Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/18/doordash-charges-16-for-a-24.html
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Even better - Have hundreds of Pizza’s shipped nightly to homeless shelters, hospitals, children’s and women’s shelters. Profit and donate much needed food for those in need.
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If Doordash is charging the final customer $160 for 10 pizza’s then they are losing $80 on an order already and in effect the store owner is capturing that loss for themselves. Pretty neat and makes you wonder how Doordash will stay in business.
I’ve never used Doordash and don’t know anything about them so can’t comment on their general business practices.
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I’d be fine with that.
But the way finance-industry types talk about scams like this is so, so gross. It’s like “I found a way to get $10 by cheating, which makes me cleverer i.e. better than some asshole who had to grow crops or do nursing to get $10”.
I always think, well, you can also get free money by sneaking into old ladies’ homes and taking it from under the mattress, so I’m curious how you’d respond to that opportunity if it crossed your desk.
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I’m pretty sure Doordash charges the customer a fee for delivery, which would be why having the pizza go to multiple places as @StatusQuo suggested wouldn’t really work.
I also thought they charged the restaurant a fee to participate as well, but I could be wrong.
Ditto. I was thinking on the one hand, Doordash is one of those gig-economy business where the delivery people are being treated as contract workers to avoid giving them benefits or rights, and on the other hand this guy “trades options” for a living. There’s no good guy here.
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A perfect metaphor for day trading stocks.
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In this case, Doordash somehow hijacked the restaurant’s contact info in Google and positioned itself as the pizza place’s delivery service without asking the owner’s permission. Another gig economy company screwing over its stakeholders (including shareholders) by recognising the American consumer’s willful blindness to sustainable prices for goods and services.
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My wife’s restaurant has the occasional Doordash pickup even though they have never used their services, probably for the same reason. But they also don’t offer delivery, so it’s not interfering with them either.
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The main problem is that there’s minimal quality control on Doordash’s part. So a customer might look up the restaurant on Google, call or click, and buy a pizza thinking the restaurant instead of DD is doing the delivery. Then the DD delivery person shows up without a thermal delivery bag or is delayed, and the food arrives cold and/or late. The restaurant will get the blame.
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I would argue that the main problem is that it’s yet another business exploiting the people it relies on for its existence, but I cede your point as well.
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Exploiting everyone, including the shareholders who are picking up the price difference that’s allowing the arbitrage. When a company is screwing over investors (see also Uber, WeWork, Theranos) in addition to employees/contractors and partners (in this case the restaurants), we’re in a brand-new phase of late-stage capitalism.
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idiotic - doordash is taking a hit to promote this guys pizzaeria, and he is now losing marketing by buying his own pizza,.
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Sounds like Uber made a mistake and should be trying to buy DoorDash instead of GrubHub. 
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It’s the Venture Capitalism model. Trade heavy losses over the first five years to establish a foot hold and destroy the existing market, then you’re the only game in town and you can charge higher prices.
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Just looked it up, Drivers are paid $1.00 per delivery plus 100% of the tip. Or DashPass at $10 a month but zero delivery fee when ordering from DashPass eligible restaurants. So you’re going to have to screw the driver by not tipping if you want to maximize your “profit”. I presume it’s an error on pricing by Doordash rather than a promotion.
I said it’s pretty neat that you can exploit it but that depends on your opinion of exploiting Doordash. The original authors are obviously happy with that. I presume it would be called fraud although it is very similar to currency trading and other legal arbitrage trading. Que two thieves and a liar.
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The prices DoorDash plagiarizes from the store menu must not be updated live if the menu changes their prices. Presumably if the restaurant price was raised higher doordash eats the difference.
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Abitrashy! Hope I am coining a neologism. No relevant google hits yet. Spread far and wide!
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Bonus points for the Gary Clail reference.
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This is just another layer of assholery. Sure, the gig delivery driver signed up for this, let’s go Team Capitalism, etc. But the store didn’t sign up to have its identity hijacked in the form of a website it didn’t create, which leads to a phone number it didn’t set up, so that the delivery service can capture a percentage of an order based on work it didn’t have to do. Given that these delivery companies are losing money, rent-seeking is always a great fallback!
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They’ll make it up in volume. I’m sure this was a policy spearheaded by the newest Doordash corporate board member, entrepreneur and former US Army Air Corps First Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder.
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