Protect Our Restaurants is requesting from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulation to assess and manage the predatory practices of food delivery app companies.

Right now, food delivery apps like Grubhub, Uber Eats, Postmates and Doordash are causing huge problems for restaurants and communities. While restaurants grapple with the catastrophic consequences of COVID-19, these Wall Street-funded predatory actors are charging hidden fees, roughly 30 percent of every transaction, manipulating delivery workers and exploiting restaurants, workers and consumers, in some cases driving restaurants out of business.

Increasingly, food delivery apps are opening their own “ghost kitchens” so that they compete with the very restaurants dependent on their services. This is wrong. Food delivery apps are a simple technology that should simply help connect people that want to order from restaurants with restaurant owners and workers that make their food.

The goal of the Protect Our Restaurants movement is to bring together restaurant owners, workers, civil society groups and consumers to persuade policymakers to regulate food delivery apps so they can’t use their market power to exploit restaurants and take money out of our local economies.

There are two ways to get started:

• Organize locally: One of the goals is getting local and state governments to cap commission fees charged by delivery apps. An organizing guide, which walks community members through how to organize restaurant owners in their community, is sent to anyone that signs up.

• Sign the letter to the FTC: Another goal is to get the Federal government entity tasked with preventing fraud in the marketplace to act against the false and deceptive actions by these apps.