Still can some places, but generally it came down to keeping a drawer of menus for restaurants you like, family looks at the menu, call up the restaurant, and they deliver for a fixed known fee (or more often free, above a normal order threshold of maybe $20 which would be $30-40 today). It would come directly from the restaurant, no petulant third party complaining about whether or not you tipped enough ahead of time of service to be worth treating you and your property with respect (ie nobody would eat your food if they didn’t like you).
It really was a fine state. I now appreciate that some places let you order online and then just pay normal prices when you pick it up. Great too. The centralized nature of door dash and GrubHub are a pain in the ass. First I have to poke through all of the adverts for McDonald’s and subway, then I have to figure out which restaurants are ripping me off with their online prices, deal with guessing which things have extra fees and which things have “waived” fees, use the mediocre UI that still friends on restaurants to do the hard work of adding pictured and sane descriptions (they usually don’t), and then guess how much tip will get my food delivered while it’s still warm by the “independent contractor” assigned my case. More middlemen means more people trying to sap you dry.
Were you old enough to order food before apps?
My first job was washing dishes in a restaurant half a decade before the iPhone released, so yes
I believe Pizza Hut had online ordering at the time, but via their website amd the drivers probably all worked directly for the individual Pizza Huts
Still can some places, but generally it came down to keeping a drawer of menus for restaurants you like, family looks at the menu, call up the restaurant, and they deliver for a fixed known fee (or more often free, above a normal order threshold of maybe $20 which would be $30-40 today). It would come directly from the restaurant, no petulant third party complaining about whether or not you tipped enough ahead of time of service to be worth treating you and your property with respect (ie nobody would eat your food if they didn’t like you).
It really was a fine state. I now appreciate that some places let you order online and then just pay normal prices when you pick it up. Great too. The centralized nature of door dash and GrubHub are a pain in the ass. First I have to poke through all of the adverts for McDonald’s and subway, then I have to figure out which restaurants are ripping me off with their online prices, deal with guessing which things have extra fees and which things have “waived” fees, use the mediocre UI that still friends on restaurants to do the hard work of adding pictured and sane descriptions (they usually don’t), and then guess how much tip will get my food delivered while it’s still warm by the “independent contractor” assigned my case. More middlemen means more people trying to sap you dry.