In 2019, a restauranteur from Philadelphia had sued Grubhub for alleging that this delivery service had charged the restaurants for even those phone calls which were not even the orders for food. Grubhub takes a part of all the restaurant orders it has and the system for ordering through phone sets a proxy number up for every restaurant that is displayed on the delivery page of Grubhub. The company claimed that this was just a statistical model for determining which of the calls had been orders and which of the calls had been for other reasons. The restaurateurs have said that this model is not workable and it was difficult for them to obtain the transcripts which would dispute the charges.
Grubhub yesterday made an announcement that it is going to create one more step in the process of ordering as it is going to as its callers to dial #1 for the orders and #2 for anything else which they want to call for. This plan has come after the hearing which was conducted by the City Council of New York about the fees that was charged to the restaurants by the services such as Uber Eats and Grubhub and had then resulted in a demand that the company must hire an evaluator who was not involved directly.
Grubhub though is still just allowing the owners of the restaurant to review the phone call records that were till 120 days ago. A councilmember has said that nothing in the changes which have been proposed to compensate those who have paid for the thousands of cases of erroneous phone order fees in the months before this.
