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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

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Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#501

Post by Dylan16807 »

ethbro wrote: post #493
hannasanarion wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

Getting something for cheaper because of marketing-driven pricing, wasting time dealing with empty shells you don't want, reimbursing the customer...

You have all those elements when backblaze was shucking drives en masse, but nobody would say that was fraud in any way. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/

If you intentionally sell a product for cheaper than you buy it to build market share (I think it's fair to call this intentional when they process the payment and don't bother changing the listed price), and you're willing to sell a whole lot of that product to someone, you can't cry foul when someone profits off that.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#502

Post by crystalPalace »

wnissen wrote: post #443
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.

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…

A couple of months ago Amazon shipped me a completely empty, sealed envelope labeled as 1 pound. At least Amazon support immediately shipped me the correct item.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#503

Post by hckr_news »

oarsinsync wrote: post #250
013a wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the OP meant through the DoorDash app? Recently, I've used the Dominos, Papa Johns, or Pizza Hut apps, which are, you know, fine enough, they get the job done, but critically: there's no surcharge beyond what you'd pay over the phone. I would be confused why anyone would buy a chain pizza like this through DoorDash (or a similar service). Beyond the one tenuous benefit of not having to install another app;…

> I would be confused why anyone would buy a chain pizza like this through DoorDash (or a similar service). Beyond the one tenuous benefit of not having to install another app; is it really worth the extra surcharge? Are they even listed in these apps? Papa Johns is listed on Deliveroo. I often order PJs through Deliveroo when I'm hungry and don't want to think too much. It costs more in money, it costs less in cogni…

Not sure how Deliveroo works. But I would think the issue here is you may miss out on coupons, promotions and deals chains like Papa Johns usually have. If we say saving yourself 5 bucks using a promo code on a weekly ordered pizza, on a yearly basis this comes out to almost 300/year of savings.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#504

Post by hannasanarion »

ethbro wrote: post #493
hannasanarion wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

What you're describing isn't fraud, it's arbitrage: buying low, selling high. Just because Doordash are a bunch of idiots for selling stuff for way less than it's worth doesn't make it illegal for me to trade with them in good faith on their own terms and profit.

Nobody's lying to anybody, no price fixing is happening, or anything. Doordash agreed to sell a product at a price to any of their users, and they are fulfilling the promise they made, end of story.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#505

Post by hnick »

jeegsy wrote: post #414
hnick wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, even at physical restaurants or cafes I often have issues where they didn't hear my order correctly. Just today I had a guy repeat my order (thank you to people who do this, it's the only way) and he'd forgotten the cheese. Phone calls to ethnic restaurants (as with GP, no offense intended) are another layer of trouble. With my local noisy Indonesian restaurant we had a 50% miss rate on our orders so usually…

DD, UberEats and the like screw up orders too. I've had a few errors even though "i didnt have to talk to anyone"

At least you get an audit trail ;)

I think it's only happened a couple of times in my few decades but dealing with "Where is the X?" "You didn't order that!" is annoying.

Also a fan of the Chinese restaurants like Din Tai Fung with the menu that you pass around and everyone ticks off what they want. It's so easy to coordinate a group of 10 that way.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#506

Post by [deleted] »

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,…

[deleted]

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#507

Post by AnthonyMouse »

abroach wrote: post #476
VHRanger wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 subs…

Right, so then the startup should sell nonrefundable tickets several weeks in advance. As soon as American starts flying those routes below cost, move your own planes to a different route, book all your passengers with nonrefundable tickets on the American flights and pocket the difference. As soon as they stop, start flying those routes again.

There is presumably some regulatory burden preventing someone from doing this. Maybe you can't move planes from one route to another so easily etc. But then that's how the company does it. Without that method of forcing the new competitor to incur unrecoverable costs, they can't do it.

It's theoretically possible to have a natural market barrier like that, but in practice to be a barrier that large it's nearly always a regulatory compliance issue. The law says you can't sign up customers on long-term contracts, preventing new competitors from locking in customers at the current price rather than the below-cost price. The law says an ISP has to serve the whole city and not just one neighborhood, increasing the startup capital required by a factor of a hundred. The law prohibits adversarial interoperability, so you can't distribute your own apps unless you can manufacture your own phones.

Most monopolies don't come from natural causes.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#508

Post by 1over137 »

huffmsa wrote: post #298
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They've only really known oil for 3 generations, so yes. And they're also desperate. The future where the world doesn't need their oil (or they've run out) isn't a distant future anymore. It's coming, and coming faster and faster. They need to diversify anyway they can if they want to avoid going back to just being a desert. And so they're jumping at pretty much any deal they see

>The future where the world doesn't need their oil

We'll need oil for plastics even if we stop using it for transportation, and Saudi oil is just about the easiest/cheapest to extract, so we'll be using their oil for a long time, but it won't be as grotesquely profitable for them as in the past.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#509

Post by missedthecue »

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…

Name me one time in the last twenty years that this "tried and proven" concept has worked?

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#510

Post by pacamara619 »

ornornor wrote: post #231
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…

What was the deal? You pay 5,000, the owner gave you back your 5,000 and kept the 15,000 as profit from door dash? The owner made a massive profit and the shelter gets free food and it didn’t cost you anything?

This reminds me of the scene in Silicon Valley where Richard bankrupts a similar delivery service that's not profitable in a specific use case by ordering a huge amount of Pizzas.
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