Popular online takeout service GrubHub (which acquired takeout biz Seamless in 2013) filed to go public in February, which means a bunch of changes are on the way to make the company more profitable to investors.
According to a Chicago bar/restaurant owner, one of those changes includes "demanding money from restaurants to get better placement (on the website)."
That sounds a little Yelp-ish to me. I use GrubHub on the regular, and when I'm feeling especially lazy, I type in "burgers," "pizza," etc. to conduct a search to see what restaurants come up. Once all the results appear, you can organize choices by "the best (or highly rated)," "cheapest" or "closest." If you look closely, the restaurants are NOT listed in alphabetical order, so those paying for placement will always be prominently displayed.
Here is the note my contact received:
As a fellow restaurant owner, I can assure you that grub hub has been doing this since day one. We pay the minimum and have quite a few orders generated and there is no pressure from them to pay more. However, this is a change for seamless as they had a flat fee and listed in alphabetical order.
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