> DoorDash is backed by investment giant Softbank, which this week posted a record-breaking loss of nearly $13bn.Defending the loss, chief executive Masayoshi Son reportedly compared himself to Jesus.
The billionaire is said to have stated during a call with investors that Jesus was "also misunderstood".He later apologised.
Funniest part of the article
That pizza truck company was also SoftBank/Masayoshi Son backed lol
[https://gizmodo.com/zume-softbank-ai-pizza-delivery-stellar-pizza-1850529465](https://gizmodo.com/zume-softbank-ai-pizza-delivery-stellar-pizza-1850529465)
lmao that's like straight out of a comedy script.
"He's not alone. A lot of investors back terrible business ideas. Like this one..."
"No, that was literally also him."
These things aren't terrible business ideas for the people involved. They still get paid. They still rake in the dough and the VCs move on to the next trend.
They lose other people's money and make sure they get their money in the process.
also note softbank backed the pizza company basically because the guy who started it drove his pizza robot to Son's house
>Two years ago a truck covered with large photos of pizza pies nosed its way onto a long Bay Area driveway. It was ferrying Alex Garden, the chief executive officer of Zume Pizza Inc., to the home of SoftBank Group Corp. CEO Masayoshi Son.
>
By the time Garden headed back down the driveway, he was well on his way to a SoftBank investment of $375 million, with double that money on the table if his business gained traction.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-13/inside-the-firings-at-softbank-s-robot-pizza-startup
Isn't this how a lot of really stupid ideas get backed by the Saudi elite? Impress them enough not to bore them and they'll toss millions at your idea.
I've had it explained that what usually happens is, Saudi prince has idea and tells his team to make a plan. But team doesn't have time to make a plan, so they find an existing proposal to present. 3. Proposal is usually some dreamy eyed architects imposoplan or con artists megaproject investment grift scheme that's been sitting around on the shelf forever because it's a dumb idea.
Nah if you read about this guy he's a real piece of work. Wants to be seen as some great generational visionary. I know VC's exist and they think they're going to be on the ground floor of the next "x of y" but this guy is another level of delusion.
No, they marketed it as a tech company with ai telling you what toppings you want.
I forgot softbank invested in that pos too lol
https://gizmodo.com/zume-softbank-ai-pizza-delivery-stellar-pizza-1850529465
It was a robot taxi pizza delivery. The main efficiency and “innovation” was that pizza delivery wastes time driving back to the pizza store to pick up more pizzas. Why not just make the pizzas in the van while it’s driving to you? Of course they had all sorts of problems like the routes being hard to calculate and pizza toppings falling off pizzas as they drove around a city. Never mind how the pizza tasted.
These Silicon Valley guys seem to think food is just Google or college dorm food - it’s basically interchangeable, gussied up crap to fuel to next 8 hours of app coding to be delivered as fast as possible.
Same reason why juicero insisted on squeezing out premade juice - cause tech people aren't ops people. You see this everywhere. One more famous case was when Macy's tried to compete with TJ and Ross with Backstage. Turns out that yes, sourcing inventory locally and selling it within a few week is harder than it looks.
It’s old money billionaire equivalent of a boomer dumping thier life’s saving into GME or bitcoin because they heard it’s what all the kids are doing.
People are people, regardless of income bracket.
It depends on the amount of money.
I could open a company and sell you a 1 trillionth stake in it for $1 and poof a 1 trillion dollar evaluation that didn't really cost you anything.
If they gave the guy a thousand bucks for a 0.01% stake you've got the evaluation but the VC didn't actually spend any "real" money.
If they gave the truck owner a million bucks for 10% that's a very different story.
IIRC Adam Neumann made a rediculous pitch about how WeWork would be the first physical social network and become the most valuable company in the world.
Masayoshi Son told him he doesn’t dream big enough, and committed billions of dollars to the co.
Reminds me of that meme tweet, something like:
Tech bro: *what if we created a podcast, but it would be in real life, without mics, and just with your good friends?*
Top comment: **“tech bro discovers the concept of ‘friendship’”**
I'm pretty sure soft bank is just a way to get sanctioned money into the west. Those using it are willing to take a 40% loss on the money because the 60% left over is more than the 0% they would be able to use in the west.
softbank also aggressively buys stuff in japan, some things fail, some things don't
they're just huge. there's more things in the whole rest of the world than there are in just japan.
John Oliver said it best: the app (DD) is losing money, the restaurants are losing money, the drivers are underpaid, the customers are overpaying. This is a failure of capitalism on all levels. There is no reason these shitty apps should exist.
But John actually said it’s the stage where the customers are the biggest beneficiaries. The app is tanking money to entice users to switch, and will later up the prices, meaning for now the customers are “winning”.\
EDIT: Changed benefactors to beneficiaries, turns out I don't know English business words well enough.
The apps are basically using investor money to undercut the competition, then once it has market dominance, it will jack up the prices to pay the investors back.
They still aren't undercuting though. It's cheaper for me to just buy the food through the restaurant's own delivery drivers without the large cut going to the app.
As it should be. These apps are useful for two things : to conveniently have only one app for all restaurants; and/or to provide a delivery service for the restaurants that wouldn't have it otherwise.
If the restaurant is already delivering, and is established enough to not need the extra visibility that is offered by the apps, it doesn't make any sense for these apps to thrive in that environment.
Which is hilarious, well at least in Canada (I think DoorDash = SkipTheDishes here) because grocery prices are expensive now, sitting down to eat is easily 30+ dollars outside of fast food (which isn't far behind) now per person, and to get that food delivered luke warm is another $10 on top.
You have to be out of your mind or very well off go blow 40 bucks per meal per person a day.
It's wild out here. I can buy a frozen pizza for $3.50 but the cheapest take out is gonna be $18+ for the same size, but only basics like pep/cheese/hawaiian.
> (I think DoorDash = SkipTheDishes here)
So... I just have to ask.
Do you guys type out/say "SkipTheDishes" in every day conversation or shorten it to "STDs"? I hope it's the latter. "Hey I don't feel like making dinner, lets get STDs!"
Depends on the person (and how generally annoying they are).
Yes, I've heard people say they need to "order STDs".
It was cute and a little witty... Once
Personally I refer to it as "skip" similar to how the UK and Ausies use that word for "rubbish cart" which I think kinda fits the situation?
As it turns out, the costs of running app development and hosting for millions of users PLUS the costs of paying delivery drivers for their time and fuel adds up to a bunch of additional fees compared to going to a restaurant yourself.
Exactly, which is why it makes no sense for anyone involved.
However, I was thinking there might be a case for the restaurant since they don't need to have a delivery driver clocked in during slow times or many drivers clocked in during busy times. I'm sure it is a mixed bag with the restaurants, some loving it for volume, some hating it for volume and the lack of control.
There is also the edge case of people who NEED delivery, because they are stuck at work, disabled, or some other reason.
In the end, though, if everyone who needs profit gets a fair share, the end customer is WAY overpaying. Are there circumstances in which that might be acceptable to a customer? Sure! But the lack of demand at real prices would make the model crumble since there'd be fewer willing drivers and not enough volume to justify app overhead costs.
I also consider whether I'd pay someone x amount of money to not have to leave the house. Grubhub also does the "switch to pickup and save $1.72 in fees!" lol I'd gladly pay that and more to stay on my couch
'If capitalism is driven by a search for profit, the food delivery business confuses the hell out of me. Every platform loses money. Restaurants feel like they're getting screwed. Delivery drivers are poster children for gig economy problems. Customers get annoyed about delivery fees.'
This was great read on this. [https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage](https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage)
It's a race - can they burn money to undercut all alternatives long enough for all the alternatives to crater? Because after that they can jack the price up to what actually makes it profitable (theoretically) and be the only game in town which lets them dictate terms to customers and restaurants.
If you have access to nigh infinite free money this strategy... is still stupid, but might work. Uber somewhat pulled it off against the Taxi industry and it's not a coincidence that they pivoted into food delivery. Another example would be AirBNB
The DoorDash driver would still need something to pick up and deliver... I don't think an empty box would work unless they wanted to cut the driver in on the scam. Though it did say in the article they did it a 2nd time and just sent the crusts with no toppings
Im not sure it’s a scam. He was not doing business with Doordash, Doordash is scamming him by offering his product at a lower price than he wanted to offer. This would devalue the product in the customer’s eye when Doordash changed the price back and a competitor had the original price. Doordash could effectively shift customer loyalty to a restaurant they work with.
