Grubhub

As NYC residents and office workers used the code FREELUNCH at checkout, many customers reported instances of the app crashing due to overloaded servers. Others ...

Another NYC resident shared that they decided to grab lunch at a local spot instead, but it was also overwhelmed with orders from the Grubhub free lunch promo. On Tuesday (17 May), the food delivery service Grubhub offered people in New York City a free lunch with a special promotional code between 11am and 2pm. “As the city’s premier food delivery service, this is just one small step in our larger mission to connect local restaurants with hungry diners,” said Senior VP Ariella Kurshan in a statement. “Plus, Grubhub will be offering an additional $5 off promotion in NYC until May 31 for anyone who missed out.” Start your Independent Premium subscription today. One person jokingly tweeted, “Fav this tweet if you were on the nyc Grubhub battle field fighting for your free lunch” while another person wrote: “Grubhub said free lunch and all the restaurants said no”.

Your pie is on its way: At Zazzy's Pizza, a New York chain, lunchtime volume was 30 times higher than normal because of the Grubhub $15 promotion. · Email icon

As MarketWatch documented in the fall of 2021, online orders at many restaurants “ have become part of a crushing new reality” even on days when there aren’t promotions. Not that Romero was complaining: He anticipated getting plenty of new customers because of the promotion. Richie Romero, a proprietor of Zazzy’s Pizza, a Manhattan restaurant with three locations, said his Wednesday lunchtime business was 30 times higher than normal because of the promotion. But the response was so overwhelming that the company said it became challenging for its system to keep pace with demand, resulting in some customers being unable to place orders. But even then, participating restaurants were backed up delivering orders because of the sheer volume. But he eventually got the app to work and was soon rewarded with a free lunch of vegan nachos.

One unhappy customer was 3630th in line to talk to GrubHub's customer service about his missing order when he gave up.

A spokesperson from GrubHub sent BuzzFeed News a statement following the fiasco: "It’s clear, New Yorkers were hungry for lunch! By 2 p.m., both restaurant counters were flooded with dozens of orders waiting to be picked up and fielding calls about missing orders. He didn’t know about the promo in advance, one of his regulars alerted him. Some of us had to jump on the line — our prep guy had to make sandwiches for a little bit, the other manager was making sandwiches. “We’re pretty exhausted,” Ching told BuzzFeed News. “We’re one person short. Manuel, a GrubHub delivery driver who did not give his last name, told BuzzFeed News it was a "crazy lunch day" but he was just doing the best that he could to deliver as many orders as possible. On Tuesday, 50 orders came through in an hour. And customers were frustrated at the delays. After that Ching lost count. "I don't have food. — filling up previously empty Manhattan salad spots to pick up now much cheaper overpriced salad. I prob won't get food.

The company's app and website crashed on Tuesday due to “unprecedented” demand during the three-hour promotion.

“We work with our restaurant partners well in advance to notify them a bit,” Kreutler said. Become a Restaurant Business member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. He said the company planned to look into why this particular promotion got such a huge response. The New York Post reported last week that restaurants in the city weren’t expecting much from the free lunch promotion because of how frequent such discounts have become. Some said that restaurants seemed to have stopped accepting orders altogether. “We had unprecedented pre-order demand, more than we’ve ever actually seen,” said Christopher Krautler, the company’s director of consumer public relations.

Grubhub planned to treat New Yorkers to a free meal Tuesday with a three-hour lunch promotion that was designed to take $15 off orders.

By the numbers: A database tracking unidentified object sightings has grown to roughly 400 reports. - Why NATO formed and why Finland and Sweden want to join the alliance Yes, but: The demand exceeded the delivery service's expectations, Grubhub spokesperson Christopher Krautler said in a statement to Axios, noting there was an average of 6,000 orders per minute and "redemptions were six times higher than a similar promotion."

The delivery platform and restaurants struggled to keep up with thousands of orders..

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'Y'all scamming... where's my food?' Furious GrubHub users slam app after waiting HOURS for free $15 lunch in NYC when surging demand crashed the system. By ...

I have been in the queue to chat for 30 minutes and have been 3,695th in line for that 30 minutes.' 'You better do right by all of the restaurants you blindsided with crazy orders and zero delivery people. CHOPT, ASTOR PLACE: According to the survey, based on a sampling of 1,000 New Yorkers, those who answered said they often don't take breaks because they are busy during traditional lunchtimes. I ordered at 12:40, food was supposed to be here between 1:20 - 1:30. It's 2:50 and I've been hung up on (twice) by customer service and the chat is unresponsive. 'My workplace placed an order for us to be delivered at 12:30. We didn't know there was a promo in place. It's impossible to contact the restaurants because they're swamped. 'All of these restaurants should drop you after today. Make sure to show them love today (and every day),' the app wrote. Still not here and the restaurant is closed now. [Customers] called very frustrated, understandably so, and at some point, we stopped taking GrubHub orders,' the manager added. 'New Yorkers went as hard for free lunch as the Rangers did in game 7. 'We could have tried to plan accordingly.

Grubhub has countless hungry New Yorkers to answer to after its ambitious ploy to give the city a free lunch backfired. The delivery app launched a promotion on ...

“Additionally, we increased driver incentives to help support demand.” Others said they couldn’t access the promotion because inundated eateries had switched off their service on the platform. A spokesperson for Grubhub told Fortune on Wednesday that during the promotion, there had been “an initial, temporary backlog due to an abundance of pre-orders and overwhelming demand at the beginning,” but they said the issue was quickly fixed.

