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California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

leginfo.legislature.ca.gov

231–240 of 663 posts

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. And how about this: If you get food poisoning from a restaurant, you deal directly with them to resolve. If the food has been delivered by a 3rd party, what rights to resolve would you then have? Restaurants can simply state that the food was tainted after it left them, delivery firms can state the food from the restaurant was bad, etc etc.

I agree with the sentiment. But you basically have no recourse if you get food poisoning from a restaurant. Unless it’s a mass event, there’s no way for you to prove it was the restaurant, and even if you could prove it, your damages aren’t likely to be enough to sue.

Food poisoning has much slower onset than most people think, and, as I understand it, it’s very common to blame the wrong food.

I think it would be good to encourage everyone with food poisoning to notify a central authority to collect statistics, but blaming a specific restaurant from a single case is dicey at best.

It’s also worth noting that most people expect meat to be the riskiest type of food. In fact, lettuce is much more likely to cause food poisoning.

(Ground beef is indeed more dangerous than solid pieces, but most chain restaurants are pretty careful about their HACCP and are likely to cook it properly. Your average large burger chain won’t serve rare beef patties even upon request.)

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#232
post #208
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, food delivery is a pretty local business. In fact, if I wanted to compete with these VC-backed companies, I'd probably do something like partner with local restaurants whose food traveled well, come up with some good packaging, etc. Of course, that's not scalable and disruptive.

>food delivery is a pretty local business ?? Food is a pretty local business, but delivery is not. You could say that person delivery is local too, because people mostly transport locally, but e.g. Uber is still global.

To a first approximation, I only care about food delivery to my house. To a first approximation, I only use Uber for places other than around my house.

I grant that there are some economies of scale to having an app that companies in different cities can make use of. But I don't see that as requiring a nationwide company for the actual food delivery.

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#233
post #190

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?

anti tech... it's called fraud. The "We're just an app" excuse needs to die already. It has absolutely nothing to do with tech, everything to do with an unethical business model. Absolutely nothing to do with technology.

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#234

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…

Was impersonation legal in California before this law?

No, but this protects small restaurant owners regardless if they are a legal entity with trademarks to protect.

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#236
post #202
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issues is a problem of transparency. I deliver for Postmates and I really think that most of the customers don't really understand that they might be ordering from a restaurant that isn't partnered with Postmates. The knock on effect is that often the menu isn't really correct, so the customer gets their order "wrong" and calls the restaurant to complain.

Even if there's no real impersonation involved, the reality is that a lot of consumers, understandably, are going to sort of lump the food as delivered as something the restaurant has responsibility for. After all, none of us have a lot of patience for companies that take the attitude of "Not our problem. This other company was responsible for that. Take it up with them." This is especially true here as, historically…

> as something the restaurant has responsibility for

Exactly. It's not unreasonable for customers to make the assumption that a restaurant has entered into an explicit contract with a delivery service, the same way we hold them accountable for the ingredients they select. It's a very different mindset from something like postal delivery from FedEx or UPS, where we are more likely to treat each party as separate entities.

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#237
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How, specifically, does this protect GrubHub/DoorDash/etc?

this law is designed to protect those companies who already made billions on abusing existing laws by making it seem like what they did was legal, a "loophole" in the law that is now "closed" for new competitors 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

So the alternative should be that we should continue to funnel VC money into every new predatory impersonation business?

Sometimes it really is a loophole that is now closed, and the government can’t subsequently dissolve all companies they’ve used it, they can only ask companies to stop.

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A courier can still collect food. They can’t impersonate the restaurant anymore.

The law prohibits a courier from being commissioned to place an order, collect it, and deliver it to you. It’s just criminalizing a perfectly legitimate form of arbitrage. The law isn’t about couriers impersonating restaurants either, because that’s just fraud and it’s already illegal. It’s just another example of a terrible law created at the behest of businesses that aren’t competent enough to keep up with changes…

[deleted]

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#239
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but companies (and individuals) pass off things all the time. Shipping is perhaps the most obvious example. If I'm an eBay seller and ship something to you, once I give you a tracking number, it's mostly between you and UPS. (Unless, e.g., an item was improperly packed and UPS won't honor a claim, etc.)

That isn't the case with these delivery services. If ANYTHING is wrong with your order, they will refer you to the business that cooked the food unless you blow them up on the phone.

> they will refer you to the business that cooked the food unless

This hasn't been my experience. Every time I've used Grubhub or Postmates and used their form to submit an issue with an order, the services have always either refunded me the issue or provided credit. I've never had to deal with the restaurant, unless I wanted something outside of money.

Re: California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

#240

Not everything has to be solved with a new law. In fact, most things shouldn’t.

The legislator has to act when the private sector refuses to behave ethically. I don't see any problem here. DoorDash and co created the problem with their unethical business model, which is at the expense of restaurants they list on their own website without any kind of agreement whatsoever. They should have stuck to restaurants who agree to do business with DoorDash.
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