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DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

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Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#121

Post by lambertsimnel »

nickff wrote: post #118
lambertsimnel wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My thinking is that spending gets split between richer and poorer people. The former buy assets with it, but the latter spend it on living costs. Each time it circulates, typically some goes to richer people and stops circulating.

Various things could disrupt the resulting increase in inequality. The Black Death and World War 2 are both supposed to have done so.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#122

Post by throwaway59148 »

chasing wrote: post #57
fortran77 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't blowing money like this redistribute it quickly, taking care of the "inequality"? It looks like this is a good way to take wealth from people who have accumulated it (the investors) and disperse it widely. I can't make your argument make any sense.

Burn a billion dollars. Artificially pump the market value of your company by 10 billion dollars. Pizza company gets a few hundred dollars for free. "Haha, we pulled one over on the man!" Go public or sell. Founders and initial investors (likely already wealthy) get billions. Other people take the hit. No, this does not distribute wealth down. It's a ploy to gin up enough excitement that people who are already wealth…

[dead]

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#123

Post by Chris2048 »

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've heard of the "broken window fallacy", and this seems an incorrect representation.

The fallacy is that breaking windows must have an inherent value (and the fallacy is that its a good thing to have vandalism). Part of the justification that it might be otherwise is the benefit of having window repairmen, and how they couldn't exist if they didn't have a steady income - and it's here that lies the fault, however the fault is one of quantification, in fact a broken window can be socially useful, just with decreasing usefulness as quantity increases, plus there are better ways to do it (e.g. insurance payment); It's still true that (in an unmanaged market) if (somehow) there aren't enough broken windows, when one breaks there might not be anyone who can repair it (economically) - I think it's the same category of problem as, donating clothes to Africa destroys its own textile biz.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#124

Post by insane_dreamer »

digging wrote: post #112
insane_dreamer wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chang…

Yeah I was basically agreeing with you.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#125

Post by nsxwolf »

ianferrel wrote: post #113
dralley wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ow…

It's completely ruined pizza delivery, which used to actually be a pleasant and affordable experience.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#126

Post by standardUser »

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.

There's also seemingly an army of judgy AF people just salivating at the chance to call other people lazy.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#127

Post by nsxwolf »

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.

You know, I do go to restaurants, and DoorDash is making restaurants worse. They're becoming DoorDash focused and the dining room experience suffers.

Even picking up your own food is becoming destroyed. Orders get made with no regard to the estimated pickup times you used to be able to rely on. Your order might get made immediately and just tossed onto a pickup shelf where it sits getting cold for half an hour.

This is all because DoorDash guarantees absolute shit quality and accuracy. Cold food, wrong orders, and they've trained people to not complain by threatening to ban you from the service. So instead of the son of the owner of the pizza place rushing right out to make your order right with an apology, you just accept that an 80% correct order is OK.

A whole generation of young adults has come of age with this thanks to COVID, so we're just stuck with it now.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#128

Post by Alupis »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #105
Alupis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is very argumentative and shuts down the discourse before it even begins. It's not very in the spirit of HN. There cannot be productive discourse where people advocate forcefully taking things from other people that worked hard to earn the things. The spirit of HN is entrepreneurship. It is literally run by a VC business - not for the goodness of their hearts or whatever, but to foster a community of thinkers…

> you'll have a ton of people wanting to tear you down just because you dared to be successful The article describes DoorDash intentionally deceiving its customers to gain their money, and wilfully depriving the restaurant owner of control of their brand. That's fraud. It's perfectly fine and in the spirit of HN to debate how contributes to measures of success.

And the parent comment has nothing to do with what you stated...

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#129

Post by nickff »

lambertsimnel wrote: post #121
nickff wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My thinking is that spending gets split between richer and poorer people. The former buy assets with it, but the latter spend it on living costs. Each time it circulates, typically some goes to richer people and stops circulating. Various things could disrupt the resulting increase in inequality. The Black Death and World War 2 are both supposed to have done so.

Money doesn’t really get “split”, it flows, and the where it goes each time it is spent is what determines who makes how much. You’re right that some people are able to accumulate, but that’s not a default, and the money usually doesn’t stay put for long.

Re: DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)

#130

Post by digging »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #111
digging wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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.

I'm really confused by your reply, and it doesn't answer the question I posed, so maybe that's that.
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