<iframe sandbox="allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-top-navigation allow-popups" scrolling=no width="100%" height="185" frameborder="0" src="https://embed.radiopublic.com/e?if=underunderstood-Wa5YKZ&ge=s1!43c5a3c91646ea6cad91ad7d8bea102531725767"></iframe>

John: Today on the show, Adrianne rustles up some grub. Hub. 

Adrianne: I live in New York City. I’m a busy person. I don’t always have time to cook. Sometimes I order food delivery through an app. Is that so bad? Is that so wrong? 

Billy: You’re talking about like Seamless, Grubhub? 

Adrianne: Basically, basically, it’s Grubhub, but it’s not actually Grubhub. It’s actually through Yelp. 

Regina: Wait, what? 

Billy: You order food through Yelp? 

Adrianne: Yeah. 

Regina: That’s a thing? I didn’t even know that was an option.

Adrianne: So, it’s Grubhub. Yelp has a partnership with Grubhub. But Grubhub is  integrated inside the Yelp app. 

So I noticed recently, when I went to order from my favorite sushi place, for some reason —  I don’t remember what it was, maybe I was thinking I would just call the restaurant and order with them directly. Whatever reason, I ended up clicking on the phone number for the restaurant and it popped up a little box that said, do you want to call for takeout or delivery, or do you want to call with general questions?

And I was like, huh, weird. I clicked on takeout or delivery and then the phone started ringing and this perky recording said, “this call may be recorded to ensure awesomeness.” 

Awesomeness recording: This call may be recorded to ensure awesomeness.

Billy: Smells like a startup. 

Adrianne: Smells like a startup, does not smell like my neighborhood sushi place.

John: Which smells like fish.

Adrianne: Which smells appropriately fishy. Not too fishy, not totally unfishy, just right. Then, forgot about this. Couple weeks later, this story comes out on this blog called The New Food Economy about Grubhub. The story said Grubhub was doing something which Grubhub said was technically allowed in its contracts with restaurants, but which many people found to be super spammy. Grubhub was buying web domains for restaurants that were on the platform.

So if you ran  Adrianne’s Grub Shack and you didn’t have AdriannesGrubShack.com, Grubhub would buy it and then use that website to divert the order through Grubhub. And even if you did own AdriannesGrubShack.biz, or whatever, Grubhub would then buy AdriannesGrubShackBrooklyn.com. 

Billy: Can we use an example that doesn’t also have the word “grub” in it? This is very confusing.

John: No, I’m liking it.

Adrianne: You said to do the pitch without scripting. 

Regina: Yeah, Grub Shack is good. 

Billy: Sorry. Sorry. 

Adrianne: So after the story came out, I was like, huh, I wonder if something similar is going on with these phone numbers where it’s like a referral phone number, and somehow Grubhub is saying, we sent you this order because the person called through Grubhub, and so therefore we get a cut of the commission from this order. 

Regina: So you think maybe Yelp has replaced the phone number with a phone number that goes to them?

Adrianne: Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. I think they have and I think they’re the ones who put in that recording that says call may be recorded for awesomeness.

I think that means it’s the Grubhub number. And the other number is the real number. And if you can find the restaurants actual website, the number that is the real number is the number listed for general questions. So even though it is possible to call most of these restaurants directly and order food with the person who picks up, Yelp is kind of trying to make you think that it’s not. At least that’s my theory.

I don’t fully know what’s going on here. 

Billy: So walk me through this again. Sorry you call the number it says, hi, something about awesomeness and then what.

Adrianne: Okay. I’m looking at the restaurant on Yelp. They display a phone number. I click on the phone number, it pops up two options. One of them is call this for takeout or delivery, one is call for general questions.

I hit call this for takeout or delivery, and it calls a different number than the one that’s listed on the listing. There’s a recording that says– 

Awesomeness recording: Call may be recorded to ensure awesomeness.

Adrianne: And then the restaurant picks up. If I call the second number, the number for general questions, It just goes to the restaurant with no recorded for awesomeness.

Regina: Maybe I’m not neutral on this because I do co-own a bar, but this is wild. 

John: So this recorded for awesomeness thing — 

Regina: It means that they’re charging a fee. 

