Grubhub’s Disastrous New York Promo is About More Than Just Bad Marketing

The bombastic failure of GrubHub’s free meal promotion highlights the biggest issues in the restaurant industry — and why restaurant workers aren’t returning

Photo by Joshua Lawrence on Unsplash

There is a sound that haunts my dreams. It sounds like a cowbell, only tinnier. More electronic. Artificial. In this instance, the cowbell is not a prescription — it is a disease, a weapon of insanity. The GrubHub order notification.¹

Now, take that cowbell, and multiply it by 6,000. Effectively, this is the fiasco that occurred in New York this past Tuesday, May 17.

As reported by numerous media outlets, GrubHub, citing a survey that said 69% of working New Yorkers skipped lunch, decided to run a promotion offering New Yorkers a $15 credit from 11am-2pm if they ordered from GrubHub — basically a free meal². Here’s the catch, though: GrubHub didn’t let restaurants know about the promotion in advance.

Additionally, New York City restaurants are, like other restaurants across the country, struggling to hire enough staff. Mondays and Tuesdays also happen to be the slowest business days for restaurants nationwide — the restaurant where I used to bartend isn’t even open on Tuesdays at the…