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Postal Arbitrage

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Re: Postal Arbitrage

#191

Post by sdenton4 »

shagie wrote: post #73
hi-wintermute wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did some napkin math on this as I recently picked up a 3D Printer and wondered the environmental comparison to print-at-home vs pick something up at the store and I was surprised. Had some help from Claude but "last mile delivery" is absolutely where the majority of the kWh is burned in the supply chain. Container ships use ~0.015 kWh per ton-km[1] and a car is ~1.35 kWh/km. If you go to the store and end up gettin…

> Not an expert though just saying it opened my eyes to how inefficient "last mile delivery" energy consumption is. One of the oddities of home shopping and delivery is that it can be more efficient. https://www.npr.org/2024/09/10/nx-s1-5020321/food-delivery-m... > In 2022, researchers from the University of Michigan and Ford Motor Co. modeled a single 36-item grocery cart to compare greenhouse emissions from an e-co…

My quixotic bicycle grocery buying system still wins, though.

Re: Postal Arbitrage

#192

Post by hattmall »

mattmaroon wrote: post #139
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to fight the VCs, you have to pull stunts like this. If they want to destroy local infrastructure because "free market", in an attempt to secure monopolies for themselves, then let them operate in a free market.

But why do you think they’re harming “local infrastructure”? The food delivery services didn’t hurt anything but their investors in the end. And they kept the restaurant industry alive during the pandemic, the fallout would have been so much worse. I work in the industry and know several bar/restaurant owners who will tell you DoorDash and competitors are the only reason they made it through 2020-21. Early on they st…

Yeah, as someone else pointed out, the gig-delivery services killed the delivery industry. Sure I can get food from a bunch of shitty fast food places now, but deliveries are way more expensive and take forever. The only place that still does good delivery around me is Jimmy Johns and Dominoes. I used to have 15-20 good quality delivery places that were fast with free delivery. And I'm as talking on the phone averse as anyone but calling a delivery place was just easier than using an app and they could give you updates on when they were out of something or whatever.

Uber eats / Door Dash suck so much I have no desire to order delivery food at all other than the two that run their own delivery and I know it will be a consistent experience. Anything else I either pick it or go without.

It was also shady how they paid for ads to supplant the phone numbers on Google so you were calling Door dash instead of the food place.

Re: Postal Arbitrage

#193

Post by kmoser »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #182
kmoser wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are mail forwarding services[0] that let you automatically filter out junk mail. Yes, they cost money, but at least you can accomplish your goal of opting out (or in) from receiving postal mail from certain senders. [0] E.g. https://www.usglobalmail.com/virtual-mailbox/

You will still get mail to your address though...

If your goal is to receive zero mail at your address, simply have all your email forwarded to this service and configure it to opt-out of all notifications.

Alternately, you can forward your mail to an entirely different address. (This is just a Gedankenexperiment; please don't spam strangers by forwarding your mail to them.)

Re: Postal Arbitrage

#194

Post by kergonath »

hattmall wrote: post #192
mattmaroon wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why do you think they’re harming “local infrastructure”? The food delivery services didn’t hurt anything but their investors in the end. And they kept the restaurant industry alive during the pandemic, the fallout would have been so much worse. I work in the industry and know several bar/restaurant owners who will tell you DoorDash and competitors are the only reason they made it through 2020-21. Early on they st…

Yeah, as someone else pointed out, the gig-delivery services killed the delivery industry. Sure I can get food from a bunch of shitty fast food places now, but deliveries are way more expensive and take forever. The only place that still does good delivery around me is Jimmy Johns and Dominoes. I used to have 15-20 good quality delivery places that were fast with free delivery. And I'm as talking on the phone averse…

> Uber eats / Door Dash suck so much I have no desire to order delivery food at all other than the two that run their own delivery and I know it will be a consistent experience.

Same. It’s about the only reason why I order from Dominos occasionally. But last week it got delivered by Uber even though I ordered directly on their website. It also took 45 minutes to get delivered instead of the usual 10. So now the only Uber-free delivery I can get is a Japanese restaurant.

