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

421–430 of 534 posts

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#421

Post by Thriptic »

astura wrote: post #104
bostonsre wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone know if it would be considered fraud and/or illegal to exploit this? I would consider doordash and grubhubs tactics of falsely representing themselves as restaurants to be more unethical. It would be great if someone could scale a solution that would take those arbitrage opportunities and pass them on to the drivers and the restaurants.

Yes, it's fraud. In general, knowingly obtaining money, goods or services you know you are not entitled to is fraud/illegal. Here's an example of someone going to jail for knowingly exploiting a glitch: https://www.inquirer.com/philly/hp/news_update/20071026_N_C_...

It doesn't seem like fraud when they are still delivering an actual pizza; that's basically just leveraging a sale. It becomes more dubious when they aren't delivering the finished good.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#422

Post by vivab0rg »

novalis78 wrote: post #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.

Source please?

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#423

Post by lonelappde »

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…

> texted the owner about being miffed they hadn’t told me they were on DoorDash.

Why would someone do this?

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#424

Post by DagAgren »

imgabe wrote: post #49

Just some back-of-the-napkin math if you wanted to do this "right". Let's say you hire drivers as employees and pay them $15/hr plus tips and reimburse them for mileage. You charge a $4.99 delivery fee. Drivers work set shifts and are paid hourly whether they are making deliveries or not. That means each driver needs to be making at least 4 deliveries an hour or you're losing money. That's not even really counting fo…

The business model is to charge both a delivery fee and a commission on the sales price. That way, you can make it profitable, even when paying a fair price to couriers, as long as you can keep your business lean and your delivery routing efficient.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#426

Post by VBprogrammer »

Majromax wrote: post #399
bko wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> My original comment said its not okay to steal from a company even if you don't like that company. Your original comment said it was wrong to exploit a bug, to which the parent poster retorted that this was a feature and not a bug. Here, you've gone further to claim that this behaviour is stealing, and I'd like to explore that for a minute: what possible moral or legal right does Doordash have to an operating profi…

Would it have crossed the line if the OP had tweaked the Italian places website (say for example setting a 0 height div) to include fake prices intended for the scraper to misinterpret?

For me I think it would have. Which makes me pause to consider whether I find the whole scheme too close to the ethical boundary.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#427

Post by DagAgren »

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?

A company focusing on delivery can do the job more efficiently and competently. Just the fact that they can route deliveries more effectively instead of going restaurant-customer-restaurant is a big win.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#428

Post by lonelappde »

blaser-waffle wrote: post #391
VHRanger wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Predatory Pricing absolutely works... when you have a working business model and capital to back it up. Walmart and McDonalds are masters of this approach. Uber is a long-term play at disrupting cabs/transportation cartels and incorporated self-driving cars into a non-literal roadmap. They're in it for the long play, and even if they hemorrhage money for a while longer it may, in fact, play out in their favor.

How can you call McDonald's predatory pricing? They have been cheap and profitable for decades.

At best you could try to argue that they make their money fleecing dumb "business owners" who pay for franchises.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#429

Post by shadowoflight »

bko wrote: post #405
Majromax wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My original comment said its not okay to steal from a company even if you don't like that company. Your original comment said it was wrong to exploit a bug, to which the parent poster retorted that this was a feature and not a bug. Here, you've gone further to claim that this behaviour is stealing, and I'd like to explore that for a minute: what possible moral or legal right does Doordash have to an operating profi…

I think it is a bug. I think they relied too heavily on automation and scraping to get a list of all the restaurants, menus and prices. From the original article: > My first thought: I wondered if Doordash is artificially lowering prices for customer acquisition purposes. > My second thought: I knew Doordash scraped restaurant websites. After we discussed it more, it was clear that the way his menu was set up on his…

> If I think Walmart is unethical, is it okay shoplift from their stores? You've made a false equivalence here, a more correct question would be: "If Walmart prices a gallon of milk at $0.25, either by mistake or for the purpose of getting people to buy milk at Walmart and not their local grocer, and I buy 100 gallons to give to people who can't afford milk right now, is that unethical?" ...to which the answer is, no, that's not unethical, you paid the price listed on the tag and Walmart (conceivably) paid the dairy farm their usual rate, so the only company hurt was the one that made the mistake or predatory pricing move.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#430

Post by lonelappde »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #281
eru wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Some people can make a profit playing at casinos (more so in the past than now).

Does that make casinos dumb? No, just imperfect.

Post reply on HN