Kara Swisher talks with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi about food delivery and the future of the economy
A restaurant delivery worker rides his bike on April 18 in New York City. Photo: Cindy Orr/Getty Images Restaurants continue to reel from the devastating impact of the coronavirus. The ones that have remained open have become even more reliant on the handful of online platforms that dominate the food delivery landscape — despite the fact that those platforms don’t really make any money themselves.
Dara Khosrowshahi: I think we always have to be concerned with their concern, because these are important people that you have to listen to, right? We have been a highly regulated and locally regulated business for a long time and will continue to be. Listen, if the concern comes from restaurant partners, making sure that the restaurant business is sustainable and they can grow — if the concern comes from couriers getting paid, that’s a great concern.
Khosrowshahi: It’s an industry that has been hit really hard. And these are people who build their lives around a great business and they are being hurt. And I guess what I’d say is, it’s easy to generalize, but as far as Uber goes, just take a look at what we’re doing. First of all, in our business, in our food business, what we charge a restaurant includes the cost of running the business, but also paying our couriers.
Khosrowshahi: Yeah, that’s been on the tipping side — we never took the tips. The tips are 100 percent pass-through. And again, there were competitors who were kind of messing around with tipping being part of earnings. We never did that. We will not do that. We introduced the feature where the eater can now pay the restaurant directly. If you just want to help out your local restaurant, you can pay that restaurant directly. That actually hurt our volumes very slightly.
Swisher: When you think about post-COVID, when the business comes back, are you expecting a much smaller restaurant scene? What does that do to your business?
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