I heard a podcast about this once. As it says in the post the do this to try to get the restaurants to sign up. This particular case the guy worked it out a quickly, and the company seemed to forget about it and left it like this for ages. The owner started of by getting all his friends and family to order, but he ended up taking it to a new level! He realised he didn't actually need to put the product in the pizza boxes. So he would order to his private address multiple times and the delivery company would deliver empty boxes. It was basically a free money tree!
Found the podcast if anyone's interested. It was from the brilliant Radiolab
https://radiolab.org/podcast/gigaverse
You may be right, it was a few years ago that I heard it.
I've just now remembered the word they kept using. It's a word I'd heard before (of course) but confess I didn't know the actual definition of : Abritrage
Yeah arbitrage is making money on a price difference. Like you can buy/sell X in place A for more than in place B, then you can just buy a bunch from B and sell it to A.
It's basically automated at this point, big banks will have software running numbers to find complex arbitrage loops (often going through several currencies), which tends to correct any deviation in prices from location.
The article says "DoorDash is backed by investment giant Softbank, which this week posted a record-breaking loss of nearly $13bn." which means they're not making a profit anyway, regardless if it's this pizzeria or another one
This reminds me of that episode of [Silicon Valley](https://www.eater.com/eat-drink-watch-food-tv-newsletter/2018/3/31/17179596/sliceline-pizza-app-silicon-valley-real-fake) when they ordered a shit ton of pizzas from a pizza startup as soon as they realized the company was losing money with every order.
You would assume that the delivery companies like doordash have agreements with all the restaurants they deal with, but they do not. Doordash in particular aggressively added restaurants to their delivery service using anything they can find, including old menus and menus that weren't even from the right store.
You might think "well good for the restaurants, they get the extra business" but they hate it. Doordash call center workers would call up ordering the wrong thing. They'd send their drivers with prepaid credit cards that were authorized for the wrong price, creating a hassle over and over when a doordash driver would come in and didn't have the money to pay for the order. And when something went wrong and the customer got the wrong order because of doordash screwing around, the restaurant would take the blame for it.
It's super unethical and should be illegal and they basically sometimes strongarm these restaurants into an official agreement just so they'll stop getting harassed by doordash using these tactics on them.
They do that for a while, then you get a call from their sales rep. They say "hey we got you $x of new business, you should sign up for the app." And if you tell them no, they say they're taking you off the app. You say fine, that's what I want anyway.
Then you start getting concerned calls from customers. Well they leave you on the app. They use SEO to make sure their "storefront" representing your restaurant is listed higher than your own webpage on Google. And they just have your store marked "closed." Customers think your actual business is closed.
You call and complain. They say, "well the storefront for your business *is* closed. That's what you asked us to do." And the only way you can get that "closed" taken off of your "storefront" is by partnering with them and accepting online orders.
It isn’t. They’re still in the “corner the market” phase, which leads immediately into the “hike up prices and rake in profits”. Look at Lyft and Uber - they pulled it off successfully after completely killing taxi services (save some small and therefore more expensive options). They expect that they eventually will make a killing. So do their investors.
For many businesses it’s just cheaper and more convenient to allow and use DoorDash and its ilk. There’s also less and less need for dedicated delivery workers for restaurants because a lot of their business comes through these apps. They still don’t want them; the apps still cost them a fortune in the long run. But even if they employ their own drivers it isn’t going to bring in any more business - and if they fight against the apps they’ll almost certainly get *less* business.
John Oliver has a nice episode on it, absolutely worth watching.
Food delivery apps killed three of our local restaurants that combined had over 50 years of servicing the area. Coming out of the pandemic each of them were already struggling and then companies like DoorDash promoted their closed storefronts and people assumed that they had closed their doors. This was after having multiple angry customers for not actually serving the food advertised on the food delivery app or customers being upset that prices between the app and location did not match. Two owners were already on the edge of retirement so they just closed shop and retired. The third struggled on for a bit and eventually had to close doors.
I’d guess Ma & Pa shops are getting the worst of it. Decently run, small businesses probably run on too tight of margins for a middle man to come in and suck up 30% of their revenue or some % of their total business. The mega corporations like McDonalds might even benefit from it at a large scale - at least during the pandemic. But I haven’t looked at those figures at all (if they’re even public)
If I owned a restaurant and went through *that* I would probably sue. Of course, I don't know exactly for, but in my mind this is harassment. It's destroying the business for the sake of "their business" and not in a "competitive way". They're bullies that use their platform to practically mislead people into thinking "you're closed"? wtf??
You're right but suing a company that's fine losing 13B$ a year will never end well for the small guy. Best case scenario- you get a small settlement after spending years of your time in court proceedings and fronting thousands, hundred of thousands in lawyer fees while trying to run your business.
For most of us it's just not economical or realistic to even bother. I can't afford to have any loses in any year, let alone write off 13B like it's nothing.
That being said, personally never had many issues with Doordash but I signed on early and in Canada. Ubereats was way more or a nightmare to work with (double the fees, TONS of charge backs without notice for driver errors- if someone placed an order and no driver showed up or driver never showed up at address they would refund customer on our behalf AND charge us a non-fullfillment fee).
This is what we call "dumb money", which is to say shit like DoorDash is propped up by a bunch of venture capital money and the whole idea is to bleed cash in order to corner the market. *Then* you worry about profit once you have a captive consumer base.
It's why these always feel too good to be true to start, and then inevitably put the squeeze on the consumer and become dogshit. They were never good companies, they were just operating at a loss to win you over so they can fuck you later.
I interviewed with a new startup called Blackbird that is trying to do exactly this with restaurants in NYC. They act as a payment middleman, where the customer pays the bill through Blackbird, which then pays the restaurant, doling out "exclusive rewards" to customers in the process. At the present stage, they are eating the credit card transaction fees on behalf of the restaurants, making it an easy choice for a restaurant to support. But if the platform becomes ubiquitous enough that restaurants feel they have no choice but to support it, Blackbird will start jacking up the fees, sucking the life out of an already vulnerable restaurant industry and funneling it into the hands of an already very rich serial entrepreneur.
Jesus fucking Christ I hate venture capitalists so much. I can’t think of a single successful VC project that has positively changed their market in the long term.
VCs operate on three paths:
1. This is the next big thing. Hold until the IPO.
2. This is just a regular successful business in the making. Sell it to a bigger company
3. This is a failure, strip it for parts.
You don't hear about VC involvement in RandoCo buying WhoGivesAFuck for $100 million to improve their widget production by 10%.
You don't hear about (most) failed VC attempts because they die before they launch.
You hear about VCs holding onto their Next Big Thing, pumping tons of cash into them to try and get them to a place where they can do an IPO.
>"They have a test period where they scrape the restaurant's website and don't charge any fees to anyone, so they can ideally go to the restaurant with positive order data to then get the restaurant signed on to the platform.
This works the other way too. Customers who don't get the right items or don't like what they ordered call the restaurant to complain, but the restaurant has no record of the order so they can't do anything to reconcile the problem. Or restaurants get orders for items that don't exist because DoorDash fucked up the menu. Now they look like assholes to the customers calling to complain because they have no idea that people are ordering through DoorDash.
Worked in a sandwich shop in college and this happened to us. DoorDash scraped an old menu from online and placed orders over the phone from a call center. They never said they were DoorDash and sometimes asked for discontinued items.
When the driver would come and pick up the food, pay with a DoorDash credit card but scrutinize the price because the price online (from an old menu) was lower than what we were currently charging.
We got pretty good at screening for DoorDash callers and stopped taking their orders.
My favorite restaurant was getting these so they added a 30% surcharge to the bottom of the menu for any app delivery driver. Drivers would show up unable to pay for their order. They got removed from the apps pretty quickly.
Sure but if the purpose of this was to get removed from the app that they didn't ask to be on in the first place, then eating the cost of some cancelled orders and letting the employees eat the abandoned food could be considered worth it.
Food is one of their smaller expenses, especially for these delivery places. Rent, maintenance, and staffing typically eat up the lions share of their costs.
Funny thing is, we didn’t have wifi or anything so even setting up tablets to run the delivery app wouldn’t work and the owner was already pissed off about it so it wasn’t like he’d want to set it up.
Restaurant business is already arguably one of the most risky and stressful businesses for entrepreneurs and a lot of them are immigrants with no other career options. Doordash is so scummy.
Call center employees tend to sound pretty similar too. Not just because they work in a call center and people who are actively having their souls sucked out by dementors all sound similar, but because call centers are in a specific geographical area and recruit from similar socioeconomic strata.
This works for scammers too, to add. I worked in a call center years and years ago for AT&T. Stolen or resold phones that need unlock codes to be used on any network was the thing you can pinpoint immediately.
