By Giuliana Keeth
I can easily say that DoorDash is one of the apps I use most regularly, especially when I am here at Cornell. Studying or working around the clock can leave you exhausted and when a dining hall menu looks particularly unappetizing, what do you do? You open up the delivery application and start looking for a restaurant to order from.
Yet, I had one experience with Paris Baguette a couple of weeks ago that left a sour taste in my mouth toward the app and, most importantly, all of the extra charges that got added to my order. Although delivery fees sometimes spike prices up to as high as eight dollars during peak times, it seemed understandable because each restaurant needs to make sure they are still making profit, as they also pay to use the DoorDash platform. The DoorDash website offers three types of service plans to restaurants: a “Basic” plan which charges a 15 percent commission per delivery order, a “Plus” plan charging 25 percent commission which lets restaurants access DashPass customers and finally, a “Premier” plan charging 30 percent commission with a guarantee that a restaurant will have at least 20 orders per month. Delivery fees exist to make sure that restaurants profit from delivery orders despite commission costs. Add these extra charges to the 15 percent service fee which helps DoorDash operate, and you typically have at least five dollars of a surcharge to your order.
Using DoorDash is a convenience, and you pay for the service to save you time. However, is there a point where this service can’t balance all of the fees it includes? In my fateful encounter with Paris Baguette, I decided to order my typical mochi donut pastry and latte in advance before getting to the restaurant. I planned to pick up the order physically, but I thought it might save me some time ordering online, since I needed to get back to studying as quickly as possible. Imagine my horror when I grabbed the pickup bag, looked at the mochi donuts that were on sale at the bakery and realized that I had paid nearly ten percent more for my donut. My coffee had a similar increase in price. I realized then that these surcharges actually came from the online Paris Baguette menu that had been created in anticipation of DoorDash commission fees. Each listed item costs around ten to 20 percent more than its original price in-situ.
Adding extra charges to menu items is still somewhat understandable when you consider that certain restaurants have to add extra packaging to each order so that it can be transported. Additionally, depending on the time of day, the delivery fee charged by the restaurant doesn’t always cover the commission fees they pay to use the application. However, in the case of places like Paris Baguette, this packaging is already included in each order. So, why are customers having to pay not only a pre-set delivery fee, but also a menu surcharge?
Let’s take the example of two of my most frequented locations: PokeLava and Bibibowl. After browsing through the PokeLava menu, I compared the prices of the original build-your-own-bowl with two proteins. In the restaurant, the menu lists the base cost for this combination as $13.50, but on DoorDash, it appears as $15.50. Almost every combination on the menu, regardless of size, includes a surcharge of around two dollars (not including delivery fees). Depending on the size of bowl you order, you could be paying up to 15 percent more for your meal! This increase is paralleled in the case of the Bibibowl menu. Restaurants like these already package each bowl individually in a recyclable container with a plastic top, and you can ask for a paper bag to go with it. So, what are we really paying for with these added charges on the menu? Is it simply compensation for DoorDash restaurant commission fees?
When you take into account the looming commission fee over every order that DoorDash partners accept, you begin to understand why menu alterations are done by many restaurants. If restaurants which don’t use extra packaging charge more on their items without any added cost for packaging, I started to wonder what the price difference would be for a place where customers sit down to eat and delivery items cost more to package. Surely, these locations must charge an even greater amount.
I decided to explore this by researching the menu of Maru Ramen, a restaurant in downtown Ithaca. To my great surprise, the prices of each menu item remained the exact same on DoorDash! Their Tonkotsu ramen is listed as $12.50 on each platform, even though the restaurant packages the ramen using more containers than other items so that the deep-fried pork doesn’t get soggy. The example of Maru Ramen showed me that the rationale for increased menu prices as a way to offset commission fees isn’t so clear-cut.
A student from the Class of ’26 shared her opinion on the subject of DoorDash fees. “I could go now to get food at McDonalds. But, instead of doing that, I decide to place an order through the app in order to save me time. Time is convenience, and I am willing to pay extra for this. It all comes down to how much you value your time and the surcharges that may come from using a delivery service like DoorDash."
Adding surcharges to the menu price of an item can be a strategic move by a restaurant to displace costs of delivery products using DoorDash services and drivers. However, as consumers, we must keep in mind the subjectivity of these added costs and the underlying reality that a restaurant can charge extra for the sake of extra profit, not for compensation of additional packaging and commissions. We must make the difficult decision: is the convenience of DoorDash enough to offset increasingly steep fees?
Giuliana Keeth is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at gmk74@cornell.edu.
