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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

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Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#511

Post by DangitBobby »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #507
abroach wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you imagine how furious people would be if they found out their airline put them on their cheaper competitor's flights and kept the difference? Rationality be damned, they'd be out for blood. I can hear the screaming already. Good luck.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#512

Post by blackrock »

Is there really a monopoly play here for food delivery?

Granted, DoorDash can possibly be used for other kinds of delivery, like medicine and groceries.

It seems the cost of labor and transportation is too high to make it feasible.

But the actual play, might be robotic. To first take over the manual market, and then, conduct research into automated delivery services, like aerial drone delivery, or robotic dog delivery.

Once that technology is viable, then phase out the human delivery people, and replace them all with robots.

I actually never thought something like this would ever be economically viable. And then one day, a pandemic hit the entire world.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#513

Post by ryanlol »

DangitBobby wrote: post #511
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you imagine how furious people would be if they found out their airline put them on their cheaper competitor's flights and kept the difference? Rationality be damned, they'd be out for blood. I can hear the screaming already. Good luck.

This happens every day.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#514

Post by em-bee »

Thriptic wrote: post #417
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?

I'm confused. Doordash is knowingly reselling an item for 75% off and someone bought many of the items. No one was defrauded; everyone in the transaction was paid what they wanted to charge, and everyone got what they paid for. What is unethical here? Are you saying it's unethical to take advantage of a sale?

what's unethical is that doordash is undercutting competitiors who can't offer such deals.

in germany, reselling something for less than what you paid for (predatory pricing) is illegal (unless it's already devalued because it's old or used)

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#515

Post by Melting_Harps »

lonelappde wrote: post #428
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.

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.

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

Their pricing and food is a gimmick, didn't that movie The Founder and the subsequent articles from various outlets pretty much lineout how Mcdonald's actual business model relies on Property Management and franchising? [1]

The food, competitively priced (questionable food costs and sources are the bigger story not told) or not is only the hook/marketing costs to get you to show up in Corporate's business model, the real money is in leasing the property and the brand name to the Local owner.

Personally speaking, I had the misfortune of eating at Mcdonalds during this COVID shutdown on more than one occasion as grocery stores were closed by the time I got off work.

And other than nostalgia for what was once a haven of my childhood, I cannot bring myself to put that stuff into my body without feeling nausea afterward. Everything is overly sweet, or salty; I remember the pickles and the fries from the happy meal being pretty decent as a kid in the 90s that went down with the Hi-C orange soda, having had one of those value-meals ($15 is hardly a value mind you) as an adult with the same items was atrocious.

1: https://medium.com/@alexcjensen/forget-burgers-mcdonalds-is-...

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#516

Post by tripzilch »

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…

It's funny when this happens in our industry. It's called a security vulnerability. And if someone were to write a blog article about finding it, but also exploiting the fault several times over for their own financial gain, we'd be all up in arms over it, right?

Even if the exploited party itself it shady as hell. Say they were a credit card scammer, someone found a way of conning them for money, does that for a while to make some $$$, and then proudly writes a blog article exposing them.

Maybe I'm missing something though. That's looking at it rationally (?), but part of me also feels like, screw Doordash.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#517

Post by mister_hn »

swiley wrote: post #324
mister_hn wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming $10/pizza...500 pizzas in my life are reasonable

$10 for a pizza actually sounds pretty cheap.

In Italy $10 / pizza is a medium-high price already.

Generally, €10 for a pizza is the average one in EU. Only in UK people is prone to pay an average of 18 pounds for it, which is sick.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#518

Post by giarc »

rootusrootus wrote: post #408
giarc wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can I choose option C? :). I don't want drones buzzing around my neighborhood. I am 100% willing to pay for professional delivery drivers. To be fair, I guess, the days of random people driving junky old compact sedans filled to the roof with Amazon packages seems to be gone in my area. All the Amazon deliveries are now done by a guy driving a large Sprinter van painted glossy gray with Prime written on the side.

I'm in Canada so we don't yet have the Amazon branded delivery drivers. In my city, many Amazon packages are delivered by a company called Intelcom. It's people driving around their own cars, delivering packages.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#519

Post by shagie »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #288
patmcc wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doordash seems to provide two different services. 1) Doordash has some deal with the restaurant, gets a commission on sales, fees, whatever. 2) Doordash has no deal with the restaurant, charges customer $x+y, buys food from restaurant at $x. In the second case, Doordash may be charging much more than the menu price, if it things it can find customers who will pay it.

I think the trick here is that Doordash isn't charging the customer $x + $y, but $x - $y. X minus Y. That is, they're subsidizing the delivery - in order to generate demand, and then come to the restaurant with the data to convince them to sign up for 1). This was actually mentioned at the bottom of the article. So in this story, 'JumpCrisscross paid $x-$y = 5k for an order to a homeless shelter, but the real, restau…

Or the -$y is marketing costs.

DD says to Pasta House, see? Look, with DD we facilitated an additional $20k of revenue for you on this day. You should enter into an agreement with us so that we can make this a more seamless process.

In most cases, Pasta House isn’t aware that those orders were drastically under cost and don’t represent actual demand.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#520

Post by amoitnga »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #32
bransonf wrote: post #15

Reading the title, I anticipated this was going to be something along the lines of getting Domino's delivered for less than their delivery fee. (Side note, does anyone actually order franchise pizza on an app? They all already deliver for far less) But this was far more interesting. The fact that Doordash scrapes prices, and apparently doesn't verify... how does this happen? I'm not familiar with the reimbursement mo…

> The fact that Doordash scrapes prices, and apparently doesn't verify... how does this happen? It kind of happens by default if your goal is "growth at any cost". The video you mention is likely this one, and it's actually even more extreme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8 The fake restaurant in their garden shed, which never took customers or delivered any food , climbed up to #1 best restaurant in Lond…

is it actually real though? I imagine it'd be really difficult to pull it off. what if somebody who reviews restaurants would go there on, say, Monday? or at lease, even if they don't get in, just try to check out the place from 'waiting area' or at least outside.

Youtube videos have reputation for being fake, I wonder if this is actually true.

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