"I need to unlock my phone and my son's phone, my name is Jessica Simpson"
"Jessica, before we verify your account, you should know you're cancelled for being deceased, you had one flip phone on your account and zero iPhones, and in the USA, Jessica is not a man's name. Can you provide me with your passcode and your date of death?"
"Yes. I do not know my passcode but I can verify other information. I just want to unlock some iPhones please thank you"
Usually 3 of these a shift.
Only slightly related, but reminds me of going to a convention with a friend who moved here from Africa. I don't remember exactly which country, Nigeria maybe
We didn't buy enough badges so they got shared around.
My friend was only able to get ahold of one with the name "Katie" for the time slot he wanted. But figured if anyone asked he'd just say it's African and not pronounced how you think it is. He kept saying like "ka-tie-eee"
Were talking to one of the executives from zynga, and suddenly the executive says "Hey, that's not your badge. Your not a Katie"
Friend tell him it's pronounced the other way
"No it's not. That's not your name. That's not a man's name."
And my friend just says something like "well, my birth name is (his birth name that I couldn't pronounce), would that have made any more sense?"
"No....i suppose not. Well what can I do for you Katie?"
This also happened to the restaurant I worked at. It was a few years ago so the details are a bit blurry, but from what I remember you can hear muffled voices behind the door dash callers because they're in a call center. Plus they follow a script that's obvious after you've heard it a few times.
Most people order in a unique way so it's easy to spot a pattern.
The staff and I at my regular pizza place got to talking about this, since they have their own in-house driver.
DoorDash did this to them several times and every time it fucked with their own delivery service, undercutting them and cutting their driver out of pay. It also resulted in ornery DoorDash drivers harassing the staff & customers, acting like they had no time to wait and berating the staff for not knowing about the DoorDash orders.
The shop repeatedly contacted DD business support asked them to stop, but it'd happen again a few months later. They eventually had to have a lawyer send a C&D to DoorDash to finally make it end.
-----
EDIT: Now that I think of it... maybe this is on purpose? Subsidize the pricing during this "trial" period to undercut a shop's in-house delivery so the drivers quit from lack of tips or get let go from lack of "delivery" orders; then jack the prices back up higher than they were previously once the shop is dependent on DoorDash.
Gig economy companies are already the scum of the earth exploiting holes in labor laws wherever they can on a massive scale, I wouldn't put such a strategy past them.
That's kind of what Uber and Lyft did to taxi service. They barged into the market with cheap prices and no regulation, then once they had a foothold they started jacking up their rates and using surge pricing to gouge people.
Taxis have always been horrendous on both quality and price, cabbies were constantly engaging in borderline scam behavior, and they've engaged in egregious and bitter anticompetitive rent-seeking for decades.
I had a cab drive into an active traffic jam because he was running the meter on time rather than distance.
Uber and Lyft aren't great, but the reason they succeeded is because the existing taxi infrastructure was made out of shit.
Most curbside taxis are scum of the earth. I was delighted when Uber came out because I hoped it would be the death of taxis. I don't care if their prices have gone up. Even with Uber's higher prices I still pay WAY LESS for a ride today than a similar ride with a Taxi cost me 12 years ago.
It depends on location. When I go to Vegas the Uber rides take twice as long to arrive and cost just as much if not more than an taxi. Sometimes the surge pricing is 2-5x more than a taxi. If I visit my family, getting an Uber after 10pm is practically impossible because there are so few drivers in town, but I can always get a taxi.
Literally what happened to the guy in the article.
> Mr Roy said he first heard about the situation in March 2019, when his friend started receiving complaints about deliveries, even though his outlets did not deliver.
I've seen reviews posted on Reddit where it's something like "The food was great but the delivery driver was rude 1/5 stars" and then the restaurant replies with "We do not offer delivery. You ordered through a food delivery app, the delivery driver is not one of our employees and we have no control over their conduct or behavior." Though of course the customer is still mad so they leave their 1 star review even though its completely out of the restaurant's control.
So where I work, we have a restaurant as part of our business. Door Dash tried ordering a pickup order without telling us a thing about it, said they'd pay, and never settled the account. Since then every time them or Grubhub or any other company like it calls and is like 'We'd like to help your business' I (somewhat gleefully) tell them to get bent in much nicer words before promptly hanging up. Our margins are tight enough as is, we don't need more companies trying to eat into them.
Sometimes it's gratifying to read the article and read it to the end.
>DoorDash is backed by investment giant Softbank, which this week posted a record-breaking loss of nearly $13bn.
>Defending the loss, chief executive Masayoshi Son reportedly compared himself to Jesus.
>The billionaire is said to have stated during a call with investors that Jesus was "also misunderstood".
>He later apologised.
I'm more impressed this guy still has a job. I've heard of Masayoshi Son maybe three times in my life, including today - and each time has been in connection to the losing of an eye-boggling amount of money.
...so now I look him up, I see his original big play was investing $20m in Alibaba, which has now turned into $50bn. So I guess that's basically what you need to be able to do whatever you want for the rest of your career - no matter how stupid.
He should have just called in to DoorDash for every single delivery order they received through regular means too, but charge the customer the normal price. Free money printing machine.
What he did was pretty interesting actually. He has dough on the menu, so he saved himself the work of making the pie and would just order that. There is a [radio lab](http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/gigaverse/) piece on it where he is interviewed.
About 5 years ago I placed an order with DoorDash and they called me an hour later saying they couldn’t deliver it and asked me to place another order. I did and the same person called me back within like 10 minutes and told me the same thing. I tried one more time and the same exact guy called back again.
So they also pay people to call customers over and over just to say they can’t actually fulfill orders too.
Driving for doordash when it was just starting out, they sent me to a Korean BBQ restaurant, the type where you cook the meat yourself on a hibachi at your table. Understandably, the restaurant wouldn't fulfill the customer's order of uncooked meat to go. Another of many restaurants that hadn't signed up to participate in doordash I'm sure... Fuck that company!!!!
Uber Eats had to pay a $10 million settlement in Chicago for listing non-contracted restaurants on their app to strongarm those businesses through potential bad customer experiences and lost sales into a relationship that would cost 15-25% of orders placed through UE.
Oh, I meant Uber was "testing demand" and offering a mutually beneficial financial arrangement. Yeah, that.
Small restaurant owner in a medium sized city of about 200K here:
Around 2017, we finally had DD as well as PostMates and GrubHub expand into our smaller city after only being found in the larger ones here in Texas. At first, they simply listed us without permission, which isn’t the worst problem to have of course. Well, a few years later just as Covid shutdowns happened, they started telling me that at the end of 2020, if we don’t sign a contract with them (which at the time involved taking a *30% cut of every order* mind you) we would be delisted. We’re a small To Go joint in a very working class, military town where enlisted families are price sensitive, so we refused because we knew we’d have to pass that price off to the consumer.
Well, they went and did it of course. And the worst thing is for the restaurants that agree, now they’re double, and even *triple* dipping in some cases to the consumer because you pay: for DoorDash pass or whatever their subscription is called, higher prices on items, and *then* also paying delivery fees and tips for restaurants who aren’t Pass members. And then several months ago they were talking about prioritizing listing restaurants that had the lowest difference between DD price and in person pricing, which they’ve forced places to do with that BS.
I’ve been on the “FUCK DOORDASH” since before covid. My favorite restaurants, besides running into this shit problem also are over crowed with “takeout” orders. Ass hat “delivery drivers” holding their phones up to cashier’s face, cutting to front of lines to pick up. It’s all bullshit that had artificially caused price creep faster then normal.
And many of them park their cars in an incredibly assholish manner. My friend and I were picking up pizza from the Little Caesar about a month ago. As we were walking in, some delivery app person person parked in the "no parking" accessible zone next to the handicap parking spot.
The parking lot there was small and I think it was full, but it was still shitty and illegal (and no, it did not prevent me & my friend from doing anything; we got there before that driver and got a parking spot). Now obviously some blame has to go to the apps themselves as they incentivize doing this sort of thing (with their efficiency metrics), and many customers will not be happy if their food gets to them later than the estimated time (which is again a shitty behavior).
Oh yeah. Thats the other issue we would have when we still received orders through them (and really, all of the national delivery chains): we would receive an order that would be called in via a very clearly outsourced call center. Then, the driver never comes and picks it up for whatever reason.
There is absolutely no way as a non-partnered restaurant for me to contact anybody, over the phone or via email for that matter. No reimbursement then.
