Some Baton Rouge Restaurants Boycotting Waitr This Week
Following in the footsteps of Lafayette, some Baton Rouge restaurants and customers are boycotting Waitr this week. This is to demonstrate to the food delivery service their value following the company's recently announced controversial new terms for restaurants.
The boycott was inspired by the recent one-day blackout in Lafayette and started on Sunday and will run through the weekend.
The Lafayette boycott wasn't as successful as most hoped because Tropical Storm Barry caused many restaurants to close unexpectedly.
Waitr issued the following statement in response to both boycott events in Lafayette and Baton Rouge:
From our founding, our mission has been to bring the value of food delivery to our restaurant partners with the lowest fees in the industry. As we move to a performance-based rate model on August 1, we continue to provide restaurants with the lowest fees in the delivery industry, with those with the highest order volume receiving a rate half that of our national competitors, and those with lower volume still lower than our competition. The success of our restaurant partners is our first priority, and we will work closely with our partners to optimize their delivery success in order to drive rates to the lower end of the scale across the board.
The Baton Rouge boycott this week even has a Facebook page -- Baton Rouge Turns Off Waitr Week.
All this is in response to Waitr's recent new commission structure, which is higher for restaurants that have a smaller volume of sales through Waitr.