John: Or maybe the owner of the business gets to hear the recordings of all of the takeout orders coming in the phone, so that they can assess how the employees at the restaurant are handling phone orders.

Billy: Or they want to have the largest database of recordings of food deliveries possible so that they can train some sort of AI to take food deliveries. 

John: It’s for awesomeness. Don’t worry. 

Billy: Awesomeness for whom? Awesomeness for me? Awesomeness for the business owner? Awesomeness for Grubhub?

John: That’s the question.

Billy: Okay, so I searched “recorded to ensure awesomeness” in quotes in a couple of places. I searched it on Twitter. There has been no one talking about the exact quote “recorded to ensure awesomeness” since 2014, and I searched I searched it on Google and there’s only nine results total. Which seems crazy to me. But they’re mostly they’re either like those kind of websites that are like 800notes.com, like “someone called me, I tried calling back and this is what happened,” or they are Yelp or Facebook pages or whatever for different restaurants. But yeah, but no one seems to be talking about this. 

John: It’s like it should be understood, but it’s it’s less understood than it should be. 

Billy: Right. 

Regina: Is there a term for that?

John: We should make one up.

Coming up. We place some phone orders.

Adrianne: I dug into this Yelp thing. 

Billy: Please, please tell us more. 

Adrianne: So one of the first things that I really wanted to know was whether restaurant owners were aware of this thing where Yelp shows this phone number that’s not their phone number but which goes to their restaurant. So I was getting lunch with some friends at this Afghan restaurant in Brooklyn that’s really good, and after we had a delicious meal of hummus and kebabs and soup, I went over to talk to one of the owners, Mohammad. 

And so do you do delivery at this restaurant? 

Mohammad Zaman: Yes, we do. 

Adrianne: And what’s the phone number for the 

restaurant? 

Mohammad Zaman: 718-389-2211. 

Adrianne: Okay, so I’m looking at the Yelp listing for Afghan Kabab and Grill house. I assume you’ve seen this before. 

Mohammad Zaman: Yeah.

Adrianne: This is you right? So here it says 718-389-2211. That’s your phone number. So if you click, then it says delivery or takeout, or general questions. And on delivery or take out, it says this number. Is that your number?

Mohammad Zaman: Nine one seven two five. No. No, no, nothing.

Adrianne: So if I call this number?

Mohammad Zaman: Nobody answers. No, cut this number. This is not all my number. This is not my number. 

Adrianne: That ringing in the background is me calling the number he doesn’t recognize. 

Mohammad Zaman: Afghan Grill, can I help you?

Adrianne: Hi. I’m right here. This is the number I just called. 

Mohammad Zaman: No. This is not the same number. It’s 718-389-2211. 

Adrianne: So that phone number that shows up in Yelp, the one that doesn’t belong to the restaurant, shows up in a few other places online. Seamless, MenuPages, and AllMenus, all of which are owned by Grubhub. I talked to Grubhub, which confirmed that the phone number is a local number registered by Grubhub.

And the company declined to do an audio interview, but a spokesperson answered some questions by email and they told me who they’re generating these phone numbers for. It’s only for certain restaurants. 

When you sign up for Grubhub as a restaurant, you have a few options. One of them is to sign up for a quote-unquote marketing commission, which is, your website gets listed in the Grubhub system, Grubhub will surface you in search results and you pay between 15 and 20 percent for that.

John: And that’s the same fee that that they were using to make these fake websites, right? 

Adrianne: Yes, that’s the referral fee for marketing. They’re saying, we’re doing marketing by making this website for you, and doing all these other things, and so we get to take this cut of that, and that number varies depending on if you want more traffic.

You can pay a higher commission and then Grubhub will put you in the search results more and you get more traffic. So this option, this marketing-only option, is for restaurants that have their own delivery drivers or that use another company other than Grubhub just for delivery the physical aspect of delivery.

Grubhub also has its own delivery drivers and if you want to use Grubhub drivers, then you pay an extra 10 percent on top of the 15 to 20 percent that you’re paying for marketing. So if you get this marketing-only option, that’s what’s going to get you this special Grubhub phone number because if you’re using Grubhub delivery drivers, that means Grubhub will know about the order.