Re: Postal Arbitrage

#195

Post by qingcharles »

jervant wrote: post #98

There are also things on eBay with a starting price of less than a dollar with free shipping that never get bids. I "won" two auctions like this the other week for brand new USB-C cables, each of them costing me 13 cents shipped. I have no idea why sellers would do this with eBay fees and USPS small package shipping costing well over 13 cents.

I did this on a mass scale. There are auction items that close at 1 cent with free shipping, so I signed up for the eBay API and wrote a bot to scrape all the auctions and bid one cent on them a minute before they closed.

I ended up with an enormous overflowing mountain of packages every day for weeks. I might have gone crazier, but there was a serious bug in eBay's checkout. Try checking out with 400 items in your cart. It really gets upset.

99% of the packages were Chinese sellers but the packages all came from Mongolia, so there must be some sort of postal arbitrage going on there.

It was all random stuff. Hairclips, 500 bicycle lamps. Dozens of tubes of ICs of every flavor. Crazy times.

Re: Postal Arbitrage

#196

Post by rahimnathwani »

At the time of writing, the cheapest item in the list is a $0.25 lime.

When I add that to my basket and go to checkout, the only available delivery option 'Fast - Tomorrow' costs $2.99.

There is a non-food item in the list, which costs $0.51+tax, i.e. $0.54 including free shipping.

Re: Postal Arbitrage

#197

Post by vasco »

gaudystead wrote: post #179
drnick1 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tipped generously. You shouldn't tip delivery drivers, it's literally their job.

While I would love to agree with you, in America restaurants of all sizes (and personal transportation companies) seemingly often rely on tips from customers to supplement the wages of their workers instead of just paying them fairly.

Yeah so you shouldn't help them do that if you disagree with the practice

Re: Postal Arbitrage

#198

Post by xg15 »

mhink wrote: post #39
_trampeltier wrote: post #28

This story comes to my mind. A pizzeria owner made money buying his own $24 pizzas from DoorDash for $16 https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262316/doordash-pizza-p...

Note: the Verge article links to this blog post, describing the situation in more detail: https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage

Maybe that's my EU mindset, but I'm baffled how it's even legal to add a company to your public listing - complete with fake phone number - and just declare they're taking deliveries, all against the explicit wishes of the company.

(Complete with "chill bro, I was just jokingdemand testing you" at the end)

The blogger calls this being "tricked" to sign up for DoorDash. Seems to me, this is the same way a burglar "tricks" you into giving them your valuables.

Re: Postal Arbitrage

#199

Post by dyauspitr »

mattmaroon wrote: post #135
ryanjshaw wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have made another $5 per 10 pizzas after order #1 by just delivering the pizza to themselves and sending the same boxes back out in the next delivery, and so on.

An actual DoorDash driver had to do the delivery though. So you risk being reported and also, if they take awhile, pizza gets cold. But they also could have just raised prices on everything but the cheap one DoorDash was using for pricing.

I mean you can just have a silicone mold in there, no actual pizza required.

Re: Postal Arbitrage

#200

Post by Terr_ »

pdonis wrote: post #142
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said what I meant: most VC-backed startups could not survive in a real-world environment. Thank you for highlighting the distinction. Note that a free market isn't necessarily an unregulated market (see: Adam Smith). Personally, I don't believe that free markets are a sensible way to manage local affairs. They work well on a medium scale, where goods are fungible and efficiency matters: but for something like the l…

> for something like the local pizza place, customer behaviour doesn't match that of a market participant. I'm not sure why you think that. "Market participant" doesn't mean "always takes the lowest priced deal". People are willing to pay higher prices for food from local restaurants, as opposed to chains, fast food, etc., because they feel that the extra value they are getting (better quality, knowing the people who…

> What is not a free market is

A bit of a tangent, but price transparency is another factor.

At least when economists publish their "it's the bestest and most efficient option" analyses their definition involves perfect information: No secret prices, no non-disclosure agreements, everybody knows what was paid for inputs and labor, etc.

I bring this up because there is an unavoidable conflict between "the market that moves freely as a whole" version versus "the market where I'm free to keep secrets."

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