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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

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Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#441

Post by mattkrause »

lonelappde wrote: post #423
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?

If you knew the owner well enough to have their number, it doesn't seem totally crazy.

"Had no idea you did delivery! Boss just put in an order for a work event! See you Friday?"

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#442

Post by 0xffff2 »

mnd999 wrote: post #261
Kiro wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“Unexpected item in bagging a area” gets me every time.

I haven't heard that phrase in years. There were some growing pains when self-checkout systems were first introduced, but every one I've interacted with in recent memory has been re-calibrated to be much more permissive.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#443

Post by wnissen »

joshvm wrote: post #165
ChuckMcM wrote: post #147

I love this story, especially about ordering dough pizzas. It reminded me of this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/meslin/status/1225834920611848192?lang=e... In which the author tries to order the Uline "box of boxes", a box of twenty-five (25) 6" x 9" x 6" boxes, only to have Amazon deliver a 6" x 9" x 6" box containing some random product. The collection product from Uline has the same bar code as the box itsel…

The automated system should say "weight, that can't be right". Works fairly reliably in supermarkets, especially if you allow a bigger margin of uncertainty on sku weight. Or verify the volume/shape - or both, like volumetric weight that shipping companies use. I'm guessing amazon has some system to automatically assign boxes based on the dimensions of stuff that's being picked.

I just had a package from Amazon that literally weighed less than the product that was supposed to be in it. I peeled off the shipping label and found another one underneath that was labeled "weight error". Someone had apparently intercepted it, overridden whatever check was going on, and sent it out anyway.

Weirdly, Amazon still made me mail back the underweight one (I would happily have paid the correct amount for the smaller quantity to save the trouble of remailing) and a few days later sent out the correct one. You'd think in this case they have a record of the actual weight of the package and could sort things out instantly, but apparently not.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#444

Post by 0xffff2 »

j7ake wrote: post #204
joshvm wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The automated system should say "weight, that can't be right". Works fairly reliably in supermarkets, especially if you allow a bigger margin of uncertainty on sku weight. Or verify the volume/shape - or both, like volumetric weight that shipping companies use. I'm guessing amazon has some system to automatically assign boxes based on the dimensions of stuff that's being picked.

Weight can easily be gamed by adding a bag of water. Verifying shape would be difficult without knowing what to expect beforehand, but can also be gamed. You won’t get the precision of supermarket weighting if you are dealing with diverse restaurants with a dynamic menu.

Unless I'm missing something, this thread is talking about the automated system making a mistake on its own. No one is trying to game the system.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#445

Post by VHRanger »

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.

Walmart and McD don't do predatory pricing -- they just have lower prices while being profitable.

Predatory pricing is intentionally setting loss-making prices to drive out competition to then hike prices to profitable levels.

Notice this isn't what "ultra returns to scale" businesses are doing -- they're just profitably pricing low.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#446

Post by myself248 »

michaelt wrote: post #297
joshvm wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking about this more, I'm surprised this couldn't be caught when the items got delivered to Amazon. I find it extremely unlikely that a picking robot accidentally found an item with the same barcode if they weren't already in the wrong place. Seems like when the items arrived at the fulfilment centre, they got mis-scanned and ended up comingled. Presumably that's the stage where you can check weight and volume -…

It's not unusual for warehouses to deal with items with multiple barcodes. For a technology example, you might get a network card with a UPC barcode, but also a MAC address barcode, and a manufacturer's part number barcode. A wholesaler/ manufacturer sells boxes of 20 items to resellers? The outer box will have a barcode. That box got sent by courier? Three barcodes on some mailing labels. So at a goods-in station, t…

Those multiple barcodes also confuse the crap out of self-check-out stations. Once it picks up on the wrong one, it throws a fault that the attendant has to come back out of, so you can't just back out scan the right one.

What baffles me is that the store/software can't build a dictionary of "known misdirection" barcodes, like "this is the shipping carton not the product itself, fault and tell the user to rescan, but don't just lock up" when they're seen.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#447

Post by hannasanarion »

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.

What restaurant doesn't allow alterations?

"I want a supreme pizza, hold the pepperoni, sausage, peppers, onions, olives, sauce, and cheese".

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#448

Post by hannasanarion »

Beldin wrote: post #318
Dylan16807 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why does it matter if the owner is reimbursing their non-owning customers? Restaurants do that all the time.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#449

Post by Spivak »

taurath wrote: post #257
jimbob45 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really makes me happy but I hope you delete this before it becomes mainstream and DD catches on.

I hope it goes mainstream and they all go under because nobody wants to pay their crazy prices while not actually supporting a restaurant

I mean if anything their prices are crazy low. I can buy about 30 minutes of a real human's time to deliver me food for about $3. With pizza joints and Chinese takeout it's averaged into the prices but not with these delivery apps. I've seen a few inflated prices but almost every restaurant around here is just charging the same as they always have.

A delivery service that supported the restaurant would be way way more expensive.

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