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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

themargins.substack.com

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Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#361

Post by Firadeoclus »

imgabe wrote: post #266
akiselev wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same question, what does A have to do with B? I've had enough herring today.

Let's assume for a moment that people are not helpless imbeciles who need us to tell them what to do and that they choose the best option available to them, within the constraints of their life. Let's further assume that they are more familiar and better equipped to balance the constraints of their lives than we are. Then we can deduce that if we remove the option they have chosen by making it illegal they will neces…

> It just makes the jobs below that floor go away.

No, it doesn't _just_ do that. It also makes the jobs that are viable above that floor pay at least that floor.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#362

Post by AlexandrB »

jrockway wrote: post #176
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until the prices inevitably rise back up to the level they require to make up for the massive losses. Then that’ll just drive your behavior right back, probably much much faster than it took for DoorDash to establish this, meaning the “monopoly mode” profit time will be so short-lived as to recover next to nothing of the losses.

I am guessing that DoorDash will succeed in the very long term. Eventually they will not need independent restaurants, they can just start their own (and cut ingredient costs to whatever they need to make a profit). And eventually deliveries will be done by robots, so no workers to pay. I'm not saying this will happen tomorrow, but think 20 years out -- there is a lot of money to be made. I am not sure that making so…

You’re describing a restaurant chain. Why isn’t Swiss Chalet valued at billions of dollars? They fit your description exactly.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#363

Post by AlexandrB »

trixie_ wrote: post #179
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is all these businesses (ride share, food delivery), have extremely low margins and the tech to spin up a competitor is extremely cheap and commodity. Thus the “monopoly” you allegedly get later is deeply unsustainable at the profit level and scale required to recoup losses on any timescale that would work for investors, assuming you can even hold onto it in the face of constant reemergence of competitors…

It works great. All those management middle men of thousands of delivery and taxi companies have been replaced with software. Razor thin margins are enough to keep the servers running and a small team of developers managing it - for the entire planet. It's difficult for any company to abuse their position as they're easily repalcable. So the margins will get lower, and more of the money paid by the customer will go d…

You should probably read the articles the parent cited on nakedcapitalism.com.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#364

Post by paulcole »

throwaway_dflka wrote: post #113
paulcole wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there's also the first sale doctrine--that after you sell your physical product, people can do with it as they please, including resell. Yep! First sale doctrine applies to all transactions. This is why my gammy can resell her Oxy’s and it’s all nice and legal.

To speak more precisely, the first sale doctrines prevent the original seller from asserting intellectual property rights (copyright, patent, trademark) as a basis to prohibit resell. I was writing an internet comment, not a legal brief!

So then first sale has nothing to do with Doordash’s food delivery service right?

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#366

Post by Dylan16807 »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #354
Dylan16807 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While the restaurant preparing "partial" pizzas to ship to coordinated orders is obviously fraud How so? They're making the pizzas the way the customer wants them. The 'objective' tastiness is none of the delivery middleman's business. And there's nothing wrong with offering a bad pizza for $24, as long as the customer knows what they're getting.

This depends on whether you think the pizza restaurant's customer is doordash. You could make a good argument that this was the case. The restaurant sells to doordash, who paid for a pizza with toppings.

Doordash is buying it, but I think it makes more sense as "a pizza for Bob" than just "a pizza". I think it would be strange to ignore everything Bob says if he calls in asking for the pepperoni to be on one side.

Though none of this matters if there's a 'special instructions' box. Have a code word for bread pizza.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#367

Post by VHRanger »

jeroenhd wrote: post #348
bko wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems very unethical. The fact that you don't like Softbank or DoorDash or the gig-economy or that you're sending pizza to homeless people is irrelevant. The fact is you're exploiting a bug to personally benefit at the expense of investors. Why wouldn't you apply the same principals of ethical hacking, where you would notify the party of the exploit?

It's nog a bug, it's a feature. Doordash uses investment money to evaporate competitors, take over the market and then raise prices for restaurant owners once they gain control. It's a tried and proven concept. Paying part of the meal is part of that strategy. They know full well that large orders and large amounts of transactions cost them more money and they're betting on nobody actually doing this. They're selling…

Just a note: it's not a tried and proven concept.

Predatory pricing hardly works in economic theory and is working disastrously for a lot of the companies trying it (eg. Ubers financials)

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#368

Post by overthemoon »

>> Uber Eats is Uber's "most profitable division” . Uber Eats lost $461 million in Q4 2019 off of revenue of $734 million. Sometimes I need to write this out to remind myself. Uber Eats spent $1.2 billion to make $734 million. In one quarter.

These might be stupid questions, but... can this go on forever? No, right? Is there precedent for this? How long of a horizon do companies like this expect to be a money toilet? What happens to everyone else if companies like this collapse? Why hasn't it happened yet?

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#370

Post by Kiro »

mnd999 wrote: post #261
Kiro wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works great in any supermarket I've been to with a self-scanning systems and that's been the standard in my country for many years now.

“Unexpected item in bagging a area” gets me every time.

It used to be like that the first couple of years but the newer systems never give me that and feel very accurate.
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