As I said in my ETA, there is some shady stuff going on here but the restaurants and the drivers have enormous power to improve the situation if they choose to. If these companies continue to survive and eventually make decent money then the conclusion I draw is that they are OK with the situation.
But that's the thing, the delivery outfits have structured their business all-in on exploiting the restaurant with obscene service fees as the way to turn a profit short term to help get them to end game. This time last year, they were collapsing...
...and then the pandemic happened. Record unemployment hits with barely any government assistance. People are scared, people are hungry. Restaurants are terrified of going under and desperate to do anything to keep the doors open.
This year, suddenly they're making a profit, and yet the restaurants are still drowning financially with these partnerships and the drivers are treated and paid like dirt. People do stupid things during desperate times, most people aren't very good at math (even when they run a business), and will sell out their future for a short term "win".
The question was whether using these services were unethical. You admit yourself these outfits are acting shady when everything is laid out in how they operate. There's the answer. A large corporation that exploits their contractors and customers does deeply unethical things to make money. In other news, sky blue, water wet.
joleran is only partially right about these companies.
Uber etc. are just like Amazon/Walmart, in that the channel wants to occupy the market, and they have a huge advantage. Why? Because if you're the channel for multiple competing products, you then have the information with which to create your own product at the best prices/margins.
Amazon has their own brands for things they sell based on the research of other retailers selling on their site, same with the Walmart "great value" brand.
So, Uber doesn't care about the drivers, or the restaurants, they want all of it. The drivers are just a nuisance until self driving cars/drones can do the work. Once that happens, or concurrently, they'll take the data from what people are ordering from restaurants, and either open their own "kitchens" that don't have storefronts to compete, or buy out or build their own restaurants. That way they can take their superior market information and dominate all of the delivery restaurant industry pretty much.
Is any of this unethical? Meh. I mean, credit card companies are there, they were just too dumb to use their market data to create competing companies. I don't know why people aren't riled up that credit card companies exploit all of these restaurants through their profits.
Bingo. You see what I see, however, I clearly find it more troubling than you do. The problem is, this isn't capitalism. It takes deep pockets to play these games, and the end goal is monopolistic mega-corporations, not diversity. How do you compete with someone who has the money to bury your own advertising and contact information replacing it with their own to hijack your own customers, from a company who's only purpose and end goal is to make enough money off of you and your brand to either put you out of business or turn you into a namebrand to exploit before the laws catch up to prevent them from taking over the entire industry, provided they don't run out of money before the glorious robot revolution to outspend you?
As for concerns over credit card fees? I'm not one of those rewards jockeys from the forums here. I've honestly been bothered by it for years, and it does trouble me that they exploit the greed of end users with bonus money who's cost they pass off to the retailers with service fees. The problem is, credit cards have become so pervasive, the retailers' losses have to be baked into the prices of the stuff they sell because so many pay with plastic and they're not allowed to directly pass the processing fee onto the user, removing any incentive and ability to pay cash.