Some Black restaurant owners say initiatives announced by delivery apps, like Uber Eats and DoorDash, to support Black-owned businesses have fallen short
Emily Birnbaum / Protocol : Tweets: @birnbaum_e , @protocol , and @mcwm Tweets: Emily Birnbaum / @birnbaum_e : I wrote about the limits of the Uber/Doordash/Postmates initiatives to boost Black-owned businesses and why some Black restaurant owners say it's not worth it to use delivery services at all. “I think it's totally a scam, how they make money off of us.” https://www.protocol.com/... @protocol : The relationship between restaurants and third-party apps can feel abusive and exploitative, and Black restaurant owners say the initiatives aren't fixing that. https://www.protocol.com/... Mike Murphy / @mcwm : first up today ! this excellent piece from @birnbaum_e exploring whether delivery apps's efforts to boost Black-owned businesses after the protests this summer have actually done anything: https://www.protocol.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The delivery platforms rolled out their Black-owned business initiatives at the height of the pandemic-driven pivot to delivery, when lockdowns made third-party apps the primary sales channel for many restaurants — and locked in the commission economics owners now describe as exploitative. That backdrop matters: the apps were courting merchants precisely when merchants had the least leverage to say no.
The initiatives also landed in a market defined by growth-over-profits competition among GrubHub, DoorDash, Postmates, and Uber Eats, where expanding restaurant supply is the strategic priority. Protocol's reporting, part of Mike Murphy's SMB tech series, tests whether these programs change the merchant relationship or just rebrand it — and the follow-on reporting found restaurants could self-identify as Black-owned through a simple form, with no verification.
First-order effects
- Black restaurant owners face a direct cost-benefit: the visibility programs don't offset the commissions and fees that led one owner to call the economics 'a scam,' and some conclude it's not worth using delivery services at all — the opposite of what the initiatives were designed to achieve.
- Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Postmates get the reputational benefit of support programs while the underlying merchant terms stay intact, meaning the initiatives function as marketing layered on the existing fee structure.
Second-order effects
- In a market competing on supply growth, each platform's initiative pressures rivals to match it with their own program — turning support for Black-owned businesses into a differentiator that rewards announcement volume rather than merchant economics.
- Self-identification without verification invites gaming of the Black-owned designation, as the later reporting on mislabeled restaurants showed, which risks devaluing the badge for the owners it was meant to help.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — goodwill programs that leave commission structures untouched — the durable fix shifts to structural questions: verification standards for merchant designations and regulatory or collective pressure on the fee model that restaurants became dependent on during the pandemic.
- The episode points toward platform governance of identity and eligibility claims becoming an ongoing operational burden for marketplaces, not a one-time program design choice.
The trend: Platform goodwill initiatives for marginalized merchants are colliding with the commission-based marketplace economics that made those merchants dependent in the first place.