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If you don't like certain business practices, vote with your dollar! I refuse to use delivery apps because they skim ~10-20% off the top of my orders. I unders
by uoaei 7y ago
If you don't like certain business practices, vote with your dollar!
I refuse to use delivery apps because they skim ~10-20% off the top of my orders. I understand the utility of DoorDash -- there are a lot of customers who want the single interface and can't be bothered to search for a restaurant individually. But if you care at all about this sort of thing, with a simple search you can find the phone number of the restaurant you like and call them up. There will always be someone by the phone, this is how restaurants operated for 50+ years! The ordering process is, paradoxically, easier and less time-consuming than going through DoorDash. I find the app to be slow, with way too many menus and scrolling. Even the browser interface is kludgy because they insist on making huge buttons that take up a large part of the screen, so I can only consider like 4 options at a time on my screen. It's been easier for me just to get a PDF of the menu, read off the stuff I'd like, and go pick it up 20 minutes later. Bonus -- the restaurant gets 100% of your tips. In this era the rent-seeking behavior of these app companies really becomes apparent. It's not easier to do it through them -- they add no real value. Clearly they don't add value for the small restaurants either: they're shafting the small ones in favor of those who have a corporate structure and throw millions of dollars into ads.
Stop feeding the ad platforms that use sneaky tricks to make the profits they promised to their investors. It's a self-perpetuating cycle if you keep letting them feed the VCs' expectations to the detriment of the people, the end users.
- hannasanarion 7y agoWhen you vote with your dollars, people with more dollars get more votes. Customers, drivers, and restaurateurs all hate doordash, but they have no choice because Doordash uses their oodles of VC bucks to squash competition and underhanded shady shit (like putting up menus without consent) to force restaurants to participate and hook them in.
- bhupy 7y agoWhat were restaurants doing for delivery before DoorDash et al came into the market? Why don't they do that now?
- vonmoltke 7y agoMany restaurants weren't delivering before services like DoorDash.
- bhupy 7y agoRight, so I would push back on the idea that "restaurants have no choice" — DoorDash, GrubHub, UberEats et al appear to be a strict improvement over the erstwhile status quo. The choice is to regress, and restaurants were doing just fine 5+ years ago.
- ryanwaggoner 7y agoAn individual restaurant can’t just go back to the pre-delivery days when the whole industry has moved on. That’s not how competitive markets function.
- bhupy 7y agoWell this isn't "pre-delivery". Delivery isn't a new thing — food delivery has existed over the past several decades. It's just that restaurants had to provide it themselves, and hire their own delivery drivers. Platforms like DoorDash et al obviate the need for that, in return for a transaction fee. Restaurants appear to think that this is a good deal. If that's no longer the case, there is nothing stopping them from taking those transaction fees that they lose and using those funds to hire their own couriers — the labor market is pretty loose right now.
- ryanwaggoner 7y agoYou keep missing the point. The delivery apps are “stealing” the demand, so you have no choice as a single restaurant because your customers are moving to the app regardless. Saying “well, the restaurants are staying on the platforms, so it must be valuable to them” misses the entire context of the market structure before these demand aggregators arose.
- djsumdog 7y agoVoting with your dollars doesn't really work. You are and ant and the people who feel like you are a small percentage. I stopped shopping at Wal-Mart around 2007, and Amazon in 2016. My purchased don't make a dent. I share my opinions and know several others who don't shop at Wal-Mart, but I remember during the 2008 financial crisis, people who had previously refused to shop at Wal-Mart were doing it again, verbally hating it, because they had kids and tight budgets and they saving nearly a $1/item on some things. We can try to affect things with our purchases and advertising those decisions to others, but honestly, they don't even compare in the slightest to the power of corporate advertising at scale.
- uoaei 7y agoTrue. But change happens from the ground up, and as more people glom onto a more morals-based view on their spending habits, other efforts will become easier to organize and wrangle until sufficient pressure can be put from below to change the circumstances in real ways. This is mainly about changing culture, which informs laws when that culture becomes widespread. And it helps me sleep at night ;)
- bhupy 7y ago> Voting with your dollars doesn't really work. You are and ant and the people who feel like you are a small percentage. Couldn't you say the same thing about actual voting, though? In an election, what difference does your one vote make, in the grand scheme of things? Has there ever been an election where the margin was low enough that your one vote would have made a real difference?
- djsumdog 7y agoOh absolutely! Especially in non-representational voting systems like in the US. Australia has order of preference (ranking) so you can't throw your vote away and NZ has MMP to evenly distribute half the party seats by % of the population that votes for them. American voting is pretty next to useless. I did a whole video on that: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/video/does-voting-make-a-difference/ https://battlepenguin.com/politics/video/does-voting-make-a-...
- MattGaiser 7y ago> you can find the phone number of the restaurant you like and call them up. > The ordering process is, paradoxically, easier and less time-consuming than going through DoorDash. The requirement that I call makes it harder and more frustrating to use than DoorDash. I can order DoorDash in a meeting. I can do it on my way to work on the train. I can start my order, pivot to a new chat message, and return 5 minutes later where I left off. I have to hope that my order and my address is not misheard. If I have a complaint, I complain to DoorDash through its interface, not some person on the phone and whatever process they have for resolving things. The value of DoorDash is that it becomes something I can do in a scrap of time rather than finding a time to do it.
- uoaei 7y agoIt sounds like you're busy enough, with enough responsibilities, and not enough care about what you're eating, that you could afford an assistant to do those things for you.
- sokoloff 7y agoWhy would you tip for an order that you went and picked up yourself? I wholeheartedly agree with ordering directly from the restaurant, but I can't think of anything they did in that transaction sequence to warrant a tip.
- uoaei 7y agoYeah, good question. To get closer to the "true utility" of the transaction we should probably just eliminate tipping altogether, and replace it with fair wage laws.
- vonmoltke 7y ago> with a simple search you can find the phone number of the restaurant you like and call them up If I understand GrubHub's model correctly, when a restaurant receives a phone order via the number listed in GrubHub they are still on the hook for the same marketing commission as if the order came from the GrubHub website. I may be (and hope I am) wrong about this, though.
- uoaei 7y agoI hadn't realized the number displayed through GrubHub is different from the one displayed on e.g. Google Maps.
- NovemberWhiskey 7y ago> go pick it up 20 minutes later I mean that's fine, but it ignores the fact / elephant-in-the-room that the primary purpose served by these platforms is delivery logistics. If I want / need delivery, my list of choices for "just call up directly" decreases to those restaurants which actually employ delivery staff, which is anecdotally a much, much shorter one.
- Jommi 7y agoOkay. Go check out that local restaurants menu and try ordering delivery and see what happens