SPOKANE, Wash. — Imagine ordering a pizza for dinner – you’re hungry and waiting, but it never shows up.
“We got a call a couple of weeks ago. The guy said, ‘Where’s my pizza? I ordered on Grubhub.’ The manager said, ‘We’re not on Grubhub’,” said Brian Dickmann, Owner of Pizza Rita.
It may sound unheard of, especially with all of the food delivery apps available these days. However, Dickmann said this has happened to him not only once, but twice.
“It’s been with Grubhub and Postmates as well,” Dickmann said.
Food delivery apps have gained a lot of popularity in recent years. However, some restaurants are claiming they’ve been listed on the apps without permission or even knowing about it. It happened to Pizza Rita here in Spokane. Full story on @kxly4news at 5
Not only was Pizza Rita listed on these apps, Dickmann said all of the information provided was incorrect.
“The wrong hours, the wrong prices, nothing was right basically,” said Dickmann.
Apparently Pizza Rita isn’t alone. Restaurants across the country are facing similar problems.
One business owner from San Francisco shared her situation on Twitter. She even talked about plans to sue the companies.
If you want to hear another story about how @seamless @grubhub, and @yelp are defrauding us restaurants and their customers, pull up a chair. I have a story to tell.
“It actually kind of makes them look bad because people look at the app and say, ‘That’s not right for Pizza Rita. That’s not the time, that’s not their hours.’,” Dickmann said.
We reached out to both Grubhub and Postmates for comment. Grubhub sent us the following statement:
Our mission since we were founded in 2004 has been to connect hungry diners with great, local restaurants. In our more than 15 year history, we’ve built a marketplace that enables restaurants to reach our network of more than 20 million diners across the country and drive more business online.
We partner with more than 140,000 takeout restaurants in over 2,700 U.S. cities, and we provided more than $5 billion in gross food sales to our local takeout restaurants in 2018, processing an average of more than 400,000 orders a day. The vast majority of our orders are and will continue to be from these restaurants we partner with.
Diners have come to expect the widest range of options as possible when they land on a food delivery marketplace. Historically, we’d only chosen to list partnered restaurants, and we still firmly believe this is the right way to build the marketplace and the only way to drive long term value for diners, restaurants and drivers. But it also takes longer to build the network this way, and other food delivery companies have chosen to list non-partnered restaurants on their marketplaces for years to widen their supply of restaurants. We’re trying this as a way to close the restaurant supply gap and drive more delivery orders to local restaurants.
Starting a couple months ago in select cities across the country, we’ll add restaurants to our marketplace when we see local diner demand for delivery so the restaurant can receive more orders and revenue from deliveries completed by our drivers. We work to provide accurate menus and hours for these restaurants on our marketplace based on available information online.
It’s our aim to bring the best delivery experience possible while balancing the interests of our diners, restaurants and drivers, and complying with all local laws and regulations in connection with our business. If a restaurant prefers not to be on our marketplace or needs to change any information like menu items or hours, they should reach out to us at restaurants@grubhub.com, and we’ll work as quickly as possible to make necessary updates or remove them.
As of today, the below Pizza Rita locations have been removed from our platform.