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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

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Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#351

Post by petee »

noahc wrote: post #349
doublesCs wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea, I'm not a lawyer. But in the original post he mentioned that he "cut a deal" with the restaurant, which to me suggests that he got the $5k back, possibly in cash, from the restaurant. If he then pockets to tax he saved, that smells like tax evasion. He then tweaked his story to say that this cost him $5k. Why did he say he was cutting a deal then?

I think he’s saying the owner will comp him deliveries. Not pay him back.

Ah, I overlooked the "free pasta for the year", thank you

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#352

Post by salawat »

wmab wrote: post #105
alteria wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got it, this makes a ton of sense, and explains why Grubhub was able to do the impossible, make money.

Yeah, Grubhub were touting themselves to restaurants as more of a marketing channel partner - find customers, advertise etc. Still, I'm not sure why that business service warranted a 20% commission fee in the first place to be profitable from.

Because who is going to balk at more sales for slightly less of a cut unless you have priced yourself to the bone already anyway?

Tech is all about inserting yourself in previously untransactable business opportunities via the leveraging of near universal connectivity to the Net, and the ease of electronic transaction settling.

Sometimes, this means taking a momentary haircut to get the right signatures in place, but fee taking and leveraging economies of scale does the rest.

The big head scratcher for me personally is how long it'll take until most people catch on to the pattern, and say "no more".

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#353

Post by [deleted] »

bko wrote: post #338
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.

This seems very unethical. The fact that you don't like Softbank or DoorDash or the gig-economy or that you're sending pizza to homeless people is irrelevant. The fact is you're exploiting a bug to personally benefit at the expense of investors. Why wouldn't you apply the same principals of ethical hacking, where you would notify the party of the exploit?

[deleted]

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#354

Post by fancyfredbot »

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.

This depends on whether you think the pizza restaurant's customer is doordash.

You could make a good argument that this was the case. The restaurant sells to doordash, who paid for a pizza with toppings.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#355

Post by bufferoverflow »

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…

Why wouldn't the pizza place order $100K worth of pizza from themselves to themselves? They don't even have to make it.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#356

Post by gambiting »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #355
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…

Why wouldn't the pizza place order $100K worth of pizza from themselves to themselves? They don't even have to make it.

I can only assume that such a large order would be eventually flagged by the system. But I imagine ordering 50 pizzas every night can be relatively "normal"(feeding the night shift or whatever).

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#357

Post by wil421 »

asjw wrote: post #341
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…

How much do you pay for pasta? 5,000$ of pasta would last me and my family until the end of my days. At ~1-1.2 euros for half a kilo it's around 90 years worth of pasta (based on an average of 28 kilos per person per year in Italy)

I doubt he ordered dry pasta. Most likely he ordered 10 or so of every pasta dish on the menu.

What restaurants let you order dry pasta beside the ones in food halls?

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#358

Post by wil421 »

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,…

There are fences (shady stores) in shady locations that will buy booze, baby formula/diapers, and over the counter medicine like daily Anti-acids. If you order liquor or wines that people sing/rap about you can find a place to sell it.

The scammers just need to find a fence which is pretty easy if you know where to look. They’ll even tell you what is the best stuff to get.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#359

Post by giarc »

slfnflctd wrote: post #319
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…

I've had amazon deliveries where it appears the whole family was in the car. Kind of heart breaking to think that a family of 4 has to drive around so I can get my AA batteries same day. We need drone deliveries.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#360

Post by AlexandrB »

hnick wrote: post #212
masonic wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the how that matters. Some countries have "interesting" taxi ecosystems. I had a friend whose taxi would drop her off to a certain part of the city she was in in Malaysia. She liked him and wanted him to bring her back home later because she felt safe. He couldn't. Apparently there were taxi gangs controlling territory and he could only drop off and GTFO. Or there's what I saw in Peru where a guy was selling TAX…

> Or there's what I saw in Peru where a guy was selling TAXI signs at a traffic light.

This is literally what Uber/Lyft are doing. You don’t even need to leave the house.

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