10 ms·

I feel really bad for small restaurant owners. These large delivery companies totally take over their internet marketing too, registering a domain like '<restau

by roel_v 6y ago

I feel really bad for small restaurant owners. These large delivery companies totally take over their internet marketing too, registering a domain like '<restaurant name>-<city>.com' and when you go to that website, you really have to pay attention to see that this is not the 'official' restaurant website and if you order through there, it's costing the restaurant a lot of money that they wouldn't miss out on if you'd order through their regular website. I don't understand how practices like that are legal - then again, small restaurant owners have other things to worry about than fighting a 5, 8, maybe 10 year trademark battle against huge tech companies. It's a disgusting abuse of power in my view.

nightcracker 6y ago
This should be straight up illegal and the companies sued to hell for. If I opened a site claiming to be a bank and accepting money on behalf of that bank, and keeping 20% I'd be behind bars for fraud in no time.
- foepys 6y ago
  Those delivery services employ many lawyers and bet on the fact that a family owned restaurants doesn't have the guts or money to sue. Truly despicable.
  - csunbird 6y ago
    Not having access to the justice because of shortage of money should be illegal instead.
    - FeepingCreature 6y ago
      You can't make a circumstance illegal.
      - csunbird 6y ago
        But you can put down legal protections to prevent this circumstance occurring. It is just like not having access to medical care because you are poor. We put protections to prevent this happening, called public health insurance. For the sister comment: I wonder why companies are not entitled to a public defender, interesting.
      - throw_m239339 6y ago
        But everybody should be equally able to defend themselves, or sue before a court of law, which is clearly not the case today in UK and most countries on the planet. The legislator has created complex laws that only benefit people with a lot of money thus lawyers. Which means that citizens do not have equal rights in a court of law and can't get a fair trial. It's just like tax avoidance. It's expensive to set up but ultimately it results in rich people paying LESS taxes/wealth than poor people for those who can afford it.
      - pessimizer 6y ago
        Yes, you can. You can make it illegal for the accused to lack representation in court if they desire it, you can make it illegal for a person to walk the street without a certain minimum amount of money in their pocket, you can make it illegal for a person under age X to not be at school at a particular part of the day without a reasonable excuse, etc. It's been done. You can even always define an occurrence as an act e.g. access to justice cannot be denied, or a shed cannot be permitted to remain purple. Maybe you mean that making a circumstance illegal doesn't necessarily prevent a circumstance from occurring?
        FeepingCreature 6y ago
        No I'm saying the notion of illegality does not apply, and in fact leads to absurd consequences. For instance, if you make it illegal for the accused to lack representation in court, you can then sue them for not having representation, a suit from which they cannot defend themselves, lacking representation, which then opens them up to another suit, ad infinitum! I think there's some conflation of "regulating" and "making illegal" going on here. Mandating that the state must provide everyone with a public defender is not equivalent to "making lacking representation illegal".
    - sdoering 6y ago
      Replying to sister comment. In Germany, if you can't afford a lawyer you are entitled to the government paying legal aid in civil cases [1]. As you are - I just realize - in many countries. Problem is, that a restaurant owner isn't entitled to that so that even if you are a small company (self employed restaurant owner) you are toast. You could hope to have a legal insurance covering stuff like that, but not sure, if that would be the case for most insurances. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aid#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aid#Germany
      - sgift 6y ago
        The Wikipedia article doesn't tell this (which is okay, it's not the main topic), but you have to be really poor to get legal aid in Germany. When I needed this years ago I wasn't eligible because my parents had paid into a pension insurance for me and it was worth more than 5k. This is a common problem with these schemes here in Germany. If you are really rich you have no problems, if you are really poor there exist some systems (I wouldn't say they are good, but that's also another topic). People in between? Tough luck.
        maxlybbert 6y ago
        If it’s limited to the poor, then the US has that through nonprofits like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legal_Aid_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legal_Aid_Society . There’s no standard, or for that matter, no single organization to look for, so it’s hard to say who exactly qualifies in any particular city.
  - ilovetux 6y ago
    IANAL, but isn't this exactly why class action lawsuits exist?
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      Class action isn't really a thing in the UK. Or rather "collective actions" and "group litigation orders" are a recent thing and haven't become a standard part of the legal system. Not many people on any side who understand how they're supposed to work in practice. The UK also has a different set of priorities in its litigation culture. You can win a huge payout if you prove unfair dismissal or discrimination, but it's much harder to prove that your work contract is unfair/exploitative or that Service Provider X is operating in a shady way.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  It's not fraud though, is it? They advertise that you'll get food from Restaurant X and that's indeed what you get. It's not fraud to resell product, you don't need permission from the original seller to do it (in fact I think that's a specifically protected right), and it's not fraud or any kind of trademark violation to describe a product as being from Restaurant X if that is a fact.
  - whelming_wave 6y ago
    The objectionable behavior is that they represent themselves as being restaurant X, or at least present themselves in such a way that finding out that they aren’t actually restaurant X but a reseller is difficult. edit: This got way more discussion than I anticipated. I think that even if there was a massive banner on the top of the site that told you GenericDeliveryCo was operating this website as a front for the restaurant, we are not them, etc, this behavior by GenericDeliveryCo is still damaging to the businesses they are creating websites of because they tend to absolutely bury the real website via better SEO. There’s an argument to be made that some restaurants would enjoy having a website made for them - for business or whatever other reason - but there’s no reason GenericDeliveryCo couldn’t... ask first.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      Ok but see how we've slipped down from full-on 'fraudulent' to just 'objectionable'? People are allowed to be objectionable if they want to.
