Grabhab suggested free lunch for everyone yesterday in New York. What could go wrong?

Between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., New Yorkers could use the Grubhub promo code to get a $ 15 discount on lunch. Naturally, the restaurants were flooded with an unexpected flow of orders. According to Buzzfeed, an employee of a Mexican restaurant in Harlem, herself delivered orders via Uber because their delivery driver was too congested. An employee of Greenberg’s Bagels in Brooklyn also told Buzzfeed that they receive 50 orders per hour, whereas they typically receive about 10 orders from Grubhub per day.

Across New York, Grubhub said he got about 6,000 orders per minute. Within an hour, some users tweeted that the promo code was no longer working or that restaurants had marked themselves closed so as not to receive more orders. In general, many orders were delayed and / or canceled, but the most affected were restaurant workers and suppliers, who had difficulty fulfilling orders at an impossible speed.

Grubhub said it simulated the action as before, but this time customers used the promo code six times more, which caused unexpectedly high demand.

“To help businesses prepare for yesterday’s campaign, we warned all restaurants in our network in advance, which included various forms of communication via email and within the platform,” Grubhab said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Even with such training, no one could have predicted the level of demand, and unfortunately, this has put a strain on some restaurants. We will undoubtedly learn a lot from this, which can help us optimize and mitigate the problems in the future. “

Obviously, many restaurant workers did not receive a memo – and even in this case, taking active measures, such as adding an additional driver to the shift, would not prepare the restaurant for such a sharp increase in demand.

This is not the first time Grubhub advertising has inadvertently served short-end restaurants.

In March, County Attorney General Carl Racine sued Grubhub for “misleading area residents and using local restaurants to increase their own profits”. One incident cited by the lawsuit was the start of the Grubhub pandemic. “Dinner for support”Promotion that has been stopped. Launched in late March 2020, Grubhub offered restaurants the option to offer a $ 10 coupon when ordering more than $ 30, but the restaurant had to pay the bill for this free meal. As for consumers, Grubhub urged customers to “save by supporting restaurants [they] love, ”even though their promotion actually puts more strain on restaurants, forcing them to lower profits.

For yesterday’s promotion, Grubhub paid customers a $ 15 coupon, not restaurants. The company says it has complied 400,000 lunch ordersthat at $ 15 apiece would put the company at $ 6,000,000 for what was pretty much a trick.

Grubhub also faced verification and legal issues for false advertising, a list of restaurants in your app without the consent of the enterprise. This means that a consumer can place an order at Grubhub for a restaurant that doesn’t even know they are on Grubhub, which means the company can pay Grubhub money without knowing it. Or, as soon as the Grubhub courier arrives, the restaurant may not even know they need to prepare a takeaway order.

Despite the increase in delivery orders during the pandemic, food delivery apps are still running fought to make a profit. But customer engagement campaigns like yesterday’s are unlikely to encourage customers to keep coming back to Grubhub.