This East Village Ice Cream Shop Doesn’t Mark Up Uber Eats at All — So It Pays the Commission Itself

9 min read  ·  1,798 words

VAN LEEUWEN ICE CREAM (East Village, 48½ East 7th Street, Manhattan) — Dessert / Ice Cream. Case study #16. Prices compared between Van Leeuwen’s own first-party pickup menu and the same store’s Uber Eats storefront, both for the 48½ East 7th Street shop, captured the same day.

Order a 14-ounce pint of Honeycomb for pickup from Van Leeuwen’s East Village scoop shop on the store’s own ordering site and it is $12.15. Order the same pint, from the same freezer, on Uber Eats and it is — $12.15. We priced 48 of the shop’s items side by side, from a 50-cent sugar cone to a $58 party pack, and found the same thing every single time: the Uber Eats price is identical to the counter price. A single scoop is $7.95 in both places; a Hot Fudge Sundae is $10.95; a bottle of still water is $3.95. The markup across the entire menu is 0%.

That makes Van Leeuwen the mirror image of most of the restaurants in this series. It has not raised its Uber Eats menu by a cent to cover the commission the platform charges it. Which means the commission comes out of Van Leeuwen’s own pocket — not yours.

The markup

Across all 48 matched items the markup was 0% — mean, median, minimum and maximum all zero. A basket of all 48 items costs $554.35 on Van Leeuwen’s own menu and the same $554.35 on Uber Eats. There is no cheap-item exception and no premium-item exception: the scoops, the sundaes, the milkshakes, the classic, vegan and special pints, the cones, the bottled water and the $58 Fan Faves Party Pack are all priced to the exact cent on both platforms.

One check confirms this is real and not a delivery quirk. On Uber Eats we switched the storefront from Delivery to Pickup — no driver, no delivery to pay for — and every price was unchanged, and equal to the price on Van Leeuwen’s own site. There is simply no menu markup here to explain away.

What the shop nets

When a customer orders through Uber Eats, the platform keeps a commission on the sale — a figure that can reach roughly 30% at the top of its fee structure. Because Van Leeuwen charges the same price on Uber as at its counter, that commission lands entirely on the shop. Apply a 30% commission to these prices and a $12.15 pint returns Van Leeuwen about $8.51 instead of $12.15; the $554.35 basket returns about $388.05 rather than $554.35 — roughly $166 less across the menu, and the shop comes out behind on all 48 of the 48 items we checked. Even at New York’s capped 15% commission, a 0% markup still leaves Van Leeuwen netting about $471.20 on that basket — around $83 less than the counter. With no markup at all, there is no commission rate low enough for the shop to break even. This is the pattern this series calls absorbing (Type B): the restaurant, not the diner, is paying the platform’s cut.

To be clear about what this is and is not. Van Leeuwen is not overcharging anyone on Uber Eats; if anything it is the most customer-friendly pattern we find, because the diner pays the true menu price for the food. But the customer does not get off free: Uber still adds its own delivery fee, service fee and tax on top at checkout, and those are what the diner pays for the convenience. What is striking is simply where the commission falls — and here, unusually, it falls on the business.

Why it still lands on Uber

Uber sets the commission that defines the economics of every order. Most restaurants respond by lifting their in-app menu prices to recover it, so the customer pays the commission invisibly, folded into the food. Van Leeuwen has chosen not to, and eats the cost itself — a decision that protects the diner’s price but squeezes the shop’s margin on every delivery order. Either way, the number that sets the floor is Uber’s, and Uber reports to merchants a “Menu Markup” metric measuring exactly this in-store-versus-in-app gap. At Van Leeuwen that gap is zero — a fact Uber can see and the customer cannot.

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 pays toward roughly 43%. None of those caps require a restaurant to raise its menu prices, and none of them touch the delivery fee, service fee and tax a customer pays in the app. Van Leeuwen’s choice to hold its Uber prices at the counter level means the commission is borne where the law assumes it might be — by the business — rather than being passed to the diner as a hidden markup. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection continues to review delivery-app fees.

By the numbers

• Items matched: 48 (same description and portion; the “make your own” sundae, which carries extra per-topping charges, and the free utensils pack were excluded)
• Markup: 0% — mean, median and range all zero across every item
• Basket: $554.35 at the counter, $554.35 on Uber Eats (identical)
• Pickup on Uber Eats costs the same as delivery, and the same as the counter — there is no menu markup
• What the shop nets: about $388.05 on the basket at a 30% commission (~$166 less than counter); about $471.20 even at New York’s capped 15% (~$83 less)
• Items on which the shop nets less than dine-in at a 30% commission: 48 of 48
• Story type: B (absorbing) — the shop, not the customer, pays the platform’s commission

Method

On 15 July 2026, USA Times captured Van Leeuwen’s own prices from its first-party pickup ordering site (order.online, the shop’s white-label storefront on the DoorDash Commerce Platform) for the East Village store at 48½ East 7th Street — the same prices a pickup customer pays. The same day, we captured Uber Eats list prices for the same store from the rendered storefront, and confirmed in the app that the Pickup price equals the Delivery price for every item, and that both equal the first-party price. We matched only items with the same description and portion, used list prices rather than promotional prices, and excluded the customisable make-your-own sundae and the no-charge utensils pack. The “shop nets” figures are an analytical estimate that applies a 30% (and, separately, a 15%) commission to the Uber Eats price; they are our interpretation of the economics, not figures disclosed by Uber, and the true commission tier for this store is a private contract term that is not public. Delivery fee, service fee, any New York regulatory fee, tax and tip are added at a logged-in checkout; this automated audit does not place orders and did not capture them. Prices can change and can vary by address; figures reflect the moment of capture.

Right of reply

USA Times contacted Van Leeuwen and Uber for comment and will update this report with any response. Van Leeuwen was asked the one question that decides this story — after Uber’s commission, does it net more, less or the same as a walk-in, and why it holds its in-app prices at the counter level — and Uber was asked about its commission tiers in New York and whether it tracks the gap between in-store and in-app menu prices.

Sources

• Van Leeuwen counter / first-party prices — Van Leeuwen (East Village) pickup ordering menu, captured 15 July 2026.
• Van Leeuwen Uber Eats list prices — Van Leeuwen Ice Cream – East Village on Uber Eats, captured 15 July 2026 (Pickup price confirmed equal to Delivery price and to the counter price).
• 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.