At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many states, counties, cities, and local communities imposed fee caps (price controls) on third-party restaurant food delivery app companies, limiting the amount they could charge restaurants for their marketing, sales, and delivery services. This made sense in March 2020 and for some time thereafter to ensure people could access food during a national emergency, but most jurisdictions with fee caps have long since removed them. 

The exception to this rule is New York City (NYC), which, to our knowledge, is the only U.S. jurisdiction to have left its COVID-era fee caps in place. While detailed public data on the restaurant food delivery industry is scarce, using what public data is available, we estimated the economic harm in dollars to the popular restaurant food delivery app companies—DoorDash, Uber (Uber Eats), and Grubhub—due to the price controls during the past four years. In total, we estimate harm from 2022-2023 due to fee caps on the restaurant food delivery app companies of between $140.1 million and $160.8 million within the NYC market alone.