The 30% Fee That’s Quietly Killing Your Favorite Local Restaurants

Seems like I have been complaining a lot lately. Usually, I try to solve the problem and refuse to play the victim. That very thing happened back in 2020 when one of my small businesses hit a road block.

Most of you know me as a builder and a real estate investor.

What you may not know is that I also own a local restaurant — The Chicken Shack, right here in the Tri-Cities.

And a few years ago, I watched something happen to my restaurant — and every other local spot I knew — that made me genuinely angry.

The problem nobody warned us about

DoorDash. Uber Eats. Grubhub.

When they showed up, they sold us a story: more orders, more customers, more revenue. What they didn’t tell us is what it would actually cost.

Roughly 30% off the top. Of every order.

Now think about that for a second. A local restaurant — the kind of place where the owner is in the kitchen, where the staff knows your name, where the margins were already thin before any of this — is now handing nearly a third of every delivery order to a corporation headquartered somewhere else. Not the driver. The corporation.

And here’s the part that really got me: the service wasn’t even good. Cold food. Lost orders. Drivers we couldn’t reach. Customers blaming us when something went wrong on their end. (And sometimes? The drivers were literally eating the food. Seriously. Take a fry, take a bite of the sandwich — gone. Try explaining that one to the customer.) Every dollar of those fees? Out of the Tri-Cities. Out of our economy. Funding someone else’s quarterly earnings call.

That’s not a partner. That’s a tax.

So in 2020, I founded TC Food Force.

Same idea I keep coming back to — if the system isn’t serving the people building things, build a different system.

TC Food Force is a local delivery service for local restaurants. Fees about a third lower than the national guys. Free menu setup, handled entirely by us. Full-time dispatchers — actual humans — when something goes sideways. Drivers trained to make customers loyal to your brand, not the delivery service. And the customer data stays with the restaurant, because those are your customers. Not ours.

Every dollar stays in the Tri-Cities.

And yes, our drivers leave the food in the bag.

This is what I mean when I talk about community

I write a lot about wealth, about freedom, about building things that outlast us. But none of that matters if the small businesses that make a place feel like a place get squeezed out by national platforms that don’t know the town’s name.

The next twenty years are going to look very different than the last twenty. Local businesses are going to need to be more resilient, more connected, more willing to back each other up. TC Food Force is one small attempt at that. There will need to be more.

If you own a restaurant in the Tri-Cities, I’d love to talk. If you’re a customer, order from places that use us — you’ll know because the food shows up hot and the driver actually cares.

And if you just believe, like I do, that the people building things in your town deserve better than a 30% haircut from Silicon Valley — forward this to someone who needs to read it.

We’re stronger together. I really do mean that.