On a related fast food topic from flyover country: Ghost Kitchens(sp) in the Sky. "Here it comes, America!":
Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
131–140 of 153 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#132I absolutely hate ghost kitchens, I think they should have to be labeled as such since they are often only a step at best above straight up scams. The 2 times I accidently ordered from one ("Oh nice, I didn't know we got an X nearby") the food has been below subpar and generally a huge disappointment. These days I really hate using delivery apps. You have to dodge the ghost kitchens which isn't easy (both the fake br…
There's nothing inherently wrong with ghost kitchens. A restaurant that only serves food for delivery is completely valid. The problem is when existing restaurants pretend they're a ghost kitchen. You order from a cool new chicken wing restaurant and get an order from Chilies. You order from a new pizza restaurant and get a box that says Chuck E Cheese on it. That's just purely deceptive. The other thing I see is the…
> You order from a new pizza restaurant and get a box that says Chuck E Cheese on it.
Do they actually do this? I at least expect the fake brand's name or generic brand. If it says Chuck-e-cheese I'd claim order never arrived.
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how long it'll be until I can order a burger from LAKPARCX Hamburgers with【1/4 pounds paty】, 【Nutritient cheese for whole family】, 【Come with choice of side】, 【Savor tasty meal】?
Needs 3x more location keyword stuffing...
Soon it will be like Amazon's search.
Customer: "I would like a burger. What burger restaurants are delivering to me?"
App: "Here's a Mexican restaurant."
Customer: "I said, "HAMBURGER RESTAURANT", not Mexican"
App: "Don't be a wimp. You know you want tacos."
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#134Since they charge restaurants for the service which forces restaurants to raise prices and then charge the customers for the service(service 17% plus delivery fee plus suggested tip) and then pay drivers the least amount possible to take the order I don't understand how they aren't making hand over fist.
$20 for a big mac meal.
$30 for a large pizza.(might offer the driver like $5-$6 with tip.
I've stopped ordering delivery and pick it up myself now.
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#135I absolutely hate ghost kitchens, I think they should have to be labeled as such since they are often only a step at best above straight up scams. The 2 times I accidently ordered from one ("Oh nice, I didn't know we got an X nearby") the food has been below subpar and generally a huge disappointment. These days I really hate using delivery apps. You have to dodge the ghost kitchens which isn't easy (both the fake br…
There's nothing inherently wrong with ghost kitchens. A restaurant that only serves food for delivery is completely valid. The problem is when existing restaurants pretend they're a ghost kitchen. You order from a cool new chicken wing restaurant and get an order from Chilies. You order from a new pizza restaurant and get a box that says Chuck E Cheese on it. That's just purely deceptive. The other thing I see is the…
Yeah, there was a local place that went delivery-only when Covid came. They wanted to remain in business but they were Chinese and didn't want to take the risk.
(And it turns out that the owner had been playing games with the IRS and some other government stuff. He's in jail, all their places are gone.)
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#136The worst ghost kitchen I've seen is for an exclusively gluten-free pizza place in Seattle. That's an appealing prospect if you have a serious celiac case and you can't eat food that's made in a typical pizza place where flour gets everywhere in the process. I looked up the address and it's actually a typical pasta and pizza Italian place with gluten in most items.
That should be downright illegal.
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#137There are a few of these delivery firms now, has at least one realized the best niche to use should be “trustworthy”? E.g require any restaurant to have a brick and mortar restaurant with actual customers in it, or it’s banned. And requiring each such restaurant to have only one listed name in the app - which must be the same as the name on the sign of the physical restaurant. And clearly highlighting the age of the…
Same name as the sign???
Many of the Chinese places around here have different names in Chinese and English. Sometimes slightly different, sometimes seriously different. I don't find it at all surprising, the Chinese names make sense to Chinese people but are hard for Americans to pronounce. It's the same thing as most Chinese people taking an Americanized version of their name (usually just informally) because their proper names get too badly mangled. (My wife is Chinese, more than once we've had the experience of being called from a waiting room and neither of us recognized what they had done to her name. At least with my last name the butchering is pretty consistent so I don't have a problem.)
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#138I've had a few. The most similar was uber eats, they constantly have a promotion on. One such was get £15 off your next order via email. I clicked through and ordered only to find no discount was applied. When I qestioned it they said some bullshit like the offer was only valid for the first 100 customers. Needless to say I am never odering through them again. I had another one when travelling. I used skyscanner (fli…
Third party sites almost always offer inferior booking options to the actual company and they're much worse about hiding gotchas.
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting choice of word. Condescending implies talking down , whereas I am in fact talking up . Poorer nations spend much more time per capita on cooking. India averages 13 hours per week. The average American male spends two and a half hours per week (20 mins per day) in "food preparation". We all have equally "busy" lives, yet our labour is distributed in different ways. The 'first world' problems I am poking fu…
If you're earning $100/hr as a software engineer/lawyer/whatever, it makes a lot more sense to buy a $30 doordash order than it does for a peasant in India. The comparison is so ludicrous I'm actually laughing.
This. If you make lots of dollars per hour you'll likely have a better quality of life putting in extra hours at work and hiring out much of the stuff we usually do at home.
Food is a problem, though, because restaurant food is generally skewed to tasty rather than healthy.
Re: Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?
#140It's insane. I once found a restaurant that had ghost kitchen'd itself EIGHTEEN times: https://i.imgur.com/7jwBlFG.png Some of the name variations are pretty funny though.
Where I live (Spain), delivery restaurants have also become a total clusterfuck. There are thousands of options which are barely undistinguishable from one another - like those cheap Chinese brands that flood many product categories on Amazon. You'll occasionally find a name that stands out, like the ones you've posted, along the lines of "Thunderfuck Porn Burgers". But they don't entice me to order, since whatever t…
Maybe we're expecting them to solve a different problem than they're built for.
As far as I can tell, the point of a delivery platform is to provide delivery services in a market where they traditionally didn't exist.
There's no claim they will improve the discovery experience. In fact, by obfuscating where you're actually ordering from-- making it less obvious "Oh, that's the place on Sixth where we all got food poisoning, let's not go back", they can further pollute it.
I could see saying "use the service, I want to order from Golden Lucky Dragon Palace, but can't be bothered to drive there myself", but saying "let's browse and hope to get lucky" is no better than opening the Yellow Pages to the restaurant section and selecting at random.