Yesterday I mentioned that
DNA Pizza takes
online delivery orders again, after a year-long hiatus. Hooray...
Perhaps it has been long enough since I talked about deliveries that you have forgotten how terrible everything has been! Let's recap!
We opened DNA Pizza in 2011, and from then until roughly 2015, we had decent delivery business. It was a pretty significant portion of our income. In fact, our delivery business was a big part of why it sounded like a good idea at the time to open a second venue, Codeword in 2015. We had been having trouble keeping up with orders on weekend nights, so once Codeword opened we staged all delivery orders from there, freeing up the DNA Lounge oven for in-house slices.
In the early days, we employed our own delivery drivers (we had a car topper and everything!) And while some restaurant apps like Eat24 and Grubhub existed at the time, they just ran the menu-and-credit-cards system: restaurants were still responsible for doing their own deliveries. But having our own drivers just wasn't economical and in around 2014, I held my nose and we switched to using "Uber Eats" for delivery. Again, at the time, they were a delivery company, which is a thing that (thanks to them) no longer exists. We conducted the transaction; they put it in a car. You used the app to summon a driver to pick up a bag instead of a person.
But in 2017, Uber abruptly decided that if you wanted them to deliver something, you also had to allow them to operate your online store, and let them take a percentage of that. So we dropped them on principle, and switched to Postmates. But then eventually Uber bought Postmates too. So we switched to Grubhub, who had recently started doing deliveries as well as ordering: this gave Grubhub the same downsides as Uber Eats, but at least they weren't Uber.
It was between 2015 and 2017 that Grubhub and similar apps started becoming really popular, and as soon as they did, our delivery business absolutely cratered. Not only did the number of delivery orders go way down, but deliveries became damn near uneconomical due to the huge cut taken by the apps, taking 15% to 30% of the value of the order rather than charging per mile for a delivery. Our margins were obliterated.
And on top of the extortionate delivery apps came the fraudulent "ghost kitchens", the fake clickbait restaurants all running out of the same warehouse that existed only as online branding. So by 2017, Travis Kalanick's debasement and destruction of the restaurant industry was nearly complete.
Twelve or fifteen years ago, the idea of a pizza restaurant that made no money from deliveries would have been inconceivable. Pizza was the canonical late-night delivery food for the entirety of the Twentieth Century. But here we are, "disrupted" by techbros.
Over the years, besides Grubhub, we used to use some other delivery services as well (DoorDash, Slice, Allset, a few others) but we stopped because we got no business from them. Like, literally one order a month or less. And that was back in the day when we did get a significant number of delivery orders through Grubhub. It was just that nobody used those services. Grubhub was, at least at the time, the 800 pound gorilla, the only game in town.
And then around 2022, Grubhub just flat out stopped working. They were so astoundingly incompetent that we got essentially zero orders through them. Their web site was never showing DNA Pizza to customers, even when they searched for it directly, and for close to two years their tech support was so useless that eventually we just gave up. It was so bad that in 2023 I asked the Lazyweb for help out of desperation, And despite turning up some technical contacts within Grubhub, nothing got better at all. So in early 2025, we just closed our Grubhub account and decided, "Welp, I guess we don't offer deliveries at all any more".
Then! Funny story! A couple months ago, a new "territory manager" got hired at Grubhub and hit us up with a "please come back" email. Devon's reply was so blistering that I'm just gonna include most of it here:
Your suggestions don't even begin to address the issue we had.
We had issues with your backend. Menus would vanish. I spent countless hours providing your support teams with steps to reproduce the problem. we got extremely deranked. I got support once to agree to completely rebuild our storefront from scratch so that we would be free of the various issues that support was unable to fix. Support just cloned the store and it had the same problems.
There was some deeply buried bug involving an integration from the otter tablet company that was disabling menus in some non-standard way. And we got de-ranked again, because our menus would turn off at inconvenient times with no way to turn them back on. Support was terrible and useless and never believed me.
So, no, having commissions waived won't do us any good when your platform itself was turning off our menus in ways that nobody who worked for you could figure out how to fix. [...]
I wasted easily 100 hours of my life over a few years on this nonsense.
Nope. Never again. Your company is terrible. You should get a job somewhere else before Grubhub gets bought again and they gut staffing even more.
So, let's hope this Chow Now thing works better than that.
As with all techbro disruption, you have to follow the money to understand this. At first glance you might think that Grubhub's customers are the hungry people ordering food. But Grubhub's actual income is the money that they claw back from the restaurants as subscription fees and a vig on every order, which means that their actual customers are the restaurants. And they will put the screws to each of those restaurants harder and harder, until they die off and another one is slotted in to replace them. They can do this because these days the restaurants have no other choice. This is a canonical example of the oft-misapplied term "Enshittification".
And the galaxy-brain version of "who are the customers?" is "the investors". It doesn't matter if Grubhub becomes so useless that it collapses entirely, so long as the VCs and C-suite get an IPO or private equity buyout just before that happens. Their victory condition is a mob bust-out, rather than a sustainable, long-term business.
Oh yeah! Speaking of Travis Kalanick's ratfucking of the restaurant industry,
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2025 14:11:26 -0500
From: ██████@cloudkitchens.com
Subject: Request to Discuss New Market Opportunity
DNA Pizza Team,
Thanks in advance for your time and attention.
I'd like to connect and talk with you about a possible partnership with one of our food halls in the Bay Area. Have you considered expanding your reach to other markets? I'm not sure if what we offer would work for you, however, It wouldn't hurt to hear me out, take a tour, and see what options we can offer.
What are your thoughts?
Keep up the good cooking,
I did not hold back:
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2025 12:28:34 -0700
From: jwz@dnalounge.com
To: ██████@cloudkitchens.com
Subject: Re: Request to Discuss New Market Opportunity
You have got a lot of nerve. Your company single-handedly destroyed the Bay Area restaurant industry and you still have the gall to come sniffing around the corpse. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, you absolute parasites.
BTW, have your Saudi owners murdered any journalists lately?
What I did not expect... was a reply!
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2025 14:56:13 -0700
From: ██████@cloudkitchens.com
To: Jamie Zawinski <jwz@dnalounge.com>
Subject: Re: Request to Discuss New Market Opportunity
Hello Jamie,
Thanks for your patience with me getting back to you.
It's unfortunate you feel this way towards CloudKitchens and what the company is attempting to accomplish for restaurant owners and operators in the industry. However, I appreciate your candor. I'll be sure to relay your message to the proper channels.
In summary, running a small business is a land of contrasts. Please buy our pizza, it's actually really good.