So this is all about Grubhub being able to track which orders are could be eligible for its marketing commission.

Billy: So what they’re saying is, any order that comes in through our marketing efforts, we deserve a commission for, and so that’s why they’re inserting themselves into this phone process, right?

Adrianne: Right. So this phone number that I found in Yelp, it’s also the same number that you would see on the Grubhub page for this restaurant. I asked Grubhub if restaurant owners know about this phone number being in Yelp, and they said, quote, “would defer to Yelp.” 

Yelp’s spokesperson told me that, quote, “It is our understanding that Grub Hub has marketing agreements with some restaurants that allow Grubhub to utilize referral numbers on third party partner sites like Yelp.” Then they told me to direct all further questions to Grubhub. 

At any rate, Mohammad did not know about this phone number and I explained to him that this is the Grubhub number that was showing up in Yelp.

Mohammad Zaman: I don’t know why they put this number. 

Adrianne: Yeah, so Mohammad told me he feels like it’s unfair that he is getting this Grubhub commission charged on phone calls coming from Yelp because he said these are customers trying to call directly to our restaurant. Why would they take 15 percent from that? 

Mohammad Zaman: This is our customer directly call in our restaurant, why would they link with this one? Why would they take the money from 15 percent? Oh my God. My car. Sorry ma’am. 

Adrianne: No problem!

At this point Mohammad realized he was parked in the wrong spot and he ran out of the restaurant.

So I was like, okay, so the interview is over, but then he runs back in and he’s like, it’s a trick. 

Mohammad Zaman: Trick. It’s a trick. Both are the same company.

Adrianne: It’s a trick. They’re both the same company. I explained to him that they weren’t exactly the same company, but they were working together, but it was basically the same idea.

The way Yelp has this button setup. I would describe it as a dark pattern. It’s an interface designed to get some specific behavior from the user, possibly a behavior that the user doesn’t understand or maybe doesn’t even want. Like in my case, I was trying to order from a restaurant directly and then I got fooled by this pop-up that said takeout or delivery, which is what I was calling for and I ended up calling through Grubhub, which was the exact opposite of what I was trying to do, but it actually gets worse.

So there’s this restaurant owner. Munish Narula. He owns a bunch of Indian restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and he filed a lawsuit against Grubhub in December of 2018. And one of the claims he made was that Grubhub was charging him for people calling in to ask if they had tofu, people calling in to ask if the curries came with rice.

John: Oh, because they were using the delivery number from Yelp or something?

Adrianne: It’s unclear where they got the delivery number. It could have been from Yelp. It could have been from Grubhub.com. Either way, they were calling that Grubhub owned number and they were not placing orders. But according to his lawsuit, he was being charged anyway, and in May of 2019 the New York Post reported that a bunch of restaurant owners were being charged for calls that did not result in orders. Some of them were losing thousands of dollars a year on this, they said. Narula declined to talk to me for the podcast, but I found another restaurant owner who experienced basically exactly the same 

Andrew Martino: Ghost truck, this is Andrew, how may I help you?

Adrianne: Andrew Martino has worked in hospitality for 15 years and two years ago he decided to launch this new restaurant concept that is delivery and takeout only. It’s been open for about four months and he says he gets about 50 percent of his sales of his sales through Grubhub. I talked to him on a Thursday and he had discovered something just a few days before. 

Andrew Martino: I almost lost my mind on Monday, I kid you not. I was sitting in my apartment when I found out about the the phone call commission situation.

Adrianne: So you found this out on Monday? 

Andrew Martino: Yeah. 

Adrianne: What happened? 

Andrew Martino: So I was doing my quarter one numbers, like all my reconciliations, trying to be super diligent about it, and I was off by a fairly significant amount of money and I couldn’t figure out what I was missing. Like, okay here are my Grubhub sales, they take this percent, and this is how much I should have from them, and I was going through bank statements. 

And so finally I get into Grubhub’s restaurant backend and I start going through each order, just kind of seeing what’s going on. And I see a few orders with just a price, but no order number or order on them.

