They allowed customers with mobility issues, inconvenient schedules, or those who just don’t feel like leaving the house to have a greater variety of dinner options available to them. They allowed restaurants to offer online delivery without having to build their own sites from scratch. In the beginning, these apps appealed to both businesses and customers. (Grubhub and Seamless would merge in 2013, and the company, while still maintaining separate sites for each brand, went public on the New York Stock Exchange as GRUB in 2014.) Chances are you’ve used one of these sites, or one of dozens of smaller apps like Slice or Foodler to get your lunch without having to ever speak to another human being. Seamless launched in 1999, Grubhub in 2004, Postmates in 2011, and Uber Eats in 2014.

To order delivery food in the olden days, a person would consult the oracle of paper menus piled up by the landline (that’s a phone with a cord that’s mounted to the wall), call the restaurant (which was often too noisy to hear), and eventually a delivery person would arrive and they could only accept cash.īut then, the “problem” of takeout was solved with the internet.

Seamless and grub hub