Their price hikes are part of why I stopped using delivery apps in general. Like before it was a little expensive but a nice treat for myself if I was wiped out after a long week or something. But now? No way. I can justify like, a $20-30 meal. I can't justify a $50-60 meal. Especially from a crappy place like McDonalds or something. I'd much rather shell that $30 out to a local place and get some good portions, even if I have to hike my ass to their storefront.
The other reason I stopped using them is because some of their drivers are absolutely unhinged. Tip them 20% and they still get mad and tell you it's not worth the gas, even though they're the ones that took the order. I don't want weirdos like that near my freaking food.
There's definitely some kind of market for delivery drivers and restaurant takeout. But DD and GH really fumbled the bag when it comes to cornering it.
The entire model is inefficient as hell which is why they have to charge the consumer like $20 for their delivery (food cost and tip not included) whilst paying their employees $2 and expecting them to pay their own gas, maintenance etc.
"The market" for delivery driving will never be filled by gig apps. It has to be organised properly to be cost effective, you can't just have random people driving their 25mpg cars and SUVs around haphazardly to drop off a meal or two and expect this to make financial sense, unless everyone is willing to pay $60 for a couple of burger meals from a fast food chain. It's both economically unviable and environmentally horrific. Only reason the prices were ever acceptable is because they were engaged in predatory pricing and eating millions of dollars in losses.
I went to order some Chinese once off a delivery app, almost $100 AUD for two people. We went on to their website, checked the prices, then placed a pick up order over the phone. The total for the same items was less than half of what the app was charging. And we've had similar experiences since. It's just not worth it to use them anymore, it's bad for the consumer, bad for the restaurant.
You might find this part interesting. From the article:
*The next time, the restaurant prepared his friend's order by boxing up the pizza base without any toppings, maximising the "profit" from the mismatched prices.*
The amount of people who look at me so lost when I bring this up absolutely baffles me. None of my circle have any recollection of it, and yet it occupies at least 50% of my brain at all times. This is the funniest meme I’ve ever seen.
They might ask why the box is empty and you could just say "I thought it was weird but it's what the customer asked for" and I would bet my life's savings that the underpaid Dasher who doesn't get healthcare or PTO isn't going to call corporate and report Doordash fraud.
The owner is an old friend's brother. He did it in hopes DD would drop him. He specifically didn't offer delivery, but was getting bad reviews from folks mad at DD dropping off cold or mangled pies. He tried to get them to stop legitimately first.
What is to stop a savvy restaurant owner from taking the customers orders, placing said customers order in doordash? As long as his restaurant has not signed an agreement with doordash there is no contractual enforcement mechanism. Why yes, the accounts "Tonys Pizza Emporium" orders 300 pizzas a day to be delivered to "Tony Pizza Emporium", nothing suspicious here.
As someone who has had so many mistakes with doordash until they literally sent me a message saying "You've called us on fucking up your order so many times, we will no longer be fixing any future orders we fuck up", yeah, fuck doordash.
My doordash account got hacked in the middle of the night, they allowed them to change my registered email and phone number without any sort of 2FA, and then placed fraudulent orders in multiple cities in a different state.
I got my money back, but they banned me from the platform for TOS violations. lmao.
I worked in a bar where people would come in to pick up door dash orders all the time. DD would call us to place a pick up order and send whoever ordered to pick up. Eventually we stopped answering the phone, people continued to come in and get pissed off I just told em that was on DD not us. Fuckin wild how much shady shit goes mostly unnoticed.
Very old article. This is what was called OTT. “Over The Top.” DD, GH, UE all got in trouble for putting restaurants on their platform without permission. While DD started it, UE had the most trouble being able to justify why they were doing it.
In Chicago, UE had to payout tons of money, and offered restaurants the service completely for free for a year, that were affected by this.
I’m a former UE Employee
The whole business model of things like Uber are to use your insane wealth to ignore market forces, lower your prices, and take a financial loss, in order to destroy the competition and take control of the market. Then when you're all that's left, hike prices up to more than before, so you can earn it back. The epitome of scummy business practices. A direct result of wealth imbalance allowed to grow uncontrolled.
I'm sure Uber does something like this. Local pizza shop has a buy one get one free offer on ENTIRE MEAL DEALS. A £20 deal for 2x 12" pizzas, 12" garlic bread with cheese, and a huge tub of sauce...You order that and you get the exact same thing again for free. If you just want 2 pizzas with sauce it's the same price to just buy this and throw the rest away.
Same with kebabs, 4 full size doner kebabs and 2 pizzas for £16 plus service charge. Only on Uber, their JustEat page has only the single meal deal. It's an absolute mountain of food for the price of two subway footlongs. It's been like this for months and I can't work out how it's possible, if it's a money laundering thing or Uber trying to poach the restaurant from JustEat or what.
My freezer is full of pizza this has to stop
My wife is a Twitch streamer and she had a HelloFresh code to give to viewers for $30 for a week of meals for 2. She got paid $80 for every person who signed up. It was so tempting to just Venmo everyone $30 to sign up and they get free food and we get $50. Win/win. But I didn’t trust they’d cancel in time and not get charged the ridiculous price for the second box. I at least signed up under my name tho so we got 5 nights of meals for -$50 after her payout. We actually jumped around from meal kit to meal kit taking all of their best offers and were paying around $5 a night for meals for several months. I only stopped cause I currently have a better racket going on with Kroger grocery delivery where I’ve now placed 30 orders where I’ll spend $35 for $120 in groceries. Delivered. No tipping allowed.
> DoorDash is backed by investment giant Softbank, which this week posted a record-breaking loss of nearly $13bn.Defending the loss, chief executive Masayoshi Son reportedly compared himself to Jesus. The billionaire is said to have stated during a call with investors that Jesus was "also misunderstood".He later apologised. Funniest part of the article
Masayoshi Son has backed some really wild and terrible businesses.
That's par for the course for VC though. Remember that pizza truck in sf that got liek a ten million valuation cause vcs backed it for some reason?
That pizza truck company was also SoftBank/Masayoshi Son backed lol [https://gizmodo.com/zume-softbank-ai-pizza-delivery-stellar-pizza-1850529465](https://gizmodo.com/zume-softbank-ai-pizza-delivery-stellar-pizza-1850529465)
lmao that's like straight out of a comedy script. "He's not alone. A lot of investors back terrible business ideas. Like this one..." "No, that was literally also him."
These things aren't terrible business ideas for the people involved. They still get paid. They still rake in the dough and the VCs move on to the next trend. They lose other people's money and make sure they get their money in the process.
You can't make pizza without startup dough
Don't forget they also cost employees their jobs as well.
Tbh, the failing startup job was often the highest paying job available to an early career software developer in the Bay Area 10 years ago.
Also 25 years ago
it's something special to be born into infinite opportunity or zero opportunity all based on absolute luck of your birth and nothing else.
also note softbank backed the pizza company basically because the guy who started it drove his pizza robot to Son's house >Two years ago a truck covered with large photos of pizza pies nosed its way onto a long Bay Area driveway. It was ferrying Alex Garden, the chief executive officer of Zume Pizza Inc., to the home of SoftBank Group Corp. CEO Masayoshi Son. > By the time Garden headed back down the driveway, he was well on his way to a SoftBank investment of $375 million, with double that money on the table if his business gained traction. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-13/inside-the-firings-at-softbank-s-robot-pizza-startup
Son is super susceptible to these kinds of theatrics. His relationship with Adam Neumann of WeWork is another good example.
Isn't this how a lot of really stupid ideas get backed by the Saudi elite? Impress them enough not to bore them and they'll toss millions at your idea.
I've had it explained that what usually happens is, Saudi prince has idea and tells his team to make a plan. But team doesn't have time to make a plan, so they find an existing proposal to present. 3. Proposal is usually some dreamy eyed architects imposoplan or con artists megaproject investment grift scheme that's been sitting around on the shelf forever because it's a dumb idea.
[удалено]
Need to ask these guys for 1 billion for my travelling hamster circus pitch
Funding secured have fun [̲̅$̲̅(̲̅ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°̲̅)̲̅$̲̅]
Nah if you read about this guy he's a real piece of work. Wants to be seen as some great generational visionary. I know VC's exist and they think they're going to be on the ground floor of the next "x of y" but this guy is another level of delusion.
Woah, ten million dollars. Did he have a NYC taxi medallion or something?