So I click into it, and it says it’s a phone commission and there’s like a button where you could hit play and so I was like, the eff is this? So I hit play and the first call was me on the phone, which freaked me out because I didn’t know I was being recorded, was me on the phone with the customer. And I remember this exact phone call. They were trying to order wings and they thought we were a different restaurant. 

Regina: That’s wild. 

Caller: What do you have?

Andrew Martino: We have chicken wings and we have chicken breast. 

So they had me on  the phone asking about prices and why things got  so expensive and we were on the phone for almost 5 minutes, and eventually they realize that they called the wrong place and the call ended and I got charged like almost $8 for that phone call.

Caller: It’s not King’s Chicken?

Andrew Martino: This is not King’s Chicken. This is Ghost Truck Kitchen. 

Caller: Oh I’m trying to get King’s Chicken. 

Adrianne: Andrew showed me his restaurant’s internal Grubhub page, the backend that all restaurant owners get access to. It shows all your sales, your financials, how you compare to other restaurants in the area, what items you’re selling, and I saw that call. It was four minutes and two seconds long and it cost him $7.80.

Regina: That’s wild. 

Andrew Martino: I was like, what the hell. So I started going through more. So I found all of the phone ones and, every single one, except for two which were orders, were not orders. 

Adrianne: One was about a side that was missing from an order. 

Andrew Martino: You’re one of the Kenneths. We had actually had two exact Kenneths for the same address so it’s a possibility that there was a mixup. 

Adrianne: One was about a Postmates driver. 

Andrew Martino: Postmates, yeah, we’ve been trying to contact them for a half an hour. I wrote you a note. It’s in your bag. 

Adrianne: One of them was about the size of the salads. 

Caller: I was calling to find out if your salads are entree-sized.

Adrianne: That call about the salads was a minute and 14 seconds long and Andrew got charged $7.92 for that. And the guy was placing his order through Seamless, which again is owned by Grubhub. 

Billy: Here’s what I don’t understand. Where are these dollar amounts coming from? 

Adrianne: Okay, we’re going to get to that. 

John: Is that a percentage of something? 

Adrianne: So Grubhub has no way of knowing how much these orders are right, so it has to guess. 

John: Oh, because they’re phone orders.

Adrianne: Because they’re phone orders. The way they do it is, they take the last six non-phone orders and average them, and they say that’s what this phone order equals, and then they take their commission off that. 

Billy: Is this for any phone call? Like how do they know that the phone call was an actual order?

Adrianne: They say that they have lots of special signals for that, that they use an algorithm to decide if the phone call is actually an order, and then they rely on the restaurant owners to dispute anything that’s not an order. 

Billy: And then they’re just like, based on whatever the average order is, this is probably what the cost of that order was. 

Adrianne: Correct. 

John: And what’s the range? What’s the like deviation here?

Adrianne: Right. There are a lot of scenarios where this does not favor the restaurant. Grubhub says it only considers a third of phone calls, 35 percent, to be phone orders. That’s how many end up getting charged. But it is kind of it does raise eyebrows that Grubhub is saying alright, we’re guessing whether this phone call is an order and then we’re guessing how much the order is. 

Billy: I can’t imagine any like small business or family-operated business having the time to make sure they go through all of these.

Adrianne: Yeah, and that’s what a lot of restaurants said. Anyway, here’s Andrew again. 

Andrew Martino: So like, if my last six orders — and I have a pretty high average ticket price because we do like more of a fine takeout food, so my average sale on Grubhub is about $45, which is pretty high. So every time I get a phone call, I don’t know how they decide when to start charging but they charge me like it was a $45 order basically. And out of all these calls, I think there was $29 in sales or $30 in sales and I got charged over, I think I was over $100 in phone calls. 

Adrianne: So they’re not doing this for every phone call you get right?

Andrew Martino: I mean, I like I said, I just found this out on Monday. We try to direct our customers to call us so that Grubhub doesn’t take a fee, and I’m sure there’s a lot of customers that think that they’re helping out a small business by calling them and placing the order, not realizing that they’re being recorded by Grubhub and the restaurant is getting charged possibly double for the order and it’s actually worse.

