate feeling like I'm getting ripped off. Being ripped off by a corporation takes on a whole nother level of annoyance. You're not just getting screwed over by some random electrician you found on Craigslist. It's like... It's the principle.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, we all know what a time consuming headache it is to deal with customer service. Now, imagine having to do that over 50 times. In April 2020, Grubhub told Eater and Ding it would conduct an audit of the calls. Ding got a case number from the company. I asked him what happened with the audit. Did he ever get his money back? Ding looked back at his records and said he couldn't find any evidence that the audit ever happened. So he called a grubhub rep, gave them the case number. Ding says they couldn't find any information on the case either. More than a year after he ran his own audit of the calls, Ding has no idea whether or not Grubhub ever refunded his money. I also call Grubhub. A spokesperson told me they couldn't share details of Ding's case for privacy reasons.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ding knew without a doubt he was being charged unfairly because he doesn't take delivery orders over the phone. He does take pickup orders over the phone, but he says of the $380 he was charged, only three calls were for pickup orders. The rest ding alleges were predatory or fraudulent charges. He says he was charged for over 50 calls that resulted in no orders during that time period. He also says he emailed Grubhub with his concerns and claims he got no response, so he performed his own audit, contesting each call individually.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I spent like hours sitting at my laptop and just manually listening through every single one of these calls, downloading them, labeling them, and then kind of like organizing them into categories.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Puglisi feels like working in the system means you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. But a few miles uptown, another restaurant owner is experimenting with ways the system can work for him.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pick your money up, or we're gonna bury you. Like, hey, if you agree to pay 25%, you'll come up first on all the searches. And if you don't, you're going to be like 10th. And it just gets more and more and more.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A business that already has small margins. When you start going to 20, 25, 30%, you've gone way, way over the line. Like you're basically now where the horse and you're whipping the horse. That's my problem”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Puglisi shared an itemized list of orders with us that came through the DoorDash app in the month of January. On January 31st, at around 9.30 in the morning, a typical order came into the bagel shop through DoorDash. The app charged the customer $11.95 total for the base order, probably a bagel, cream cheese, maybe some locks. The customer paid a delivery fee and a tip. But Paglisi had to pay too. DoorDash charged him a commission fee of $2.39 on the order, 20% of the total. And that 20% commission fee kicks in on every single delivery order that a customer places at Puglisi's restaurant through DoorDash. These fees add up. Puglici showed us a grubhub bill from last year, $75,000 in orders, $15,000 in commission fees. Again, 20%. Iglesias says he could see paying a smaller fee, maybe 5 to 10%. The apps do bring in more customers. But”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Third party delivery apps charge restaurants commission fees every time an order comes through an app. And that is Puglisi's big problem with these services. They take what he feels is far too big a cut.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other thing that I don't like is how they sort of, you know, and I'm Italian American, so I like to use the mafia reference, but they're sorry, but it's very mafia-esque, very like, hey, pay up, or you're not going to make any money.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over half of Puglisi's orders are now online orders. He needed to adapt to the moment and made some tough decisions. He said he had to lay off 30 members of his staff, and he narrowed down his menu. That's how he was able to remain profitable during the pandemic. But that doesn't mean he's happy. The iPads in the back, that wasn't his vision for the store. He wants the scratch pad vibe, talking to regulars, getting to know their stories. And beyond losing touch with his customers, Paglisi has another problem with delivery apps.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know that they've invested a lot of time and money into developing their customer base and their platforms. And they've come up with great ideas. I don't knock them and they are a necessity. And I probably wouldn't have survived the pandemic without them. Like I acknowledge all that.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aglesi says before the pandemic, delivery wasn't really a priority for him. About 20% of his orders were delivered via third-party platforms. But then, in March twenty twenty, the pandemic shut down the city. And when it looked like indoor dining wasn't coming back anytime soon,”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This area of the back was once intended to be a spot where customers could sit and eat and watch the food being made, much like what I'm doing. But Puglisi ripped out seating to make space for a waiting room for delivery workers.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Christopher Puglisi is the owner of Tompkins Square Bagels, and he's been in the restaurant industry for years. He's old school, a scratch pad kind of guy. The digital future where customers hardly interact with staff at all, Puglisi's suspicious of all that. He's all about the in-person connection. You can see it in the way he's designed the place. The walls are bright yellow and green, and there are vibrant paintings of New York City by local artists. Customers can look into the kitchen as workers make the bagels by hand.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amanda is naming the big question about restaurant delivery here whose footing the bill? You may pay a delivery fee when you order food through an app, but often that's not really how much your delivery costs. The app and the restaurants are subsidizing your true delivery cost out of their own pockets. Because the delivery infrastructure is expensive. You have to pay a driver, there's insurance for the driver, the apps themselves are expensive to run, and those are just a few of the costs. So we consumers are getting a huge discount. Even if we pay, we're getting more than we pay for. This dynamic can really sting for restaurants, especially when they feel that their businesses are bearing more of our costs than the apps. After the break, the ways restaurants are absorbing the costs.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been a decade since Zifty opened up a world of possibility for Chapman. She's actually trying to order delivery less now. Because, like many consumers, she has this growing awareness that small restaurants are struggling. And by ordering delivery, she might be part of the problem. Here's Amanda Clute again.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With Amazon Prime, I can get toilet paper by tomorrow. If my kid asked me a question, I can Google it and tell him the answer immediately. I can pull up any song on my phone immediately. There's this immediacy to our lives now that just did not exist before technology entered the fray. And I think that translates very easily and seamlessly to food.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is Amanda Clute, editor-in-chief of Eater. So Seamless and Grubhub had been around in two thousand four and five, but all they did basically was aggregate menus into a website and connect customers to delivering restaurants. They didn't yet provide their own drivers.”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Land of the Giants. I'm Amadal Yukbur. I'm a food writer and audio journalist, and I'll be hosting our first ever miniseries Delivery Wars. This is a unique season for Land of the Giants because we're not focusing on one big company. We're examining a whole industry, restaurant delivery. And since that industry intersects with tech and the restaurant business, Delivery Wars is a collaboration with Recode and Eater, Fox Media's Food Publication. We're covering delivery apps this season because these companies are giants in the making, and they're taking the same path that the biggest tech companies in the world took before them. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix. A path of disruption in the pursuit of convenience. All the ways third-party delivery apps are upending the restaurant industry, defining the terms of the gig economy, and transforming our culture, that's still unfolding, which means this is a perfect moment to look more closely at”
2021-07-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Land of the Giants: Delivery Wars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT