The delivery apps have your customer’s name, phone number and order history. You have a percentage of the ticket. Every order through them makes the relationship theirs and the margin thinner, and the day you stop paying, the orders stop.
Meanwhile the thing that actually fills a Tuesday… people who know you, who’ve been in, who got a reason to come back… is the thing nobody is working on. There’s no list. The reviews are whatever walked in and felt strongly. The Instagram has a photo of a burger from eleven months ago.
And the one asset that’s genuinely yours, the room on a slow night, sits empty while you pay commission on the busy one.