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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

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Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#371

Post by inquiryaccount »

wil421 wrote: post #358
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.

Yeah, the scammers ordering their stuff are only getting the good stuff. Don Julio, 1942, Johnny Walker Blue, high-end wines, etc.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#372

Post by ryanianian »

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)

Shrimp scampi at the deli by me is like $16. Ordering for a family of 4 with just 2-3 meals a week would easily cost $5k+

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#373

Post by pepy »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #32
bransonf wrote: post #15

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…

> The fact that Doordash scrapes prices, and apparently doesn't verify... how does this happen? It kind of happens by default if your goal is "growth at any cost". The video you mention is likely this one, and it's actually even more extreme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8 The fake restaurant in their garden shed, which never took customers or delivered any food , climbed up to #1 best restaurant in Lond…

I gave a lecture in marketing at an university using that story.

To this day it is one of my favorites.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#374

Post by mikeryan »

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.

A Doordash delivery guy actually has to pick up the food though right?

This also does probably provide some legal cover as well.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#376

Post by billme »

inquiryaccount wrote: post #153
walrus01 wrote: post #139

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…

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,...

Appears likely that someone that has access to the hotel’s customer CC data might be behind this and the local police are aware of it too...

“Not only is this hotel horrible, our guests had their credit card stolen and $500 worth of purchases made on it!!! Reporting this place to the police. Do not even go near this hotel. Total crooks, denied everything when confronted but they were caught red handed” [1]

...makes you wonder what is really going on.

[1] https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Hotel_Review-g60763-d267183-Revie...

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#377

Post by billme »

jml7c5 wrote: post #292
inquiryaccount wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,...

Told the police about it? Someone would be eager to chase that case.

Appears local law enforcement already knows about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23222004

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#379

Post by bko »

jeroenhd wrote: post #348
bko wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's nog a bug, it's a feature. Doordash uses investment money to evaporate competitors, take over the market and then raise prices for restaurant owners once they gain control. It's a tried and proven concept. Paying part of the meal is part of that strategy. They know full well that large orders and large amounts of transactions cost them more money and they're betting on nobody actually doing this. They're selling…

My original comment said its not okay to steal from a company even if you don't like that company. Your post is a lot of words about why you don't like that company. You don't directly address my claim that its unethical to steal from a company even if you don't like the company.

And then you make a weird point that software can be unethical (e.g. phising software) and this somehow applies to Doordash. Just to get this straight, making peer to peer scheduling software used for deliveries is unethical? And because of that, its okay to steal from their investors (including many US investors and pension funds)?

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#380

Post by jeroenhd »

VHRanger wrote: post #367
jeroenhd wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nog a bug, it's a feature. Doordash uses investment money to evaporate competitors, take over the market and then raise prices for restaurant owners once they gain control. It's a tried and proven concept. Paying part of the meal is part of that strategy. They know full well that large orders and large amounts of transactions cost them more money and they're betting on nobody actually doing this. They're selling…

Just a note: it's not a tried and proven concept. Predatory pricing hardly works in economic theory and is working disastrously for a lot of the companies trying it (eg. Ubers financials)

Where I live, one company has taken over all meal delivery nationally. After destroying the competition, this company had started raising prices each year. They ask for a percentage (13%, rising each year) in an industry where the margins are already very thin.

They money grab got a lot worse after they pushed out all the alternatives and just like with Google, everybody has to play by their rules or they'll be mostly undiscoverable for a large portion of the general public. Their delivery people are still underpaid, but by increasing their percentage of the bill they take for themselves they're now turning a profit. It's gotten to the point where companies are not even allowed to lower their prices when people use other delivery systems (or the restaurant's own personnel) which are cheaper.

The company only got this large because they could afford making losses for many years. Now other companies such as Doordash are trying to cut into the market as well, using hundreds of millions of foreign cash flows and putting business owners under even more pressure. Had there not been a company doing this since 2014, Doordash or any of its competitors would have taken the market regardless.

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