The epidemic hit a hundred industries, called the San Gabriel Valley, California, “the first Chinese” delivery platform Gesso recently quietly shut down, quit operating six years of the Chinese and foreign markets, and with the withdrawal of the platform together with the sigh of relief is a group of restaurant business is owed money, some of the business thousands of thousands of dollars in meal fees down the drain, but also very helpless.
“Our more than 8,000 yuan is likely to follow soak”, said Mr. Liu, owner of the long-established barbecue restaurant Fukui in Ka Wai Road, Monterey Park, who was contacted by the Gesoo platform a few days ago and told that they were forced to shut down due to poor business and could only pay half of the amount owed, on the condition that the merchants would not file legal action.
Mr. Liu said that the platform personnel took the initiative to contact them about four years ago to promote the take-out service on the condition that the restaurant gave them a 20% discount. The operating procedure is that the platform takes orders on the Internet, calls the restaurant to make the meal after receiving the order, and then the driver who cooperates with the platform picks up the meal from the restaurant and delivers it to the guest. We settle the bill once every two weeks according to the contract,” said Liu, the owner of the first few years of good cooperation, the best time through the platform received orders of more than 10 to 20 orders per day, “which is quite good for us.
Because of this, Mr. Liu said, when the delivery platform began to delay the bill this year, there was no urgency. The business is getting less and less, but there is still some. The company’s business has been in the process of being closed down for more than 8,000 yuan. He said that up to now, half of the outstanding amount that the platform promised to repay has not yet arrived.
Those in the know said Gesoo was founded by a group of Chinese students. According to public information, the Gesoo delivery platform was created in 2014, and the company’s service side once claimed to cover nearly 200 Asian restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley. A delivery boy once told a restaurant business that he alone was doing more than 8,000 deliveries a week.
However, after the outbreak of the New Guan (Chinese Communist virus) in March this year, restaurant delivery began to grow explosively because of the run-at-home order. “Our family calls out for delivery almost once every two days,” said Diamond Bar City Councilor Zhou Baihua, because the couple both work from home and have two children, they are usually too busy to cook and can only call for delivery, which is convenient, from calling to place an order to the meal arriving home in half an hour.
The biggest kink is that the cost of take-out to the house increases a lot. He said, for example, in addition to the “fuel cost”, there are four to five yuan “service charge”, plus a few yuan “tip”, the original price of more than 40 meals, the final cost to about 60 yuan. Even for an ordinary meal of more than 20 yuan, the extra cost is nearly 10 yuan, which many people can’t afford.
On the one hand, as the epidemic continues, take-out restaurants are proliferating, attracting a large number of investments to join the food delivery industry and intensifying competition; on the other hand, the high cost of food delivery services, coupled with the increase in the number of good folk cooks during the epidemic and the weakening reliance on take-out food, have led to ups and downs in the food delivery business.
We work with four platforms, they take orders from customers, call us to inform us of the production, and then their drivers come to pick up the food for delivery. Mr. Chen, owner of Colonial kitchen, a well-known western restaurant in San Marino, said that the four delivery platforms add two yuan to each dish and then take a 20 percent cut from the restaurant. For example, a sandwich in this building is $15, the takeaway platform is priced at $17, and then the platform takes a commission of three dollars from the business. We also joined after the epidemic, because it is difficult to maintain only on the old local customers”. Chen boss said that even if they do not earn much, but still not without a small supplement. He said that about one-third of the business since the epidemic comes from the platform’s single.
But for businesses with mainly familiar local customers, take-out delivery becomes a seller’s market. El Monte Tsui River restaurant owner Mr. Huang said there have been several take-out platforms wanting the restaurant to use the delivery service, but Mr. Huang felt the service fee was too high for guests to afford. He said the platform usually draws a commission of 20-30%, and the meal tax also has to be paid by the restaurant, which would have been a small business has little left.
Although not joined, but Huang boss said, now every day there are still a lot of allegedly various platforms of Chinese, Indian, Mexican women or take-out boy, they received orders to call them to book, and then they come to the store to pick up the goods to give guests. The difference is that restaurant merchants no longer have to give discounts to the platform, as for how much the platform earns, the restaurant does not care.
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