211–220 of 663 posts
HN is so strangely anti tech and anti startup at this point. I'm not sure exactly who's on the platform at this point. Unemployed OSS devs bitter that everyone else in the valley is making more money than them?
On the other hand my social surroundings are obviously picking up some aspects of HN. Maybe culture is converging globally in a lot of ways?
This is undeniably a good thing if you put yourself in the shoes of the restaurant. Imagine if someone went around impersonating your business online, leveraging the good name you have built for yourself over the decades. They create ads offering your expert development services, ostensibly competing with your existing website, but with intentionally slashed pricing and a ‘creatively’ misrepresented offering (aka gro…
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I don't understand how couriers are extracting any margin from restaurants.
Right now restaurants are in a damned if you do damned if you don't situation with the various delivery services out there. If the restaurants explicitly agree to do business with grubhub and the like, they have to give the delivery service a 10% cut. The delivery service also takes a percentage cut on the customer side. I think there's the expectation that the restaurants keep charging the delivery service the same…
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The goal is to kill the competition, no local delivery service can compete with a few million in VC funding. Once you are the only delivery in town you can raise the prices all you want and force the local restaurants into one sided deals on your terms. It also has a rather questionable legality
> no local delivery service can compete with a few million in VC funding A simple ordering form on the restaurant's own website always gets preference from me and seems to usually end up being the first result on Google/Google Maps.
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Why enforce existing law, we can you use this opportunity to create ever more complex laws to ensure stake holders that already abused to the condition the law is purporting to address can maintain their advantage and ensure no new entrants to the market That is all this does, it protect GrubHub, DoorDash and other large players from competition
How, specifically, does this protect GrubHub/DoorDash/etc?
They are not "new entrants" in the market, they have a network effect now so it will be preferable to them to sign exclusive deals with restaurants to further ensure there can not be any competition
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Then why not make impersonation illegal? If they enforce making reselling illegal proactively they can enforce making impersonation illegal just the same. This is overreach. I would be rightly pissed if I lived in CA.
Someone else has mentioned that impersonation is certainly already illegal, and the right solution would be prosecution instead of making a new law, and I agree. I'm not from CA/US so I have no idea why the legislators felt the need for a new law.
Also, if a judge for whatever reason doesn’t agree with it, say, “if the government wanted trademarks to be enforced in this manner they’d pass a law about it, no deal” (this happens Eg. An argument that made it all the way up to the Supreme Court, taking years and years to do so, is that discriminating against trans people isn’t discriminating on the basis of sex because if legislature intended it that way they’d say it more explicitly in law. Imagine how many trans people were fired for being trans while this thing was going through the courts.) then now you have to pass legislature again.
This is undeniably a good thing if you put yourself in the shoes of the restaurant. Imagine if someone went around impersonating your business online, leveraging the good name you have built for yourself over the decades. They create ads offering your expert development services, ostensibly competing with your existing website, but with intentionally slashed pricing and a ‘creatively’ misrepresented offering (aka gro…
IDK, this seems more like a mixed-bag to me on account of being opt-in instead of opt-out. Absolutely I agree that businesses should be able to easily opt out of being listed on a given delivery platform if/when it causes problems for them. But on the flip side, I've observed a lot of restaurant owners not having the time, energy, or know-how to set up even basic online things that could really boost their business.…
The key thing is this deals with a predatory practice.
This is undeniably a good thing if you put yourself in the shoes of the restaurant. Imagine if someone went around impersonating your business online, leveraging the good name you have built for yourself over the decades. They create ads offering your expert development services, ostensibly competing with your existing website, but with intentionally slashed pricing and a ‘creatively’ misrepresented offering (aka gro…
The misrepresentation would seem to be the big thing. Someone, let's call them Joe, publishes a list of restaurants online with links to their menus and offers to deliver for the price of the order with tip plus a $10 delivery fee. And has a clear disclaimer that they're not affiliated with the businesses. That seems pretty unobjectionable. And how would the restaurant even know? [ADDED: Subject of course to any heal…
This isn’t actually clear. GrubHub’s about page:
“ Grubhub is a leading online and mobile food-ordering and delivery marketplace with the largest and most comprehensive network of restaurant partners. ”
This tells me as a customer that the restaurant is a consenting partner. This is a lie.
EDIT: a commentor below had issue with my use of the word lie here. To clarify, I meant that this is not a clear disclaimer.
always entertaining how regulation unintentionally acts to increase barriers to entry for incumbents. in this case closing the barn doors almost a decade after the horse left the stable. you couldn't pay politicians enough for the favors they perform in earnest. edit:to elaborate, the growth hacks of the likes of Doordash and Postmates doing exactly this got them their start, now it will be illegal to compete with th…
The barn door needs to be closed. I don't care if it means there won't be more doordashes if the only way those companies can exist is by scamming customers and exploiting restaurants. I don't see why this is a problem. They're called "growth hacks" for a reason. If your concern is that people won't be able to compete with DoorDash now without breaking the law, maybe DoorDash should be penalized for past misbehavior.…
I don't know about prepared food delivery. Dominos makes it work well. A lot of Chinese restaurants do, usually for a pretty small delivery radius. But there are a lot of things that just don't have a critical mass of people willing to pay for what 30 minute delivery costs. (On the other hand, the consensus seems to be that grocery delivery, or just pickup, is going to stay fairly common going forward.)
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> Why? The practice involved is in response to the absolute garbage of misrepresentation of a restaurant's telephone number to be intercepted by your own call centre's. Sure, that's bad and that should be banned. But that's not the practice banned. What got banned is me paying someone to pick up my food for me. I could still run a website that misrepresents the restaurant's telephone number and intercepts your calls.…
That’s not what the law does. It addresses the problem GP pointed out, and it bans the service you’ve described as well. It also doesn’t forbid you from paying someone to pick your food up for you. Here’s the relevant text: > 22599. A food delivery platform shall not arrange for the delivery of an order from a food facility without first obtaining an agreement with the food facility expressly authorizing the food del…