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Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

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Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#31
In a similar situation, the alcohol delivery service Drizly received a ton of backlash for buying ads on the brand terms of a Black-owned wine shop in Boston that they had no affiliation with. When buyers understand how platforms do this, they are pretty clear that they don’t agree with it.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CGpUGbuAc-q/?igshid=1u5yor18vch0...

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why aren't GrubHub concerned about the legal reprecussions of this? When is the last time a company was SERIOUSLY threatened by the repercussions of doing something illegal in the US? When was the last time a company was fined/sued out of existence for something they were doing to average people?

All I know is I’m still waiting for my Equifax settlement check. Any day now, I’m sure!

Heh, in the state I used to live in there was a huge controversy regarding a power company, corrupt politicians, amassive infrastructure project failure who's cost was passed on the the consumer, and strange mergers . People were promised compensation and the the three cent checks eventually trickled in.

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#34
post #19

I hope there's a strong precedent set here. Companies like Grubhub list restaurants on their site/app, but put the wrong phone number on it- one that goes to their own people instead. That's clearly some kind of fraud or misrepresentation. Makes me feel like I should setup a phone number and a website called something like "GrubhubHelp.com", and list a help number for assistance with GrubHub orders. Then when custome…

Unless I'm missing something, the substantive difference hereis that GrubHub is still ordering from the restaurant that the customer is ordering from.

Your comparison of pretending to offer GrubHubHelp but then going to competitors is like if I ordered McDonalds, and you brought me pasta.

I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with what GrubHub is doing, but I could see them needing to clearly note the relationship. There are lots of personal shopping/delivery services which phone in orders and go pick something up without having a pre-existing relationship with the restaurant.

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#35
post #2

At the size / scale of grubhub, it will always be cheaper to do unethical things for money now versus settling out of court later. Knowing someone that used to do sales at grubhub, this doesn't surprise me at all. The company that person currently works at is probably doing the same, because if you can get away with it, why not? Worst thing that happens to the people who put those policies in place is they find anoth…

i'll go even further... the other thing about it is that the owner has to have the money is order to bring the lawsuit to court. also, depending on how backed up the courts are, it could be years before the case brought into court by which time the owner could be out of business.

it really is horrible how screwed up our civil court system is.

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#36

Tbh I don't see a major problem with this. If folks want to pay someone (Grubhub) to go pick up food for them, why should the restaurants be allowed to say no? > Food may not travel well. Fair point, but if the customer still wants it, that's on them. > But that may lead to unfairly low ratings for the restaurant. If (say) 30% of the restaurant's patrons choose to get the food via food delivery, why shouldn't those f…

I think the main problem is grubhub don't make it clear that this isn't "officially supported". Imagine someone set up a website claiming to sell your services, without making it obvious they have nothing to do with you, then after accepting jobs would ask you to do them (ok, this comparision doesn't quite work, but I think it gets the basic idea).

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#37

Tbh I don't see a major problem with this. If folks want to pay someone (Grubhub) to go pick up food for them, why should the restaurants be allowed to say no? > Food may not travel well. Fair point, but if the customer still wants it, that's on them. > But that may lead to unfairly low ratings for the restaurant. If (say) 30% of the restaurant's patrons choose to get the food via food delivery, why shouldn't those f…

> why shouldn't those folks' ratings of the food be factored into the restaurant's rating?

Because a lot of people are not capable of differentiating between product and delivery, and poor delivery (which they have no control over in this case) shouldn't result in low ratings. Have you ever looked at Amazon reviews? A good chunk of them seems to purely give their stars based on delivery.

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#38

Tbh I don't see a major problem with this. If folks want to pay someone (Grubhub) to go pick up food for them, why should the restaurants be allowed to say no? > Food may not travel well. Fair point, but if the customer still wants it, that's on them. > But that may lead to unfairly low ratings for the restaurant. If (say) 30% of the restaurant's patrons choose to get the food via food delivery, why shouldn't those f…

I think one of the big issues is that if this is done honestly, telling the customer that this is what's happening (and the restaurant), that's ok. But both the customer and the restaurant were misled into this transaction.

But perhaps that would have led to a much lower CR on the site. Who knows.

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#39
A lot of companies do things like this where they pretend to be another company to scoop in business as a middleman. Recently googled a tradesperson and called the number on the top result that came up. It quickly became clear that I wasn’t talking to the outfit I was trying to call but someone trying to insert themselves in the middle and collect a fee. When I grilled them it became clear what was going on.

I eventually hung up and found a new number which put me in touch with the company directly. When I told them what happened they were like “yeah (insert name of one stop shop for home repairs) has been doing this... we have nothing to do with them but they keep trying to pretend we work with them and put out adverts under our name.” Super frustrating and I can sympathize with the restaurants where the same sort of thing seems to be happening.

The likes of Google could of course police this a lot better but they’re happy to take the money for the ads.

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this analogy, it would be more like you creating an eBay store called "Strand Books", listing the entire Strand Books' catalog, and then when someone purchases a book from you, popping into The Strand to get the book and shipping it to them. Except sometimes they're out of the book, and so the customer never receives it. Or you damage the book between the book store and the post office, and they receive a badly da…

But the customers are ordering the food from Grubhub , no? So why would they be confused that there's a middle-man?

A middle man is responsible to the consumer. A subcontractor is not. Grubhub does not tell the consumer whether they are acting as a subcontractor or middle man for a particular restaurant. This is deceptive and harms the restaurants who do not subcontract Grubhub.
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