EatStreet to stop delivery service in Tucson area

If your Friday night consists of curling up in a blanket, watching Netflix and having EatStreet deliver your favorite Chinese food, you’ll have to adjust your plans.

Beginning Monday, Oct. 1, EatStreet will no longer deliver in the Tucson area.

But EatStreet, primarily known as an online food-ordering service, isn’t leaving Tucson entirely.

Here’s how EatStreet works: You open its website or app and see 15,000 restaurants in 250 cities, including dozens of Tucson eateries. View menus, order food and drive to the restaurant to pick it up.

Beyond online ordering, in certain cities EatStreet will also deliver. Tucson was one of those cities — until Monday.

You can still order online through EatStreet, but it will no longer deliver in the Old Pueblo.

Despite Tucson’s growing culinary scene, EatStreet’s delivery service didn’t do as well as CEO Matt Howard had hoped.

The company started doing deliveries in Tucson in January.

“Tucson is a little bit bigger of a market than we normally focus on,” Howard said, adding that the city was “outside of our normal comfort zone.”

EatStreet is based in Madison, Wisconsin, which is home to 250,000 people. Tucson’s population is more than twice that.

Beyond Tucson’s size, Howard said there’s been an increase in competition within delivery services.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

Grubhub, Door Dash, Postmates and Uber Eats are just a handful of restaurant delivery services available in Tucson.

“Tucson’s an important market to us,” Howard said, adding that he hopes EatStreet can continue to grow here, even without the delivery option.

But Jay Tolkoff, owner of Tucson’s PJ Subs, said companies such as EatStreet are actually hurting local businesses.

PJ Subs worked with EatStreet when the company first started delivering in Tucson.

“There were problems at first; I expected that,” Tolkoff said. “We were giving them feedback because they were simple, fixable problems. Nothing ever changed.”

Tolkoff said PJ Subs lost customers because of EatStreet’s operational and service issues.

For example, Tolkoff said there was a lack of communication between delivery drivers and the restaurant. Although it took him 15 minutes to make a sandwich for a customer, drivers wouldn’t pick it up for an additional 30 to 45 minutes, he said.

Other times, he said, a driver would pick up the food but the customer wouldn’t receive it for an additional hour or so. He said these kinds of issues were common.

And Tolkoff had no way of contacting the drivers.

Tolkoff also said EatStreet would often dispatch delivery drivers from Tucson’s far west side, even though there were drivers closer to PJ Subs, which is near the University of Arizona.

“The bottom line is that they were not in control of the situation,” Tolkoff said. “It was more trouble than it was worth.”