The FTC is sending $23.8 million back to Grubhub customers this month, the payout from a 2024 settlement over consumer bans and misleading driver pay claims. It is a delivery platform story, but the real lesson is for the restaurant that took the order, not the app that delivered it.
Here is the uncomfortable part. When a guest orders through Grubhub, DoorDash, or Uber Eats, the restaurant rarely knows who that guest is. No name attached to a visit history, no phone number, no way to say welcome back. If that guest gets banned, confused, or annoyed by the platform, the restaurant eats the reputational hit without ever getting the chance to make it right. You cooked the food. The app owns the relationship.
That is the opposite of how retention actually works. A guest's second, third, and fourth visit is where the real money sits, but you can only build toward that if you know a visit happened at all. Delivery orders routed entirely through third-party apps are invisible to your loyalty program, invisible to your win-back list, invisible to your team's ability to recognize a regular. You cannot flag a first-timer, honor a returning guest, or check them into a rewards program if you never see their name.
This week, do an honest audit of your delivery mix. Pull the percentage of orders coming through third-party apps versus your own website, phone, or in-house ordering. For every delivery order, ask whether there is any way to capture that guest into your own system, a loyalty sign-up prompt, a receipt insert, a QR code for a direct-order discount next time. If the answer is no, that revenue is disconnected from your retention program entirely, and you are paying platform fees to remain a stranger to your own customer.
For the guests you do have contact with, in-house dine-in and pickup, make sure your floor is actually doing the basic blocking and tackling that turns a name into a habit. Ask every guest at checkout if they are a member of your loyalty program. Sign up the ones who are not. Fix a missing phone number on the spot. This sounds small next to a $23.8 million FTC settlement, but it is the exact opposite failure mode, an app losing track of who its customers are because the system got too big and too automated to notice individual people. Do not let your own restaurant make the same mistake at a smaller scale.
The operators who win the next five years will not be the ones who fight delivery apps. They will be the ones who treat every channel, delivery included, as a chance to convert an anonymous transaction into a known guest they can win back a second and third time. That takes a deliberate habit on the floor and a system that actually tracks who came back and what they spent.
Wingman builds that muscle into daily shifts, prompting the team to ask, capture, and recognize every guest so repeat visits become a real, trackable number instead of something you hope is happening.