OPS (Bushwick, 346 Himrod St, Brooklyn) — Italian / Pizza. Case study #42. Prices compared between Ops’s own Square online-ordering menu (the shop’s direct-order channel, linked as “Bushwick Ordering” from opsbk.com) and the same shop’s DoorDash storefront, both for the 346 Himrod Street location, captured the same day. Ops’s DoorDash page also carries a Pickup toggle; set to pickup, the storefront names the pickup point as “346 Himrod Street” and prices identically to delivery.
Order a Margherita from Ops — the naturally-leavened sourdough room on a quiet Bushwick corner that people cross the borough for — from the shop’s own online menu and it is $20.00. Order the same pie on DoorDash and it is $20.00. Not a cent more. The Pops (guanciale and onions) is $24 and $24; the 12″ Square Pie is $28 and $28; the Juno, the Cicero, the Rojo, the Mamma, the Iron Age, the calzone — all priced to the penny on both. We matched 16 items, and on 13 of them the DoorDash price is the shop’s own counter price exactly. Of the three that move, the Marinara is actually a dollar lower on DoorDash ($17 direct, $16 delivered); only the braised beans ($12 to $14) and the flourless chocolate cake ($10 to $12) run a dollar or two higher. The average across all 16 items is about +2% — statistically, no delivery markup at all.
That is the opposite of what a delivery bill usually implies. This series more often documents a menu quietly inflated on the app to claw back the platform’s commission — 15%, 25%, sometimes 40% over the counter. Ops does almost none of that. A basket of all 16 items rings up at $299 ordering direct and $302 on DoorDash: a difference of three dollars on three hundred, driven entirely by two four-dollar-and-under items. On the food, Ops charges DoorDash customers essentially what it charges everyone else — and when a shop holds its delivery prices at its own, it is the shop, not the customer, that swallows the platform’s cut.
The receipt
Because the food is not marked up, the entire delivery premium sits in the fees — and on DoorDash in New York those fees are unusually easy to itemize, because DoorDash discloses them itself. Take that one $20 Margherita. It travels onto DoorDash at the shop’s $20.00. On top of it DoorDash adds a service fee — which it states as 17% (minimum $3.25) on its New York checkouts — of about $3.40; a $1.99 “NYC Regulatory Response Fee,” a surcharge DoorDash invented to offset New York’s commission cap; and $0 delivery, as the storefront displayed. That is roughly $5.39 in platform charges on a $20 pie — and none of it reaches Ops. Add New York’s 8.875% prepared-food tax ($1.77, which a walk-in pays too) and a standard 10% driver tip ($2.00) and the same pie that costs $20 at the counter lands at roughly $29 out the door — about a +46% premium, essentially all of it fees and tip rather than food. (These fee figures are illustrative, built from DoorDash’s own published New York fee structure; the exact service and delivery fees a customer sees depend on the order, the address and DashPass membership, and require a logged-in checkout to confirm.)
The markup
Across the 16 matched items the delivery markup was, on average, about +2% — a mean of +1.9%, a median of exactly 0%, and a mode of 0%. The range runs from −6% (the Marinara, a dollar cheaper on DoorDash) to +20% (the $10 chocolate cake, listed at $12). But those are the only three items that move at all: 13 of 16 are identical to the cent, so a basket of all 16 items costs $299 at the counter and $302 on DoorDash — +1% on the food, three dollars on a three-hundred-dollar basket. We did not find a single pizza marked up the way this series has documented elsewhere. Ops simply carries its menu onto DoorDash intact.
What the shop nets
Here is why a near-zero markup is the whole story. When a customer orders delivery through DoorDash, the platform keeps a commission on the sale. To come out level with a walk-in, a shop would need to mark its delivery menu up by about +42.9% at a 30% commission — or about +17.6% even at New York’s capped 15%. Ops marks up about +2%. So the math runs almost entirely against the shop: at New York’s capped 15% commission, the $302 delivery basket leaves the pizzeria about $257 — roughly $42 less than the $299 the same items bring in at the counter. If the store pays a higher effective rate for wider delivery and promotion — the 2025 New York amendment lets a restaurant opt into add-ons that can push the total toward roughly 30% or more — it keeps about $211, some $88 less than direct. On all 16 of the 16 items at that effective rate (and 15 of 16 even at the 15% cap), the shop nets less selling through DoorDash than selling the same item at its own counter. This is the pattern this series calls absorbing (Type B): the customer pays the shop’s own price, and the shop quietly eats the commission out of its own margin.
