Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

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> At Baology, which partners exclusively with the delivery service Caviar, owner Judy Ni says the restaurant has struggled with being listed on Doordash and Grubhub.

So you'd think Judy would have her web people make this loud and clear on the website: https://www.baology.com/menu

While it is clear that for delivery, it partners with Caviar (and no other option), maybe there should be some decently visible blurb about that partnership being exclusive, and not being involved in any manner with Doordash and Grubhub, or any provider besides Caviar.

> Sate Kampar takes to-go orders over the phone, regularly — but unknowingly — accepting Doordash orders that way. When the couriers arrive to pick up the orders and the restaurant’s listed menu prices turn out to be higher than those listed on Doordash, guests refuse to pay the correct charge. This means lost money for Sate Kampar, as well as wasted time and angry customers.

That's pretty crummy behavior! What can you try to do is is ask callers whether they are delivery agents. Also, monitor caller ID and keep a list. Always quote the correct price to whoever is calling, whether it's the consumer or a delivery agent. If there is reasonable suspicion that the person on the other end is an agent, insist on pre-payment with credit card before preparing the meal.

I'm not sure I understand yet:

1) Restaurant takes order over the phone (and may quote the total price to the ordering party).

2) Restaurant makes food.

3) Courier arrives to deliver food.

4) Courier pays restaurant for food.

5) Courier delivers food to customer.

If there is a mispricing problem, shouldn't that get solved in Step 4, where the restaurant doesn't give the courier the food until they are made whole?

It sounds like, in one case:

1) Doordash takes order on their site

2) Courier shows up to pick it up

3) Order never got to the restaurant, customer is confused, customer blames restaurant.

In the phone example:

1) Doordash connects the customer to the restaurant

2) Customer tries to place an order based on outdated info

3) Restaurant is now trying to convince the customer that the menu they are looking at is wrong. And restaurant looks like a fool because they can't even publish a menu.

In both of these cases, Doordash is damaging the restaurant (at least their reputation and wasting their time) and doesn't sound like they're making any good-faith effort to be a good actor here.

Also, in your example, if it gets to food being made and then an argument about price, what happens to the restaurant if someone refuses to pay? They don't really get to put that cooked meal into a fridge and wait for someone else to order it. It's garbage (straight up lost money) now.

Agreed that in all cases Doordash damages the restaurant, but in your first case, and in my example, Doordash is damaged even more (the restaurant will have to eat the loss in the short-term, but they have a VC-backed company they can sue for order-and-run+damages, perhaps in a class-action, if they don't get paid). After a platform-driven screw-up or two, it is hard to see a customer using Doordash ever again.

Your second example, however, damages primarily the restaurant, as the customer has attempted to disintermediate Doordash, but is doing so with incorrect information. The restaurant's best defense here may be communication, informing the buyer of the price, and correcting misconceptions, at the time of ordering.

As quipped eloquently in another thread here, "Move fast and break other people's things" may work in the short term, but lawsuits and grumpy attorneys-general seem like they could catch up to a bad actor pretty quickly when there is real money on the line.

Does Doordash get damaged here? Or does the story become "all these other restaurants work when I order from Doordash, except that this one screws it up"? Because that's what people will assume.

Doordash has VC money to burn on this kind of garbage; restaurants in general already have a tough business to make work. In my mind I know who should take on the responsibility of getting this right.

Even the bona fide affiliated people can cause screwups, sometimes assisted by the restaurant staff.

Here is an experience I had. I ordered a meal, and made it clear that I'm picking it up in person. (Why would you use a delivery service and opt for pick-up? There was a good coupon discount involved which made them look more attractive than phoning the restaurant, and they charged quite a bit for delivery.)

Anyway, the courier got there a minute before I did and took the meal away. This happened while I was on the phone with someone at restaurant, informing them that I'm walking there, less than two blocks away, coming to get my order!

They didn't have the phone number of that delivery person, and so had no way to contact him to bring the meal back. They had to make me another instance of that meal while I waited.

You made them cook you a second meal because the first one was picked up by the courier you hired to pick it up?!

It sounds like you’re at fault in this case, ordering from Doordash or whoever then trying to slip yourself in the middle of a transaction that is actually between the courier-and-restaurant, not you-and-restaurant

Pick up versus delivery is an option that you select in the UI. Literally while I was talking with the person at the restaurant, they gave all the orders to the pony to take away. The courier is working with the restaurant as far as I'm concerned; it's their outsourced delivery, not a freelancer working for me. The operation is tightly integrated: the restaurant gets the orders directly from the website and processes them. The yahoo who ran off with my meal sure wasn't delivering it to me; I never even entered my address into the system!

I own a restaurant and I’ve been on the receiving end of this.

There’s a 6 you’re missing where the customer comes in or calls in an order directly and realizes that the prices are wildly different (in my case it was about $2/item for fast food) and complains about it, including on yelp (ha). They think I’m cheating them when none of the services will let me update the menu or the price.

If these companies are doing this at scale, there may be a possibility of class-action lawsuits, or small-claims court cases with added damages. Willfully misrepresenting someone else's pricing surely falls afoul of the law somehow.

it’s unclear to me what delivery customers are being charged, and for me the companies tried to leverage the “look how much business we’re sending you” into signing contracts. i refused and they took the listings down. so i didn’t really get a chance to find out where the customers are getting angry...

to be clear, i don’t think i’ve ever had a problem with payment - the couriers generally just paid whatever amount we rang up and asked for a receipt. i assume that gets passed to the customer.

would if i could look into the legality of things. i’m usually so swamped with life and i’m such small fry i get left alone fairly easily.

They are just disrupting the food delivery industry /s

The problem is that at Step 4, the downstream customer refuses because they feel they have been deceived by the wrong price listed on the unaffiliated website. In turn, the courier refuses to pay and the restaurant is stuck with the unsold meal they made.

I suspect that in some cases, it may be that the downstream user has might already have paid with their credit cared before step 1 has even happened. The delivery-related operations staff are trusting their site's own prices, which are wrong due to some other employees not updating them.

Then they realize at step 4 that if they buy the meal at the correct price, they won't make a profit any more.

If the service has entered into a contract to deliver the order for $TooLow, and the courier pays $Correct to the restaurant, then the service has to take the ($Correct - $TooLow) loss.

But the article states that the delivery drivers are paying $nothing and driving off, leaving the restaurants with a loss of $CorrectPrice and leaving the service with a marginal loss.

Which is why the restaurants are pissed, and why these services (GrubHub, Door Dash, Uber Eats) are losing 9-figures or more every year.

At that point, the restaurant is left with 100% liability for the cost of the raw ingredients and of making the food. The courier can leave (wasting their own gas money), but the 3rd-party delivery service is entirely removed from the situation (they lose nothing by not paying, as the customer and their driver will almost definitely blame the restaurant).

It is currently being addressed in that way, but it is ruining the reputations of these local restaurants, and burning through their cash.

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