The $14 Burrito That Becomes $32 Before It Reaches You

The restaurant sets a price for its food. The delivery app takes roughly a third of it, in commission, fees, and charges. To survive, the restaurant raises its menu prices, and you end up paying more, while the driver gets paid less, and the app walks off with a cut of every side of the transaction.

The 30 percent toll

Delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats charge restaurants commission rates that can reach 30 percent of each order, on top of marketing fees and other charges. For a restaurant running on single-digit margins, that’s a loss on every delivery order, or a price increase on every item to absorb it. The app doesn’t build the kitchen, buy the food, or employ the cook, but it takes a cut large enough to decide whether the restaurant can afford to stay on the platform at all.

The restaurants know the math. Many have said plainly that they lose money on delivery orders. But they stay, because they’re stuck. Once a neighborhood’s customers order through an app, the restaurant can’t simply stop being on it without losing that entire channel, so it eats the commission and jacks up prices to try to break even.

The fee that double-charges you

Here’s the part that makes it enshittification instead of just an expensive service: you pay for delivery more than once. You pay a delivery fee, you pay a service fee, you pay higher menu prices because of the commission, and you’re often nudged to tip. The restaurant set a price, the app adds its layer on top, and the item that cost $14 on the menu can end up costing $32 by the time fees land, all while the driver sees only a fraction of it.

The app has become the toll booth on a transaction that previously happened between two people in the same town. It inserts itself between the restaurant and its own customers, captures the relationship, and charges everyone involved, the restaurant in commission, the customer in fees and markups, and it optimizes for keeping the whole loop running.

The endgame for a local business

The long-term result is that the app stops being an occasional convenience and becomes the primary way a restaurant reaches its customers. The restaurant loses direct knowledge of who its regulars are, loses the ability to offer them a deal without the app’s markup, and becomes a supplier to the platform rather than a business with its own customers. Its margins get dictated by a third party, and the brand it built becomes part of someone else’s inventory.

That’s the enshittification endgame: a convenience that arrives cheap, then extracts more and more until the business that produces the actual value is barely holding on, and the customer is paying a premium to a middleman who made nothing.

The receipt

• The scam: Delivery apps take up to 30 percent of each order, so restaurants raise prices and everyone pays more except the app.
• The mechanism: High commissions and fees that get passed to the customer through markup, plus fees stacked at checkout and low driver pay.
• Why it’s still running: Restaurants are stuck, unable to leave the platform without losing the delivery channel that now defines their customer relationship.
• The fix that’s missing: Caps on delivery-app commissions and fees, and a marketplace that doesn’t let a middleman extract more from a local business than the business makes.

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This is a real, widely-documented problem. The video below walks through it.

Watch: Food Theory: Why Is DoorDash SO Expensive?