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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

themargins.substack.com

151–160 of 534 posts

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or, it is the age of social distancing. Just order it to a random address and steal it off the porch/lobby area.

Majority of the liquor ordered using a phished account goes here – so sketchy: https://www.google.com/maps/place/101+bowery+st/@40.7176021,...

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#152
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - I don't have to create a new account or fuck around with giving some restaurant my credit card In case you need to in the future, i'd recommend privacy.com for merchant-locked cards.

How has your experience been with privacy.com?

Mine has been excellent apart from the daily limit and merchants that don't accept their cards like cloud providers. Takes a bit of regular activity before support will raise the limit but the fact that Privacy.com cards show up as prepaid (try it out with the Stripe api, for example) is a show stopper for some narrow use cases - which overlap almost perfectly with spammers so who can blame the merchants.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#153

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…

From what I can gather, it is a ring of people behind this operation likely getting a commission for each 'drop' back at base

https://www.google.com/maps/place/101+bowery+st/@40.7176021,...

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#154

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.

The cost for a taxi is way less reliable, and harder to dispute. It's a common but unpleasant way to arrive to a new city to realise you've been shafted on the taxi fare.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#155

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

> Normal people can't resell liquor, nor resell takeout food from a licensed restaurant

That's actually good and a bit surprising. I find it quite disingenuous that DoorDash lists restaurants that haven't agreed to do take-out or delivery. Not only that by having a call center call into a restaurant it's just making the experience more expensive.

There is one restaurant in SF that was going to push for legal action. https://www.eater.com/2020/1/29/21113416/grubhub-seamless-ki...

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#156
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am arguing that they would rather be paid some wage rather than have no job available. A backpacker who just wants to make enough money to get to their next destination probably doesn't want to deal with the overhead of taking on a full-time job and is happy to have the flexibility in exchange for less money. Fair is determined by the two people who are party to the transaction. If they both agree to it, then they…

How many transient backpackers actually work for these companies to fund their immediate journeys and what do they have to do with a debate on localized externalities that they never experience?

No idea. It is probably not anywhere near the number of salaried employees who bully local governments into passing wage laws they will never experience the unintended consequences of. Yet somehow they still feel entitled to decide for other people what working arrangements they should be allowed to make for themselves.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#157

Oh, one other interesting thing I've heard happens regularly. Couriers have multiple cellular devices. The second account usually get batched orders from the same restaurant they are already at which leads to a host of problems for the customer and restaurant. This leads to the order that was ready first to just sit and die in the courier bag while they work to maximize their earnings. Couriers sometimes leave before…

With location services, should be simple to detect this occurring. The apps could do something about it, if they wanted.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#158
post #135

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.

Pedantically, that wouldn’t be arbitrage, it’d just be fraud. Arbitrage would involve exploiting differences in price for the same good/commodity, i.e. not substituting a different item...

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#159
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The driver pays with a Doordash prepaid-reloadable card. When the driver GPS-checkins at the restaurant they're picking an item up at, the card is loaded with the exact balance the restaurant is "supposed to charge"

I wonder to what extent the back end software supporting this is identical to, or similar to, what Moviepass created.

Think of something similar to https://stripe.com/issuing (Postmates apparently uses this, same industry).

Doordash's are debit mastercard, iirc.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I typically order from Papa Johns and their website/app had tipping for years. I never tip in person except on holidays. Just not a fan of cash.
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