The more you know - Ordering food for delivery

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I just read a news story about how restaurants are making money from delivery services during this Covid-19 time. Better yet how they are making very little money off the delivery services like Uber Eats, Grubhub, Door Dash and others. Now I don’t know how much you all have used these systems in the past, if ever. So here is a quick lesson if you have never used or heard of them. You order your food through the app or website of the delivery service company. The order is sent to the restaurant of your choice, they make the food and a driver from said delivery company picks it up and delivers it to you. Sounds easy and convenient right? Here is the catch to using this convenience. It can be really expensive to use over ordering the food and going to get it yourself. Some people say well it will be a little more expensive to have them deliver than for you to go get the food. I agree 100%, but when does a little more become a lot more? I will try to break this down a little for you. If you use the app or website from the delivery company and compare that price to the price of looking at the restaurants website you will see a little difference. This difference comes in a $0.50 - $5.00 per item extra cost. Right away you are paying more for each item that you get. Second is the fees that you will be paying, that is right, there are fees added to your order. You will be paying a processing fee that usually is somewhere between 5-15% of the order. Add in the delivery fee of somewhere between $1.99 - 9.99. Then depending on how far the restaurant is from you, you might also see a trip fee. Plus, if your nice enough to tip the delivery person you can add that to your total. So here is a nice little example for you. I decide to order those burger meals for the family of four. Four meals at $6.95 each when I go there ends up costing me $27.80 plus tax. I am to lazy to go get the food so I get on the app and order the same thing. Alright, they raised their prices? They are now $7.99 each, that is odd, oh well it is convenient. Umm, there is a $2.99 delivery fee and what about this processing fee of $3.18. Wait there is a trip fee? There is a delivery fee and a $0.99 trip fee? Let me get this straight for ordering my food from a place that is 3.4 miles from my house it is going to cost me $39.12 plus tax and since I have delivered food in the past I have to at least give the driver $3 for the short delivery. Now I am at $42.12. I wonder if the convenience is worth the extra $14.32 for some crappy Mcburgers. Yes, I took the actual numbers from the actual app to see what it would cost and got the prices from the local restaurants website to compare. So before using one of these websites you might just want to compare the price vs the convenience.