“I think you’re just going to see, at the end of the day, it’s pretty hard to differentiate,” he added. “The customer doesn’t care.” Price predicts companies that focus on a single area, such as the merchant aggregators like Seamless that market and process orders, and those on the back end handling delivery logistics, will fare best. “I believe what’s going to happen is what’s happened in every other industry, that there is explicit value in specialization,” Price says. “Specialize in one thing and do that one thing really well.”

Less promising are the more unwieldy, broader efforts to market, process orders and fulfill deliveries such as Postmates and DoorDash, he says.

Bloomberg reported recently that Square Inc. tried to sell Caviar, its food delivery business, but was turned down by potential buyers like Uber, GrubHub, and Yelp. It said Caviar was losing money and pulled out of Atlanta, Minneapolis and Miami. It also reported that Postmates had been slow to raise new financing and, earlier this year, the financing efforts of DoorDash fell short.

Stock in GrubHub, meanwhile, has seen a healthy rise. Its price has risen to $42.64 from $30.68 in late October of 2015.

Seamless has succeeded at training customers to think of its website first, says Price. “Anytime you think about ordering food, you just think about Seamless,” he says.

A convenient truth

Going without a system like Seamless, which Roland hopes to do one day, means coaxing customers to give up the convenience. Swanger thinks that may be difficult right now.

“Let’s face it. New Yorkers are all about convenience,” he says. “Unless he gets 10,000 restaurants to follow his suit, you’re really not going to take on Seamless or GrubHub, I don’t think.”

Identified only as Mike, a delivery restaurant owner in Brooklyn commented on the Tribeca Citizen piece that he had stopped fighting Seamless, which he called a “necessary evil” with a “greedy business model.”

“It is next to impossible to get people to stop using Seamless and order through your site,” he wrote. “People want everything in one spot, and Seamless does that for ordering.”

Roland says he would dearly love to see his customers willing to make the extra effort to go to his website and sign in with a name and password to place orders.

He is raising his Seamless and GrubHub prices to encourage them, and he is offering customer loyalty programs such as a free 11th order as well as lower prices on his website, he says.

“I’m asking a little more out of my customers,” he says. “You want to be lazy and just use your thumbprint and GrubHub app, you’re going to pay more for it, that’s all,” he says. “If you log into my website and put your password, you’ll get a cheaper sandwich and the 11th one will be free.”

“Come on,” he says. “Get with the program. I’m trying to hook you up.”