Why it still lands on DoorDash
Ops sets its own menu prices; DoorDash does not. But DoorDash sets the commission and the consumer fees, and a shop that chooses to hold its delivery prices at its own is choosing to absorb the cut. Many restaurants in this series lift their delivery menus to recover the platform’s commission, in whole or in part; Ops has, on all but two small items, declined to. That protects the delivery customer from a menu markup, and squeezes the kitchen. It does not make the customer’s bill cheap: the service fee, the $1.99 NYC Regulatory Response Fee, tax and tip still stack up at checkout, none of which appear in the matched menu prices above. And it does not make the platform’s take disappear — it simply moves it. DoorDash collects a commission from the restaurant and a stack of fees from the customer on the very same order.
The New York context
New York City caps the core commission a delivery app can charge a restaurant at 15% for delivery, plus 5% for other listing and marketing services and 3% for card processing — limits the City Council first made permanent in 2021. A 2025 amendment, signed into law after the platforms sued and settled, now lets restaurants opt to pay an additional up to 20% for “enhanced services” such as wider delivery zones and top-of-search placement, which can push the total a restaurant chooses to pay toward roughly 43% — the same figure a shop would need to mark up its menu just to break even. Ops marks up next to none of it. Where New York’s cap does reach the customer is in DoorDash’s own disclosure: after a New York delivery address is set, DoorDash shows a notice that “Regulations in New York City have increased the cost of facilitating deliveries” and that it therefore charges the $1.99 NYC Regulatory Response Fee — a consumer surcharge that offsets the commission cap. The same notice adds, under New York’s algorithmic-pricing law, that “this price was set by an algorithm using your personal data.” The Mayor’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection continues to review delivery-app fees.
| Item | Counter price | DoorDash | Markup | Shop nets @15% cap (vs counter) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pizza | ||||
| Square Pie (12″) | $28.00 | $28.00 | 0% | $23.80 (-4.20) |
| Mamma | $24.00 | $24.00 | 0% | $20.40 (-3.60) |
| Pops | $24.00 | $24.00 | 0% | $20.40 (-3.60) |
| Rojo | $24.00 | $24.00 | 0% | $20.40 (-3.60) |
| Cicero | $22.00 | $22.00 | 0% | $18.70 (-3.30) |
| Juno | $22.00 | $22.00 | 0% | $18.70 (-3.30) |
| Calzone | $20.00 | $20.00 | 0% | $17.00 (-3.00) |
| Iron Age | $20.00 | $20.00 | 0% | $17.00 (-3.00) |
| Margherita | $20.00 | $20.00 | 0% | $17.00 (-3.00) |
| Marinara | $17.00 | $16.00 | −6% | $13.60 (-3.40) |
| Appetizers | ||||
| Antipasti Combo | $20.00 | $20.00 | 0% | $17.00 (-3.00) |
| Ops Salad | $15.00 | $15.00 | 0% | $12.75 (-2.25) |
| Marinated Artichokes | $14.00 | $14.00 | 0% | $11.90 (-2.10) |
| Beans | $12.00 | $14.00 | +17% | $11.90 (-0.10) |
| Marinated Olives | $7.00 | $7.00 | 0% | $5.95 (-1.05) |
| Dessert | ||||
| Chocolate & Amaro Cake | $10.00 | $12.00 | +20% | $10.20 (+0.20) |
| All 16 matched items (basket) | $299.00 | $302.00 | +1.0% | $256.70 (-42.30) |
By the numbers
- Items matched: 16 (same description and portion, same 346 Himrod St location; the rotating special pizza, sides, raw pizza dough, beverages, alcohol and any item we could not confirm on both channels were excluded)
- Delivery markup: mean +1.9%, median 0%, range −6% to +20% — 13 of 16 items are identical to the cent, 1 is cheaper on DoorDash, 2 are a dollar or two higher
- Basket: $299 ordering direct, $302 on DoorDash — +1% on the food alone
- Break-even markup at a 30% commission: +42.9% — Ops’s ~2% is a long way below it
- What the shop nets: about $257 on the basket at New York’s capped 15% (~$42 less than direct); about $211 at a 30% effective rate (~$88 less)
- Items on which the shop nets less than the counter: 15 of 16 at the 15% cap; 16 of 16 at 30%
