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DoorDash and Societal Arbitrage

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Re: DoorDash and Societal Arbitrage

#111

Post by ketzo »

timecube wrote: post #105
tartoran wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long until some actor emerges who provides a network of ordering sites hosted on the cloud that charge $30-50 a month for each restaurant and nothing more? As margins get thinner and thinner this is inevitable. And no marketing needed, if the service is good word of mouth would do it.

ChowNow is exactly this: https://get.chownow.com/

And for what it's worth, I actually love using ChowNow. I can order directly from the restaurant, but I don't have to use a 2009 website built in PHP 0.2 by the owner's niece.

Re: DoorDash and Societal Arbitrage

#112

Post by Kalium »

wwweston wrote: post #29
lacker wrote: post #9

To me, this is the key claim of the article: This is not a genuine partnership, it’s extractive. Is DoorDash extracting money from its users, the restaurants and the delivery drivers? Or is it actually providing something of value? To me, the delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats just work a lot better than calling up restaurants for delivery did in the pre-app era. Maybe the drivers are underpaid, maybe the rest…

> the delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats just work a lot better than calling up restaurants for delivery did in the pre-app era. Not my experience for takeout. Before: I called in an order, they told me how long it would take, I would arrive, it would be done. After: I submit an order via the app. I receive confirmation and an estimated time. Arriving at the time is optimistic, so I arrive 5 minutes later. I f…

> If this is the comparison, then be afraid, because streaming has both destroyed a huge amount of value in recordings and redirected a significant portion of remaining value towards new middlemen.

Counterpoint: streaming didn't destroy value, it exposed how much value was fictional or an artifice of a dearth of consumer options.

Apps have done something similar. They have exposed that many customers, in many cases, don't actually care all that much about things that restauranteurs believed they did. The supposed value largely didn't exist.

One example is supposed relationships between vendor and customer. Most people don't have strong, deep, and enduring emotional attachments to relatively generic pizza shops. They do not deeply bond to an artist they kinda like one song from, but otherwise find interchangeable with several dozen other artists on their lofi playlist.

Re: DoorDash and Societal Arbitrage

#113

Post by Viliam1234 »

novok wrote: post #24
goatinaboat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the drivers are underpaid, maybe the restaurants are underpaid, maybe the food costs too much, but even if they end up charging more money, are they really going to go away like Groupon did? There is this corrosive process of these gig-economy companies, they end up making life just a little bit more shit for everyone. You'll turn a blind eye to the desperate delivery drivers, to the stress of the restaurant ow…

Honestly I think a lot of things in life would shake out properly if Most Favored Customer clauses[0] were made blanket illegal by large marketplace aggregators. So that would be stores, visa, costco, walmart, ebay, amazon, uber, etc. I think they are the fairly key lynch pins that make these abusive relationships work with larger market players leveraging their position against smaller ones. With no more MFC clauses…

Would it be possible to redefine "customer" to include the credit card costs? Then the MFC clause can remain, but it will have a different meaning.

Like, if the customer A pays me $10 in cash, and the customer B pays me $11 using credit card, and the credit card company then takes $1 from me, in some sense I have provided "the same price for each customer": each of them ultimately gave me $10.

Re: DoorDash and Societal Arbitrage

#115

Post by lmm »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #76
Melting_Harps wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think buying stuff from someone who sells to the public is abusive. I don't think scraping is abusive. I do think workers' rights are important, but the restaurant industry (especially the mon-and-pop end of it) hardly has a great reputation on that front, so I don't think ordering directly rather than DoorDash sends a message there. Agreed. But the sentiment within the Industry was that COVID gave an oppor…

All agreed, except: > Despite the tired narrative Monopolies are not formed through unfettered Free Market laissez-faire systems, they're made when power is consolidated through the use of arcane legal loopholes and large lobbying purchasing power in elections and the orchestrated consolidation of Capital. I don't think it's a tired narrative. It's a recognition that monopoly is the end goal of every profit-driven co…

> "arcane legal loopholes" are caused by accumulation of capital.

