Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 300 posts

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#191

Post by mbrameld »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #94
tw04 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99%+? I can give you a case in point: we just tried to order Thai on Saturday from one of our favorite restaurants. They were short staffed in the kitchen and the wait time was over an hour... so we didn't order. I'm willing to bet a ton of other people did the same thing. Why should the Thai place have to PAY for people that declined to order?

> Why should the Thai place have to PAY for people that declined to order? They don’t, unless they agreed to those terms with the entity charging them. For example, if the agreement was to pay Yelp for all phone calls coming from Yelp’s website.

That's a little disingenuous. They don't HAVE to pay for those calls, but if Yelp's system decides an order took place then they get charged for the call. Based on some experimenting done recently by a podcast I listen to (can't remember which one right now), that decision boils down to "if the call was longer than 45 seconds and food was discussed, then an order took place". It's then up to the restaurant owner to reconcile and dispute any charged calls that didn't end in a sale. That means listening to the recording of every call that was charged and requesting a refund for each one that didn't end in an order.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#192

Post by donmcronald »

lacker wrote: post #34

This article really buries the lede, that all of these restaurants agreed to pay GrubHub for any leads that GrubHub generated. Sounds like the restaurants should simply stop buying GrubHub’s marketing service, if it isn’t worthwhile for them.

It's a prisoner's dilemma. If a company like GrubHub decides they're going to build a demand aggregation platform for a certain market segment, part of that is going to include significant advertising to acquire users (demand). They'll also offer a good (or great) looking deal to vendors (supply).

So, if you're a vendor, the appeal of early adoption is huge. You get access to a platform with a bunch of free advertising and a built in set of potential customers. The platform might let you reduce costs (shut down your website) and, as an early adopter, a lot of those potential customers become your customers in the short term.

Then, as vendors keep joining the platform, it becomes de facto market for those goods. That's the point where the demand aggregation has succeeded and the vendors get converted into a commodity. Customers want a class of product, not a specific product.

So now, you _must_ be on the platform to succeed even if you hate it and you're just another cog in supply side of the system, The company (like GrubHub) that successfully aggregated demand can rent seek for as long as they maintain the demand monopoly and there's nothing a single vendor can do about it.

Get used to it because every industry susceptible to demand aggregation is going to look like the food industry soon IMO.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#193

Post by dmart »

donmcronald wrote: post #175
underwater wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out. For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to tar…

People always adapt to work the system. It's "juking the stats" and IMO the thing that makes it so easy is that computers are great at correlation, but worthless when it comes to cause and effect. Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good. Without a certain amount of human intervention and moderation, the computers are extraordinarily s…

> Blog posts tended to be a good source of info, so now everything is a blog post because all Google sees is blog post = good.

Ah, this explains why looking for reviews or comparisons for any type of product returns page after page of fake, single-purpose blogs now. You'd think Google would have wised up to this obvious, annoying SEO strategy by now.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#194

Post by mbrameld »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #161

I fail to understand how exactly yelp/grubhub would bill the 10-20% of the order amount of the phone call. The call is recorded, yes (a reason why they can forget about that in the EU, in the EU you would need to implement a system for the caller to deny consent of the recording while on the line other than "if you don't like being recorded hang up now"). But do they manually listen to every phone call, make sure the…

A podcast I listen to just did an episode about this, specifically GrubHub. It's an automated system that analyzes the call, and it seemed to charge for any call over 45 seconds where food was discussed. As far as the amount goes, they used the average of the last X orders placed through the GrubHub app for that restaurant and charged some percentage of that. Then the owner is able to log in to their GrubHub account and see a list of all the calls they were charged for, listen to each one, and dispute any that didn't actually result in an order. The system is garbage.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#196

Post by Nasrudith »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #161

I fail to understand how exactly yelp/grubhub would bill the 10-20% of the order amount of the phone call. The call is recorded, yes (a reason why they can forget about that in the EU, in the EU you would need to implement a system for the caller to deny consent of the recording while on the line other than "if you don't like being recorded hang up now"). But do they manually listen to every phone call, make sure the…

They could set up a forwarding phone number as a way of proving effectiveness of advertising if they only publish the phone number there. A consensual arrangement is basically the only way it could work for all circumstances pick up or delivery through the number.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#197

Post by sneak »

ajb wrote: post #104
castratikron wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say there's no moral difference between a human operator and a mechanical operator whose behavior is controlled by a human. Configuring the operator to drop calls from a particular area code would be an example in the case you provided.

Sure. It just used to be harder to build in, and to do so precisely. In your example, dropping calls from an area code, that's a relatively coarse filter. There's a whole strand of academic research [1] arguing about whether people can build prejudice into technological artifacts, eg one disputed example was an underpass with low clearance, supposedly so that white middle class people in cars could pass, but black po…

> In your example, dropping calls from an area code, that's a relatively coarse filter.

Where I grew up, when I was in grade school, the (mostly white) 810 area code split off from the (remaining mostly black) 313 area code.

Afterward, the first three digits on the caller ID were a decent coarse proxy for the caller's race.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#198

Post by pavel_lishin »

aledalgrande wrote: post #181
tb303 wrote: post #111

I mean this with no snark at all: Yelp has been screwing over not just restaurants, but small businesses in general, since the moment their first sales representative had a friend leave a negative review to someone who didn't pay up. Mafia tactics are core to their business.

Be curious to see Yelp's "culture" booklet

It's probably as relevant to the decisions driving Yelp's frankly criminal activity, as a handbook handed out to ants is to the anthill itself.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#199

Post by Gibbon1 »

samatman wrote: post #164
sxzxs wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate more on (or give an example of) "mechanical honesty"? From the outside looking in, it doesn't seem unfeasible to implement biases in mechanical systems (especially government departments!), but I haven't given it a lot of thought.

The phone book. It's a public mapping of people and businesses with how to contact them. Any dishonesty would be noticed, because everyone has the same phone book. Contrast with getting a phone number from $large-company, be it Yelp, Google or otherwise. The only thing stopping them from selling this privilege to an intermediary is their reputation, and clearly where Yelp is concerned, this isn't enough. One could ar…

Another example is targeting job ads to particular demographics. You can put out an ad that only white men between the ages of 22 and 30 who come from an upper class background will see. And women, minorities and people from poor backgrounds, not only won't see them, they won't know they exist.

Re: Yelp Is Replacing Restaurants’ Phone Numbers So Grubhub Can Take a Cut (2019)

#200

Post by luma »

underwater wrote: post #136
bichiliad wrote: post #112

I think that this practice of Yelp is pretty malicious. I did have a shower thought the other day, though: Individual restaurants often run their own websites. Plenty of those offer a phone number for you to call them through, and they frequently encourage you to do so because it saves them on order fees typically accrued by Yelp, GrubHub, Seamless, or any other order system. In order for that site to show up first i…

Google is fundmentally broken, and has fundamentally broken the web. SEO means that people are effectively buying the top Google spots, and niche, non commercial, and smaller sites consistently lose out. For example an SaaS company might have 50 employees, with 10 people dedicated to SEO, generating backlinks (i.e. spamming other companies asking for reciprocated links) and writing landing pages and blog posts to tar…

You sound like you might not have been using search engines before Google, because SEO predates Google by... well since the invention of the search engine. People were gaming Yahoo, AltaVista, etc and selling their services to do so long before PageRank was a thing.
Post reply on HN