- Illustrative DoorDash checkout on one $20 Margherita: about $5.39 in platform fees (17% service fee + $1.99 NYC Regulatory Response Fee) before tax and tip — none of it to the shop; ~$29 all-in with tax and a 10% tip, a ~+46% premium over the $20 counter price
- Story type: B (absorbing) — the customer pays the shop’s own price; the shop absorbs DoorDash’s commission
Method
On 16 July 2026, USA Times captured Ops’s own current prices from its first-party online-ordering menu on Square (opsbk.square.site) — the shop’s direct-order channel, reached from the “Bushwick Ordering” button on opsbk.com — using the list price, which is the price a customer pays ordering directly from the shop with no delivery cost attached, and treated it as the direct/counter price. We cross-confirmed that the same store on DoorDash, set to Pickup, names the pickup point as 346 Himrod Street and prices identically to delivery. The same day we captured DoorDash marketplace list prices for that 346 Himrod Street store and matched them item by item. We matched only items with the same description and portion (each named pizza to itself, the 12″ Square Pie as its own item, the calzone, and the salad, olives, artichokes, beans, antipasti combo and chocolate cake like-for-like), used list prices rather than promotional prices, and excluded the rotating “Special” pizza (whose description changes), sides, raw pizza dough, beverages, alcohol and any item we could not confirm on both channels. Across the 16 matched items the DoorDash prices were, on average, about 2% above the shop’s own counter prices, with 13 identical to the cent; we report the prices as captured and do not speculate on why a shop’s two online channels differ on a few items. The fee figures in the receipt are illustrative: they apply DoorDash’s own disclosed New York fee structure — a 17% service fee (minimum $3.25) and a $1.99 NYC Regulatory Response Fee, both recorded by USA Times from a DoorDash New York checkout on 15 July 2026 — to a single $20 Margherita, with $0 delivery as displayed, New York’s 8.875% prepared-food tax, and a standard 10% driver tip; the exact fees a given customer sees depend on the order, address and DashPass membership and require a logged-in checkout to confirm, which this automated audit did not place. The “shop nets” figures are an analytical estimate that applies New York’s capped 15% (and, separately, a 30% effective) commission to the DoorDash price; they are our interpretation of the economics, not figures disclosed by DoorDash, and the true commission tier for this store is a private contract term that is not public. Prices can change and can vary by address; figures reflect the moment of capture.
Right of reply
USA Times contacted Ops and DoorDash for comment and will update this report with any response. Ops was told plainly that it is not the target of this story — and was asked the one question that decides it: after DoorDash’s commission, does it net more, less or the same as ordering direct, and is pricing its DoorDash menu at its own counter price a deliberate choice. DoorDash was asked about its commission tiers in New York, why it charges the $1.99 NYC Regulatory Response Fee, and whether it accepts that on an order like this the customer funds the fees while the restaurant funds the commission.
Sources
- Ops’s direct-order (counter/pickup) prices — Ops’s Square online-ordering menu, 346 Himrod St, captured 16 July 2026.
- Ops’s DoorDash list prices — Ops, 346 Himrod St, on DoorDash, captured 16 July 2026.
- Shop website / “Bushwick Ordering” link — opsbk.com, reviewed 16 July 2026.
- DoorDash NYC Regulatory Response Fee and service fee — DoorDash NYC checkout disclosure, recorded by USA Times, 15 July 2026.
- NYC delivery fee caps and the 2025 amendment — NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, delivery fee caps, reviewed July 2026.
This report is part of a USA Times series auditing food-delivery pricing. Prices were collected by USA Times on the date noted, compared item by item against the restaurant’s own current menu, and reviewed by an editor before publication.
