Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

leginfo.legislature.ca.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 663 posts

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

#71

Post by everfree »

whiddershins wrote: post #63
kome wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Maybe it's that the first is an involuntary participation without someone's agreement, while the 2nd is someone agreeing to work under given conditions?" It's an old debate, the "lochner era" debate ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_era ). "Agreeing on conditions" is not enough to make something fair. You may agree because you are desperate and you need cash, you may go straight to voluntary serfdom... Society…

That’s an argument, but many think this doesn’t work in practice.

Antitrust cases are a good example of this type of thinking working well in practice.

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

#72

Post by frombody »

th3iedkid wrote: post #70

If cloud-provider X is providing a managed-service A , which is otherwise available as an open-source project Y. Does X need an agreement from Y to run the managed service ? If X does a bad job of providing value from Y, isn't X showcasing Y in a bad-light as well?

software licenses allow for this, so in this scenario there is generally already an agreement between the creators and the consumers / distributors over what uses of the product are considered fair.

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

#73

Post by [deleted] »

throwawaysea wrote: post #22
foobar1962 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law is taking a food safety angle: restaurants have a duty of care to their customers, which extends through the delivery chain.

This seems like a stretch to me. If I am using a courier service to get food, I know that there are two different parties involved and that the restaurant's own standards cannot be guaranteed. Safety is, as ever, a way to generate political expediency for otherwise bad ideas.

[deleted]

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

#74

Post by ratww »

WalterBright wrote: post #65

If a person decides to buy a pizza from X and then sell it to Y, don't they have a right to?

I think the core issue here is that some platforms were creating websites and phone numbers to impersonate the companies. In practice it's a man-in-the-middle attack. This is what the law seems to intend to stop.

I'm pretty sure that if I falsified a website to resell services or products on behalf of a larger company I would get slapped by a lawsuit, trademark or otherwise, but it seems that for small restaurants the government felt it needed to step up.

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

#75

Post by roenxi »

ratww wrote: post #69
roenxi wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the argument is I should accept this silly law because I can get around it by handling all the coordination between Uber and the Restaurant to make it clear to both that I was the one who placed the order and Uber is acting strictly as a courier service with no extras? That is silly. Uber can do the ordering and I can enjoy my evening without phoning people up.

Uber Eats or Uber Taxi? Uber Eats doesn't engage in the practices this law is trying to curb since they already have agreements in place with the restaurants (AFAIK), so you won't have to phone up anyone if you use Uber Eats. If you're taking about Uber the Taxi app, or some courier service, then this law doesn't apply to them since they're not "food delivery platforms", and you can just ask them to order on your beh…

> Uber Eats doesn't engage in the practices...

Doesn't change the fact that the law is silly. Every time I leave the house I wear closed in shoes. A law forbidding me from leaving the house unless I'm wearing closed in shoes would be silly.

This is a law that is arbitrarily preventing people from doing something that is perfectly reasonable - acting on behalf of a third party to order food. If legislators want to ban something objectionable they should ban it directly, not indirectly through making it illegal to do something reasonable.

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

#76

Post by say_it_as_it_is »

supernova87a wrote: post #49

I admit that I have yet to reconcile my own somewhat conflicted feelings about these recent bills (e.g. the one voted on in Nov 2020 about drivers as contractors, versus this one). For example, I'm in favor of regulating tech companies from misrepresenting restaurant menus as their own, and extracting a hefty margin off restaurants' barely-surviving profits by merely being a middleman aggregator. Yet on the other han…

I don't understand how couriers are extracting any margin from restaurants.

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

#77

Post by ehnto »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #60
danielheath wrote: post #33

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…

This is going to sound a bit curmudgeonly, but why should hospitality bend over to some tech middlemen? Not every industry needs to "innovate" their way into surviving the VC bubble's attempts to disrupt it. Hospitality is a fundamental service that's been provided for centuries, and is a cornerstone of the economy.

Second to that, the law doesn't prohibit it, it just makes the delivery service seek an arrangement first. I am not terribly saddened by the fact that the delivery platforms have to do some groundwork instead of just web scraping a bunch of menus and making money off splitting all the risk between restaurants and customers.

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

#78

Post by carbonx »

WalterBright wrote: post #65

If a person decides to buy a pizza from X and then sell it to Y, don't they have a right to?

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.

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

#79

Post by kflzufkrbzi »

foobar1962 wrote: post #34
roenxi wrote: post #9

This is a silly law. If someone feels like sending a courier to buy take away then that should be legal.

Say you're the restaurant, I'm the delivery guy. I pickup your meals and deliver them to your customers. On the way the meals go cold (or hot) and get damaged. Your customers aren't happy and want their money back. My actions have made your service look bad, your customers unhappy and cost you money. You didn't know I was delivering your food!

As someone who is working on food delivery in Europe it's weird to even consider someone delivering food without the restaurants approval. I guess it's the only way to scale extremely fast but still it seems counterproductive to me.

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

#80

Post by frombody »

ljm wrote: post #24
dogma1138 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did they made a profit off this?

Doordash priced the pizza at $16, but the pizza place charged $24. Presumably a 'growth hack' to get more users. The pizza place, seeing the difference, bought pizzas for $16 and received $24 from Door Dash, so for each purchase they were $8 better off. They also ordered plain pizza dough in larger quantities, for more profit. Presumably because they didn't have to actually make the full pizza.

Technically they didn't have to make any pizzas at all.

I always felt like the story about the dough was embellished a little bit to avoid being charged with fraud.

Post reply on HN