611–620 of 663 posts
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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.
If you have a complaint, they just refund you right away. I think they know customers could start issuing chargebacks through the credit card company and they wouldn’t have a way to defend themselves against that.
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If I buy something from you for $10 and then sell it to someone else for $15, I haven't taken anything away from you. You have your price and I have mine.
Yeah, but if my marked up $15 thing you sell to someone else is crappy because of your handling, and now the customer associates my name with expensive, crappy product, my brand has been spoiled by you.
What you are referring to isn't about profit extraction. It's about brands, reputation, distribution rights, etc. These are valid, separate concerns not related to the question I'm asking.
The profit extraction argument is invalid until proven otherwise.
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> This is going to sound a bit curmudgeonly, but why should hospitality bend over to some tech middlemen? Because that’s what their customers want, and providing something that their customers want should probably be one of the most important things for a business to do. The only genuine harm that can be caused to these businesses by the delivery companies, is if the delivery company is legitimately impersonating the…
Their customers want easy delivery options that's definitely true. But if you could ask them if they think restaurants deserve a chance at fair negotiations they would probably also say yes. All the bill is asking for is cooperation up front, not afterwards if at all. It's not criminalizing the business model of DoorDash and friends, it's just forcing them to treat their business partners like business partners. I th…
It’s also silly to say that these delivery apps are trying to make the world a better place. They’re just providing a service to consumers. They’ve certainly changed the takeout food market significantly (and in a way that is very beneficial to consumers). But they’ve also made it harder for takeout food businesses to operate, because they’ve massively increased the competition they face. Takeout restaurants used to only compete with other nearby take out restaurants, for the business of customers within a convenient distance from their location. Now they have to compete with businesses from miles away too.
This is fantastic for consumers, which is generally who should benefit most from these sort of regulations. This law is an absolute affront to consumers, and serves only to protect bad businesses from having to address innovation. It’s understandable that these businesses want a slice of that value, and I’m sure you could tell a very sympathetic story about them. But they did nothing to create this value, and the law shouldn’t exist to shield them from competition.
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Oh boy I love selective enforcement.
Scale does matter. There are a ton of things that people can and do do for a bit of cash under the table like give a haircut even though they don't have a license, rent out an apartment to a friend of a friend for a few weeks because you'll be traveling, etc. And those same things would probably be a problem if they were pursued as an ongoing business. Which, the general silliness of some occupational licensing aside…
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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…
A courier service is extracting profits no more than a waiter or waitress is. Whether it's staff (waiter) or contractor (courier), both are providing "delivery" services in exchange for fees. A waiter offers internal delivery within the restaurant. A courier offers external delivery to the home. Counting the courier's myriad cuts and how it monetizes its services isn't revealing profit extraction. You're revealing how couriers are paid for their services (10% of the bill + market premium).
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Creating and defending a trademark is very expensive. Many restaurants would prefer not to spend this money just to prevent unauthorized listings. They’d rather delegate the responsibility of preventing unauthorized listings to the state attorney who has more resources and expertise.
That's not true. A trademark costs around $300: https://www.uspto.gov/trademark/trademark-fee-information Enforcing it is free: you can send your own cease and desist for free. The only time you need a lawyer is if they refuse and you want to sue them. If the court rules in your favor, you can even sue them for the legal costs and costs of damages.
(And as I understand it, you get some trademark rights just by establishing a business, so you don't have to register the trademark to sue UberEats or Grubhub or whoever)
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> Things that you think are "perplexingly obvious", to the point that you can't conceive of not thinking about it, just aren't to them. And it can take almost half a lifetime to realize this That other people can have so vastly different brains.
Which is pretty strange given that you see can see clearly a vast spectrum of different mental capabilities (from handicap to genius) your entire life. I guess it flies in the face of cultural virtues about how hard work will set you free.
In first grade, I was in the "green" reading group, with just 4 or 5 out of about 30 kids. Nothing was ever said about abilities. I just assumed that the groups were random. I was the best in the green group by far, so it seemed that I was experiencing the other extreme of mental abilities. Late in the year, something inadvertently revealed to me that "green" was the best. To this day, I have no idea how bad the other groups could have been.
I remember being the best in AP Chemistry too. I set the 15-year record for the final exam score, permanently changing the grade scaling for the class by 3 points out of 100. (old scaling would have given me a 103 but that became a 100, and even years later all the grades would be lower by 3 points) That class was about 15 out of 350 students who started as freshmen. There were other students, about 50 out of the 350, who dropped out. I don't have much of an idea of what their science classes might have been like.
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I can't imagine getting takeout soup dumplings. They're almost getting a little too cooled down by the time you finish them in a restaurant. Dumplings that you pan fry at home can work reasonably well but, of course, a product that you have to partially cook yourself is not what a lot of people are looking for in take-out.
For the most part, they're okay, if you don't have super high expectations for the soup portion of it. Some Chinese places near me have started selling the dumplings they make frozen as well.
I'd be very happy with good frozen potstickers and wontons. Actually cooking them is pretty easy; I just find making them really tedious. And I haven't really found the ones I can get in Oriental markets all that great.
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I’m incredibly perplexed why people do this. Even pre pandemic it was patently obvious to anyone who paid attention that certain foods just don’t deliver well. Before the internet became a thing, the only places that regularly offered delivery were pizza joints and Chinese food, because both of those survive delivery well! I ordered delivery burgers once, from a restaurant close by, and learned my lesson that burgers…
> I’m incredibly perplexed why people do this. Even pre pandemic it was patently obvious to anyone who paid attention that certain foods just don’t deliver well. I don't say this with any malice, but a lot of people are just not that bright. Things that you think are "perplexingly obvious", to the point that you can't conceive of not thinking about them, just aren't to them.
From anecdotal observation, I wouldn’t say intelligence is the deciding factor, but impatience. People don’t pause to evaluate.
I have a friend who lashes out or gives up at mundane life problems (why is this hamburger soggy and how to avoid it) without pondering a solution or cause. Her immediate reaction is to find blame (even if herself), not to consider if and how the issue can be fixed.
But I’m confident she has the ability and intelligence to find solutions, because from what she tells me of her work—including customer and management reviews—she does it in professional settings.