Grubhub ‘free lunch’ promotion leaves Queens hangry
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A number of undelivered orders sit idly at Comfortland as restaurants and drivers were overwhelmed by a free lunch promotion from delivery app Grubhub on Tuesday, May 17, 2022. Photo via Comfortland/Instagram
By Jacob Kaye
There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
On Tuesday afternoon, long after a normal lunch rush would have ended, the owner of Comfortland in Astoria had to figure out how to get rid of all the food getting cold on their counter.
Comfortland, like countless other restaurants in the city, had been slammed, receiving more than double the amount of lunch orders they’d normally receive on a Tuesday because of a promotion being offered by delivery app Grubhub. Without enough delivery drivers to take the food to customers, packaged food sat waiting.
And so Comfortland’s owner took to another piece of tech – social media – to tell customers that if they came to pick up the food themselves, they’d get a free ice cream cone as compensation for the heated situation.
“At that point, I think everyone was just kind of pissed off and it didn’t work, really,” said Donnie Dalessio, the owner of Comfortland. “I think they were just frustrated that they couldn't get the food that they ordered for lunch – maybe ‘hangry’ is the word.”
Grubhub, one of several major delivery app companies operating in New York City, ran a promotion Tuesday from 11 a.m. through 2 p.m., offering $15 off every order made through the platform. They named the promotion “Free Lunch.”
Restaurants, delivery workers and customers throughout Queens and the city reported myriad issues with the promotion Tuesday. Some restaurants were backed up – some had to cancel orders as they came in. Some delivery workers were rushed from one location to the next. A number of customers either couldn’t access the promotion because of a glitch on Grubhub’s platform or had to wait hours for their food, which, in some cases, never arrived.
Christopher Krautler, a spokesperson for Grubhub, said that the company didn’t expect so many people would take advantage of the promotion, which was projected to generate similar order numbers as a promotion run last year. This time around, the promotion generated six times as many orders – at one point, the platform was averaging 6,000 orders per minute.
“Customer demand absolutely blew away all expectations,” Krautler said. “Aside from the initial technical issues and strain on some restaurants, we had many positive outcomes, both for Grubhub and our restaurants, namely driving [450,000] lunch orders to restaurants across the city, with no added marketing costs required for those businesses.”
But on Wednesday morning, nearly 24 hours after the stovetops had cooled, a number of restaurants were still left reeling.
“We're still trying to process what happened yesterday – we're all kind of a little shell shocked,” Dalessio said.
Darren and Melanie Lawless, the owners of nearby Il Bambino, were similarly inundated with orders. With only one cook working the grill, Darren Lawless had to jump in occasionally and cook up an order, all while keeping up with the new orders that kept coming in.
“It's a Tuesday, it's usually the slowest day of week and we just got exceptionally busy and weren't staffed accordingly,” Lawless said. “It made us look silly.”
The owners of both Il Bambino and Comfortland say they were not made aware of the promotion by Grubhub – Dalessio said he heard about it through a customer and the Lawlesses say they had no knowledge of it at all.
“They refer to us as their partner but there was no correspondence at all before this,” Lawless said. “And there's been no correspondence today to offer an apology for the s–t that they did yesterday. We’re only their partner when we’re greasing their palms.”
Krautler, however, says the platform reached out to restaurants in advance of the promotion.
“To help businesses prepare for yesterday’s promotion, we gave advance notice to all restaurants in our network, which included multiple forms of communications across email and in-platform,” Krautler said. “Even with that preparation, no one could anticipate the level of demand and unfortunately that caused strain on some restaurants.”
“We’ll undoubtedly have a lot of learnings from this that can help us optimize and mitigate issues in the future,” he added.
Melanie Lawless said that the numerous deliver workers showing up to Il Bambino said that they didn't know that the promotion was going on either.
Dachuan Nie, the co-chair of the Justice for App Workers Coalition, said that yesterday’s promotion would have been run smoother had app workers had “a voice on the job.”
"Yesterday's promotion on Grubhub is one of countless examples of app companies discounting the wages and working conditions of restaurant and delivery workers, despite us being the people that make their businesses run every day,” Nie said. “We will continue demanding that app companies listen to their workers and business partners.”
“This would have never happened if workers' voices were considered from the start,” Nie added.
Despite the chaos, a number of Queens residents who participated in the promotion told the Eagle that their negative experiences won’t influence how they feel about the local businesses they ordered lunch from.
Rasim Alam, an Astoria resident, learned about the promotion Tuesday morning from a friend, and passed the information along to a number of his friends, as well.
Both Alam and his wife ordered lunch from separate restaurants. While his wife’s food was delivered without issue, Alam’s never arrived, an experience he said several of his friends had, as well.
After waiting, he tried calling Grubhub in an attempt to get a refund but was told the wait time to speak with a representative was over 100 minutes long.
“That was a whole mess,” Alam said. “But I just don't know if I can put the fault on [the restaurant].”
Juan Sanchez, also an Astoria resident, was one of Comfortland’s customers to have their meal sit idly on the restaurant’s counter and never get delivered. But after he saw the restaurant’s owner take to Instagram to explain the situation, he said he understood.
“It’s not the fault of Comfortland at all – they were actually pretty cool about it,” Sanchez said. “They did a good job about communicating how messy the whole situation was.”
Comfortland in Astoria. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
While the promotion may not have caused friction in the relationship between customers and restaurants, it did between restaurants and Grubhub.
“They're such wormy bastards,” Lawless said. “I think if you talk to any restaurant owner, they get so hot in the collar talking about these guys.”
While Lawless said he doesn’t like working with the companies, they still affect his bottom line less than hiring multiple full time delivery drivers would.
Delivery app companies helped a number of local restaurants stay afloat during the pandemic, when indoor dining was off limits, Dalessio said. But now, with Comfortland aiming to expand its indoor dining capacity, the owner said he’s looking for ways to move away from using Grubhub, Seamless, UberEats and other delivery companies.
“We've been thinking about ways to be more independent,” Dalessio said. “Grubhub is never something that is good for business, just because of the margins. So, it's not something that we're ever crazy about, it's just, we can't afford not to do it because of the pandemic and everything – deliveries were our main source of business.”
“There’s going to be mistakes and problems, but you always have an opportunity to make good on that and write a happy ending,” he added. “Yesterday, there was no happy ending, that’s why it felt so terrible.”
Additional reporting by Rachel Vick.