      - roenxi 6y ago
        Mr. Wave may have meant legally objectionable as in "the objection that would be the core of the legal case" or "the legal system objects to this". Similar to how a legal complaint doesn't mean someone whining.
        chrisseaton 6y ago
        If they did then what do they think is the infraction or offence that is being committed? They're being objectionable by committing or infracting... what? What law or regulation would they be breaking?
- FireBeyond 6y ago
  100% agreed. Look (listen?) for the cagey answers: "Is this Restaurant X?" "I can help you place an order!" "But is this Restaurant X?" "I can take your X order when ready!"
- meowface 6y ago
  On the apps I use, they now have a disclosure about this before you press "Order".
throw_away892 6y ago
A customer won't order through 3rd party app if the restaurant doesn't partner to sell through them. Same case for internet marketing. What you should feel bad about are the excessive commission fees charged by those delivery apps.
- Hydraulix989 6y ago
  It's not always obvious to users that the restaurants listed on these apps are not the real restaurants themselves.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > the restaurants listed on these apps are not the real restaurants themselves This isn't what is happening. The food still comes from the actual restaurants.
  - throw_away892 6y ago
    True. But that was not my argument.
- ivanbakel 6y ago
  This is untrue. A few months ago there was an article on the front page about a restaurant serving pizza that had been auto-listed by, IIRC, Deliveroo - which had put a menu online with marked-up prices and was allowing users to place orders. The restaurant owner even discovered that, because of some inconsistency between his prices and the third-party ones, he could cause the delivering company to pay him by simply placing orders to himself.
  - FireBeyond 6y ago
    I had visions of doing fancy CSS too, to render an accurate menu to your website viewers, but that would be deceptive to Uber's scrapers to mess with their menu.
ctoth 6y ago
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.
- Hydraulix989 6y ago
  Many restaurant owners are not as technically inclined as you. They might also think just having a social media presence is enough.
  - ctoth 6y ago
    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?
chrisseaton 6y ago
> and if you order through there, it's costing the restaurant a lot of money How does it cost the restaurant any money when they do this? The delivery companies can't unilaterally take a cut of the price, can they. I think you'll find the delivery companies mark up, and get their money that way, in this case where they don't have an agreement with the restaurant. The restaurant gets the price they ask for it.
- twoslide 6y ago
  An owner of a local restaurant told me he pays about 30% revenue to share to Deliveroo, as part of his agreement with them. He also runs his own delivery service, and encourages customers to use that (phoning in) rather than Deliveroo.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > An owner of a local restaurant told me he pays about 30% revenue to share to Deliveroo, as part of his agreement with them. If they've agreed to it, what's the problem? The parent comment was complaining about Deliveroo setting up without an agreement. When they do that they have to mark up - they can't take a 30% cut of the restaurant's price as the restaurant charges Deliveroo full price.
    - Shish2k 6y ago
      > If they've agreed to it, what's the problem? They’re in a position where the options are pretty much “agree to this” or “go out of business” (To which I guess the free-market response is “That’s not a problem - an independent restaurant SHOULD go out of business if they can’t compete with a website company when it comes to websites”?)
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        So Deliveroo is helping these restaurants survive the pandemic is your main argument? Or that they’d do just fine if no one had a website offering their food, but the Deliveroo website is an arms-race bleed-them-dry move?
saddlerustle 6y ago
Deliveroo and Uber Eats don't do that.
twoslide 6y ago
Agree that Deliveroo fees seem high on both ends (customer and restaurant). Wonder if this means they (a) they are inefficient (b) they have large profit margins or (c) it is actually more expensive to run than one might think. If (a) or (b), the conditions for lower priced alternatives seem high.
- Closi 6y ago
  The answer is somewhere between A and C depending on what you call inefficiency - Assuming 20 minutes per order (3 per hour) at a minimum wage of c£9 per hour pre-holiday and any other benefits, you are talking about £3 per delivery. They need to pay more than this, as many drive and the fee needs to cover fuel, so call it £4 per delivery or something like that, it's somewhere between £3-£4 probably. So then you add the cost of user aquisition - which is usually giving out £5 - £10 vouchers and for most of those customers to only use the service once. Clearly the first delivery is a massive loss. Then following that lots of orders are done on a free-or-low delivery cost basis (incl. Deliveroo Plus). These companies are in a land grab still so it's low margin and high competition between them and Uber Eats. Uber Eats is technically a better cost model (i.e. more efficient) than Deliveroo assuming car delivery, as you can interleave deliveries and cab rides.
  - djhn 6y ago
    The pools for Eats and ride-hailing are separate in most markets.
    - Closi 6y ago
      Well that’s silly, I assume that will change.
raverbashing 6y ago
Haven't this done by any company in Europe, and yes, it is despicable
bookmarkable 6y ago
Perhaps more screenplay than solution for this particular problem, but this illuminates a reason organized crime has existed for many years. You have an underserved, unprotected group being abused by a more powerful group with huge financial backing that can twist existing laws to further the abuse. Organized crime groups step into the vacuum and build a powerful backing, including support of non-criminals in the abused group. Personally I'm surprised you don't hear of hacker groups that protect websites and social media properties of the downtrodden. GoodFellas meets Social Network.
sildur 6y ago
Could you please tell me who is registering these domains? I'm honestly interested, I don't want to use the services of such crooks.

