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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

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Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#471

Post by echlebek »

snowwrestler wrote: post #420
golergka wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He can pick up empty boxes and then immediately hand them back as the delivery address is the restoraunt address, no?

If the food delivery driver is knowingly not delivering any food, but is paying for the "food" anyway... that seems pretty close to fraud. If you order a shitload of real food and the pricing works out well for the restaurant, it's weird but it is still following the rules that DoorDash set out.

But if Doordash never made an agreement with the restaurant in the first place, like in the article, the restaurant has no obligation to follow any of Doordash's rules.

That doesn't mean they won't fall afoul of some state or federal laws in doing that.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#472

Post by [deleted] »

wdb wrote: post #466
esotericn wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the UK tipping delivery drivers is basically unheard of For you it might be. I tip delivery drivers and I received tips when I worked. Tips made up >20% of my pay. Rich people generally would not tip, poor people would.

Did you pay income tax over those tips?

[deleted]

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#473

Post by rdiddly »

fortran77 wrote: post #461
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?

What makes it unethical is the "quid-pro-quo". If he didn't expect to get free food for life it would be OK.

Interesting take, but I think the compensation only takes it from an act of charity down to exchanging favors, which isn't unethical in itself. The very act of buying a pizza is a quid pro quo. This money for that pizza.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#474

Post by beart »

myself248 wrote: post #446
michaelt wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Scanners in distribution centers contain a barcode hierarchy that filter out unused barcode types. For example, after something has been picked, a UPS label might be applied to it. Subsequent scanners will be programmed to only read either the internal routing label or the UPS label (or both and let the software handle it).

The scanners in supermarkets are made by the same companies and I would assume run on the same software. However, it might be more difficult to ensure a specific type of barcode is used on 100% of products in the store. So if you see the scanner picking up the wrong barcode at the check-out aisle, it is most likely either the scanner is not programmed correctly, or the scanned barcode is the same type as a valid barcode used somewhere else in the building.

As far as handling faults, that would probably be done on the POS system, not the scanner itself. The scanner software is perfectly capable of handling errors in different ways (for example, sending a specific code to indicate two different non-matching barcodes were read in the same pass), but from a functional standpoint, the scanner is 'dumb'.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#475

Post by victor106 »

> The owner insisted the driver take the pizza in a heated bag so the customer didn’t get cold pizza, but leave an ID so the driver would be compelled to return the bag.

>Doordash was causing him real problems. The most common was, Doordash delivery drivers didn't have the proper bags for pizza so it inevitably would arrive cold

What this means is that the restaurants really care about their customers. The delivery really really don't care.

I spoke with a few restaurant owners in NYC and they all universally hate the delivery companies. The restaurants are charged anywhere between 30% - 40% which is a ridiculous amount.

There's another company in India called Swiggy. I used to travel to India and would frequent a few bars in Bangalore and Hyderabad. All of them absolutely hated them for the same reason.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#476

Post by abroach »

VHRanger wrote: post #445
blaser-waffle wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

American Airlines famously killed upstart after upstart that attempted to fly out of Dallas Love Field. They kept a lease on two gates, but left them unused almost all of the time (AA generally flies out of the larger Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport). Whenever any new company tried to start new service out of Love field, American would open those two gates, match routes exactly to the startup, and charge substantially less, clearly incurring a loss for each plane flown. As soon as the new company was driven into bankruptcy, AA would again shutter those gates, leaving them available to crush the next company that tried to start at Love Field. See, e.g., Legend Airlines.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#477

Post by setgree »

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…

I've been thinking about this comment a lot today. It's cool that you have relationship with the owner of a local restaurant! I know the owners of a local coffee shop pretty well and it's been really interesting (and a bit depressing) discussing the economics of owning a small business with them.

And when you know your local business owners by name, opportunities like this emerge.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#478

Post by ethbro »

hannasanarion wrote: post #448
Beldin wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(IANAL) My gut says coordination would be be evidence of both (a) premeditated intent & (b) knowledge that actions constituted fraud.

One could place a personal order (or 100) innocently.

One looks substantially less innocent when coordinating with a third party to place orders and transfer money around.

While that speaks to the severity of the crime (if one were proven), as you noted, it doesn't in any way impact whether that behavior is a crime at all.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#479

Post by eli_gottlieb »

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…

... so you basically used Doordash's algorithms to make Softbank donate $15k to your local homeless shelter?

That's fucking awesome. Way to go, man.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#480

Post by esotericn »

wdb wrote: post #466
esotericn wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the UK tipping delivery drivers is basically unheard of For you it might be. I tip delivery drivers and I received tips when I worked. Tips made up >20% of my pay. Rich people generally would not tip, poor people would.

Did you pay income tax over those tips?

Are HMRC paying you for this comment? :)
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