9 Surprising Reasons It's Cheaper to Go Out to Dinner Than Order Delivery

It’s a Friday night, and you’ve had a long week. The fridge is empty, but the last thing you want to do is get dressed and go out to dinner. So you pick up your phone, open your go-to food delivery app, and decide on Chinese food. A few clicks later, your tab is somehow $60 for an order of General Tso’s and wonton soup.

“It would have been cheaper just to go to the restaurant!” you exclaim as you pull out your best cash back credit card.

And you might be right. Prices on delivery and take out have skyrocketed in recent years, so much that it might be cheaper to dine in an actual restaurant on occasion. Here are nine surprising reasons you might be better off getting dressed and heading out for dinner.

If you’re ordering just for yourself, then a sandwich and a side of fries might be all you want. Yet the $15 delivery minimum means you have to add to your order. Before you know it, a simple $12 meal balloons to $25 before fees and a tip. The delivery minimums are designed to make the stop worth it for drivers, but they work against people who would otherwise have a small order.

When you order delivery, the restaurant sets a delivery fee. This is usually a few dollars and it’s charged through the platform that you used to order. Let’s say you order a $6 McDonald’s burger, but there’s a $4 delivery fee. All of a sudden, before you even get to tax and tip, you’ve increased your total by 66%. This makes a huge impact, especially on smaller orders.

On top of the delivery fee, there’s often a separate service fee. This isn’t a tip, and it’s not delivery. Instead, it’s to help cover operating costs. Typically, this is the fee that offsets the commission that the platform charges the restaurant. But it can add another several dollars to your total order.

Most people are happy to tip their delivery drivers. These people are making their lives easier, often on the busiest nights or the evenings when you just don’t want to go out in the bad weather. The delivery drivers deserve those tips — but sometimes it isn’t made clear that gratuity is already included so you end up double tipping. And that’s on top of both the delivery fee and service fee.

People became used to low or no delivery fees in the early days of apps like Uber Eats. But now that those platforms are out of startup mode and are shifting towards a more sustainable business model, it’s become clear that those cheap prices were part of a customer acquisition plan. And now the prices are climbing back up to where they should have been.

While most people like ordering delivery on occasion, it is a luxury service. Someone is coming to your door to hand-deliver your food. It might seem like it’s less glamorous than going out to dinner, but it’s actually a pretty sweet situation if you think about it. But that’s why it has extra fees that drive the price up.

You might be paying more for take out or delivery based on the third-party platform that you use. Prices aren’t always consistent from platform to platform, and you could end up paying more for your butter chicken, depending on which app you decide to open up that day. It’s always worth checking to see if prices vary.

Restaurants run slim margins. While it might seem like they’re staying busy, it’s not a business that’s known for printing money. Add in a third-party ordering platform that’s taking a 20% or more commission on an order, and the restaurant is going to feel the pressure to cover that cost. That leads to you paying more when you order.

Even if the cost of ordering delivery does add up to more than dining in, sometimes you have to consider the cost of leaving the house. Between gas, parking, and even just your time and energy to put on clothes, sometimes the few extra dollars you’ll pay for delivery are worth it. Delivery fees are all about paying for convenience, and that’s exactly what you’re getting when you don’t even have to put on shoes.

To try to save a few more dollars on delivery, you can take advantage of the unlimited delivery programs that many of the delivery platforms offer. For $10 a month for each platform, you can get free delivery on all the DoorDash, GrubHub, or Uber Eats you want. Unfortunately, though, those service fees aren’t going anywhere.