On Tuesday, the delivery app Grubhub offered free food to anyone who used the promo code “freelunch.” But the platform and restaurants were overwhelmed by ...

Let’s pause to think about the restaurant workers, who simply went to work on a Tuesday and had no way to benefit from this promotion. Grubhub has apparently never tried to buy concert tickets online; otherwise, it might have anticipated the problems. The fight to become New York City’s preeminent delivery service is getting extremely heated as competitors get increasingly aggressive with their tactics and promotions.

GrubHub orders didn't arrive for many during the NYC free lunch promotion on Tuesday.

Even with that preparation, there was unfortunately strain on some restaurants due to the unprecedented demand; however, we’ve already been hearing from many of our partners about how this was a success and a positive boost to their business." Along with our restaurants and drivers, we ultimately were able to fulfill more than 450,000 orders connected to the promotion," Grubhub said, in part, in their statement. "Delivery drivers are riding all over the city and are hard to find. We didn't know this was happening and couldn't adjust ETA," the restaurant said. Harlem Public says it was one of the restaurants buried in orders. Given the current state of the economy, it's not really a wonder why.

Between 11 AM and 2 PM, New Yorkers could use a Grubhub promo code to get a $15 discount on lunch. Naturally, restaurants got flooded with an unexpected deluge ...

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The delivery app promised NYC office workers a free lunch. It... didn't work.

“But this needs to be planned months out and give knowledge to the large businesses who see tens of thousands of dollars daily.” I also asked about the strain on restaurants, to which the spokesperson responded: “While unfortunately some restaurants did experience a strain, which we will learn from and optimize to help mitigate in the future, thousands of restaurants benefited from this lunchtime boost. A New York Post article from last week confirms that restaurants were informed about the promotion in advance and weren’t “planning to staff up or purchase more food.” Unfortunately, some restaurant workers say they received no notice at all. But if Grubhub attempts a similar promotion in the future, drivers and restaurant owners have some requests. “The fast food, fast casual, and any quick service restaurants definitely got overwhelmed heavily,” she says. “These were not hidden by Grubhub, nor do we have access to do that,” the spokesperson told me. At first glance, it seemed as though the company also hid one of my tweets (see left) in which I asked a frustrated restaurant worker to comment for this article. We had to turn off our GH ordering because no one was coming to take the deliveries to the customers.” “It was unprecedented and at times we were receiving 6,000 orders a minute.” Michael, a Grubhub driver of nearly three years who asked to remain anonymous, tells me that Grubhub drivers were informed of the promotion via email about a week in advance. “GrubHub did not have enough drivers on the road today to handle the volume of orders. Grubhub maintains that the promotion was a success—but a vocal contingent of participants are claiming utter failure.

Yesterday was a bad day for Grubhub. The food delivery service launched a free lunch promotion for people in New York City. And spoiler alert: it backfired.

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The delivery service offered a $15-off promotion Tuesday, causing the app to crash and overwhelming restaurants.

The chaos surrounding the promotion comes as Grubhub struggles to capture a larger share of the third-party delivery market. But even with the emergency measures, Grubhub had a cancellation rate of about 5 percent of the total orders, five times the typical 1 percent, Tovar said. Tovar said the company sent “a couple of different emails” to restaurants as well as messages via the tablets that operators use at their establishments. As the numbers spiked, executives had to shell out “two or three times what we normally pay for drivers,” Tovar said. “For anybody who was driving on the Grubhub platform yesterday, while it was extremely busy and a bit chaotic, the financial incentive for them was significant.” Grubhub has also been taken to court in recent years. “We don’t want any customer to have a bad experience. “Obviously, we now have a new data set that we can apply toward future promotions like this.” But even with the warnings, Tovar acknowledged that Grubhub undersold the expected response. “The restaurant still gets paid for the full amount of their order. The crush caused some consumers to get an error message when they tried to place an order or rejected their promo code altogether on checkout. The company was giving locals $15 off between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., although customers were still responsible for taxes, additional fees and tip.

By Jacob Kaye. There's no such thing as a free lunch. On Tuesday afternoon, long after a normal lunch rush would have ended, the owner of Comfortland in ...

“Grubhub is never something that is good for business, just because of the margins. So, it's not something that we're ever crazy about, it's just, we can't afford not to do it because of the pandemic and everything – deliveries were our main source of business.” Juan Sanchez, also an Astoria resident, was one of Comfortland’s customers to have their meal sit idly on the restaurant’s counter and never get delivered. “That was a whole mess,” Alam said. Delivery app companies helped a number of local restaurants stay afloat during the pandemic, when indoor dining was off limits, Dalessio said. “We will continue demanding that app companies listen to their workers and business partners.” “To help businesses prepare for yesterday’s promotion, we gave advance notice to all restaurants in our network, which included multiple forms of communications across email and in-platform,” Krautler said. “And there's been no correspondence today to offer an apology for the s–t that they did yesterday. Christopher Krautler, a spokesperson for Grubhub, said that the company didn’t expect so many people would take advantage of the promotion, which was projected to generate similar order numbers as a promotion run last year. They named the promotion “Free Lunch.” Darren and Melanie Lawless, the owners of nearby Il Bambino, were similarly inundated with orders. Some delivery workers were rushed from one location to the next.