Increased revenue is usually a problem you (a business) want to have. If that revenue isn't trickling down to the workers, well, that is pretty much America in a nutshell.
Becoming a commodity supplier to an aggregator is a losing proposition. If the value is in delivering the food, restaurants slowly stop being able to differentiate based on branding, experience, presentation, location, or offering and instead compete mostly on price and speed. It's a shit position to be in.
How can you compete on quality when every delivery has been sitting in a box for ~10 minutes prior to pickup and ~15 minutes awaiting delivery? Pizza delivery companies like Dominoes spend $$$$$$$ to develop ingredients and methods that ensure that 25 minutes cold pizza is still palatable. That local hibachi or taco joint can't do the same. A cold, premium taco is just as unpalatable as the janky one from the cheap place.
Isn't that Domino fighting the symptom rather than the cause? Do you need RnD to install heater ovens in the pizza delivery cars?
Concerning your point, isn't local delivery dishes still kind off diffirentiated becouse it's local and you test most restaurangs in your area sooner or later?
Edit: I never do home delivery so I don't know how important fresh dishes are.
They have no control over the rest of the experience: how it's plated and presented, how it's transported, the temperature it's served at, music and ambience etc. One pizza tastes much like another after it's been cooling for 30 minutes. Pretty soon, you don't even need a restaurant to cook the food, only a cloud kitchen. And why would cloud kitchens be owned and run by restauranteurs? It's much cheaper for the delivery company to hire a bunch of cooks to develop and cook menus for "different" restaurants that share the same facilities, suppliers and staff.
That doesn't make any sense. It's a choice for restaurants to sign up and they have like 10 services to choose from. If it's not good for the restaurants they'll just stop using it. Any marginal delivery is pure profit for a restaurant.
There have been many cases of delivery app companies doing things like taking out ads in the company name with a phone number and website that looks like the restaurant but is actually the app company. So they feed off people organically searching and getting deliberately redirected.
> If it's not good for the restaurants they'll just stop using it.
it's not that it's not good, but that they noticed the delivery funnel is growing (and foot-traffic funnel correspondingly shrinking). This means if they don't participate, they risk losing this revenue stream to their competitors (who do participate).
This is what happens when your business becomes a commodity to another business. You have to make sure your business has a value proposition that prevents it from becoming a commodity (or make sure you are very efficient at production and scale up to take advantage of your product becoming a commodity).
Edit: i suspect things like massive, efficient industrial kitchens producing delivered food may become the new norm.
