Sir, – Catherine Cleary's Weekend piece on restaurants and third-party delivery services was well balanced, and it was very uplifting to read a story from one restauranteur who has used these services to grow their business ("Food delivery in the Covid-19 age", Weekend, May 9th).
The other side of the coin is the insidious rent-seeking nature of these third-party apps. They add little to no economic value and divert a sizeable percentage of meagre restaurant margins away from the local business, and in some cases into the pockets of the so-called “disrupters” in the United States who in many cases bring nothing useful to business.
The delivery business is probably here to stay in some guise or other, so let us hope that a better way can be found for restaurateurs to make it work while ensuring that whatever margins exist flow back to local Irish restaurants and food producers. – Yours, etc,
JAMES CONNORS,
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Phibsborough,
Dublin 7.