Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

themargins.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 534 posts

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#311

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

limomium wrote: post #186
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is all these businesses (ride share, food delivery), have extremely low margins and the tech to spin up a competitor is extremely cheap and commodity. Thus the “monopoly” you allegedly get later is deeply unsustainable at the profit level and scale required to recoup losses on any timescale that would work for investors, assuming you can even hold onto it in the face of constant reemergence of competitors…

How about public transport? It makes a substantial difference that I can pull up the route suggestion and station timetable from my pocket always-on always-connected supercomputer to know to the minute when I need to start tieing my shoes to get where I'm going. You're basically arguing that adding telepathic conscioussness to a service provides less than zero value.

It's not that these services don't provide value, it's that they don't make money. These are two quite different things.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#312

Post by simias »

>I knew Doordash scraped restaurant websites. After we discussed it more, it was clear that the way his menu was set up on his website, Doordash had mistakenly taken the price for a plain cheese pizza and applied it to a 'specialty' pizza with a bunch of toppings.

If that's really what happened (sounds plausible) that means that you should be able to trick DD even more by designing a website specifically in order to confuse the scraper. Have some cheap dish listed at $50 but in a way that would be scrapped as $5 or something. As long as a human would have no issue parsing the menu and understanding the actual price I don't really see how you could get into trouble, it's DD's fault for having crappy parsers.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#313

Post by icebraining »

et2o wrote: post #161

Something just doesn’t make sense with this story. Ok, it’s possible doordash has accidentally mispriced a pizza. But why would they misprice a pizza but then pay the correct price to the restaurant?

Because the person calling the restaurant to place the order gets the correct price. Why isn't it detected and fixed then? Probably a mix of bureaucracy and undermotivated employees; the call center people don't really know or care if DD is making a loss on purpose or not, even if they know how much the final customer actually paid.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#314

Post by Beldin »

tptacek wrote: post #172
asdfaoeu wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your case is more clear cut because that is a glitch in the website. It seems that in this case Doordash is offering a promotion. Calling that fraud would be like calling taking advantage of reward points fraud.

It gets dicier when the restaurant starts shipping out plain pizza dough.

This made me wonder: what if a restaurant puts a pain dough "pizza" for $30 on their menu?

Of course, no one would order it. But in this situation, an aggregator could offer it and the restaurant owner could take advantage of that.

It smells like fraud, except that every individual step seems legitimate (albeit weird). I'm pretty sure you're allowed to charge ridiculous prices for common goods if you so choose...

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#315

Post by TulliusCicero »

saos wrote: post #287

> 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

Are they? They were in Munich but then pulled out. Looks like only Lieferando still exists here, as far as I can tell.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#316

Post by TeMPOraL »

imgabe wrote: post #266
akiselev wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same question, what does A have to do with B? I've had enough herring today.

Let's assume for a moment that people are not helpless imbeciles who need us to tell them what to do and that they choose the best option available to them, within the constraints of their life. Let's further assume that they are more familiar and better equipped to balance the constraints of their lives than we are. Then we can deduce that if we remove the option they have chosen by making it illegal they will neces…

> Legislating a price floor does not magically change the underlying economics of a business. It just makes the jobs below that floor go away.

It may make some of those jobs go away. The price of the product/service will go up a bit, which will reduce a demand a bit, so the market will get oversaturated supply-side until some of the companies in it scale down or close up. Those who lose jobs will be worse off, those who will keep jobs will be better off. Yes, it sucks for those who lost jobs, but we can cater to them elsewhere in the system (e.g. different industry).

Competition will happily push the salary floor to as low as legally possible, so it's up to the legal system to ensure that floor doesn't go too low; in fact, I'd argue laws should be always set up in a way so that doing unsustainable business off unlivable wages should not be possible. The market is good at figuring out solutions to multifaceted problems, so let it deal with that constraint.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#317

Post by lentil_soup »

yedava wrote: post #259
MattGaiser wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also don't know how "not having to talk to someone" is a perk. For us introverts it is.

It is indeed a perk for an introvert like me, but having to chose between empathy for another human and my discomfort, I prefer the former. Yes, it will cause me anxiety to talk to someone, and go pickup an order. But if I was to avoid that and use an app, I'd be dipping my hand into their pockets and stealing money for a middleman. So I end up calling my preferred restaurant and picking it up myself.

I also struggle with phone calls (or even ordering in house). Apart from the empathy side that you mention my reasoning is also that confronting the anxiety and getting used to it is the only way to manage it.

I rather face the discomfort from time to time and learn to handle it than being paralised in situations when there's no other way and you can't avoid it.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#318

Post by Beldin »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #200
ethbro wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like it would depend on who's initiating the action. While the restaurant preparing "partial" pizzas to ship to coordinated orders is obviously fraud, I'm not so sure "Asking the restaurant owner about their costs, then independently ordering a large number of pizzas" qualifies. It's not your responsibility if Doordash has shit code and auditing. And given VC-onomics, it's not even clear how you would be cer…

> While the restaurant preparing "partial" pizzas to ship to coordinated orders is obviously fraud How so? They're making the pizzas the way the customer wants them. The 'objective' tastiness is none of the delivery middleman's business. And there's nothing wrong with offering a bad pizza for $24, as long as the customer knows what they're getting.

Well, if the restaurant reimburses the customer after, it probably would become a problem.

Way around this: private owner places his own orders as customer, pockets profits as owner. That might be legitimate - but remember: if you take legal advice from the Internet, you get what you paid for.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#319

Post by slfnflctd »

rootusrootus wrote: post #22

After reading more about how these delivery companies function, we stopped using Door Dash a few days ago. We found it very convenient during the pandemic, but we like our local restaurants and we thought we were helping them out by ordering delivery pretty often. So now we just order it as take-out and then we go pick it up ourselves. Screw Door Dash.

We came to the same conclusion a couple weeks ago. As a bonus, you're eliminating a person/environment from the loop (the delivery driver & their car), thereby reducing your Covid-19 attack surface.

Edit: I have also both read about & seen firsthand food delivery drivers with someone else in the car. It's almost certainly someone from the same household, but still, that's potentially yet another unknown, potentially untraceable person in the loop.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#320

Post by mister_hn »

ornornor wrote: post #243
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The owner made a massive profit and the shelter gets free food and it didn’t cost you anything? We’re in the midst of a pandemic. The restaurant stays afloat, nothing more. The shelter got a donation, and I got promises of comped deliveries and catering. It cost me $5,000; it cost DoorDash over twenty thousand.

That’s fine, I wasn’t trying to expose you, I just wanted to understand. It looks like everyone is happy, the restaurant gets cash, the shelter gets food, and you get... a lot of pizza for the rest of your life! I don’t think I’ve eaten 5,000$ worth of pizza in my life so far haha

Assuming $10/pizza...500 pizzas in my life are reasonable
Post reply on HN