The Perth Voice – Uber eats into profit

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A MAYLANDS restauranteur says UberEats’ high charges could send him broke if he signed up to the service.

UberEats deliverers, with cube-shaped backpacks, have become a common sight in the inner-city, with more than 300 restaurants signed-up, and other restaurants using rival services like Deliveroo.

Francesco Deiana runs Café Pizzeria Amore Mio and says he wouldn’t mind paying the $750 sign-up fee, but claims the 35 per cent charge per order, plus $7 delivery charge, would cripple his business.

The UberEats website is full of success stories of restaurants getting great results and increasing their sales, but Mr Deiana says the cost is too much for a small business.

• Francesco Deiana and Aury Elmendorp at his Maylands pizzeria. Pizza on the left is what he currently serves and the one  on the right is what customers would be left with if he signed-up to UberEats. Photo
by Steve Grant

He says to go with UberEats he’d have to raise the price of pizzas from $20 to $34, or “buy super cheap, very low cost sauce with lots of preservatives, and very rubbish mozzarella”.

“To sell a good quality product like we do, we have to respect at least this ratio: one third of the price is food cost, one third is staff, one third is rent, bills, GST…each one of this third given to Uber Eats makes any business fail, unless they drastically reduce the quality of the food or increase the price of each item by 35 per cent, with the consequence of not making them affordable for many.

“We want to keep the quality of our ingredients high and the pizzas affordable.”

When UberEats launched in October last year it already had 75 restaurants signed up, and now they’ve got over 300 on-board and deliver to 40 suburbs.

Florist Stacey Lenstra from Northbridge’s Beans & Bunches agrees, saying “Big companies like Uber Eats and Interflora who take a 30 per cent cut really affects small business. Shop local, shop small, and keep great pizza and flowers in your hood.”

by DAVID BELL

Source: https://perthvoiceinteractive.com/2017/06/23/uber-eats-into-profit/