Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission • Hacker News Board

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#251

Post by thrownaway954 » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 7:05 PM UTC

ciarannolan wrote: post #167

thrownaway954 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are the courts "backed up", or is the process of discovery and everything else leading up to a trial/judgement just a necessarily long one?

the point i was trying to make is that it for any reason, the case can be delayed in getting to court. i've personally seen cases take 10 years to finally get to court only to have the case dismissed.

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#252

Post by skipnup » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 7:08 PM UTC

rileymat2 wrote: post #245

punitxsmart wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the sentiment. But, it should not be illegal to lie about your inventory. As long as you are receiving what is promised by them at a price that you both agree, its all fair game.

I don't understand this position, how is it not a form of fraud?

Atleast in the EU it even is forbidden to use false information ("only X rooms/seats/items left" if that isn't true) as a sales tactic.

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#253

Post by hinkley » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

We finally started driving across town to get carry-out once we realized how big a difference in cost it was. Not only is there a fee but I think they're also inflating prices, and for some restaurants they kept getting the order wrong.

Plus the tip goes to their driver, not the restaurant. I mean yeah, props to the driver driving all over getting my food, but I want my guilt money to go to the cooks, who are breathing each other's air in a kitchen so I can stress eat, just feeling lucky they still have a job at all.

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#254

Post by jjk166 » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

kevincox wrote: post #222

jjk166 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that the restaurant owner was frustrated but this is like giving your waiter a bad tip because your food didn't taste good - you really think the driver has any influence on which restaurants get listed?

No, but if you manage to identify all of these delivery people and refuse them service I bet that they unlist you.

That's a fairly unreasonable assumption. Odds are the only thing a human at corporate will ever see is "Driver John Doe could not complete delivery, customer complained" Unless purely by chance the same person just so happens to see the same issue with the same restaurant a few times, it's very unlikely that they'ed notice a trend, nonetheless correctly deduce its cause. The person in charge of making sure deliveries get completed is almost certainly not the person handling restaurant partnerships.

Even if someone does eventually notice and takes corrective action, this is far from an optimal way to do it. Given that the server is acting like the drivers should just know that they wanted to be unlisted, it wouldn't surprise me if the "we told you before" means all they did was tell drivers they wanted to opt out and never actually did the opt out procedure.

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#255

Post by mikestew » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 7:21 PM UTC

mytailorisrich wrote: post #201

bckygldstn wrote: post #100

The lawsuit [1] lists the following Factual Allegations: • Gruhub tells consumers it’s working cooperatively with restaurants • Grubhub decides to add unaffiliated restaurants to its website and mobile apps without the restaurants’ permission • Grubhub’s unauthorized use of restaurants’ names and logos misleads consumers and harms restaurants • Restaurants have good reasons for choosing not to work with Grubhub ◦ Gru…

A counter point is that an individual is free to hire someone to go and pick up food from a restaurant on their behalf and it does not make any difference to the restaurant. I suspect that what restaurants fear, though, is that Grubhub is trying to grab as much marketshare as possible then once they are in a position of strength they'll go and demand a commission from the restaurants, or else...

That's not much of a counterpoint. In isolation, I would question whether this reply is aimed at the wrong comment as it doesn't seem to counterpoint much of anything in the parent comment as far as I can tell. It's not about someone coming to pick up food at a restaurant.

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#256

Post by gjreda » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 7:29 PM UTC

kop316 wrote: post #115

ghthrowaway99 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[ Disclaimer: GH employee but speaking independently & not representing the company in this message ] You're mixing up controversies - there was a separate "feature" Grubhub did years ago where grubhub would stand up online presence for restaurants to bring in web search traffic (branded websites, search results on grubhub.com, etc) and list a grubhub phone number instead of the real phone number so that grubhub coul…

"Grubhub was against place and pay at first, when UberEats and Doordash began doing it (not because Grubhub is selfless but because partnered restaurants are way more profitable), but resisting place and pay turned out to be a recipe for losing market share so that's no longer the case." If Grubhub actually took a stand and showed they not only did not do this sort of behavior, I would actually use it, and I would pa…

Here's an excerpt from their October 2019 letter to shareholders. TL;DR - they're a public company and the markets told them they needed to keep growing in order to survive.

