“Profit” is a extinct Baby Boomer concept
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Sorry to be so stupid, but if the guy charges $24 and Door Dash pays him $24, how does he make money on Door Dash? Is it because he resells them?
Like as a customer, he orders a pizza for $16 from Doordash. DD pays his pizzeria $24. Now he has a pizza he can resell for $24. It seems, regardless of other costs, on this basis, he’d make $8/pizza.
I’m usually not this stupid, but I don’t get it, otherwise.
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He didn’t resell the pizza; he had them delivered to a friend’s house.
He paid $160 for ten pizzas; his cost to make them was around $70 ($230 total out-of-pocket). The driver showed up with a credit card and paid $240. Total profit: $10!
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But. If someone ELSE (a customer) had bought those pizzas, his profit would have been $170.
So he lost $160 on this transaction because he bought the products himself.
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I wish more people would click through to articles, read them, and comment on the actual article… not just the excerpts posted here on BoingBoing.
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Yes. The article is written by - in fact, the whole idea of arbitraging the ridiculous situation was thought up by - the pizzeria owner’s friend, who happens to write about the excesses of late-stage capitalism. So many comments here seem to think the pizzeria owner thought he was being clever.
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YES! Exactly this. That’s what was confusing me. He just added $16 in cost per pizza.
The real way to do this is order the pizza for $16, have it delivered to whoever is next door and then resell it for $24. So, a real customer orders a “deluxe” pizza for $24. After the order comes in, he immediately orders the same exact pizza from DD, delivered to a cooperative party next door. DD arrives, picks up the pizza, walks 15 feet, gives it to next door. Next door “sells” it back to the pizza parlor and they then deliver it.
Do that 10 times a night and pull in an extra $150.
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It’s more wholesome than the opposite: I looked up a local restraunt on grubhub to see if they had a dish I like, then called the place directly, and the final price was much cheaper than what was listed on grubhub and they probably kept more of the profits.
Luckily the restraunt had a website so I could get a non SEO’d number
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If he’s charging $24 for a pizza, I imagine he’s already making money hand over fist.
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I didn’t read the original article and the excerpt is misleading in that one of real stories should be that Doordash is basically impersonating the restaurants as their delivery service. It reminds me of the Google Assistant voice ordering although no money is made by google for that service.
End result can be the same - customer complains and gives the restaurant bad reviews because the food was cold/miss-ordered/unavailable etc.
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Yes. The actual point of the article is that Doordash is screwing everybody here:
- restaurants, by impersonating them and damaging their reputation (the customers didn’t even know they were ordering from an outside service)
- customers, whose food may arrive late and cold and certainly after being handled under conditions the restaurant would never approve
- drivers, who are just hustling to make ends meet
- themselves in the short term, with the intention of building market share and raising prices in the future.
What makes this all possible is the massive injection of cash that Doordash had recently received from Softbank; the (original) author makes it pretty clear that this is a Bad Thing, and it’s hard to disagree.
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One word: volume.
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Hey! That’s the same strategy as the First Citiwide Change Bank!
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I would think that they would never be able to raise prices. It’s too easy for any other sleazeball with coding skills to do the same and saturate this non-market.
I bet they’re just trying to make it to an initial offering as a way to cash out of a business that is really just a con.
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I knew a guy I graduated high school with, and after college he was hired by a large insurance company. His first job with them, he told us, was to renegotiate insurance payouts to old ladies and men when their spouses died.
By renegotiate, he meant talk them into a lower payout, taking advantage of their age and confusion and grief. He didn’t see any problem with this. We thought he was a monster. Still, this monster fitted nicely into a position that some other monster would have readily filled had he developed a conscience.
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No, because if you read further, because they knew where these pizzas were going, they chucked an empty crust in the box (which cost virtually nil). After all, it wasn’t like the customer was going to complain.
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If only. RTFA/RTFM has been a thing since usenet, sadly.
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Yes, because I did read further, and $75 is still less than $170. But sure, it’s only a $95 loss now.I
Sorry friends but you don’t make profit by spending to create something and selling it to yourself, however cheaply you charge.
Oh, neat! I like learning about additional ways that fine citizens are going to work every day to do blackly disgusting evil on an industrial scale and then just shrugging it off and pretending they’re about the same as a regular person (and slightly better than a poor) because someone paid them to do it in an office.
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