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Comment by MichaelCollins | Hacker News Reader

> Doordash and the pizza company had no contractual relationship.

Don't Doordash and the pizza company owner have a contractual relationship when the pizza shop owner agrees to the Terms of Service for using the Doordash app to order food?

I have no clue if the doordash TOS forbids such usage, but it might?

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Not necessarily, considering how DoorDash adds restaurants to their site without their knowledge and foists the customer service burden onto them.

e: Yes, the original article makes it clear that he didn't sign up for this: https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage

I don't mean a TOS between Doordash and the restaurant, I mean the TOS between Doordash and customers of Doordash using the Doordash app. The pizzeria owner signed up to Doordash as a customer, in order to buy pizzas.

And he honored this contract. He paid $16 for each pizza, just as Doordash offered. The fact that Doordash was selling pizzas for a loss was Doordash's problem, not his.

> And he honored this contract.

I don't know, what does the TOS actually say? The app's TOS might say something like "you can't use this app to order food from a business you own", or something else that might forbid this scheme. Maybe it doesn't though, I don't know and haven't read it, but I think it could.

I have no reason to believe the TOS contains a clause like that.

I’d argue it’s clearly a ‘nuisance’, which is prohibited by the TOS.

There is one Term that is probably applicable, but this was certainly not the case they were anticipating when they wrote the term:

> (f) You will not use the Services, or any content accessible through the Services, for any commercial purpose, including but not limited to contacting, advertising to, soliciting or selling to, any Merchant, User or Contractor, unless DoorDash has given you prior permission to do so in writing.

This hinges on if trying to make money by using the service as a consumer counts as commercial use. But you can tell they were thinking about very different scenarios when they wrote this term.

If you access any of our websites (or other methods) … you have read, understand, and agree to be bound by this Agreement - https://help.doordash.com/consumers/s/terms-and-conditions-u...

The T&C attempts to bind “merchants” to the “Self-Delivery Product Addendum”, which states: Merchant shall ensure that pricing of Merchant Products under the PickUp Program is not greater than the pricing of the same Merchant Products for pickup (a) in-store - https://help.doordash.com/merchants/s/us-addendum-self-deliv...

So it’s expressly prohibited. But are they bound to the additional merchant provisions if they never signed up to be a merchant?

Of course not. He’s not acting as a merchant when he orders pizza from himself on Doordash and can’t be bound by contract terms he never agreed to. Doordash didn’t ask him to sell pizzas on doordash, they decide to list his products themselves below cost. He doesn’t have an agreement with them except as anyone else ordering food from doordash, or doordash ordering food from him as anyone else could. Doordash doesn’t bind him contractually any way here.

Uh huh. There’s also this in the T&C: You will not use the Services, or any content accessible through the Services, for any commercial purpose, including but not limited to contacting, advertising to, soliciting or selling to, any Merchant, User or Contractor, unless DoorDash has given you prior permission to do so in writing. the pizza shop owner used it for the commercial purpose of selling pizza to himself.

In English law, if it’s dishonest, it’s fraud. The pizza shop owner’s conduct was plainly dishonest by the standards of “ordinary decent people”. Where was this, anyway? What’s the local standard? Probably a variation of exactly the same.

I like DoorDash’s chances on this.

Then you are a real advocate for predatory marketing or doordash or you are just a pedant...

Two wrongs make a right?

I was providing an analysis of the situation. The name calling is not appropriate.

I just scanned through the TOS. The only thing I could find that's related to this at all is a clause saying that you won't submit a review or rating "for any Merchant or business for which you have an ownership interest, employment relationship or other affiliation or for any of that company’s competitors"

Nothing about not ordering from your own business.

I feel like such a clause, even if somehow enforceable, could easily be worked around. The owner's child could place the order. Or the owner's spouse. Or a close friend.

Clearly the better option for Doordash is to simply not engage in predatory pricing to begin with.

Still probably fraud since done with intent.

No, that was kind of the point. Doordash listed them without the restaurant's approval. In fact it was a surprise to the pizza place they were on DD.

The restaurant agrees to Doordash’s terms when they buy pizza, not sell.

