When you are a busy college student, activities like, well, eating, can be a daunting task to accomplish. The Grubhub app is meant to help students have one less time-consuming activity in their daily rush. Rather than waiting in line at the Cafe to order a coffee or lingering in Lower waiting for their food, students don’t have to wait at all. They can just order ahead, receive the notification confirming their order is ready, grab their food, and get on with their next thing. This works well for students who prefer to eat in their dorms or who are always on the go.
Cafe 2020 is an especially Grubhub-friendly location, sometimes to a fault. Although students have sometimes benefitted from the convenience, they also have their grievances. With the ease of ordering online, there can be an overwhelming backup of orders, causing a longer waiting period. Students might end up waiting 20-30 minutes for their food, and items tend to run out quickly. Is the convenience of Grubhub neutralized when students end up waiting longer and staff end up working harder?
To understand Grubhub’s impact, I wanted to talk to the workers of the Cafe themselves. This was not necessarily easy, as the workers are usually all hands-on deck and have little time for a student badgering them with inquiries. I initially made the mistake of going during the day. As an employee made a drink, I sheepishly waited to ask my question. They hardly had a moment to pause in between orders, so I rolled back in around 4:30 pm. I approached one employee, mid-latte-making, and took down her email. The employee wished to remain anonymous. She shared that Grubhub has had huge backlogs since it’s implementation. On my next visit to the Cafe, I got the emails of two more employees. One of them wrote, “Orders have increased an incredible amount, it’s very overwhelming.” The change to the Grubhub system came quickly for the staff, and, in some ways, added to the demand of their jobs. “The Grubhub system has made my job harder as they dropped it on us last semester,” the employee wrote in an email.
Prior to the Grubhub system, Cafe 2020 was still overwhelmed at times with students’ orders. During rush hours you could walk into the Cafe and see a line of 10 or more students. However, things were managed differently. For starters, because all orders were made in the Cafe, some students wouldn’t bother to join in the line if they saw it was especially long. And, the workers could only take a few orders at a time, forcing students to wait while they got caught up before taking the next order. The chaos is less visible in the Cafe now that there is no physical line of hungry students, but if you take a look behind the counter, chaos is rampant. A dozen drinks and aluminum-wrapped food sit ready on the counter for students who sometimes aren’t even in the building yet. Workers can be seen hurrying from drink to drink and carrying breakfast sandwiches by the handfuls to keep up with online orders.
The Grubhub system also lacks the person-to-person interaction that is typical in cafes. Not only do the workers have an increase in demand, but they aren’t directly interacting with the customers. “The Grubhub system has changed the workflow entirely,” says the one-year-employee. When it comes to virtual orders, “the drink slips sometimes lack important information for us to make the drinks people want.” Since all orders are virtual, students cannot make specific requests as easily; there is a disconnect between the barista and the student.
While students may have had the wherewithal before to turn around if they saw a line that was too long, this same choice is not applicable on the Grubhub app. Students can get frustrated when the convenience of Grubhub is unreliable. One employee commented on her experience with customers’ frustrations, “We have students complain that we were slow with their orders,” and some students asking for refunds after they felt their time was wasted.
On an app that places great demand on the workers’ end, they are bound to be overrun with orders at times. While this may feel annoying for students on the receiving end, we should remember we aren’t the only ones facing the inconvenience.
There is only so much the Cafe workers can do within this system. “We are doing our best to keep up,” one employee says. Yes, we are busy students, but these workers are quite busy too. The Grubhub app helps us students navigate our schedules, but it also adds to the workload of others. As much as we are all entitled to an iced coffee and warm bagel to keep us going, we can’t forget to express our gratitude to the people who are providing sustenance for hundreds of students every day.