I read this news today about how food delivery services are charging service charge of between 20-30% fee from every food delivered.
The Indian Muslim restaurant Owners Association is now asking for the food delivery services to reduce their service charges. They are saying that if they continue charging this high, they worry that they would need to retrench workers and some even may have to close shops after this pandemic is over. They claim that they make substantially less now as they still need to makes sure that the workers get paid including rentals and so on.
Reading this also reminded me of a tweet that I came across on the first day of the movement control.
Anyone who has read Peter Thiel’s Zero To One would come to the same conclusion as to how these food delivery services are labelling themselves as being part of a “competitive industry”. They claim that they face a serious challenge from other F&B businesses and so on when in fact they are actually sitting above everyone else in terms of acting as the intermediary with near-monopoly by getting a 20 -30% cut of the service fee from food delivered.
I feel that these food delivery services are missing a great opportunity to do good and create a stronger relationship with their customers and workers by actually doing better than this. For instance, subsidizing face masks is simply just not good enough for me. They are losing a great chance to show that they really care about their workers and customers.
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