Comment by ctoth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ctoth | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It's 2021. If I were opening a restaurant in <city> I think the bare minimum I could do would be to register the base domain? Okay, let's assume I don't. I'm still getting people ordering that wouldn't otherwise order? because I didn't have a website?

Still just don't see what's wrong here.

I don't want to mention that I'm blind in every frickin HN post but I'm blind, and Uber Eats and etc. are great. and there are restaurants that I specifically know that are in my neighborhood and they are not available on Uber Eats. And I don't order from them because I can't accessibly, so they lose my business presumably because they have opted out. Then there are other restaurants that are local and on Uber eats, and I order from them and feel absolutely fine that I have given the restaurant a sale it wouldn't have otherwise had and employed someone sitting in a car that otherwise had nothing to do. For a minor marginal cost, the restaurant made an extra sale and I got my food. If the restaurant did not want to make this transaction at all, it would not. So everybody came out ahead? I got food, Uber got money, the restaurant got money. What's wrong here? It's like the old argument so many have made about piracy. Uber eats turned a person who otherwise wouldn't be buying food into a sale. Who lost here?

Also, let's say that registering bobs-pizza-chicago.com is wrong. If so, this applies just as much to JebBush.com redirecting to Trump's website, and all the permutations you can think of there. We either solve domain squatting in the general case, or admit that it's shitty but just as okay when done to a restaurant as when done to your least favorite website or political figure.

It's very unfortunate that restaurant websites are often so terrible that sometimes they don't even include a proper PDF to check the menu, I can imagine it really makes it impossible for people with special needs to get the info they want or to order, I myself almost always only go to restaurant websites as a last resort because they tend to be awful unless they belong to some big chain.

There are of course some site builders restaurant owners can use to improve this, but since, as others have said, they are not always tech savvy they probably don't know, best thing to improve accessibility I can think of is that local commerce boards create some sort of recommendation or guidelines on how to setup a business website following best practices with a list of easy to use builders for such.

What sucks about the domain squatting is that those large corps will have much better SEO capabilities, so even if someone owns register bobs-pizza-chicago.com and make sure it works they could just make chicago-bobs-pizza.com or some variant and beat them in SEO and steal their traffic, even if they were required to provide some banner saying "this is a doordash website" most people wouldn't care and order anyway.

Many restaurant owners are not as technically inclined as you. They might also think just having a social media presence is enough.

This is my experience.

I have friends who own medium-sized restaurants in a couple different major EU cities.

They all have domain names, and web sites sort-of, but none of them thinks anything matters besides Facebook and to a lesser extent Instagram. The web sites are rarely, if ever, updated. Of course right now they are all forced to close anyway; but pre-Covid at least one of them tried to take the web site seriously and gave up after a while, everybody used Facebook anyway.

One of these owners is my age, the others are younger. I even know a guy who owns a catering company and doesn't bother with a web site.

This is a response to the first sentence of my comment, which I strongly appreciate. But I don't understand how it fits with the rest of my questions?

I understand your friends think a social media website is enough. This doesn't mean they need to accept having a website created for them. It sucks that they have to opt out of local delivery services, but it also sucks I have to opt out of junk mail. I still don't understand where the evil is here? It's legal for people to create websites that look and feel similar to existing websites. If this is a problem let's fix it! if it's not, let's not focus on restaurants?

Why would a response have to address everything in a comment, especially when it goes rambling like that?

EDIT: Note, the comment I’m replying to grew by about 300% after I posted this.

It totally doesn't! Excepting the case where the first sentence introduces an idea and the rest expand upon it.

Let's assume that restaurants don't want people to order their food through delivery. Why don't they just opt out? If they aren't opting out, then clearly the people buying the delivery are paying the same as any other takeout customer? Where is the problem here? What is the thing that gets people so very offended on behalf of restaurant owners? I actively want to understand this!

> If they aren't opting out, then clearly the people buying the delivery are paying the same as any other takeout customer? Where is the problem here?

If people have to pay a large markup, they may end up ordering less food. Or maybe ordering from another place because this one seems too expensive.

The offense comes from delivery companies forcefully inserting themselves between customers and the restaurant. Why not just let customers go to the delivery company's website to order, if that's what they wanted? Why is it necessary to deceive customers?

If you owned a restaurant called Fred's Diner, you might have a website called freds-diner.com.

If a delivery company gets the domain freds-diner-restaurant.com, then they're competing for your traffic.

And their domain might end up higher in Google search results, leading customers to order there. So I don't think it's necessarily the case that they're getting customers they otherwise wouldn't have.

Customers that are only willing to order from Uber Eats etc. aren't going to look for the restaurant's website anyway, they'll just go through the delivery company's website.

The problem is that it's misleading for consumers. If you go to bobs-pizza-chicago.com it's reaosnable to assume you're ordering directly from Bob's pizzas, not some middleman who's gonna take a big cut to pass your order on to Bob's and deliver.

What's wrong is that Deliveroo is making a profit while exploiting workers, who work for them but don't have worker protections. Other delivery companies do have employees with standard benefits (Just Eat in Spain IIRC) and they provide the same service. It's possible, just less profitable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com