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

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

#151

Post by 35fbe7d3d5b9 »

Jugurtha wrote: post #95

I don't understand. Why do you have to call the joint on an application ? Yelp isn't available here, but on the local apps (Algeria), I can make the order by clicking on foods, adding quantities, adding drinks, then confirming the order. For every joint, there's their menu with different tabs (drinks, desserts, pizzas, burgers, briskets, pastrami, etc) custom for every joint. The app then tells me when the joint has…

> I don't understand why do you have to call on an app. That sucks.

I call every restaurant I order from because I want the restaurant taking every dime of the order. I don't want Grubhub or Doordash or whoever "facilitates the transaction" to take a percentage of my order. Worse yet, some restaurants in my area have wised up and increased menu item prices for app-facilitated purchases only to avoid margin erosion, so I'm definitely not going to pay more for the privilege of "clicking buttons on an app".

I will use Yelp or Grubhub on occasion for discoverability. Hyper-SEO has lead to real restaurant websites falling out of my Google results, so sometimes I need to look up their phone number.

Yelp knows that there are people like me, and are now positioning themselves to suck more cash out of my local restaurants by hijacking my phone call to them. Fuck that, no more Yelp for me. I'll continue adding known good phone numbers to my phone & taking pictures of paper menus so I can refer to them when I want.

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

#152

Post by krisgee »

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…

>These days that dispute is ridiculous - obviously prejudice and bias can be built into technological artifacts. It's one "if statement" away.

And with machine learning we're building our biases into the algorithms explicitly; see all those "resume parsers are racist" articles.

This is clearly an issue that needs to be dealth with but the problem is that it's not a problem we can engineer our way of, we need to confront the biases that we have and try and build ways to expose biases we don't even realize we have.

This is obviously quite hard and if I had a solution to it I'd probably be implementing it instead of waxing poetic on HN.

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

#153

Post by bigbubba »

fairity wrote: post #89
bigbubba wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obvious to you that corporations don't break laws because doing so is illegal? That's very naive.

> It's obvious to you that corporations don't break laws because doing so is illegal? No, you're over-generalizing my claim. My claim is that it's rare for large companies (with established legal counsel) to approve of illegal policy changes when those changes are very public and likely to be noticed.

Given yelp's reputation for having a toxic extortionist corporate culture, I think it's naive to assume anything is beyond them. If you told me yelp flat out had somebody murdered, I wouldn't dismiss even that out of hand. Not after what I've heard about their corporate culture, and not after hearing what eBay executives thought they could get away with.

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

#154

Post by briandear »

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…

Maybe Google should fix that. If you Google a restaurant, your intent is to visit that restaurant website.

If you add “reviews” after the query, then the intent is to read reviews about that restaurant.

It’s trivial for Google to prioritize the actual website over agreegators. Most restaurants already have the ability to set up and “claim” their business on Google. Why not simply surface the “claimed” result first.

A better experience for everyone.

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

#155

Post by covercash »

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…

> what's to stop Seamless (for example) from winning the SEO race against a non-trivial chunk of small restaurant websites? This would mean that there are plenty of cases in which you search for a restaurant and end up on Seamless, even though that's not the "right" search result.

This is exactly what Slice does. They create a plausible sounding url and outrank small pizza shops. They also replace the phone number so orders get routed through their call center. They end up charging more for both phone and online orders through their site. They also encourage users to install the Slice app.

Before I realized what was happening, I ordered through Slice twice (one online and one phone order) and both times they sent my order to a completely wrong address 15 minutes away from me. That’s what made me dig a little bit and discover their shady practices.

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

#156

Post by gnicholas »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #45

Does anyone have an alternative to Yelp. What I care about: - Open Now (Optional) - Sort by Rating - Search by food category, not name of restaurant. Part of the problem is I have a food allergy. I'm highly allergic to soy, so I can't eat all dishes at most restaurants except their drinks. The few I can eat at tend to be very high end or very highly rated, because the alternative to ingredients that use soy is almost…

My reaction was the same. Maybe Google Maps? Not that I want to send more of my data to Google, but this is totally unacceptable.

Especially during COVID, I'm trying to make sure that as much of my money goes to the restaurant as possible when I call in a takeout order. It would be one thing if Yelp showed me an advertisement and I clicked through and placed an order. But when I'm using Yelp just to look up a phone number, there's absolutely no reason for a commission.

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

#157

Post by gnicholas »

fma wrote: post #61
germinalphrase wrote: post #25

I understand charging a fee to the customer who is making the choice to call, but if a restaurant simply answers the phone - how is it acceptable that Yelp can charge them for doing so? Did they consent to this fee?

For the record, I dislike this practice...but to play devil's advocate (pls don't downvote for playing devil's advocate LOL) If I go to Google and I type in {name of my favorite restaurant}...and the first link on top is an ad placed by that restaurant, and below it is the actual restaurant's website...If I click on that ad, Google will charge that restaurant money, when it just redirects me to the website. In this c…

There are two differences:

1: There is no way for the customer to tell that the phone number is not 100% organic. On Google, you can tell it's an ad (even if this is getting harder as Google disguises ads more and more).

2: Grubhub didn't place phone numbers on Yelp. Yelp has had phone numbers since day 1.

If Grubhub puts menus or something on Yelp and someone uses that to place an order more efficiently, then they would be adding some value. That still wouldn't justify charging a premium without telling/asking either party, but I would at least agree there is some value-add there (but only for customers who actually look at the GrubHub-provided menu before calling in).

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

#158

Post by chungus_khan »

pydry wrote: post #51
colpabar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have personally never seen much value in Yelp. Most people use Google as a starting point when searching anything, and the Yelp page that is returned is not very helpful to me. At best, it contains menus, pictures, hours, phone number, and reviews. At worst, it has none of those and is effectively an ad for the Yelp app. Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else. Google absolutely tries t…

>Either way, Google shows me all of that before I click anything else. All seeded from Yelp. When Yelp complained google shrugged their shoulders and said they could remove them from their search index entirely if they liked. Being the world's no. 1 search destination gave them carte blanche to rip off IP all over. Google was a parasite on Yelp. It's not really surprising that Yelp is now like "fuck it, parasitic bus…

This is something important that a lot of people miss when discussing unethical actions by corporations. It would be foolish from the perspective of Yelp or Google to not exploit the massive power differential here, so of course they will. It isn't a matter of morals, morals don't talk. Money does.

Competition, fairness, and freedom are not free, they have to be defended adaptively against stuff like this.

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

#159

Post by labawi »

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.

If it were a mutually negotiated contract, on equitable terms, then it would be a valid and very relevant point.

Yelp is not exactly known for fair negotiation.

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

#160

Post by sxzxs »

ajb wrote: post #33

In 1891, the first electromechanical telephone exchange was invented by Almon Strowger, an undertaker. He was concerned that the human operators were diverting his customers (specifically, the wife of one of his competitors was an operator). If you think about it, every business interaction before the twentieth century was mediated by 1:1 interactions with humans, who brought their own prejudices and self-interest to…

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.
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