Restaurants face high fees from delivery apps. Uber buying Postmates will make it worse.

Nobu Shiozawa is determined to get customers his restaurant's homemade tofu and sushi without using delivery apps such as Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash, and Postmates.

That’s not easy these days. Thanks to COVID-19, New York City banned restaurant dining in March. So Shiozawa, who owns and manages Hibino LIC in New York City, uses his own small crew to avoid high commissions from the apps, usually around 30 percent or more.

"If I start using the food delivery service providers during the pandemic, the number of orders and the amount of sales would be increased," he admitted. 

But then he would have to hire more workers to handle the extra orders, which was hard for him to justify with the high fees and the fact he cut more than 60 percent of his staff after the pandemic started.  Read more...