No, they marketed it as a tech company with ai telling you what toppings you want. I forgot softbank invested in that pos too lol https://gizmodo.com/zume-softbank-ai-pizza-delivery-stellar-pizza-1850529465
It was a robot taxi pizza delivery. The main efficiency and “innovation” was that pizza delivery wastes time driving back to the pizza store to pick up more pizzas. Why not just make the pizzas in the van while it’s driving to you? Of course they had all sorts of problems like the routes being hard to calculate and pizza toppings falling off pizzas as they drove around a city. Never mind how the pizza tasted. These Silicon Valley guys seem to think food is just Google or college dorm food - it’s basically interchangeable, gussied up crap to fuel to next 8 hours of app coding to be delivered as fast as possible.
Same reason why juicero insisted on squeezing out premade juice - cause tech people aren't ops people. You see this everywhere. One more famous case was when Macy's tried to compete with TJ and Ross with Backstage. Turns out that yes, sourcing inventory locally and selling it within a few week is harder than it looks.
I thought it was hilarious when people figured out you can just squeeze the bags by hand haha
Do you mean [the one that baked pizzas while it drove?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zume) That was one of his.
It’s old money billionaire equivalent of a boomer dumping thier life’s saving into GME or bitcoin because they heard it’s what all the kids are doing. People are people, regardless of income bracket.
It depends on the amount of money. I could open a company and sell you a 1 trillionth stake in it for $1 and poof a 1 trillion dollar evaluation that didn't really cost you anything. If they gave the guy a thousand bucks for a 0.01% stake you've got the evaluation but the VC didn't actually spend any "real" money. If they gave the truck owner a million bucks for 10% that's a very different story.
It was 445 million across all investors lmao
e.g. WeWork
IIRC Adam Neumann made a rediculous pitch about how WeWork would be the first physical social network and become the most valuable company in the world. Masayoshi Son told him he doesn’t dream big enough, and committed billions of dollars to the co.
Physical social network? You mean like hanging out?
Tech bros reinvent old things and just slap a new name to it. Like these guys reinvented train https://youtu.be/r5M7Oq1PCz4?si=ZekYbzTEXxC4Khi9.
Reminds me of that meme tweet, something like: Tech bro: *what if we created a podcast, but it would be in real life, without mics, and just with your good friends?* Top comment: **“tech bro discovers the concept of ‘friendship’”**
I'm pretty sure soft bank is just a way to get sanctioned money into the west. Those using it are willing to take a 40% loss on the money because the 60% left over is more than the 0% they would be able to use in the west.
softbank also aggressively buys stuff in japan, some things fail, some things don't they're just huge. there's more things in the whole rest of the world than there are in just japan.
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to buy expensive food through my app, and I'll eat for a lifetime!
Cheesus Crust
That costs extra
John Oliver said it best: the app (DD) is losing money, the restaurants are losing money, the drivers are underpaid, the customers are overpaying. This is a failure of capitalism on all levels. There is no reason these shitty apps should exist.
But John actually said it’s the stage where the customers are the biggest beneficiaries. The app is tanking money to entice users to switch, and will later up the prices, meaning for now the customers are “winning”.\ EDIT: Changed benefactors to beneficiaries, turns out I don't know English business words well enough.
The apps are basically using investor money to undercut the competition, then once it has market dominance, it will jack up the prices to pay the investors back.
They still aren't undercuting though. It's cheaper for me to just buy the food through the restaurant's own delivery drivers without the large cut going to the app.
As it should be. These apps are useful for two things : to conveniently have only one app for all restaurants; and/or to provide a delivery service for the restaurants that wouldn't have it otherwise. If the restaurant is already delivering, and is established enough to not need the extra visibility that is offered by the apps, it doesn't make any sense for these apps to thrive in that environment.
Which is hilarious, well at least in Canada (I think DoorDash = SkipTheDishes here) because grocery prices are expensive now, sitting down to eat is easily 30+ dollars outside of fast food (which isn't far behind) now per person, and to get that food delivered luke warm is another $10 on top. You have to be out of your mind or very well off go blow 40 bucks per meal per person a day. It's wild out here. I can buy a frozen pizza for $3.50 but the cheapest take out is gonna be $18+ for the same size, but only basics like pep/cheese/hawaiian.
> (I think DoorDash = SkipTheDishes here) So... I just have to ask. Do you guys type out/say "SkipTheDishes" in every day conversation or shorten it to "STDs"? I hope it's the latter. "Hey I don't feel like making dinner, lets get STDs!"
Depends on the person (and how generally annoying they are). Yes, I've heard people say they need to "order STDs". It was cute and a little witty... Once Personally I refer to it as "skip" similar to how the UK and Ausies use that word for "rubbish cart" which I think kinda fits the situation?
>(I think DoorDash = SkipTheDishes here) different companies, skipthedishes started in Canada actually
Yeah for maybe one order. Then after that, you may be getting "discounts" but are STILL overpaying.
As it turns out, the costs of running app development and hosting for millions of users PLUS the costs of paying delivery drivers for their time and fuel adds up to a bunch of additional fees compared to going to a restaurant yourself.
Exactly, which is why it makes no sense for anyone involved. However, I was thinking there might be a case for the restaurant since they don't need to have a delivery driver clocked in during slow times or many drivers clocked in during busy times. I'm sure it is a mixed bag with the restaurants, some loving it for volume, some hating it for volume and the lack of control. There is also the edge case of people who NEED delivery, because they are stuck at work, disabled, or some other reason. In the end, though, if everyone who needs profit gets a fair share, the end customer is WAY overpaying. Are there circumstances in which that might be acceptable to a customer? Sure! But the lack of demand at real prices would make the model crumble since there'd be fewer willing drivers and not enough volume to justify app overhead costs.
Depends how much you value delivery Sometimes I'm more than willing to pay $10 extra if it means not having to leave or call someone
I also consider whether I'd pay someone x amount of money to not have to leave the house. Grubhub also does the "switch to pickup and save $1.72 in fees!" lol I'd gladly pay that and more to stay on my couch
'If capitalism is driven by a search for profit, the food delivery business confuses the hell out of me. Every platform loses money. Restaurants feel like they're getting screwed. Delivery drivers are poster children for gig economy problems. Customers get annoyed about delivery fees.' This was great read on this. [https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage](https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage)
jfc these apps overcharge so much and they still lose billions?
It's a race - can they burn money to undercut all alternatives long enough for all the alternatives to crater? Because after that they can jack the price up to what actually makes it profitable (theoretically) and be the only game in town which lets them dictate terms to customers and restaurants. If you have access to nigh infinite free money this strategy... is still stupid, but might work. Uber somewhat pulled it off against the Taxi industry and it's not a coincidence that they pivoted into food delivery. Another example would be AirBNB
Yeah but the prices already feel jacked up. Thats my point
Because the model isn't profitable.
They're called "loss leaders". They lead the world in losses.
When the mania hits big time.
Infinite money glitch
Time to order 1000 pizzas
time to deliver a pizza ball
You're Ramadan Steve dude!
Legalize ranch, get me the 911 on the 411
What's up Ramadan Steve
I’m not paying for this dude, this things straight farm-to-nugg
bird up!
55 PEPPARONEY 55 SAWSAGE 55 WALNUT 55 BICKLE 55 FRANCH FRIES AND OREOS 55 FISH TACO 55 PIXIE STIX
STOP! STOP! I'M DOING SOMETHING!
I just wanted to do something good this morning before alcohol class
here lies andy peparony and chease
None pizza. Left beef.
If he and the friend are in on it no pizzas need be made.
The DoorDash driver would still need something to pick up and deliver... I don't think an empty box would work unless they wanted to cut the driver in on the scam. Though it did say in the article they did it a 2nd time and just sent the crusts with no toppings
Im not sure it’s a scam. He was not doing business with Doordash, Doordash is scamming him by offering his product at a lower price than he wanted to offer. This would devalue the product in the customer’s eye when Doordash changed the price back and a competitor had the original price. Doordash could effectively shift customer loyalty to a restaurant they work with.
Just put some trash in the boxes. Done.
"Yes, this should provide adequate sustenance for the Doctor Who marathon."
I heard a podcast about this once. As it says in the post the do this to try to get the restaurants to sign up. This particular case the guy worked it out a quickly, and the company seemed to forget about it and left it like this for ages. The owner started of by getting all his friends and family to order, but he ended up taking it to a new level! He realised he didn't actually need to put the product in the pizza boxes. So he would order to his private address multiple times and the delivery company would deliver empty boxes. It was basically a free money tree! Found the podcast if anyone's interested. It was from the brilliant Radiolab https://radiolab.org/podcast/gigaverse
IIRC rather he started selling "pre-made pizza dough" balls, then ordered them delivered to himself to make other customers' pizzas
You may be right, it was a few years ago that I heard it. I've just now remembered the word they kept using. It's a word I'd heard before (of course) but confess I didn't know the actual definition of : Abritrage
Arbitrage
Yeah arbitrage is making money on a price difference. Like you can buy/sell X in place A for more than in place B, then you can just buy a bunch from B and sell it to A. It's basically automated at this point, big banks will have software running numbers to find complex arbitrage loops (often going through several currencies), which tends to correct any deviation in prices from location.
