Not because the food got more expensive. Because four separate charges stack on top of each other, and three of them are calculated on a number that was already raised.
Say you order $40 of food from a place you already like. Here is what typically happens between the menu and your card.
That is 79 percent more than the food costs. And notice the compounding: the tip and the tax are both calculated on the inflated menu price, so the markup quietly charges you three times.
Fees vary by app, city, restaurant and membership tier. The point is not the exact numbers. The point is the shape, and you can check the shape on your own receipt in about thirty seconds.
Open the app, pull up your most recent delivery, and add these four lines: service fee, delivery fee, tip, and the difference between the app menu price and the price on the restaurant's own website. That last one is the invisible one, and it is usually the biggest.
Divide the total by what the food actually costs. Most people land somewhere between 1.5 and 1.8. Twice a week at $28 of overhead is about $240 a month, or roughly $2,900 a year, spent on the act of not driving.
Call the restaurant or use their own site. No markup, no service fee, no delivery fee, and usually no tip. On the example above you pay about $43 instead of $72. It costs you a ten minute drive, and the restaurant keeps the whole thing instead of handing over a quarter of it.
Plenty of local places run their own delivery or use a flat fee driver. You skip the markup and the service fee and pay one honest delivery charge. Always worth asking, because the app is often not the restaurant's preference either.
Somebody local cooks a set number of plates on a set night, everybody orders ahead, and the price is the price. No fees stacked on top because there is no platform in the middle taking a cut. This is the model we run ourselves, below.
We are not going to pretend otherwise. Cooking is the cheapest thing on this list by a wide margin. It is also forty five minutes and a sink full of dishes on a Tuesday when two kids need to be somewhere at six. That trade is real, and it is the whole reason the delivery apps got to charge what they charge.
SideGuy is based in Solana Beach and we run a small food operation called Just the Tip. One item, Cardiff style tri tip, cooked by machine to exactly 131 degrees. Twenty dollars flat gets the meat, hot jus, chips, a bagel toasted in the drippings and a cold sparkling water. Presold, so nothing is wasted. We deliver it.
Twenty dollars, all in, brought to you. Compare that to a $28 burrito bowl that started life as an $18 burrito bowl.
We would rather you use this page and never buy a plate from us. Ordering direct from the taco shop you already love saves you more than we ever could, and it keeps the money in the neighborhood. That is the whole point.
One text. Orders close Thursday, plates go out Friday. Tell us how many and where you will be.
Text PJ · 858-461-8054