Adrianne: The guy who filed the lawsuit in Philadelphia, Munish Narula, he says in his suit that when he called his account manager at Grubhub to complain about the phone orders that weren’t actually orders, the account manager told him that Grubhub just charges her every call that’s over 45 seconds. 

So I wanted to test that. So I called Ghost Truck, Andrew’s restaurant, three times from three different phone numbers. And the first time I called and had a conversation with the person who picked up, one of his very nice employees, and interestingly this call, which was over 45 seconds, but was just a general conversation, did not get charged.

Regina: Did you try it where you mentioned food? 

Adrianne: Yes, so the second time I called and pretended to place an order. 

Employee: Ramiya speaking. How can I help you? 

Adrianne: Hi. Can I place an order for pickup? 

So then I’m like, okay. I actually never mind and I hung up and I made sure to keep that call just under 45 seconds and that call also did not get charged. 

The third time, I called and I used pretty much the exact same script, but I ad-libbed a little to get the call over 45 seconds. 

So yeah, do you think that’s enough food for two people? 

And then I said never mind. 

Actually, forget it. I’ll call back. 

That call ended up being 57 seconds long and it cost Andrew $7.98.

Sorry, Andrew. 

Billy: Are you going to pay  Andrew back? 

Regina: You better Venmo him. 

Adrianne: Okay, but we learned something from this. It does seem like it’s more complex than the 45 second cut off, and Grubhub also bleeps out personal information in these calls like addresses and full names, credit card numbers. Although there were a couple calls I listened to where that stuff slipped through, but it does suggest that there is something listening to the content of these calls.

So restaurant owners like Andrew can get into the system and dispute the charges and according to the New York Post, one Restaurant owner in New York got reimbursed $10,000 for erroneous fees going back to 2014, but that’s only for restaurants that know that this is happening at all. 

Misc: And I’d like to welcome you to today’s hearing on digital food delivery apps and the impact… 

Adrianne: So in New York, all this reporting by the New York Post about these phony charges inspired a hearing in the city council on June 27.

Robert Guarino is the CEO of a Manhattan chain called five Napkin Burger and he’s also on the board of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, which is like the trade association for the restaurant industry and the hospitality industry here. He was one of the restaurant owners who testified at that hearing about the impact that food delivery services have on restaurants.

He’s very engaged on this issue, but he didn’t realize that Yelp was listing Grubhub phone numbers, even though two of his four restaurants have the Grubhub number on their Yelp listing. 

Robert Guarino: I’ve not heard that. That’s actually the first time anybody’s pointed that out. 

You know, we’re working with these companies to help generate orders but so many times, you know, we’re put in this position where we need to compete against them to get access to our to our customers. So many of these practices make it hard to trust the companies. But to not, you know have all the practices clearly spoken about and understood by the businesses, is really scary in my eyes.

Adrianne: I asked Grubhub’s spokesperson if the company was considering revisiting any of the policies around how it does referrals in response to some of the backlash after the news reports and the New York City Council hearing which did not go well for them. Quote, “We have never abused the trust of our restaurant partners or built our business through trickery and fraud. Through Seamless we have supported restaurants in New York City for over 20 years, driven billions of dollars in food sales for them, managed millions of care issues on their behalf, and institutionalized takeout as a fundamental core of eating in New York.”

John: That’s some statement. 

Billy: Can you read the first part of that again?

Adrianne: It was, “We have never abused the trust of our restaurant partners or build our business through trickery and fraud.” 

Billy: Yeah, what? How could they claim that? Like, I’ve been with my wife for 17 years. I love her more than anyone. I’ve definitely abused her trust before. How could you say that? It seems so defensive. 

Adrianne: It does seem defensive. I asked them about the Yelp thing specifically and I posed it to them as, you know, people use Yelp to look up phone numbers in order to order from a restaurant directly. They don’t realize their calls are being routed through Grubhub and that Grubhub is getting a cut. Isn’t this just inserting Grubhub into a transaction where it’s not bringing any value? 

They said, quote, “We value our partnership with Yelp and the benefits it brings to restaurants and diners alike. The combination of Grubhub’s restaurant network and delivery infrastructure with Yelp’s audience generates thousands of new diners and millions of orders for Grubhub restaurant partners. That’s the real tangible benefit of our relationship,” end quote. Yelp did not respond to that same question.