by roel_v 6y ago

nightcracker 6y ago

This should be straight up illegal and the companies sued to hell for. If I opened a site claiming to be a bank and accepting money on behalf of that bank, and keeping 20% I'd be behind bars for fraud in no time.

foepys 6y ago
Those delivery services employ many lawyers and bet on the fact that a family owned restaurants doesn't have the guts or money to sue. Truly despicable.
- csunbird 6y ago
  Not having access to the justice because of shortage of money should be illegal instead.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    You can't make a circumstance illegal.
    - csunbird 6y ago
      But you can put down legal protections to prevent this circumstance occurring. It is just like not having access to medical care because you are poor. We put protections to prevent this happening, called public health insurance. For the sister comment: I wonder why companies are not entitled to a public defender, interesting.
    - throw_m239339 6y ago
      But everybody should be equally able to defend themselves, or sue before a court of law, which is clearly not the case today in UK and most countries on the planet. The legislator has created complex laws that only benefit people with a lot of money thus lawyers. Which means that citizens do not have equal rights in a court of law and can't get a fair trial. It's just like tax avoidance. It's expensive to set up but ultimately it results in rich people paying LESS taxes/wealth than poor people for those who can afford it.
    - pessimizer 6y ago
      Yes, you can. You can make it illegal for the accused to lack representation in court if they desire it, you can make it illegal for a person to walk the street without a certain minimum amount of money in their pocket, you can make it illegal for a person under age X to not be at school at a particular part of the day without a reasonable excuse, etc. It's been done. You can even always define an occurrence as an act e.g. access to justice cannot be denied, or a shed cannot be permitted to remain purple. Maybe you mean that making a circumstance illegal doesn't necessarily prevent a circumstance from occurring?
      - FeepingCreature 6y ago
        No I'm saying the notion of illegality does not apply, and in fact leads to absurd consequences. For instance, if you make it illegal for the accused to lack representation in court, you can then sue them for not having representation, a suit from which they cannot defend themselves, lacking representation, which then opens them up to another suit, ad infinitum! I think there's some conflation of "regulating" and "making illegal" going on here. Mandating that the state must provide everyone with a public defender is not equivalent to "making lacking representation illegal".
  - sdoering 6y ago
    Replying to sister comment. In Germany, if you can't afford a lawyer you are entitled to the government paying legal aid in civil cases [1]. As you are - I just realize - in many countries. Problem is, that a restaurant owner isn't entitled to that so that even if you are a small company (self employed restaurant owner) you are toast. You could hope to have a legal insurance covering stuff like that, but not sure, if that would be the case for most insurances. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aid#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aid#Germany
    - sgift 6y ago
      The Wikipedia article doesn't tell this (which is okay, it's not the main topic), but you have to be really poor to get legal aid in Germany. When I needed this years ago I wasn't eligible because my parents had paid into a pension insurance for me and it was worth more than 5k. This is a common problem with these schemes here in Germany. If you are really rich you have no problems, if you are really poor there exist some systems (I wouldn't say they are good, but that's also another topic). People in between? Tough luck.
      - maxlybbert 6y ago
        If it’s limited to the poor, then the US has that through nonprofits like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legal_Aid_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legal_Aid_Society . There’s no standard, or for that matter, no single organization to look for, so it’s hard to say who exactly qualifies in any particular city.
