Plenty of restaurants would like very much to have you order through their own website. But they are less (not not) tech savvy than the people that run the various large aggregators, who will stop at absolutely nothing to muscle their way in.

It started off with 25 cents per lead and it ends with 27% of your margin because the counterparty engages in unfair business practices, not because the restaurant isn't tech savvy. Blame the perp, not the victim.

I dunno. One of the best SEO people I know runs a Thai restaurant and on a good day controls the whole first page when searching for Thai restaurants in his town.

> And that’s why they get ripped off by ubereats and other delivery services. They will outsource their whole ordering process and lose almost 30% of their margin because they can’t be bothered to have their own app or a proper website.

I don't think this makes sense. For anything but the largest chains (McD's etc), few are going to install an app just to order from you. And food aggregators have the same advantage that restaurant streets or mall food courts do: people who would like to eat but are not sure what have a place to start looking at options. Pair that with a nice unified payment and uniform no-call ordering interface, and you have a virtually unbeatable advantage compared to any restaurant handling their own orders, tech-savvy or not.

Ignore the legality of it for a second and just think what would happen when you have a dinner party that shows up where some people have different phones. The groups would immediately see the price differences.

Also, the QR menus I’ve seen don’t connect to the actual ordering process. Waitstaff come over to get the order, then they punch it into the POS device that tallies the bill. So maybe they could have dynamic pricing day to day, but not from customer to customer

I don't know where you live, but I would be very, very surprised if your country happened to have "mobile OS" enshrined in law as a forbidden avenue of price discrimination.

Then you're using "tinfoil hat" with a much different definition than the usage I've generally seen. I tend to see the term applied in cases where somebody is mistaken about matters of fact, not merely differences in value judgments about the facts. It's the difference between "Is there meat in this dish? I'm vegan." and "Is there meat in this dish? All meat dishes are made from dolphins.". The former is reaching a different conclusion based on the same facts, whereas the latter is reaching a different conclusion based on erroneous understanding of the world. Only the latter is "tinfoil hat".

By calling a difference in value judgment "tinfoil hat", you are stating that they are wrong about the facts, not merely that they care where you don't.

What do you gain from calling normal people interested in their privacy with the grave name of "tinfoil hat"?