Grubhub didn’t make anyone available for phone call, but there were these two representatives for the company who testified along with a spokesperson from UberEats at this hearing in New York City on June 27th. 

Grubhub spokesperson: As you may know, we’ve been operating in New York since 1999. Our employees literally live, work, breathe and eat New York.

They also have helped drive billions of dollars of revenue to restaurants and $1 billion in tips to delivery workers 

Adrianne: So they’re talking about how much they’ve helped grow the industry and how much value they bring to restaurants here. 

Grubhub spokesperson: There’s a there’s a couple quick examples I like to give. One is that there is a restaurant on the Upper East Side that serves sushi. We worked with them and we said that there’s a trend for poke bowls, right?

Poke bowls. They’re a very common, they use fish. And anyway, we suggested that they start adding some of these items to their menu. They did this and within one month, they doubled their orders and within three months they 7X’ed their orders to 1,600 orders a month. This is a small business that went all the way up to 1,600 orders a month and they actually changed the name of the restaurant to put that name, “poke,” in there because it’s worked so well. 

Regina: I liked his explanation of poke. 

Adrianne: The restaurant changed its name. It’s like what Facebook did to websites. It’s like clickbait. It’s like all of a sudden you’re on this platform and you all have to play to the platform’s algorithm and it’s going to homogenize everything. That’s what I’m worried about.

Anyway, they keep referring to Grubhub as a marketing platform and talking about how they sent photographers to restaurants and they drive up the average order size. 

Grubhub spokesperson: Our marketing platform levels the playing field for independent restaurants here… 

Adrianne: They also keep talking about how Grubhub sales are incremental. They’re happening on top of what the restaurant would do on its 

Mark Gjonaj: So, why don’t we go back to Reggie’s Pizza, because he makes some great pizza.

Adrianne: That’s Mark Gjonaj. He’s the one who called this hearing. 

Mark Gjonaj: If he’s making 10 percent on his $24 pie, yields him $2.40 in profit. If the same pie is sold through your app, he would yield a net loss on that transaction. 

Grubhub spokesperson: I would go back to a couple points we made earlier. First of all, these are incremental orders that we’re bringing restaurants, right? So they are,they still have to pay their rent. So when we bring extra diners in that they are basically incremental order to the restaurant. 

Adrianne: Gjonaj gets Grubhub to admit that they are doing $30 million in sales in phone orders in New York.

Mark Gjonaj: Thirty million dollars is not small. It’s big by anyone’s model. Thirty million dollars in additional revenue, I don’t think anyone’s going to walk away from that. Right now I’m just trying to get a better understanding when you when you say it’s a very small portion of what you do. It’s 30 million real dollars, okay, so now I’m trying to guess how many refunds or how many challenges have there been made? Because I come from the pizzeria world and I say no one had time to look at that stuff. No one would spend the next 24 hours looking at every phone order and listening to the conversation in the real world. We don’t small owners of these eateries really don’t have that time. 

Billy: I love this guy. The people’s champ. 

Adrianne: Yeah, he worked in a pizzeria when he was a kid. 

Billy: It’s like, we’re tossing pizzas, we don’t have time for this.

Adrianne: So after that hearing, I would say it did not go super well for the tech companies, the city council member who organized it, that guy Mark Gjonaj, he called for the State Attorney General to open an antitrust investigation into Grubhub. There was some testimony about how the food delivery Market in New York is concentrated, overly concentrated, like beyond the levels of where usually a regulator would intervene. 

And then Senator Chuck Schumer wrote Grubhub’s CEO a letter and threatened to get the Federal Trade Commission, which regulates antitrust, involved. 

At the time I was researching this, Grubhub was only allowing restaurant owners to review their phone charges back two months, 60 days, but after pressure from the industry and Chuck Schumer, the New York Post reported that Grubhub was extending that window to 120 days, four months. But still, no one is talking about this Yelp thing.

Awesomeness recording: This call may be recorded to ensure awesomeness. 

Billy: So back to the original question, who is the awesome for? 

