DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage

> You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It's used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and increased prices. But is that even viable?

Inequality is driving this. We have let money become so accumulated, that the owners of the capital are being silly with it at the same time that workers are having a hard time. We have to tax this capital and make it work for everyone.

The driver argued the amount of time it would take to come back to return the bag would mean he couldn’t make enough deliveries to “pay my rent”.

There you have it. The actual “business model” of Doordash.

I'm surprised more restaurants aren't suing DoorDash for damage to their reputation.

Inserting themselves unrequested into the ordering process, then delivering cold food, the wrong food, etc. the customers just blame the restaurant ultimately.

Previous discussion:

Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216852 - May 2020 (518 comments)

From the same writers: ZIRP Explains the World

https://www.readmargins.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world

These should prove to be historical pieces of import, capturing the state of tech in the last days before raised interest rates.

Door Dash/Seamless/Uber Eats, etc. have driven many low-priced restaurants out of business here in New York City many of which had long traditions of providing delivery services for their food by inserting themselves as middlemen and taking all those restaurants' profits and more.

I realize that in many places, they provide services that never existed before, but here in NYC they've driven hundreds of wonderful mom and pop restaurants out of business while they lost billions.

Those entrepreneurs who ran successful businesses for decades were forced out of business, as their quality, inexpensive food (especially in an expensive place like NYC) only netted them 5-10% profits, which were more than eaten up by the 15-30% charged on every order.

I'd rather starve than give any of those jerks a nickel.

> These platforms [Grubhub, DoorDash, Uber Eats] are all losing money.

Has this changed? Do all these companies still losing money?

People wonder why investors are piling so much money into losing companies. well, here's the answer:

Most investments are actually Bad https://www.lynalden.com/most-investments-are-bad/

Both Uber Eats and DoorDash made restaurant listings without permission at first, just like Reddit seeded threads with their own comments at first. It's just a necessary part of building something that requires economy of scale. Neither platform does this anymore to my understanding.

sliceline, sort of a rhyme pun

makes me think of webvan and peapod.

DoorDash is wonderful if you want to pay 30% more for the same item, and then add tax and tip on top of that. Restaurants pass on the platform fee to you.

It's idiotic. Just phone it in directly and go pick it up.

Would this be wire fraud?

(2020)

Wait what? What's preventing merchants from doing this now? Why even fill the pizza boxes? I must be missing something...

did this happen before or after the silicon valley episode

This article is more than four years old