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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

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Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#491

Post by jononomo »

MattGaiser wrote: post #208
Barrin92 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't know if I'm living in a different world than everyone else but I've been ordering food and taking cabs all my life and I've never had to deal with any friction. Like, you call the pizzeria, tell them what you want and then some college student delivers your stuff, and if you order for more than 20 bucks it doesn't cost you anything. Not even being facetious, but what problem do these apps solve? I al…

> I also don't know how "not having to talk to someone" is a perk. For us introverts it is.

This is a misunderstanding of what it means to be an introvert. Introverts are capable of talking to people. The inability or disinclination to place an order for food delivery is a sign that you are disabled, not introverted.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#492

Post by neap24 »

fokinsean wrote: post #397
neap24 wrote: post #388

I've noticed the opposite phenomenon at a popular restaurant in Austin. The menu through DoorDash is priced higher than the normal price. Curiously, the restaurant's own, in-house delivery system is the same price as dining in. This is when I stopped using DoorDash...when I discovered that using the restaurant's own delivery system is just as easy and maybe cheaper.

Which restaurant? (I live in Austin)

Tarka

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#493

Post by ethbro »

hannasanarion wrote: post #484
ethbro wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 wh…

But who's defrauding who? If the doordash website says I can buy a dough pizza for $19, then doordash has to get me a dough pizza for $19 when I buy one. No fraud is happening, doordash is fulfilling the requirements of the contract they make with all their customers. If anything, the one who's committing fraud is doordash, because they're putting in "takeout" orders with the restaurant and presenting them as "delive…

In the example from TFA, Doordash says you can buy a pizza for $16 and charges you $16. The restaurant menu price is $24, and Doordash pays $24 for the pizza. That's... the starting place. (As screwy as it is)

Now, if I order a dough pizza for $16, in coordination with the restaurant, and Doordash pays $24 to the restaurant, and the restaurant gives me a dough pizza, and then the restaurant makes it worth my while, what do we have?

Doordash has been paid $16, and spent $24 + (cost of delivery) = (-) SoftBank money

The restaurant has been paid $24 and spent ~$1 (cost of dough pizza [1]) = ~$23 profit (minus labor)

I paid $16 (let's ignore tip). The restaurant reimburses me for that (me: $0, restaurant: $7) to make it worth my while, and then splits profits with me (me: $3.50, restaurant: $3.50).

So at the end, Doordash: -$8 - delivery cost, restaurant: $3.50, me: $3.50.

It's the reimbursement of the customer that seems... suspect.

The way to ethically monetize this would be for restaurants to target Doordash misprices, and "sell" coupons (a food box, containing only a paper coupon), good for future food orders directly through the restaurants. Then encourage all their customers to buy as much as possible.

[1] We'll say we return and recycle the boxes, being environmentally conscious citizens

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#494

Post by hckr_news »

CodeCube wrote: post #434
swyx wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> delete this before it becomes mainstream ignoring the fact that this post itself is top of HN and going viral?

I don't really think going viral on HN === mainstream ;)

DoorDash engineers are on here too. Unless they want to keep quiet about it ;)

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#495

Post by FireBeyond »

giarc wrote: post #359
slfnflctd wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Friend of a friend has the same issue, works for Instacart or one of the grocery delivery services. With their kids in the car. And they spend their days waiting in grocery store parking lots as that maximizes their throughput.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#496

Post by FireBeyond »

Spivak wrote: post #451
Traster wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you imagine getting that call "Hi, little Pizza place, we've been fraudulently impersonating your business, dragging your brand through the mud and pissing off all your customers selling your pizza at a loss, clearly we're the sort of people you need to do business with"

I think there's a huge grey area between "hire a 3rd-party person to pick up your food and deliver it to you" and "impersonating your business." Like DD, GrubHub, or whatever aren't pretending to be the restaurant (shady website bullshit notwithstanding). They're just saying that they can buy and drive the food to you on your behalf.

Absolutely they are. They'll set up phone numbers and answer as though they're your restaurant. They'll set up websites (which I think you allude to? "they aren't pretending to be the restaurant... other than setting up a website pretending to be the restaurant"). They'll pretend to be the end customer if they have to.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#497

Post by FireBeyond »

kabacha wrote: post #198
bb611 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't fully explain why they priced a $24 pizza at $16. I wouldn't be surprised if they're subsidizing purchases, but just skipping fees doesn't explain that.

Web-scraping is hard man, especially with mom-and-pop restaurant websites that are often exported straight from microsoft word or some ancient "platform" that got reconfigured 20 times over. As article pointed out it picked up full-toppings pizza as plain cheese.

It could be so easy to game this.

Table Column A, menu items, lowest to highest in cost.

Table Column B, prices, highest to lowest in cost.

Naive scraper associates rows as menu item and cost.

You use CSS, etc., to rearrange things correctly. People looking at your site get info as intended, scrapers have problems, and it's only a dark pattern to them.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#498

Post by coderholic »

xuki wrote: post #39
coderholic wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pizza business is the one making the profit here, at doordash's expense. It'd presumably be trivial for doordash to fix this, by checking the order amount against the cost. The article explains why they might not be doing that ("growth")

The problem is some customers received the pizza cold, and instead of blaming DoorDash, they blamed the restaurant. It's very misleading when DoorDash resell a product and pretend like the restaurant is actively participating in that process. I personally would not hesitate to ramp up the "self ordering", just to f * with DoorDash.

Gotcha. You're talking about doordash pretending to be the restaurant, not the arbitrage problem.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#499

Post by thebean11 »

echlebek wrote: post #471
snowwrestler wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right but this thread is about the driver pretending they picked up food that never existed. IANAL but sounds like fraud on the driver's part.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#500

Post by eitally »

peteretep wrote: post #267
eitally wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last bit only applies in dense downtowns. In the Bay Area, if I'm hungry right now and that happens to be roughly dinner time, I'm waiting 50-70 minutes for a food delivery.

My guess is that your app of choice can show you estimated delivery times for different restaurants based on distance and avg preparation, adding yet another reason for using

Yes. I'm just saying that the majority of restaurants in the greater bay area will have lengthy delivery times during weekday dinner hours... the exception being if you order from a place physically close to your delivery point.
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