I have no idea why anyone would want to order ice cream from DoorDash or similar services. It’s gonna arrive melted.
Unless the DoorDash person drives a Good Humor truck. (Actually, that could be a specialty business.)
Exactly this. There’s a good chance that your DoorDash driver is stopping at multiple restaurants, and multiple homes, in the process of eventually getting your order to your house. And, unlike a dedicated delivery truck (like a grocery-store home-delivery truck), which may be equipped with coolers and/or freezers, any particular DoorDash may not necessarily have a cooler or the like in their car.
If you order hot food through DoorDash, and it’s cold or barely warm when it finally gets to your house, you can at least heat it back up a bit. Once your ice cream sundae has melted, it’s not going to refreeze well (and even then, it’d take hours to get it frozen again).
I posted in another thread about the glaring error of menus (paper and online) with no prices. It’s not an error, in that they mistakenly left off the prices. But it is most definitely an error in judgement on the part of the business.
Indeed, I’m sure most of the time it’s quite deliberate so some schmo doesn’t call up after a price hike and complain that the menu says $xxx. This is even quite common in online menus.
I think they’re trying to social-engineer people. They won’t tell you the price until you’re 99% done with the ordering process so that it’s quicker to just finish the order than to go off to another site too check other prices.
I haven’t seen it on an actual ordering site—that always has prices in my experience when you put it in the cart—just as a restaurant menu for call-in orders. To which, upon calling, I ask “how much is your large sausage pizza these days?” or similar.
My favorite burrito place is hilariously bad at setting up their Doordash menu. Ordering a black bean and steak burrito, I have the options of customizing it with:
- Milk
- Sugar
- -----------7?
It’s likely a matter of the fact that, for the past several years, restaurants have been facing continual increases in the costs of food, rent, utilities, and wages; in order to stay afloat, they have to ultimately pass those price increases on to their patrons.
That means that the prices on a printed menu may well be out-of-date within weeks or months of printing it up – and, as @pulykamell notes, some patron who has a paper menu with prices in their drawer, and orders from it, is probably going to be angry when the actual price doesn’t match what’s on that piece of paper.
Yes, website prices can be updated more easily, but mom-and-pop restaurants likely don’t want to have to keep going back to whoever they hired to build and maintain their website, to adjust prices (and incur costs every time they do that).
Yeah, it’s annoying that prices aren’t shown on the menu. It’s also annoying when prices on a menu are out of date. Restaurants are in a Catch-22 situation on this, and I’m pretty sure that most of them aren’t trying to “social engineer” you.
My annoyance when it comes to online restaurant menus is when the website refuses to show me the menu because the restaurant isn’t open at that time of day. I may be reviewing the menu in the morning because I’m thinking of ordering from that restaurant for lunch or dinner. Or I’ve been invited to eat at that restaurant (usually for a work occasion) and I want to decide ahead of time what to order, or even whether I want to attend the event.
Many times the menu that I want to look at to get a sense of price and options aren’t Mom and Pop restaurants– they are national chains. So I suspect that the price isn’t necessarily the same in California and Kentucky. And that’s ok, but also, I like to know approximate prices sometimes– so I don’t get really attached to the most expensive item on the menu, when there’s less expensive options I’d enjoy as well.
I find that I can usually get the prices for chains - but it often requires me to pretend I’m ordering for pick-up. There’s no menu I can just look at, with or without prices but I can find out the prices and menu of the particular location I’m interested in.
Yeah, I’ve done the pretend i”m ordering for pick-up thing before. It just pisses me off. I shouldn’t have to declare where I’m located (or pretend I am somewhere I’m not) just to get a general sense of price and offerings.
I’ve noticed this, too, in recent years. I’d expect prices and menu offerings to vary by region and location, and I suppose that it doesn’t surprise me that some don’t have a “general” menu listed on their sites anymore. But for a number of chains, the only way to view the menu of your local place is to go through the hoop of starting an order. “But I don’t want to order online, I just want to see the darned menu!”
All of the issues about changes to prices and inconvenience have existed for decades, if not longer. It may be a catch-22 situation but they’ve always had that situation. And yet, they still managed, until recently, to put the prices on the menus. The change is that someone has figured out another tactic to increase sales through influencing the process people use to select food. Making a person have to go through most of the ordering process to find the desired information may get some folks to just commit to the place in question when they might otherwise go look at other places to see their prices. Yeah, maybe not a large percentage, but for a chain, a small percentage is still a lot of money.
The other change is that I know the paper menu I had in my drawer is from the last time I ordered or went to the restaurant - so when they tell me they raised the prices a week or a month or two ago, I can’t really say anything if I’m an honest person. Doesn’t work the same if I saw the old price on a website ten minutes before I ordered.
And for a franchised chain, the individual owner sets the prices and decides which promotions to particpate in. So there will always have to be a “choose your location” to find the menu and price, whether you have to start an order or not.
I don’t really have an issue with setting my location first since it’s usually something I want delivered. But after that, there should be a menu with prices.
Who is doing this? I’m curious about an example. I’ve never seen this. Once you start ordering, prices show up in every app or website I’ve used. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone does it the way you say–I’ve just never seen it.
Marios pizza has just moved into my county and they are the chain that is guilty of the tactic. The other places were all local joints.
There is - it’s just that it’s also often the same page where you start your order so that you have to click n “start your order” or “delivery” or "pick up to see t . It’s not that you have to choose every item before you see any prices.Just like when you find a price on Amazon there are “buy now” and “add to cart” buttons.