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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

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Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#131

Post by MattGaiser »

mikekchar wrote: post #112
spurdoman77 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Majority of times I order from these centralized sites becauae of convenience. Id like to support my local restaurant by ordering via phoning the restaurant directly, but it is pain in the arse compared to the convenient web ordering process.

Given that, I wonder if there is an opportunity to provide the ordering service and leave the delivery up to the restaurant... It would be dramatically easier to start up, require far less capital, require almost no human resource challenges, etc, etc. Edit: Just noticed lower in the comments that this is exactly what GrubHub was doing before Doordash showed up.

> leave the delivery up to the restaurant

Then you get an inconsistent experience.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#132

Post by icelancer »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #123
imgabe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately in the US you get people screaming that those drivers are criminally underpaid and are being exploited by heartless capitalists. Because of course random Internet commenters are better able to judge the drivers' priorities and desires than the drivers themselves.

Are you seriously arguing that the drivers would rather be underpaid than get paid a fair wage? The argument is not that these people shouldn’t be able to find work, but that they should get paid fairly for the work they do.

>> Are you seriously arguing that the drivers would rather be underpaid than get paid a fair wage?

Economist Thomas Sowell has argued that point and more about how the minimum wage enables racism, so, potentially?

https://www.aei.org/economics/thomas-sowell-on-the-cruelty-o...

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#133

Post by throwaway_dflka »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #44
throwaway_dflka wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting question. I suspect there's some trademark arguments to be made regarding confusion as to who is providing the product and service and whose failures any mistakes reflect. That kind of attribution, and the product quality it promotes, is one of the central purposes of trademark law. But there's also the first sale doctrine--that after you sell your physical product, people can do with it as they p…

All the regulation around food and beverage sales stands to the contrary - Normal people can't resell liquor, nor resell takeout food from a licensed restaurant. Relatedly, it's surprising that delivery times aren't monitored because of (totally appropriate!) food safety laws on holding food at proper temperature

Those prohibitions have nothing to do with the original seller asserting his copyright or trademarks or patents, which is what the first sale doctrine prevents. They're just requirements for anyone who is selling food to the public.

The safety angle is interesting.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#134

Post by MattGaiser »

masonic wrote: post #115
chrisseaton wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it just the benefit of being able to browse in one app/website everything available for be delivered to you? Yes I think that’s a big part of it. That’s a big part of Uber as well - I can fly into a city not knowing anything about how they do taxi and get an Uber.

I can fly into a city not knowing anything about how they do taxi What airports are you flying into where you could avoid signage/references to local taxis/buses/transit if you wanted to ? Heck, most have taxi stands right outside baggage claim, if not all exits.

Not the where, the how.

How much do they cost? Do they know where my hotel is or do I need to provide a specific address for their GPS? Are specific taxis limited to specific jurisdictions? Can I get a van if I have 6 people or do I need two vehicles? Do they go out as far as the somewhat rural university? How about to the manufacturing plant 20 km outside the city?

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#135

Post by Cerium »

bransonf wrote: post #15

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…

From the title I expected a story of how Doordash is running a pizza arbitrage scheme. Using an expensive restaurant name, and having the drivers go to a cheap pizza place to get the pie.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#136

Post by karagenit »

One thing I'll point out is that we don't actually know if delivery services (for restaurants such as pizza places that the article mentions) are profitable period. It's entirely possible that businesses offer delivery at a loss (i.e. cost of delivery is more than the delivery fee, so it hurts their overall profit margin) because they expect the increase in revenue due to added convenience for customers to offset the lower profit margin.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#137

Post by MattGaiser »

karagenit wrote: post #136

One thing I'll point out is that we don't actually know if delivery services (for restaurants such as pizza places that the article mentions) are profitable period. It's entirely possible that businesses offer delivery at a loss (i.e. cost of delivery is more than the delivery fee, so it hurts their overall profit margin) because they expect the increase in revenue due to added convenience for customers to offset the…

Companies like Dominos are mostly delivery, so I would imagine they must profit.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#139

Post by walrus01 »

inquiryaccount wrote: post #51

This reminds me of a post I submitted a few weeks ago on HN. A friend of mine works for a restaurant group in NYC and they like many they have had to respond by offering delivery to folks in order to keep some revenue flowing. He and I were chatting and he mentioned that lately, a large majority of high value ($500+) orders were fraudulent with the fraudster ordering things that can be resold such as high-value wine,…

I bet the person physically receiving the wine/goods is some gullible, naive person who has been social engineered into thinking they're working for a legit business.

It's like the 419 emails where they are trying to "recruit a remote working employee in our finance department" where your job is actually to receive fraudulent ACH wire transfers and send the money to some overseas destinations, go to a bitcoin ATM and buy bitcoin to send to the scammer, etc.

If the scammers are reasonably intelligent and have put a degree of thought into how to not get caught doing this, they'll introduce multiple layers of abstraction between the physical delivery of $450 bottles of liquor, and the point at which that booze is turned into (gift cards, bitcoin, ethereum, etc) and ultimately in their hands. They're probably calculating on taking at least a 20-35% haircut on the revenue before the somewhat-cleaned-up cryptocurrency or gift cards makes it to them.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#140

Post by bb611 »

kevindong wrote: post #19

Very important note (near the bottom of the post) on why Doordash did what they did: > Note 1: 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 platform.

It doesn't fully explain why they priced a $24 pizza at $16. I wouldn't be surprised if they're subsidizing purchases, but just skipping fees doesn't explain that.
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