Adrianne: I think there’s a little debate here. I think it’s clearly awesome for Grubhub, which is getting more phone order commissions. I think Grubhub would say it’s also awesome for restaurant owners, but restaurant owners might not universally agree with that and then I wasn’t able to get any specifics on the deal that Yelp has cut with Grubhub.

They have a partnership. They announced it in 2017. They’re working together. Presumably — they called it a long-term partnership — presumably there’s some financial benefit both ways, but I asked does Yelp get a cut of the cut that Grubhub gets on these referral calls that come from the Yelp app, and they just didn’t answer.

So I’m not sure if this is directly awesome for Yelp. Especially if people learn about it and get upset with them for doing this. But I think we can say it is awesome for Grubhub at least in the short-term. 

John: They seem to have become a marketing company after providing a baseline service that everybody wanted or enough people wanted, right, and now that they’ve got a critical mass of users, now they can turn the screws a little bit on the restaurants, say we’re a marketing company now too, and start double dipping. 

Adrianne: This is like antitrust theory. I think that’s what’s happening. And I think also we should acknowledge that there are other effects that this can have. It can drive prices up for restaurants. It could eventually drive prices up for customers, but there are other effects that are not price effects, like every restaurant turning into a poke bowl restaurant, like restaurants dropping off the lower-priced end because they don’t make enough profit margin to afford Grubhub’s 30 percent.

A couple days ago, Andrew from Ghost Truck Kitchen reached back out to me. He wanted to tell me about the conversation he had had with Grubhub after he went through every recorded phone call and then contacted the company to dispute some of the charges. 

Andrew Martino: I explained how I found the practice to be extremely shady and deceiving. I told him I imagine this isn’t the first time he’s had this call. He told me that, right away, he said he would after feeling my angst that he would take our phone commissions from the percentage. We were paying down to zero percent, which is great. Also, you know, once again makes you think like, they know that they’re doing something wrong and right away if he’s able to offer that without even so much as supervisor approval, clearly I’m not the first one to spot it and bring it to their attention. So he told me that I would be on zero percent commission unless we had a call that was over 800 seconds.

So I found that timing to be interesting given what we know about the timing of their charges. You know overall like I said, he was pleasant. I know it wasn’t his fault. He kept trying to explain why they did what they did. Eventually I kind of just cornered him and said listen, you know, like this isn’t right. You guys are the ones that should be monitoring this. If at the end of every month there’s eight phone calls, it should be you guys that listen to the calls and then put commission as necessary. It should never be on the customer, on the restaurant, to have to leaf through all these calls and figure out where they’re getting screwed.

Billy: So if I want to order from a business and I want to avoid this whole racket, I want to get out of the Grubhub mafia control of taking a cut of all commissions of everything, what’s the best method for me to do, if my starting point is on the internet? 

Adrianne: Right now, Google will surface the restaurants real number, but there’s nothing that stops Google from striking up a partnership with Grubhub and replacing that phone number with the Grubhub phone number. They already have a partnership with delivery.com where on some listings there’s just a big order button and you just click right through to delivery.com. You could also in the Yelp app, go to the number that says general questions, if you’re on a listing that pops up that double option. And finally, you can try to find the restaurant’s actual website. 

This is all assuming that you’re starting from a computer. If you do have the privilege of walking into a restaurant, they usually have business cards. 

Billy: Huh? 

John: Is this like a card that describes a business? Is this like an SD card?

Billy: Yeah, what port do I plug this in? Do I need a dongle? 

Regina: Several dongles. 

John: I’m in.

Billy: Underunderstood is reported and produced by Adrianne Jeffries, Regina Dellea,. John Lagomarsino, and me, Billy Disney. 

John: If you liked this episode, good news, there are a bunch more waiting for you. You can subscribe and hear those episodes wherever you listen to podcast. So that’s Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, wherever. Just search for Underunderstood.

You can also find subscribe links and a lot more stuff including photos, links, and story notes at our website, underunderstood.com. 

Adrianne: Special thanks this week to Motherboard, which ran a text version of this story. You can go read that over at vice.com. 

Billy: Have a burning question the internet can’t answer? Please shoot an email to hello at under understood.com. We might just look into it. 

John: Thanks so much for listening. We will be back again next Tuesday.