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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

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Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#281

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

eru wrote: post #247
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #220

I cut this deal with my neighborhood Italian restaurant! I texted the owner about being miffed they hadn’t told me they were on DoorDash. He replied. They aren’t. We compared pricing, and found the prices advertised are way off from what the restaurant charges. So I placed a $5,000 order to the neighbourhood homeless shelter. DoorDash paid him over $20,000, and I get free pasta for the rest of the year. (My neighbour…

That's capitalism as its finest. Saudi money (via SoftBank) is paying for poor people's food (and also subsidizing their transportation, via Uber).

Frankly, after all these years I still don't get it. Are the Saudis that gullible? How much more they need to lose to understand they're being duped?

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#282

Post by [deleted] »

sneak wrote: post #222
Dylan16807 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$15/hr plus tips plus mileage is overkill. Let's say you cut out the awful feature that is tipping and make it $15/hr plus mileage, which is a perfectly good wage. If I was previously paying $6-7 in fee+tip for a limited selection of restaurants, I'd be okay paying $10 for places that don't normally have delivery. If that means two trips per hour, and you're not in one of the ten worst cities for traffic in the entir…

You forgot wear and tear on the car, and gas. 15/hr is decent without additional expenses. Take out gas and tires and brakes and maintenance and it's poverty level.

[deleted]

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#283

Post by hrktb »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #271
hrktb wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Works fairly reliably in supermarkets No it doesn’t. Not just because they can be badly calibrated, but also because the range of weight they have to deal with must make it hard to manage any sane range. The only SCO I’ve seen doing a decent job at dealing with weight use a binary check (“was there any product at all added to the to total weight of the basket ?”) and they still miss products like lollipops or anyth…

For vast majority of things amazon sells, a system checking if the weight is within a pound or 25%, whichever is greater, would almost never have a false positive.

So a pound is 453g.

I checked my order history and my last orders are around:

- 350g

- 600g

- 200g

- 500g

- 5kg

- 120g

a box with empty packing would fit within a pound for most of these. I don't intend to nitpick your back of the enveloppe calculation, just that it's not as simple as it seems.

I don't know if I am the typical amazon shopper, but on my 35 orders in the last 6 months the above pattern is repeating with mainly very small items (like cables, dongles etc.) and one big heavy package from time to time.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#284

Post by morrbo »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #220

I cut this deal with my neighborhood Italian restaurant! I texted the owner about being miffed they hadn’t told me they were on DoorDash. He replied. They aren’t. We compared pricing, and found the prices advertised are way off from what the restaurant charges. So I placed a $5,000 order to the neighbourhood homeless shelter. DoorDash paid him over $20,000, and I get free pasta for the rest of the year. (My neighbour…

I wish I could vote a hundred times. What a great thing to do.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#285

Post by [deleted] »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #268
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #220

I cut this deal with my neighborhood Italian restaurant! I texted the owner about being miffed they hadn’t told me they were on DoorDash. He replied. They aren’t. We compared pricing, and found the prices advertised are way off from what the restaurant charges. So I placed a $5,000 order to the neighbourhood homeless shelter. DoorDash paid him over $20,000, and I get free pasta for the rest of the year. (My neighbour…

I don't understand how this works. If your order to doordash cost $5000, why did they pay the restaurant $20,000? That would suggest their prices are 4 times cheaper to the customer. But I thought everyone complained they were more expensive. Surely DD are still keeping their commission from your order? What have I misunderstood?

[deleted]

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#286

Post by hrktb »

Kiro wrote: post #249
hrktb wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Works fairly reliably in supermarkets No it doesn’t. Not just because they can be badly calibrated, but also because the range of weight they have to deal with must make it hard to manage any sane range. The only SCO I’ve seen doing a decent job at dealing with weight use a binary check (“was there any product at all added to the to total weight of the basket ?”) and they still miss products like lollipops or anyth…

Works great in any supermarket I've been to with a self-scanning systems and that's been the standard in my country for many years now.

Speaking for France, a lot of supermarket who introduced self-checkouts have further invested in developing scanning apps operated by the client on their phone as a parallel solution. Basically a low-tech amazon-go solution, where the client is its own casher.

Those bring their own set of issues, can be difficult to understand and use from the customer, yet they still felt way easier to deal with than the SCO experience.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#287

Post by saos »

> Amazon just bailed on restaurant delivery in the U.S.

Yeah and Amazon just plugged £500m into Deliveroo in the UK. They are going for UK food delivery market and potentially Europe with that investment. Deliveroo is pretty amazing.

1. I can track my driver in real-time 2. Communicate with drivers via Whatsapp 3. Great range of resturants 4. Super convenient. Order comes usually within 30 minutes

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#288

Post by TeMPOraL »

patmcc wrote: post #272
SimonPStevens wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how this works. If your order to doordash cost $5000, why did they pay the restaurant $20,000? That would suggest their prices are 4 times cheaper to the customer. But I thought everyone complained they were more expensive. Surely DD are still keeping their commission from your order? What have I misunderstood?

Doordash seems to provide two different services. 1) Doordash has some deal with the restaurant, gets a commission on sales, fees, whatever. 2) Doordash has no deal with the restaurant, charges customer $x+y, buys food from restaurant at $x. In the second case, Doordash may be charging much more than the menu price, if it things it can find customers who will pay it.

I think the trick here is that Doordash isn't charging the customer $x + $y, but $x - $y. X minus Y. That is, they're subsidizing the delivery - in order to generate demand, and then come to the restaurant with the data to convince them to sign up for 1). This was actually mentioned at the bottom of the article.

So in this story, 'JumpCrisscross paid $x-$y = 5k for an order to a homeless shelter, but the real, restaurant price for that order $x=20k, which means DoorDash has just subsidized the transaction for $y=15k. The restaurant got an extra $20k of business that day, and 'JumpCrisscross bought $20k worth of food for a shelter at 1/4 the price.

And the best part, they could probably do it again :).

EDIT: Reading the article again, it seems to me Doordash is supposed to be charging the customer $x in the lead generation phase; so perhaps the -$y part is a scrapper error.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#289

Post by icebraining »

joshvm wrote: post #167
ngngngng wrote: post #64

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?

One selling point is ordering from places that don't offer deliveries, like McDonald's or Burger King. Essentially pay someone else to order and collect for you. That can backfire, as with the article here... McDonald's is now partnering with Uber Eats, but in the wild west days there were a few apps which let you order from pretty much anywhere.

One app in my area (Glovo) still lets you do a free-form request: just write whatever you want delivered from any shop within a certain radius of your house. I never tried it, though.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#290

Post by curiousgal »

ornornor wrote: post #231
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #220

I cut this deal with my neighborhood Italian restaurant! I texted the owner about being miffed they hadn’t told me they were on DoorDash. He replied. They aren’t. We compared pricing, and found the prices advertised are way off from what the restaurant charges. So I placed a $5,000 order to the neighbourhood homeless shelter. DoorDash paid him over $20,000, and I get free pasta for the rest of the year. (My neighbour…

What was the deal? You pay 5,000, the owner gave you back your 5,000 and kept the 15,000 as profit from door dash? The owner made a massive profit and the shelter gets free food and it didn’t cost you anything?

15000 minus the actual cost of the food.
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