The article quotes plenty of dispirited restauranteurs, some of whom have to pay six figures a year to a middleman they would just as easily do without. I had assumed employees featured certain titles on tables because they liked them- or, you know, because they thought those titles could sell I had no idea that prime table placement was not merely coveted but bought. My initial naive reaction to this reminds me of my equally innocent surprise when I found out that publishers pay to get their books arranged on the front tables in bookstores rather than simply on the shelves.

(And unlike with, say, Google search results, there’s no disclaimer.) When you search for restaurants on Seamless, you may have noticed that, in the default view, the results appear to be random, but they’re actually arranged by who paid what.

(In April of 2014, under pressure from the New York Attorney General, Seamless agreed to stop including gratuity and tax.) Restaurants can choose from four commission levels (12.5%, 15%, 17.5%, and 20%) the more a restaurant pays, the higher up it will appear in the search results. Seamless takes a percentage, not a flat fee, of the total food and beverage amount, even though its involvement is the same whether an order is for $10 or $250. The article adds, “GrubHub Seamless also owns MenuPages, Allmenus, Restaurants on the Run, DiningIn, and Delivered Dish.”Īnother thing I hadn’t known: that the results that appear when you search for nearby restaurants are far from random.

For one, that Grubhub and Seamless united to form one mega-site and, like all monopolies, it now revels in its newfound powers: “With no formidable competitors, GrubHub Seamless isn’t afraid to flex the extraordinary power it has over restaurants that offer delivery.” I learned so many things from this Tribeca Citizen piece about the downsides of the websites GrubHub/Seamless. Restaurants are less than pleased by delivery services

Are grubhub and seamless the same