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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

themargins.substack.com

81–90 of 534 posts

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#81
post #49

Just some back-of-the-napkin math if you wanted to do this "right". Let's say you hire drivers as employees and pay them $15/hr plus tips and reimburse them for mileage. You charge a $4.99 delivery fee. Drivers work set shifts and are paid hourly whether they are making deliveries or not. That means each driver needs to be making at least 4 deliveries an hour or you're losing money. That's not even really counting fo…

> Domino's and lots of other places do it, but they probably aren't paying $15/hour and they also have one central location and more predictable demand. One thing to note about Dominos is that people pay at the door, so they would need to look the delivery guy in the face as they stiff him on the tip. Not required for the delivery apps and fewer people tip there.Because people tip, you can pay lower wages. I had a re…

When ordering with the app, a lot of pizza places now (since social distancing started) allow adding the tip (or lack of) when placing the order.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#82

Reading the title, I anticipated this was going to be something along the lines of getting Domino's delivered for less than their delivery fee. (Side note, does anyone actually order franchise pizza on an app? They all already deliver for far less) But this was far more interesting. The fact that Doordash scrapes prices, and apparently doesn't verify... how does this happen? I'm not familiar with the reimbursement mo…

> The fact that Doordash scrapes prices, and apparently doesn't verify... how does this happen? It kind of happens by default if your goal is "growth at any cost". The video you mention is likely this one, and it's actually even more extreme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8 The fake restaurant in their garden shed, which never took customers or delivered any food , climbed up to #1 best restaurant in Lond…

I saw that video a year ago... pretty epic.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#83

This quote summarizes it all for me: "Amazon just bailed on restaurant delivery in the U.S." If amazon, a "real" business with a reputation built on ruthlessly cutting margin can't get it to work why would anyone else?

I mean, think about it – Amazon can't run it like their current delivery service. They can't mark it as delivered, but then not deliver it until the next day. They can't drive up to the curb, throw it over your fence and then drive off. They can't claim to have delivered it but just not bothered. They can't say they're giving you a pizza from Pizza Hut and then actually give you a pizza some guy made in his basement. In other words, they can't run it like their current business.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#84

What if you strip out the entire 'aggregation' and customer facing side of DoorDash/GrubHub/UberEats and rebuild them as complete back-end logistics services to the restaurants? You charge lower percentage of orders or just a monthly fee to help procure and pay the labor and route deliveries. Seems like that's the actual challenge for restaurants

Chipotle has white labeled DoorDash for delivery in my area. If I open the Chipotle app and make a delivery order, the "track your order" screen says it's "Powered by DoorDash."

> Chipotle has white labeled DoorDash ... it's "Powered by DoorDash."

Disclosing who’s powering it is the opposite of white labelling.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#85
post #8

This is so asburd it feels like a story in bad movie. We have pushed finance & capital so far into the realm of fiction that it doesn't really make sense anymore. Artificial growth for the sake of artificial growth, just so you can get to your exit and leave someone else holding the bag. Ponzi schemes at massive scale. How did the startup/VC world become so entangled in all this bullshit capitalism?

For a period of time when Uber was in China, a huge amount of revenue was from fraudulent rides that weren't actually happening.

There were smart investors who saw through the facade and didn't invest and there were smarter ones who saw through it and invested despite that.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#86

Reading the title, I anticipated this was going to be something along the lines of getting Domino's delivered for less than their delivery fee. (Side note, does anyone actually order franchise pizza on an app? They all already deliver for far less) But this was far more interesting. The fact that Doordash scrapes prices, and apparently doesn't verify... how does this happen? I'm not familiar with the reimbursement mo…

>The fact that Doordash scrapes prices, and apparently doesn't verify... how does this happen? In the article they say: > We found out afterward that was all the result of a “demand test” by Doordash. They have a test period where they scrape the restaurant’s website and don’t charge any fees to anyone, so they can ideally go to the restaurant with positive order data to then get the restaurant signed onto the platfo…

Google tracks outclicks, so setting a lower price at first is a cheap enough SEO tactic.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#87
post #20

The restaurants need to work through their own trade organization where they band together and push out the delivery businesses that are costing them money, and then allow delivery companies to bid for their business.

In the end the customer needs some single easy interface where to order food from. It is kind of difficult to see how this could work in a way where restaurants would dictate how customers prefer to order.

Why? All I want is for each restaurant to have their own website (which most already do), and to have a menu, a way to place an order, and a way to enter a credit card online, or for the person who comes to my door to be able to take a credit card. I don't care about an app or centralization, or having it be the same for every business. I just want to give them my money for their food in my house. So long as it works, doesn't get in my way, and doesn't cost me 30% extra, I don't have too many preferences on how it's done.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#88

I don't understand why doordash, uber eats, deliveroo, and similar business are starting to exist. Restaurants have been running successful delivery operations independently for ages. And there are many software offerings to help businesses get set up with delivering food. Why do we need a centralized on? Is it just the benefit of being able to browse in one app/website everything available for be delivered to you?

I've spent many thousands of dollars on app-delivered food over the last few years (Foodpanda, Uber Eats, Grab Food, Lineman, and Deliveroo). I use the apps because:

- GPS tracking of the driver, and helpful notifications

- Discovery of new restaurants

- Detailed menu (and occasionally useful suggestions of menu items)

- I don't have to create a new account or fuck around with giving some restaurant my credit card

- I don't have to speak to a human

I'm hungry right now. I can pick up my phone, and in 30s, without needing to do anything other than click on the food I want to eat, in 25m I will have a human with food at my building's lobby.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#89
post #49

Just some back-of-the-napkin math if you wanted to do this "right". Let's say you hire drivers as employees and pay them $15/hr plus tips and reimburse them for mileage. You charge a $4.99 delivery fee. Drivers work set shifts and are paid hourly whether they are making deliveries or not. That means each driver needs to be making at least 4 deliveries an hour or you're losing money. That's not even really counting fo…

It's also 30% - 40% of the order not just a delivery fee

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#90
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably can't since people don't have to be honest about being DoorDash.

But how can DoorDash advertise and impersonate someone else's restaurant without their consent?

https://www.google.com/search?q=in+n+out+doordash+lawsuit
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