I notice when I use a delivery service for food or groceries, the price I pay through them is not the same price as in store/restaurant. So a $4 burger at McD will cost me $5 through DoorDash/Uber/x, so who gets the extra dollar? Merchant or delivery service? I mean I’m already paying delivery fee plus tip, so I should be getting in-place price. Does anybody know?
Door Dash. It’s how they make money.
Edit: From what I can tell, the restaurant pays a delivery charge and commission (to door dash), hence the higher price. DoorDash (and the others) tried to force the restaurants to have the same prices in the restaurant, I presume, to hide that. There’s is/was a lawsuit over that.
Due to my current mobility issues I have all my groceries delivered. I’ve noticed that I don’t always get offered things at the sales prices that are listed in the store’s weekly flyer, or get the Thursday senior discount that I would get in the store. Although there are occasional discounts of the “$6 off if you spend $30” on selected items. This is with Instacart, where I have premium account which reduces my delivery charges.
Look at what it would actually cost to make a delivery: money for the delivery driver, money for his vehicle expenses, money for running the delivery system. And note the time used so he is probably only delivering one or two orders an hour (between waiting between orders, waiting at the pickup window, driving to you, driving back). So the system needs $20 plus in money for each delivery–but few are willing to pay this directly. So instead it gets split up between commissions from the restaurant, marking up prices, a small delivery fee and tips for the driver.
as an example–if I went to Ruler in person, a 3lb log of hamburger costs $13.97, but delivery same item it costs $20.97!!
I’m in England and I use deliveries for both my weekly grocery shop and an occasional curry.
I pay a stated delivery charge, but the items themselves are the same price as if I went shopping.
There isn’t a set answer to this… it depends on the particular delivery service you’re using, the store you’re ordering from, whether you have a membership with the delivery service, etc. Each combination can have different prices.
Some places charge the same AND don’t charge a delivery fee. Then the delivery service adds their own fees, along with taking a cut from the store’s prices, and sometimes part of the driver’s tip too (at least until they were sued over it).
Some stores don’t want to eat all that margin and so raise their online prices too.
It really just depends.
I raised this issue a couple of years ago in this thread. I previously used Instacart for grocery delivery, mostly from Safeway. But since I discovered Instacart’s practice of marking up prices, I’ve stopped using Instacart and just shop directly on the Safeway web site. As far as I can tell, they don’t mark up over in-store prices, and with a FreshPass membership, delivery is free. FreshPass costs $99/year, but gives you a $5/month credit, so if you use it every month it’s really $39/year, which is totally worth it. All you pay above going to the store and shopping yourself is the driver tip.