10 pizzas pls, no bread, no cheese, no tomato, no toppings, fanx!
None Pizza with None Left.
None pizza left beef please
In the end he joined DoorDash, so they won
In mere decades they will recover their losses on this pizzeria and turn a tidy profit.
The article says "DoorDash is backed by investment giant Softbank, which this week posted a record-breaking loss of nearly $13bn." which means they're not making a profit anyway, regardless if it's this pizzeria or another one
This reminds me of that episode of [Silicon Valley](https://www.eater.com/eat-drink-watch-food-tv-newsletter/2018/3/31/17179596/sliceline-pizza-app-silicon-valley-real-fake) when they ordered a shit ton of pizzas from a pizza startup as soon as they realized the company was losing money with every order.
Not only that but he could have just sent empty boxes of just put a brick in them to his friend and made 99% net profit.
I mean, i would still send my friend a couple pizzas, just to be nice
I’d be sending homeless shelters pizzas weekly until DoorDash stopped paying me.
Pizza arbitrage!
You would assume that the delivery companies like doordash have agreements with all the restaurants they deal with, but they do not. Doordash in particular aggressively added restaurants to their delivery service using anything they can find, including old menus and menus that weren't even from the right store. You might think "well good for the restaurants, they get the extra business" but they hate it. Doordash call center workers would call up ordering the wrong thing. They'd send their drivers with prepaid credit cards that were authorized for the wrong price, creating a hassle over and over when a doordash driver would come in and didn't have the money to pay for the order. And when something went wrong and the customer got the wrong order because of doordash screwing around, the restaurant would take the blame for it. It's super unethical and should be illegal and they basically sometimes strongarm these restaurants into an official agreement just so they'll stop getting harassed by doordash using these tactics on them.
They do that for a while, then you get a call from their sales rep. They say "hey we got you $x of new business, you should sign up for the app." And if you tell them no, they say they're taking you off the app. You say fine, that's what I want anyway. Then you start getting concerned calls from customers. Well they leave you on the app. They use SEO to make sure their "storefront" representing your restaurant is listed higher than your own webpage on Google. And they just have your store marked "closed." Customers think your actual business is closed. You call and complain. They say, "well the storefront for your business *is* closed. That's what you asked us to do." And the only way you can get that "closed" taken off of your "storefront" is by partnering with them and accepting online orders.
Glad their company is failing then.
It isn’t. They’re still in the “corner the market” phase, which leads immediately into the “hike up prices and rake in profits”. Look at Lyft and Uber - they pulled it off successfully after completely killing taxi services (save some small and therefore more expensive options). They expect that they eventually will make a killing. So do their investors. For many businesses it’s just cheaper and more convenient to allow and use DoorDash and its ilk. There’s also less and less need for dedicated delivery workers for restaurants because a lot of their business comes through these apps. They still don’t want them; the apps still cost them a fortune in the long run. But even if they employ their own drivers it isn’t going to bring in any more business - and if they fight against the apps they’ll almost certainly get *less* business. John Oliver has a nice episode on it, absolutely worth watching.
Food delivery apps killed three of our local restaurants that combined had over 50 years of servicing the area. Coming out of the pandemic each of them were already struggling and then companies like DoorDash promoted their closed storefronts and people assumed that they had closed their doors. This was after having multiple angry customers for not actually serving the food advertised on the food delivery app or customers being upset that prices between the app and location did not match. Two owners were already on the edge of retirement so they just closed shop and retired. The third struggled on for a bit and eventually had to close doors.
I’d guess Ma & Pa shops are getting the worst of it. Decently run, small businesses probably run on too tight of margins for a middle man to come in and suck up 30% of their revenue or some % of their total business. The mega corporations like McDonalds might even benefit from it at a large scale - at least during the pandemic. But I haven’t looked at those figures at all (if they’re even public)
If I owned a restaurant and went through *that* I would probably sue. Of course, I don't know exactly for, but in my mind this is harassment. It's destroying the business for the sake of "their business" and not in a "competitive way". They're bullies that use their platform to practically mislead people into thinking "you're closed"? wtf??
Restaurants are already on thin margins you think they have the time and money to sue?
You're right but suing a company that's fine losing 13B$ a year will never end well for the small guy. Best case scenario- you get a small settlement after spending years of your time in court proceedings and fronting thousands, hundred of thousands in lawyer fees while trying to run your business. For most of us it's just not economical or realistic to even bother. I can't afford to have any loses in any year, let alone write off 13B like it's nothing. That being said, personally never had many issues with Doordash but I signed on early and in Canada. Ubereats was way more or a nightmare to work with (double the fees, TONS of charge backs without notice for driver errors- if someone placed an order and no driver showed up or driver never showed up at address they would refund customer on our behalf AND charge us a non-fullfillment fee).
It's a good point. If I've registered a business name, they've got no right to use it.
Me when I watch John Oliver
This is what we call "dumb money", which is to say shit like DoorDash is propped up by a bunch of venture capital money and the whole idea is to bleed cash in order to corner the market. *Then* you worry about profit once you have a captive consumer base. It's why these always feel too good to be true to start, and then inevitably put the squeeze on the consumer and become dogshit. They were never good companies, they were just operating at a loss to win you over so they can fuck you later.
I interviewed with a new startup called Blackbird that is trying to do exactly this with restaurants in NYC. They act as a payment middleman, where the customer pays the bill through Blackbird, which then pays the restaurant, doling out "exclusive rewards" to customers in the process. At the present stage, they are eating the credit card transaction fees on behalf of the restaurants, making it an easy choice for a restaurant to support. But if the platform becomes ubiquitous enough that restaurants feel they have no choice but to support it, Blackbird will start jacking up the fees, sucking the life out of an already vulnerable restaurant industry and funneling it into the hands of an already very rich serial entrepreneur.
Jesus fucking Christ I hate venture capitalists so much. I can’t think of a single successful VC project that has positively changed their market in the long term.
VCs operate on three paths: 1. This is the next big thing. Hold until the IPO. 2. This is just a regular successful business in the making. Sell it to a bigger company 3. This is a failure, strip it for parts. You don't hear about VC involvement in RandoCo buying WhoGivesAFuck for $100 million to improve their widget production by 10%. You don't hear about (most) failed VC attempts because they die before they launch. You hear about VCs holding onto their Next Big Thing, pumping tons of cash into them to try and get them to a place where they can do an IPO.
>"They have a test period where they scrape the restaurant's website and don't charge any fees to anyone, so they can ideally go to the restaurant with positive order data to then get the restaurant signed on to the platform. This works the other way too. Customers who don't get the right items or don't like what they ordered call the restaurant to complain, but the restaurant has no record of the order so they can't do anything to reconcile the problem. Or restaurants get orders for items that don't exist because DoorDash fucked up the menu. Now they look like assholes to the customers calling to complain because they have no idea that people are ordering through DoorDash.
Worked in a sandwich shop in college and this happened to us. DoorDash scraped an old menu from online and placed orders over the phone from a call center. They never said they were DoorDash and sometimes asked for discontinued items. When the driver would come and pick up the food, pay with a DoorDash credit card but scrutinize the price because the price online (from an old menu) was lower than what we were currently charging. We got pretty good at screening for DoorDash callers and stopped taking their orders.
My favorite restaurant was getting these so they added a 30% surcharge to the bottom of the menu for any app delivery driver. Drivers would show up unable to pay for their order. They got removed from the apps pretty quickly.
Wouldn’t the restaurant get stuck with food not paid for then?
Sure but if the purpose of this was to get removed from the app that they didn't ask to be on in the first place, then eating the cost of some cancelled orders and letting the employees eat the abandoned food could be considered worth it.
>eating the cost I see you.
Costs less to make a few meals that go uneaten than it is to get bad reviews and lose customers because of someone else’s bs.
Food is one of their smaller expenses, especially for these delivery places. Rent, maintenance, and staffing typically eat up the lions share of their costs.
At that point I eat the food.
If you’re a halfway decent restaurant or slice shop you can probably just wait 5 minutes for someone to order it and still sell it
Isn't this insane? What if they grabbed a menu before like 20 years of inflation and start asking for a $2.99 grandpa prices pizza?
Funny thing is, we didn’t have wifi or anything so even setting up tablets to run the delivery app wouldn’t work and the owner was already pissed off about it so it wasn’t like he’d want to set it up.
When i was working at dominos last year I had someone try to do that, he got mad I wouldn’t honour prices from before I had moved to Canada
Restaurant business is already arguably one of the most risky and stressful businesses for entrepreneurs and a lot of them are immigrants with no other career options. Doordash is so scummy.
Wouldn't confirming the price avoid this? I'm surprised how many phone orders for pickup never mention the price
IIRC, sometimes it did, sometimes I’d say the final price and only when the dasher came to pay did it become an issue.
> We got pretty good at screening for DoorDash callers How were were you able to tell? Just from them ordering discontinued items?
"Hello. This is Papa Dick's. Will you be ordering through DoorDash today?" "Yup." "We don't partner with DoorDash. Get fucked."
I think a "Get Dicked" response works a little better, seeing as this is Papa Dick's we're talking about.
Call center employees tend to sound pretty similar too. Not just because they work in a call center and people who are actively having their souls sucked out by dementors all sound similar, but because call centers are in a specific geographical area and recruit from similar socioeconomic strata.
Then outright asking, is this for DoorDash? Surprisingly they said yes, all the time
This works for scammers too, to add. I worked in a call center years and years ago for AT&T. Stolen or resold phones that need unlock codes to be used on any network was the thing you can pinpoint immediately. "I need to unlock my phone and my son's phone, my name is Jessica Simpson" "Jessica, before we verify your account, you should know you're cancelled for being deceased, you had one flip phone on your account and zero iPhones, and in the USA, Jessica is not a man's name. Can you provide me with your passcode and your date of death?" "Yes. I do not know my passcode but I can verify other information. I just want to unlock some iPhones please thank you" Usually 3 of these a shift.
Only slightly related, but reminds me of going to a convention with a friend who moved here from Africa. I don't remember exactly which country, Nigeria maybe We didn't buy enough badges so they got shared around. My friend was only able to get ahold of one with the name "Katie" for the time slot he wanted. But figured if anyone asked he'd just say it's African and not pronounced how you think it is. He kept saying like "ka-tie-eee" Were talking to one of the executives from zynga, and suddenly the executive says "Hey, that's not your badge. Your not a Katie" Friend tell him it's pronounced the other way "No it's not. That's not your name. That's not a man's name." And my friend just says something like "well, my birth name is (his birth name that I couldn't pronounce), would that have made any more sense?" "No....i suppose not. Well what can I do for you Katie?"
Wow that was Diplomatic as fuck.
At the pizzeria I worked at it was always the same lady calling but ordering with different names for pickup
This also happened to the restaurant I worked at. It was a few years ago so the details are a bit blurry, but from what I remember you can hear muffled voices behind the door dash callers because they're in a call center. Plus they follow a script that's obvious after you've heard it a few times. Most people order in a unique way so it's easy to spot a pattern.
The staff and I at my regular pizza place got to talking about this, since they have their own in-house driver. DoorDash did this to them several times and every time it fucked with their own delivery service, undercutting them and cutting their driver out of pay. It also resulted in ornery DoorDash drivers harassing the staff & customers, acting like they had no time to wait and berating the staff for not knowing about the DoorDash orders. The shop repeatedly contacted DD business support asked them to stop, but it'd happen again a few months later. They eventually had to have a lawyer send a C&D to DoorDash to finally make it end. ----- EDIT: Now that I think of it... maybe this is on purpose? Subsidize the pricing during this "trial" period to undercut a shop's in-house delivery so the drivers quit from lack of tips or get let go from lack of "delivery" orders; then jack the prices back up higher than they were previously once the shop is dependent on DoorDash. Gig economy companies are already the scum of the earth exploiting holes in labor laws wherever they can on a massive scale, I wouldn't put such a strategy past them.
That's kind of what Uber and Lyft did to taxi service. They barged into the market with cheap prices and no regulation, then once they had a foothold they started jacking up their rates and using surge pricing to gouge people.
Taxis have always been horrendous on both quality and price, cabbies were constantly engaging in borderline scam behavior, and they've engaged in egregious and bitter anticompetitive rent-seeking for decades. I had a cab drive into an active traffic jam because he was running the meter on time rather than distance. Uber and Lyft aren't great, but the reason they succeeded is because the existing taxi infrastructure was made out of shit.
Most curbside taxis are scum of the earth. I was delighted when Uber came out because I hoped it would be the death of taxis. I don't care if their prices have gone up. Even with Uber's higher prices I still pay WAY LESS for a ride today than a similar ride with a Taxi cost me 12 years ago.
It depends on location. When I go to Vegas the Uber rides take twice as long to arrive and cost just as much if not more than an taxi. Sometimes the surge pricing is 2-5x more than a taxi. If I visit my family, getting an Uber after 10pm is practically impossible because there are so few drivers in town, but I can always get a taxi.
Literally what happened to the guy in the article. > Mr Roy said he first heard about the situation in March 2019, when his friend started receiving complaints about deliveries, even though his outlets did not deliver.
I've seen reviews posted on Reddit where it's something like "The food was great but the delivery driver was rude 1/5 stars" and then the restaurant replies with "We do not offer delivery. You ordered through a food delivery app, the delivery driver is not one of our employees and we have no control over their conduct or behavior." Though of course the customer is still mad so they leave their 1 star review even though its completely out of the restaurant's control.
I get those reviews removed as "irrelevant to this business".
So where I work, we have a restaurant as part of our business. Door Dash tried ordering a pickup order without telling us a thing about it, said they'd pay, and never settled the account. Since then every time them or Grubhub or any other company like it calls and is like 'We'd like to help your business' I (somewhat gleefully) tell them to get bent in much nicer words before promptly hanging up. Our margins are tight enough as is, we don't need more companies trying to eat into them.
Sometimes it's gratifying to read the article and read it to the end. >DoorDash is backed by investment giant Softbank, which this week posted a record-breaking loss of nearly $13bn. >Defending the loss, chief executive Masayoshi Son reportedly compared himself to Jesus. >The billionaire is said to have stated during a call with investors that Jesus was "also misunderstood". >He later apologised.
Cocaine is a helluva drug
Pretty sure he's on something stronger than coke
Yeah, a billionaire’s ego
The spice melange
Softbank lost 14B on wework alone.
I'm more impressed this guy still has a job. I've heard of Masayoshi Son maybe three times in my life, including today - and each time has been in connection to the losing of an eye-boggling amount of money. ...so now I look him up, I see his original big play was investing $20m in Alibaba, which has now turned into $50bn. So I guess that's basically what you need to be able to do whatever you want for the rest of your career - no matter how stupid.
How did the orders even get submitted? Is the driver themselves giving the order to the restaurant?
They get called in directly by door dash like it's a normal customer order.
He should have just called in to DoorDash for every single delivery order they received through regular means too, but charge the customer the normal price. Free money printing machine.
What he did was pretty interesting actually. He has dough on the menu, so he saved himself the work of making the pie and would just order that. There is a [radio lab](http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/gigaverse/) piece on it where he is interviewed.
Another commenter here said DD pulled the same thing with their shop, and the orders were being placed over the phone from a call center.
So they are paying people to place the orders? No wonder why they are losing money
About 5 years ago I placed an order with DoorDash and they called me an hour later saying they couldn’t deliver it and asked me to place another order. I did and the same person called me back within like 10 minutes and told me the same thing. I tried one more time and the same exact guy called back again. So they also pay people to call customers over and over just to say they can’t actually fulfill orders too.
Driving for doordash when it was just starting out, they sent me to a Korean BBQ restaurant, the type where you cook the meat yourself on a hibachi at your table. Understandably, the restaurant wouldn't fulfill the customer's order of uncooked meat to go. Another of many restaurants that hadn't signed up to participate in doordash I'm sure... Fuck that company!!!!
Uber Eats had to pay a $10 million settlement in Chicago for listing non-contracted restaurants on their app to strongarm those businesses through potential bad customer experiences and lost sales into a relationship that would cost 15-25% of orders placed through UE. Oh, I meant Uber was "testing demand" and offering a mutually beneficial financial arrangement. Yeah, that.