> For restaurant inventory, we will rapidly expand our recent pilots of putting non-partnered restaurants on the platform. For reasons we’ve discussed many times, we believe non-partnered options are the wrong long-term answer for diners, restaurants and shareholders. It is expensive for everyone, a suboptimal diner experience and rife with operational challenges. With that said, it is extremely efficient and cheap to add non-partnered inventory to our platform and it can at least ensure that all of our current and potential new diners have the option to order from any of their favorite restaurants now, even if it’s not the best solution. By leveraging non-partnered options, we believe we can more than double the number of restaurants on our platform by the end of 2020.

> At the same time, because we know that partnered relationships are critical to the long-term success of this business, we will be investing aggressively in our independent restaurant sales organization to support converting as many of these non-partnered restaurants to partnered relationships as quickly as possible and to take advantage of other innovations in the restaurant space, like virtual restaurants.

https://s2.q4cdn.com/772508021/files/doc_financials/2019/q3/...

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#257

Post by brlewis » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

ghthrowaway99 wrote: post #165

doc_gunthrop wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The restaurant can opt out of this, but they never asked for the service in the first place so it's kinda shitty. That's what this article is about. If the driver places the order without making it clear to the restauranteur that they are the middleman company (UberEats, Doordash, etc.) then the opt-out clause is meaningless. You can't opt out of something you're never aware of.

While I agree, restaurants do tend to pick up on this over time because (more issues with Place & Pay) people will complain to the restaurant about food being cold/slow not realizing that the restaurant isn't even involved in the delivery. Sometimes the delivery people make it quite obvious (e.g. drivers are given GH branded credit cards to pay with)

> people will complain to the restaurant about food being cold/slow not realizing that the restaurant isn't even involved in the delivery

By using their name in commerce, restaurants have a trademark.

People complaining to the restaurant about delivery shows that consumers mistook the Place & Pay vendor for the restaurant. This is proof that the trademark was infringed.

I don't see how Place & Pay could survive a court case, or even prolong one.

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#258

Post by mytailorisrich » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

mikestew wrote: post #255

mytailorisrich wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A counter point is that an individual is free to hire someone to go and pick up food from a restaurant on their behalf and it does not make any difference to the restaurant. I suspect that what restaurants fear, though, is that Grubhub is trying to grab as much marketshare as possible then once they are in a position of strength they'll go and demand a commission from the restaurants, or else...

That's not much of a counterpoint. In isolation, I would question whether this reply is aimed at the wrong comment as it doesn't seem to counterpoint much of anything in the parent comment as far as I can tell. It's not about someone coming to pick up food at a restaurant.

> Grubhub decides to add unaffiliated restaurants to its website and mobile apps without the restaurants’ permission

My counterpoint is that I don't believe that there is anything wrong with that or that permission is needed. Of course as long as there is no misrepresentation, which may indeed be an issue here.

If you think otherwise I'm happy to hear your argument...

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#259

Post by userbinator » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

loceng wrote: post #154

TuringNYC wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI - the same thing happens with Hotels.com. When you "call the hotel" with the number listed, I learned that the representative is actually a Hotels.com rep, not a hotel employee or hotel call-center employee. This matters. In my case, I asked about my corporate discount and they gave me a vague answer about "I dont see anything in the system", which I guess was technically not a lie, but definitely deceitful. I wi…

I had to recently book a hotel for a few nights. Hotels are mostly empty because of COVID. When I called to book a room it was clearly a script being followed with high pressure tactics including saying rooms are filling up quickly. Once I arrived at the hotel it looked mostly dead, and I when I asked the manager who was helping me behind the counter, he said they were at 10% capacity. It should also be illegal for b…

I don't know what's more amusing, the fact that they didn't change the script at all for the current conditions, or that there are probably still people falling for it.

Re: Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission

#260

Post by freeone3000 » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 7:41 PM UTC

jjk166 wrote: post #254

kevincox wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but if you manage to identify all of these delivery people and refuse them service I bet that they unlist you.

That's a fairly unreasonable assumption. Odds are the only thing a human at corporate will ever see is "Driver John Doe could not complete delivery, customer complained" Unless purely by chance the same person just so happens to see the same issue with the same restaurant a few times, it's very unlikely that they'ed notice a trend, nonetheless correctly deduce its cause. The person in charge of making sure deliveries…

I'm going to start showing up at your house and ringing the doorbell once a day until you follow my opt-out procedure.