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DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

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Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#111

Post by JumpCrisscross »

digging wrote: post #103
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sounds like customers were reacting to their environment more than driving change It sounds like customers had agency. Tides of capital gave them more or fewer options, and they chose them at their discretion when the terms were advantageous. When they weren't, ever or any longer, they didn't.

...In other words, because DoorDash is convenient and advantageous for customers, they choose to get food delivered instead of go to the restaurant. And admonishing people for choosing the advantageous option is useless, at best. Does that not follow?

You argued "customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital." That's attributing cause and effect. The tides of capital didn't cause the customer behaviour, it enabled existing behaviour to scale. Capital driving behaviour describes diamonds, not DoorDash.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#112

Post by digging »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #106
digging wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ultimately it's driven by customer behavior. If people went to restaurants instead of expecting to be served hot food in their living room, this whole destructive business model wouldn't even exist or would be small enough as to not be negatively impactful. No, you've got that backward. Customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital. Advertising is a pretty clear example but it's not the limit. I mean, how man…

There is no doubt that advertising has a huge impact on customer behavior. But that doesn't mean that consumers are incapable of making choices that go against the grain of the market. It does take a conscious effort, and it's true that most consumers just don't care or can't be bothered with it, or are crushed by too many other things in our modern society to have the bandwidth to even consider their choices.

Everything you're saying is exactly in accord with what I posted. Individuals always have choice, but when we're looking at an entire population and seeing that large amounts of people are making a choice that we think is "bad", saying, "Well people just need to stop making bad choices. People are stupid. I make good choices." is ludicrous.

Let's assume that the answer really is to ensure individual choices are changed. Who's going to go house to house and educate everyone about why the choice to use DoorDash is problematic? Does this person have the time to customize their solutions to every family's needs? It's insanity. It's an argument that leads nowhere at all; it's an abdication of responsibility (which is totally unnecessary, because the commenter never had a responsibility to change the situation). Hell, it's a call for the audience to also abdicate responsibility they might feel. It's just a useless or harmful way of telling listeners how proud one is to be a statistical exception.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#113

Post by ianferrel »

dralley wrote: post #90
jjmarr wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, direct wealth transfer is happening from the rich to the poor. The only flaw with this is that people have to work economically inefficient jobs delivering food, instead of the wealth transfer occurring through taxes on the rich and funding something like basic sciences.

It's equivalent to "broken window" spending. Yes, breaking a window allows you to generate economic activity by paying the manufacturer to create a new one and paying an installer to install it, but it's not socially useful economic activity. You could have spent the same money building excess renewable energy resources, or on basic science research, or a million other things that might be equally "inefficient" from…

I disagree with that.

In the case of food delivery, there's socially and economically useful work of getting food from where it can be efficiently created (restaurants) to where it can be efficiently consumed (hungry people's location). In the absence of that work, the hungry people would be making their own food (less efficient, generally, than restaurant cooking which can do larger batches) or going to get their own food (less efficient, at least plausibly, because a delivery worker can make multiple deliveries on one drive rather than a strict out and back trip that people would take).

The thing that makes fixing a broken window "fake" economic growth is that it is arguing that destruction is economically useful because of the work to fix it, but nothing's being broken in this case. People are naturally hungry on a pretty regular basis, and the production and transportation of food is economically and socially useful work, which in this case was being subsidized by capital.

Is it curing cancer? No, but it's not digging holes and filling them up again either.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#114

Post by mikejulietbravo »

forinti wrote: post #42

> You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It's used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and…

Taxes are not the answer, let the free market figure it out

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#115

Post by mikejulietbravo »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #77
forinti wrote: post #42

> You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It's used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and…

Ultimately it's driven by customer behavior. If people went to restaurants instead of expecting to be served hot food in their living room, this whole destructive business model wouldn't even exist or would be small enough as to not be negatively impactful. People are not forced to use DoorDash, UberEats, etc. We never do and are surviving just fine.

This is the biggest point. You can simply not use them. Cook your own food or walk or drive or bike to a restaurant.

There is a massive market of lazy AF people who also are terrible at personal financial management, and they are the ones complaining.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#116

Post by saagarjha »

mikejulietbravo wrote: post #114
forinti wrote: post #42

> You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It's used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and…

Taxes are not the answer, let the free market figure it out

…which seems to be going poorly?

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#117

Post by dml2135 »

mikejulietbravo wrote: post #115
insane_dreamer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately it's driven by customer behavior. If people went to restaurants instead of expecting to be served hot food in their living room, this whole destructive business model wouldn't even exist or would be small enough as to not be negatively impactful. People are not forced to use DoorDash, UberEats, etc. We never do and are surviving just fine.

This is the biggest point. You can simply not use them. Cook your own food or walk or drive or bike to a restaurant. There is a massive market of lazy AF people who also are terrible at personal financial management, and they are the ones complaining.

I hear this a lot but I don't think the "lazy AF people who also are terrible at personal financial management" is really fair.

I order delivery through the apps a ton, but it's not because I'm bad at financial management. Like many here, I have a well paying job that takes up a ton of my time and energy during the week, and cooking every night is simply not feasible. Takeout is expensive, sure, but if it enables me to hold down a job that let's me afford it, it's a conscious trade-off that I can make.

Could I spend more time meal-prepping and freeze meals instead? Sure. But again, time and energy.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#118

Post by nickff »

lambertsimnel wrote: post #92
RandallBrown wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly does the money that a company like DoorDash loses end up with other plutocrats? Isn't most of that money being paid to people working for those companies?

Am I right in thinking that if those employees save any of the money, then they accumulate wealth, but if they don't (because they don't receive enough compared to their fixed costs, or for any other reason) wealth accumulates elsewhere, probably in the hands of plutocrats?

Just because one person wastes money, it doesn't mean that someone else gets rich. If the employees spend their income on low-margin goods or services (food and clothing are quite competitive low-margin sectors with high labor costs), the money has flowed from investors mostly to laborers.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#119

Post by dml2135 »

colechristensen wrote: post #99
insane_dreamer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately it's driven by customer behavior. If people went to restaurants instead of expecting to be served hot food in their living room, this whole destructive business model wouldn't even exist or would be small enough as to not be negatively impactful. People are not forced to use DoorDash, UberEats, etc. We never do and are surviving just fine.

Food delivery has been a thing for a very very long time. The problem here is that there's a $45B company (doordash) in the middle of the person cooking the food and the person delivering the food instead of a high school kid in a funny hat. Exchanging the overhead of a dining room for the overhead of unskilled labor taking food to a place is an easy win for a restaurant. Doordash and the like are taking jobs that yo…

There are food delivery companies, such as Toast and ChowNow, that seem more restaurant-oriented. As in, they sell an online-ordering-platform-as-a-service to restaurants (sometimes bundled with a POS system), rather than gunning for market dominance on the consumer side of things.

I think that's probably a viable model for the future, assuming they don't have VCs that will push them to squeeze restaurants like the big apps, at some point.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#120

Post by KeplerBoy »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #109
KeplerBoy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you leave out the toppings it's definitely fraud. Doordash doesn't get the pizza they paid for and want to resell.

> Doordash doesn't get the pizza they paid for and want to resell Given the restaurant was receiving calls from customers, would it be okay if a customer who ordered from DoorDash called to change their order? If so, we can add an imaginary step where the person who "ordered" these pizzas had them changed to just dough without demanding a price change.

Wouldn't work in the scenario described in the text.

As far as the restaurant is concerned the order was made by the dasher and can't be changed by seemingly random people who happen to call.

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