That's going far too far. Governments introduce legal loopholes for any number of reasons: personal favours, genuine good intentions. Capital is one reason among many.

Re: DoorDash and Societal Arbitrage

#116

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

fxtentacle wrote: post #57
TeMPOraL wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clever, but how long until Takeaway.com and others add a clause in their contract against putting such business cards in their order? These companies have power over restaurants, because they can ruin a restaurant's reputation until it yields and accepts the new contract.

That's about as anticompetitive as it gets, using your market power to prohibit your partners from mentioning a lower cost alternative. The damage to consumers would be easy to illustrate.

Reminds me of a certain fruit company whose new M1 processor has been making the rounds on the news lately.

Re: DoorDash and Societal Arbitrage

#117

Post by gexla »

lacker wrote: post #9

To me, this is the key claim of the article: This is not a genuine partnership, it’s extractive. Is DoorDash extracting money from its users, the restaurants and the delivery drivers? Or is it actually providing something of value? To me, the delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats just work a lot better than calling up restaurants for delivery did in the pre-app era. Maybe the drivers are underpaid, maybe the rest…

Extractive is more about the relationship than money.

It's extractive because the service gains power by becoming the platform. Users go to the app to view food items and order. The app becomes the experience of the restaurant. The service also becomes a major centralized competitor to everyone in the region. How are you going to compete with a service which is fighting a war of attrition backed by millions from Softbank? Rather than many restaurants having delivery drivers, all the drivers then become gig workers. And perhaps this is just the beginning. Where else might this service expand once it has a solid logistics platform in your area?

I don't have to think much about winner take all in the social media space. Services like Door Dash, Grab, Uber, etc are taking winner takes all economics to your home town. They have the power to become transformative and we're placing a lot of trust in them to do things right. And they're doing this with questionable transparency, as the article pointed out. How do we know this isn't some massive scam which threatens to upend communities by imploding after they have transformed the way we work and our daily habits?

It's too much power IMO.

Re: DoorDash and Societal Arbitrage

#118

Post by eru »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #71
eru wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who says they need to retrain as a webdev? I have no clue what the jobs of the future will be. Just as people in the past scarcely had a clue about the jobs of our present.

But the important point is, retraining takes time, and kicks you down to the bottom of the career ladder. Which means automating people away pushes some of these people into poverty, and the only hope they have is that their children will start a profitable career in a sector that doesn't get eaten by software in the next few decades. That's not to say I'm against automation and improvement. Just that not much though…

In the long run, the average member of society can consume exactly as much as the average member of society produces.

Productivity is what got us out of poverty of the pre-industrial-revolution era. And productivity is still key in the long run.

Re: DoorDash and Societal Arbitrage

#119

Post by andrewjl »

eru wrote: post #118
TeMPOraL wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the important point is, retraining takes time, and kicks you down to the bottom of the career ladder. Which means automating people away pushes some of these people into poverty, and the only hope they have is that their children will start a profitable career in a sector that doesn't get eaten by software in the next few decades. That's not to say I'm against automation and improvement. Just that not much though…

In the long run, the average member of society can consume exactly as much as the average member of society produces. Productivity is what got us out of poverty of the pre-industrial-revolution era. And productivity is still key in the long run.

Averages can conceal just as much as they reveal. What does a society look like with those same averages but where the distribution of production is governed by power laws and the distribution of consumption isn't?

Re: DoorDash and Societal Arbitrage

#120

Post by eru »

andrewjl wrote: post #119
eru wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long run, the average member of society can consume exactly as much as the average member of society produces. Productivity is what got us out of poverty of the pre-industrial-revolution era. And productivity is still key in the long run.

Averages can conceal just as much as they reveal. What does a society look like with those same averages but where the distribution of production is governed by power laws and the distribution of consumption isn't?

In the end, for people's welfare it matters what they can consume over their lifetimes.

So flat distribution of consumption seem like an egalitarian utopia?

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