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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

themargins.substack.com

321–330 of 534 posts

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#321
> Now suddenly each trade would net $75 in riskless profit ⇒ $240 from Doordash minus ($160 in costs + $5 in boxes).

If you do this over and over, obviously you can use the same dough and boxes, so costs are just what you pay Doordash.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#322
Reminds me of the discussion in ‘The Bitcoin Standard’ about zombie industries directly or indirectly build on top of unsound monetary policies. One could argue this capital burning colossi exist by virtue of access to a populations purchasing power / wealth. Instead of multiplying productivity and increasing living standards they stall progress.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#323

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.

It’s not where they pickup, it’s things like how much do they cost, do they take cards, are they even safe to use?

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

$10 for a pizza actually sounds pretty cheap.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#325
post #249
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.

I hated the weight check at Tesco when I lived in the UK. It unnecessarily locked up my self service checkout a few times per week and in general made things slower.

Compared the AH in the Netherlands where you just scan the barcode on all your things and they really don't care about the weight or where you put them after scanning.

I'm sure there will be a tiny percentage extra fraud that Tesco may catch with this, but given the choice I don't shop there due to the shitty user experience. That's got to cost them more in lost revenue than the fraud they stop.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#326

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.

Meanwhile, door dash never asked for the restaurant to participate in the "promotion," so screw them... They are offering to deliver boxes of dough at deathly inflated prices, with no other agreements with the restaurant. How is taking advantage of that "service" fraud?

Exactly. That's the real problem. Even if it's just a "trial". Somehow getting a delivery number on the restaurant's listing without their knowledge or consent is abuse. Good thing they get punished for it.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#327
post #54

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…

Yes, it has been exploited exactly like you described. An example that I remember - Foodpanda in India. I guess fraud costs are massive for all the food delivery startups. source: http://www.livemint.com/Companies/rYKC6HjnShogjE62jO5lpK/The...

That may explain why individual restaurants fare better at delivery; obviously they would catch a fraud immediately and are therefore immune to it.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#328
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The full price was paid because a door dash card was used to pay for the order on pickup.

Which should have triggered some sanity check indicating that their scraped data is way off.

In the end you need someone to look at those alerts, maybe they just got missed.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#329

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've always dreamt of having a post of mine read in court. Hi judge!

In this case DD is essentially acting like a ticket scalper. And since DD screwed themselves, is there even a law broken?
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