Using Seamless while on coronavirus lockdown? Here’s how to do it without hurting local business.

As in many cities, every business except those deemed essential has closed in New York City amid the coronavirus pandemic. 

While you can’t sit down at a restaurant, eateries can, thankfully, still offer takeout. It makes sense  in New York especially, where some of us live in apartments so small, we don’t even have kitchens. Local supermarkets are packed, with hours-long lines just to enter, where you find the items you need are out of stock. Grocery delivery services are fully booked a week out. That means takeout food has come through as a lifesaver over these past few weeks. Naturally, hungry New Yorkers who are sheltering in place are firing up their Seamless apps and ordering delivery.

I’ve never been a fan of online food delivery companies and I don’t use them … until I found I had to during the pandemic. Despite my distaste for the company, in recent days, I’ve found myself opening Seamless whenever I’m looking to order takeout because it has the most up to date information about which restaurants are open and when. Necessity is the mother of invention, though, so I’ve found a way to use it to help me support local restaurants, and I haven’t paid Seamless a cent.

So, what’s my resistance to using Seamless? 

Many of the third-party food delivery services that have blown up over the past few years, like Seamless and MenuPages, are owned by a parent company, GrubHub, which offers its own similar service. The ease of ordering delivery online through a mobile application from your favorite local food joint has been enticing for many app-savvy consumers: GrubHub recently it made $1.3 billion in revenue last year.

GrubHub, however, makes a profit by charging hefty commissions to small businesses for its services as a middle man. Simply picking up the phone and calling your favorite local eatery to put in a takeout order saves that local business anywhere from of the entire bill. (Some local businesses pass that cost on to you by marking up their menu prices on services like Seamless, so you can save money too by bypassing the app.)

At a time when local eateries need help more than ever, GrubHub it would temporarily defer its commission fees. Not wave them, not lower them — these struggling restaurants will have to make it up to the middleman with payment in full at a later date. 

Furthermore, in order to entice concerned customers to keep ordering takeout during the pandemic, GrubHub is $10 discounts. That sounds great, until you find out that this billion dollar company is making small local establishments take the hit out of their own pockets.

On top of GrubHub’s mistreatment of its restaurant partners, it’s important to note that the company’s delivery drivers, who are on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, are independent contractors with little-to-no benefits or labor rights. That’s the gig economy for you. Its hard enough for workers in normal life, let alone during a pandemic. We shouldn’t let the system as it is perpetuate, if we can help it. 

There is one way that Seamless can help you while you’re stuck at home, though. Since people in the U.S. started sheltering in place, many local small businesses deemed essential have had to shorten their store hours or even close on days in which they’d normally be open. Many of these small takeout joints don’t regularly update their websites, if they have one at all. I’ve also found that Google and Yelp are both displaying inaccurate information about them.

One place where this information has been up-to-date and accurate, however, is on apps like Seamless. Since the food establishments take orders on Seamless, unlike with Google, there is direct financial incentive in denoting that you are indeed open for business so you can process and get paid for orders customers make through the app.

So, I now regularly check Seamless to see which local takeout places are open for business when I’m looking to order. Then I give that restaurant a ring directly to place my order.

There have been many about whether it’s to order takeout during this pandemic, and how to do it safely. (Heck, there’s been discussion about whether its okay to use Seamless in general.) Sure, large corporations and chain restaurants can likely afford the hit. But, for local establishments and family-owned businesses like many of your favorite Chinese food restaurants, for example, being open is a necessity that keeps them and their families afloat. They deserve our support for serving our communities during these dangerous times.

So, one of the most ethical things you can do right now is to keep ordering takeout, if you can afford it, to support local businesses in your community. Fire up that Seamless or GrubHub app to check which ones are currently open. Just don’t use the service to place that order. Pick up the phone and call your favorite takeout place directly.