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?
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2) Customer tries to place an order based on outdated info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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Which is why the restaurants are pissed, and why these services (GrubHub, Door Dash, Uber Eats) are losing 9-figures or more every year.
It is currently being addressed in that way, but it is ruining the reputations of these local restaurants, and burning through their cash.