An interesting perspective

“As an owner of a food retailer that utilises the services or Uber Eats, I would like to weigh in on the debate.

Yes, Uber Eats provides an excellent platform, both backend for food outlets but more importantly for customers via convenience and easy to use interface.

For this service they charge 35% - on top of this fee to the food outlet, they also charge a "delivery fee" for most orders to customers. Yes this is in addition to the service charge to the restaurant.

When the food outlet is thriving, Uber Eats is complimentary as it utilises existing staff and helps move through perishables ingredients. This helps us to turnover over more ingredients and ensure freshness.

In this case any Uber Eats order is incremental as the staff are already occupied with face to face customers and the only incremental cost is ingredients and uber bags (which is also additional cost on top of the service fee).

Assuming the restaurant is honest with pricing, meaning the face to face menu price matches the Uber Eats eats price. In same cases prices are $1 more to cover eco package and uber bags. 

Simple Calculation: $10 sale, customer pays $13 - $3.50 Uber Eats fee, $3 delivery fee, $1 packaging, $3.5 COGS, $2 profit utilising existing staff.

Now in the current environment where face to face transactions have reduced to 20%-30% of what they were.

All of a sudden the labour cost is added to the cogs and so are other overheads as these are not covered by face to face sale any longer.

Now a $9 item costs you $6.50 in relative terms at best case scenario considering minimum 2 staff, gas, electricity, rent, labour and ingredients. 

Let's run that calculation again:

$10 sale, $13 to the customer. $3 for delivery fee, $3.50 to Uber Eats, $1 packaging and $6.50 cogs. This equates to a loss of $1 if the customer buys one item.

If the customer buys bulk - 5 x $10 = $50. Customer pays $57 with $7 delivery fee. So out of $50, Uber Eats service fee $17.5, packaging $3.5 (approx), COGS $32.5 (approx) = loss of $3.5.

So yes, even at high turnover via Uber Eats, if the overheads aren't covered by walk in or dine in customers. Then Uber Eats becomes more a service to bring great food to our awesome customers rather then a platform for making profits to keep us afloat. “

I’ll leave you to ponder!