EDMONTON—When a north Edmonton restaurateur discovered a website offering deliveries from her diner without her knowledge, she got to the bottom of it by placing an order — to herself.

Pamela Charlet was surprised Saturday morning when a regular customer congratulated her on finally offering deliveries through a website called DoorDash.

Only issue? Charlet had never heard of the service.

Not only that, but when Charlet and her husband Lyle opened Hathaway’s Diner in 2006, they decided against offering delivery due to the restaurant’s size and location, and chose to focus instead on the dine-in experience. Since then, the diner has become a Wellington neighbourhood favourite and Edmonton’s top-ranked restaurant on TripAdvisor.

“I don’t do deliveries because we’re quite small,” Charlet said of the 39-seat establishment. “To put delivery containers all over the place doesn’t work for us. We put our customers in the dining room first.”

Fearing an impostor was delivering dishes under the diner’s name — the website used Hathaway’s logo and a similar menu with several pricing errors — Charlet had her grill master and de facto social media manager Theresa McDougald post a notice on the business’s Facebook page to say the restaurant has never delivered and to be wary of imitators.

Then, out of curiosity, Charlet asked McDougald to order a Hathaway’s bacon and egg breakfast, through the website, to herself.

Several minutes later, the diner got a call for a takeout order from a number from the state of Georgia placing the same order under McDougald’s name. So, the kitchen prepared the dish with the same attention it would for a seated customer, packed it up, and waited for a confused Dasher, what DoorDash calls its delivery drivers, to show up and cop to the jig.

Read more:

Four Edmonton restaurants crack list of top 100 outdoor dining spots in Canada

Servers scammed by recent dine and dash thefts shouldn’t be footing the bill, lawyer says

Edmonton Queer History App aims to fill gap left by textbooks

An American tech company that connects eaters with eateries, DoorDash facilitates food deliveries in cities across Canada and the United States through a mobile app and website.

First, users place an order from a list of local restaurants offering takeout in their area, then, DoorDash dials in the request, and assigns a driver, or “Dashers,” to fulfil the last mile.

The company, which launched five years ago, expanded into Edmonton, St. Albert, and Sherwood Park in October 2017, offering deliveries from more than 100 restaurants. The only hitch is that not all the restaurants know they’re on DoorDash’s list.

The website lists restaurants from larger chains such as Tim Hortons and Subway, as well as smaller eateries.

But some, like LovePizza and Prairie Noodle Shop in Edmonton, have also spoken out against the tech company’s penchant for failing to consult them first, and posted similar statements to their own Facebook pages.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“They really overstepped their boundary thinking they could just put my diner on their site,” Charlet said.

Having been approached by similar delivery services, Charlet said she turned them down, believing that Hathaway’s in-house experience would suffer from an influx of orders.

“Skip the Dishes called me, and I said no and they backed off. This place didn’t even approach me,” she said. “To do too much takeout at lunchtime would not be a good thing because (we’re) not set up for that,” she explained.

But if she did decide to deliver, Charlet said, she wouldn’t want agents she had no hand in hiring or managing placing orders, handling the product, or hanging around the restaurant waiting for pickups.

In a statement to StarMetro Edmonton, a spokesperson for DoorDash wrote that the tech company’s goal is to help local businesses flourish by serving as their “last-mile logistical partner.”

“For the majority of our merchants, being on DoorDash offers not only an additional influx of customers and revenue, but also presents an additional marketing opportunity,” the statement read.

“For those not interested in being on DoorDash for any reason, we immediately remove them from the platform upon their request.”

The spokesperson also confirmed that the company adds restaurants to its list of vendors without informing them first, and relies on those restaurants to request removal from the platform.

For Charlet, DoorDash’s liberties feel like a practice that borders on “bad business.”

“I feel pretty angry. I feel used. I worked so hard to make this name, to pick a logo, to make my menu, to think about the menu,” Charlet said. “It’s my name on the line.”

After a series of phone calls, Hathaway’s Diner has been dashed from the app and website, and is no longer listed as a DoorDash restaurant.

It’s a relief to the restaurateur, but the experience has forced her to reconsider how she handles takeout orders in the internet age.

“I think we caught it early enough.” Charlet added. “Had this gone on another three months, who knows how many takeout orders I would have had? Who knows how many people would have been unhappy?”

Read more about: