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Comment by travisoneill1 | Hacker News Reader

Can't figure out why they would do this. Seems like a no win situation.

In the long term, perhaps. But all of these companies are burning VC money in hopes of getting enough market share that they can dictate terms. Or at least justify yet more VC investment. In the short term they are getting away with quite a bit. E.g., once you take expenses and lost time into account, many DoorDash workers are losing money: https://www.salon.com/2020/01/19/doordash-drivers-make-an-av...

You're exactly right. It's even in the article:

> Postmates told the team at Hardena that the only way to change the prices would be to become a member, which meant accepting delivery orders and paying the company a percent of their profit. The listing is still live, and still reflects the 2001 menu prices. Grubhub, Doordash, and Postmates did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

(In this case "a percent of their profit" is actually 30% of each delivery order's total revenue.)

Idk about you, but the surface level value of these apps to me is the number of restaurants they deliver. Presumably they have an incentive to oversell because there’s no real remediation route when they mess up.

Probably because (1) mostly it works; they have the right prices a lot of the time (or, shall we say, correctly marked-up prices relative to the real prices) and (2) as for the remaining situations, they are just your usual tech sociopaths who like disrupting for its own sake. The site operators doesn't care about the restaurant, or the ground-level courier who has to deal with a tense situation, or the customer.

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