The restaurant did not agree to anything, at most the person ordering food agreed to something.

> the person ordering food agreed to something

That’s… the restaurant owner, though.

Which is legally distinct from the resturant.

If the owner agreed not to create a nuisance and they’re order creates a nuisance then they’re not meeting their agreement.

In your hypothetical case they could sue the owner but not the company.

> at most the person ordering food agreed to something.

That's the part I'm talking about. The restaurant owner agreed to something in order to use the app to buy pizza.

It's a bit bizarre that you are claiming this relationship might exist, when you could simply read the TOS and see if such a clause exists.

I'm not a lawyer, I can read the TOS but I'm not qualified to understand it. TOSes are a farce but that doesn't mean they can't be enforced.

EDIT: But I'll humor the premise, here are some lines from the customer TOS:

> (e) You will not use the Services to cause nuisance, annoyance or inconvenience.

> (q) You will not try to harm other Users, DoorDash, or the Services in any way whatsoever.

> (t) You will not abuse our promotional or credit code system, including by redeeming multiple coupons at once or by opening multiple accounts to benefit from offers available only to first-time users.

> You agree that promotional offers: (i) may only be used by the intended audience, for the intended purpose, and in a lawful manner;

What are the actual legal implications of these lines? I have no clue. Could they be construed by lawyers to forbid this scheme? I don't know.

It would be really interesting for DoorDash to argue in court that ordering food from them and then paying for it somehow harms them.

But in case you really can’t tell, no the terms don’t apply here. Lawsuits generally assume people have put on their big boy pants, if sell a painting for 10$ that ends up being worth millions that’s on you. You decided 10$ was a reasonable price at the time of sale and you don’t get to say but your honor I am an idiot.

Seems like a deliberate nuisance?

He was making individual orders of a large but not extreme size every few days. That's hardly a nuisance.

Seems like a meaningless distinction? The owner knows he’s being an ass - he wrote a whole article about it.

Let’s assume a random person across the street happened to make identical orders exactly when he did through random chance.

Could Door Dash argue that person was being a nuisance?

Law looks at intent.

Not for determining if something is a nuisance.

It's like harm, you are either inconvenienced or you arn’t.

> "no the terms don’t apply here"

Is that your legal opinion as a lawyer?

It says that customers agree to only use promotional discounts "for the intended purpose"; what does that mean and how can you be sure a business owner using promotional discounts to profit from arbitrage is the "intended purpose" of the promotional discount?

This stuff isn't complicated, “Intended purpose” is the obvious use aka making orders.

Finding the cheapest order possible and making repeated orders to DOS the company locally wouldn’t be.

This actually wasn't listed as a "promotional discount". Doordash just listed the pizza as cheap. And the pizza man decided to enjoy the cheap pizza.

The restaurant was represented by the person ordering the food. That person had to agree to TOS when downloading the Door Dash app. That is what is being considered.

Owing a business doesn't mean every action you take represents the company.

Potentially yes, and I think people are skimming over this because they want to agree with what the shop owner is doing (because Doordash sucks and is a predatory business).

To buy from Doordash, you have to agree to some TOS on their app. Sales, as has been pointed out, no. But buying, yes. He could be violating that TOS, if they try to prevent this sort of thing. Since this loophole was reported on in a fairly well-known publication years ago, it isn't ridiculous to think they have something in there.

IANAL, but I wonder if he could coordinate with somebody to have them order the pizzas instead, so he doesn't have to agree to anything.

A funny idea might be to start offering Doordash's discount to in-person customers who were going to buy the pizza anyway. "Just order on this stupid app and set your delivery location to our address, then we'll Doordash it across the room or whatever."

A further extension of this would be, if he can figure out what Doordash is parsing wrong on his online menu, then maybe he could try to work out how to get that field to show up as $1. I'm not sure if it was this one, but there was some place that had had their fancy custom pizza listed with their plain cheese pizza price. So maybe they could start their menu with something like:

Plain pizza raw (subheader: It is literally a lump of uncooked dough, don't buy this): $1

I don't think you could add such language to a TOS and have it be legally binding.

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