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Doordash priced the pizza at $16, but the pizza place charged $24. Presumably a 'growth hack' to get more users. The pizza place, seeing the difference, bought
by ljm 6y ago
Doordash priced the pizza at $16, but the pizza place charged $24. Presumably a 'growth hack' to get more users.
The pizza place, seeing the difference, bought pizzas for $16 and received $24 from Door Dash, so for each purchase they were $8 better off.
They also ordered plain pizza dough in larger quantities, for more profit. Presumably because they didn't have to actually make the full pizza.
- dogma1138 6y agoThat makes more sense than someone just offering a free delivery.
- frombody 6y agoTechnically they didn't have to make any pizzas at all. I always felt like the story about the dough was embellished a little bit to avoid being charged with fraud.
- Slartie 6y agoThey had to produce something that could legally be called a pizza to at least fulfill the purchase contract with DoorDash and avoid making themselves legally liable. But what would probably have worked would be to pull this off with two restaurants, each ordering pizzas from the other, with them sending the same physical pizzas around all the time. Cold and old pizza is still legally a pizza, just a bad one.
- rainbowzootsuit 6y agoThat reminds me of the Raines sandwich. "Minimum viable sandwich" https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/raines-sandwich https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/raines-sandwich So this is "Minimum viable pizza"
- rrjjww 6y agoBefore clicking on this I thought it was going to be about Cuomo's order in this summer that all restaurants offering drinks had to be served with food. I went to at least a couple outside bars that were serving half a piece of white bread with a slice of American cheese on it for your "meal"
- ashtonkem 6y agoThey have to claim that they made something that met the definition of pizza, but with the “buyer”, driver, and store colluding they could just lie.
- Slartie 6y agoThe first buyer is DoorDash however, and if they somehow want to take vengeance on you after you managed draining their funds in an otherwise perfectly legal way, they might just use the non-fulfillment of their initial purchase contracts as a wedge to take you to court (of course this assumes they somehow learned about that detail of your plan). I don't know if they would have any luck with that, but it's easy to prevent this from happening by actually delivering something that's basically a minimally viable pizza.
- Mokosha 6y agoThey could simply make a single pizza, and then deliver it to themselves N times.
- Balgair 6y agoReading through the article again, it is strongly implied that a lot of stores may have a similar arbitrage issue and the DD os getting taken to the cleaners over it. That and I don't think there are any legal issues over this as there were no contracts signed. If anything DD is the one in legal trouble over it.
- mrweasel 6y agoHow would is that ever going to work long term? Most pizza places I frequent offer free delivery, or very cheap delivery once you get pizza for two people. The “growth hack” will never work when you compete with your supplier. Even if this was somehow going to work, once Doordash has pushed others out of the market, then they would need to raise the price significantly, pushing many to just do pickup themselfs. More suprising, to me, is that it was ever legal to list resturants without and opt in.
- ljm 6y agoGrowth hacks are never about sustainably growing a business, they're just there to fatten it up before parading it in front of the VCs. Of course by growth hacking, we're talking about the act of using unethical practices against users to boost certain metrics.