Volume on the wrong night

Free delivery on iftar orders. A discount on the family platter. Both have been on the app's Ramadan page since the month began, around the eighteenth depending on the sighting. Neither is the app's money.

Read the terms behind the banner. The app builds the page and puts its own name on it. The discount comes off the restaurant's ticket, and so does the waived delivery fee. One party is announcing the generosity and another is funding it.

Every kitchen in the collection has agreed to it, because the alternative is not appearing in the one month that pays for the year. That is a race to the bottom seen from the inside. An offer that began as a difference between two restaurants is now the price of being visible at all, and once everybody has paid it, nobody is chosen for it.

The part I find harder to watch is the hour. The discount does its work between about five and seven, the one stretch of this month when a kitchen is already at its limit. The family that was going to order anyway orders at a lower price. The family that was not becomes the two hundredth ticket in a kitchen that can land a hundred and fifty warm.

So the question worth an owner's evening is which hour of the month actually needs a customer. It is never sunset. It is the flat stretch between the table being cleared and ten at night, and the middle weeks, when ordering in has stopped being a novelty and the household is cooking again.

Volume at sunset changes nothing except the price of a sale the kitchen had already made, and the customer who came on it will remember that the app was generous in Ramadan. Nobody offers to fund a discount on a quiet Tuesday.