If your order to doordash cost $5000, why did they pay the restaurant $20,000? That would suggest their prices are 4 times cheaper to the customer. But I thought everyone complained they were more expensive.
Surely DD are still keeping their commission from your order?
What have I misunderstood?
1) Doordash has some deal with the restaurant, gets a commission on sales, fees, whatever.
2) Doordash has no deal with the restaurant, charges customer $x+y, buys food from restaurant at $x.
In the second case, Doordash may be charging much more than the menu price, if it things it can find customers who will pay it.
So in this story, 'JumpCrisscross paid $x-$y = 5k for an order to a homeless shelter, but the real, restaurant price for that order $x=20k, which means DoorDash has just subsidized the transaction for $y=15k. The restaurant got an extra $20k of business that day, and 'JumpCrisscross bought $20k worth of food for a shelter at 1/4 the price.
And the best part, they could probably do it again :).
EDIT: Reading the article again, it seems to me Doordash is supposed to be charging the customer $x in the lead generation phase; so perhaps the -$y part is a scrapper error.
DD says to Pasta House, see? Look, with DD we facilitated an additional $20k of revenue for you on this day. You should enter into an agreement with us so that we can make this a more seamless process.
In most cases, Pasta House isn’t aware that those orders were drastically under cost and don’t represent actual demand.