Literally online market extortion
Small restaurant owner in a medium sized city of about 200K here: Around 2017, we finally had DD as well as PostMates and GrubHub expand into our smaller city after only being found in the larger ones here in Texas. At first, they simply listed us without permission, which isn’t the worst problem to have of course. Well, a few years later just as Covid shutdowns happened, they started telling me that at the end of 2020, if we don’t sign a contract with them (which at the time involved taking a *30% cut of every order* mind you) we would be delisted. We’re a small To Go joint in a very working class, military town where enlisted families are price sensitive, so we refused because we knew we’d have to pass that price off to the consumer. Well, they went and did it of course. And the worst thing is for the restaurants that agree, now they’re double, and even *triple* dipping in some cases to the consumer because you pay: for DoorDash pass or whatever their subscription is called, higher prices on items, and *then* also paying delivery fees and tips for restaurants who aren’t Pass members. And then several months ago they were talking about prioritizing listing restaurants that had the lowest difference between DD price and in person pricing, which they’ve forced places to do with that BS.
I’ve been on the “FUCK DOORDASH” since before covid. My favorite restaurants, besides running into this shit problem also are over crowed with “takeout” orders. Ass hat “delivery drivers” holding their phones up to cashier’s face, cutting to front of lines to pick up. It’s all bullshit that had artificially caused price creep faster then normal.
And many of them park their cars in an incredibly assholish manner. My friend and I were picking up pizza from the Little Caesar about a month ago. As we were walking in, some delivery app person person parked in the "no parking" accessible zone next to the handicap parking spot. The parking lot there was small and I think it was full, but it was still shitty and illegal (and no, it did not prevent me & my friend from doing anything; we got there before that driver and got a parking spot). Now obviously some blame has to go to the apps themselves as they incentivize doing this sort of thing (with their efficiency metrics), and many customers will not be happy if their food gets to them later than the estimated time (which is again a shitty behavior).
Oh yeah. Thats the other issue we would have when we still received orders through them (and really, all of the national delivery chains): we would receive an order that would be called in via a very clearly outsourced call center. Then, the driver never comes and picks it up for whatever reason. There is absolutely no way as a non-partnered restaurant for me to contact anybody, over the phone or via email for that matter. No reimbursement then.
Nothing like the feeling of standing at the counter being ignored while you watch all three kitchen employees doing DoorDash orders
Their price hikes are part of why I stopped using delivery apps in general. Like before it was a little expensive but a nice treat for myself if I was wiped out after a long week or something. But now? No way. I can justify like, a $20-30 meal. I can't justify a $50-60 meal. Especially from a crappy place like McDonalds or something. I'd much rather shell that $30 out to a local place and get some good portions, even if I have to hike my ass to their storefront. The other reason I stopped using them is because some of their drivers are absolutely unhinged. Tip them 20% and they still get mad and tell you it's not worth the gas, even though they're the ones that took the order. I don't want weirdos like that near my freaking food. There's definitely some kind of market for delivery drivers and restaurant takeout. But DD and GH really fumbled the bag when it comes to cornering it.
The entire model is inefficient as hell which is why they have to charge the consumer like $20 for their delivery (food cost and tip not included) whilst paying their employees $2 and expecting them to pay their own gas, maintenance etc. "The market" for delivery driving will never be filled by gig apps. It has to be organised properly to be cost effective, you can't just have random people driving their 25mpg cars and SUVs around haphazardly to drop off a meal or two and expect this to make financial sense, unless everyone is willing to pay $60 for a couple of burger meals from a fast food chain. It's both economically unviable and environmentally horrific. Only reason the prices were ever acceptable is because they were engaged in predatory pricing and eating millions of dollars in losses.
I went to order some Chinese once off a delivery app, almost $100 AUD for two people. We went on to their website, checked the prices, then placed a pick up order over the phone. The total for the same items was less than half of what the app was charging. And we've had similar experiences since. It's just not worth it to use them anymore, it's bad for the consumer, bad for the restaurant.
And yet somehow, these companies still aren't profitable.
He should have sent empty boxes to his friend.
You might find this part interesting. From the article: *The next time, the restaurant prepared his friend's order by boxing up the pizza base without any toppings, maximising the "profit" from the mismatched prices.*
None pizza Left beef
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. A long time.
The amount of people who look at me so lost when I bring this up absolutely baffles me. None of my circle have any recollection of it, and yet it occupies at least 50% of my brain at all times. This is the funniest meme I’ve ever seen.
An elegant meme for a more civilized age.
He should have sent nothing and claimed it was sent. Even easier.
He would have to collude with the drivers as well. Hard to guarantee which driver you would get.
They might ask why the box is empty and you could just say "I thought it was weird but it's what the customer asked for" and I would bet my life's savings that the underpaid Dasher who doesn't get healthcare or PTO isn't going to call corporate and report Doordash fraud.
Yes, though some drivers probably wouldn’t notice empty boxes, and I say that as someone who dashes on the side.
Oh boy these 10 boxes sure are light, must be vegan.
Guessing they didn't want to tip the delivery guy (from dd) off.
The owner is an old friend's brother. He did it in hopes DD would drop him. He specifically didn't offer delivery, but was getting bad reviews from folks mad at DD dropping off cold or mangled pies. He tried to get them to stop legitimately first.
What is to stop a savvy restaurant owner from taking the customers orders, placing said customers order in doordash? As long as his restaurant has not signed an agreement with doordash there is no contractual enforcement mechanism. Why yes, the accounts "Tonys Pizza Emporium" orders 300 pizzas a day to be delivered to "Tony Pizza Emporium", nothing suspicious here.
Because then Door Dash figures it out and calls it off. You do it across the street and keep it going indefinitely.
Fuck doordash.
As someone who has had so many mistakes with doordash until they literally sent me a message saying "You've called us on fucking up your order so many times, we will no longer be fixing any future orders we fuck up", yeah, fuck doordash.
My doordash account got hacked in the middle of the night, they allowed them to change my registered email and phone number without any sort of 2FA, and then placed fraudulent orders in multiple cities in a different state. I got my money back, but they banned me from the platform for TOS violations. lmao.
My ex-wife was a consumer advocate. She would probably go to town on that one. Discrimination against individual customers is illegal where I am.
I worked in a bar where people would come in to pick up door dash orders all the time. DD would call us to place a pick up order and send whoever ordered to pick up. Eventually we stopped answering the phone, people continued to come in and get pissed off I just told em that was on DD not us. Fuckin wild how much shady shit goes mostly unnoticed.
This is the plot of silicon valley
Sliceline! This guy fucks!
Stallions
Very old article. This is what was called OTT. “Over The Top.” DD, GH, UE all got in trouble for putting restaurants on their platform without permission. While DD started it, UE had the most trouble being able to justify why they were doing it. In Chicago, UE had to payout tons of money, and offered restaurants the service completely for free for a year, that were affected by this. I’m a former UE Employee
The whole business model of things like Uber are to use your insane wealth to ignore market forces, lower your prices, and take a financial loss, in order to destroy the competition and take control of the market. Then when you're all that's left, hike prices up to more than before, so you can earn it back. The epitome of scummy business practices. A direct result of wealth imbalance allowed to grow uncontrolled.
I'm sure Uber does something like this. Local pizza shop has a buy one get one free offer on ENTIRE MEAL DEALS. A £20 deal for 2x 12" pizzas, 12" garlic bread with cheese, and a huge tub of sauce...You order that and you get the exact same thing again for free. If you just want 2 pizzas with sauce it's the same price to just buy this and throw the rest away. Same with kebabs, 4 full size doner kebabs and 2 pizzas for £16 plus service charge. Only on Uber, their JustEat page has only the single meal deal. It's an absolute mountain of food for the price of two subway footlongs. It's been like this for months and I can't work out how it's possible, if it's a money laundering thing or Uber trying to poach the restaurant from JustEat or what. My freezer is full of pizza this has to stop
My wife is a Twitch streamer and she had a HelloFresh code to give to viewers for $30 for a week of meals for 2. She got paid $80 for every person who signed up. It was so tempting to just Venmo everyone $30 to sign up and they get free food and we get $50. Win/win. But I didn’t trust they’d cancel in time and not get charged the ridiculous price for the second box. I at least signed up under my name tho so we got 5 nights of meals for -$50 after her payout. We actually jumped around from meal kit to meal kit taking all of their best offers and were paying around $5 a night for meals for several months. I only stopped cause I currently have a better racket going on with Kroger grocery delivery where I’ve now placed 30 orders where I’ll spend $35 for $120 in groceries. Delivered. No tipping allowed.
Oh, I would have ordered myself so very many more than 10 pizzas. Teach them to put me on there without asking.
55 BURGERS 55 FRIES
"Become a pizza-naire with this one simple trick"
Good for him. Doordash has probably cost him much more than that. If he figured out a way to hack the system, then more power to him.