- ilovetux 6y ago
  IANAL, but isn't this exactly why class action lawsuits exist?
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Class action isn't really a thing in the UK. Or rather "collective actions" and "group litigation orders" are a recent thing and haven't become a standard part of the legal system. Not many people on any side who understand how they're supposed to work in practice. The UK also has a different set of priorities in its litigation culture. You can win a huge payout if you prove unfair dismissal or discrimination, but it's much harder to prove that your work contract is unfair/exploitative or that Service Provider X is operating in a shady way.
chrisseaton 6y ago
It's not fraud though, is it? They advertise that you'll get food from Restaurant X and that's indeed what you get. It's not fraud to resell product, you don't need permission from the original seller to do it (in fact I think that's a specifically protected right), and it's not fraud or any kind of trademark violation to describe a product as being from Restaurant X if that is a fact.
- whelming_wave 6y ago
  The objectionable behavior is that they represent themselves as being restaurant X, or at least present themselves in such a way that finding out that they aren’t actually restaurant X but a reseller is difficult. edit: This got way more discussion than I anticipated. I think that even if there was a massive banner on the top of the site that told you GenericDeliveryCo was operating this website as a front for the restaurant, we are not them, etc, this behavior by GenericDeliveryCo is still damaging to the businesses they are creating websites of because they tend to absolutely bury the real website via better SEO. There’s an argument to be made that some restaurants would enjoy having a website made for them - for business or whatever other reason - but there’s no reason GenericDeliveryCo couldn’t... ask first.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    Ok but see how we've slipped down from full-on 'fraudulent' to just 'objectionable'? People are allowed to be objectionable if they want to.
    - roenxi 6y ago
      Mr. Wave may have meant legally objectionable as in "the objection that would be the core of the legal case" or "the legal system objects to this". Similar to how a legal complaint doesn't mean someone whining.
      - chrisseaton 6y ago
        If they did then what do they think is the infraction or offence that is being committed? They're being objectionable by committing or infracting... what? What law or regulation would they be breaking?
FireBeyond 6y ago
100% agreed. Look (listen?) for the cagey answers: "Is this Restaurant X?" "I can help you place an order!" "But is this Restaurant X?" "I can take your X order when ready!"
meowface 6y ago
On the apps I use, they now have a disclosure about this before you press "Order".

throw_away892 6y ago

A customer won't order through 3rd party app if the restaurant doesn't partner to sell through them. Same case for internet marketing. What you should feel bad about are the excessive commission fees charged by those delivery apps.

Hydraulix989 6y ago
It's not always obvious to users that the restaurants listed on these apps are not the real restaurants themselves.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > the restaurants listed on these apps are not the real restaurants themselves This isn't what is happening. The food still comes from the actual restaurants.
- throw_away892 6y ago
  True. But that was not my argument.
ivanbakel 6y ago
This is untrue. A few months ago there was an article on the front page about a restaurant serving pizza that had been auto-listed by, IIRC, Deliveroo - which had put a menu online with marked-up prices and was allowing users to place orders. The restaurant owner even discovered that, because of some inconsistency between his prices and the third-party ones, he could cause the delivering company to pay him by simply placing orders to himself.
- FireBeyond 6y ago
  I had visions of doing fancy CSS too, to render an accurate menu to your website viewers, but that would be deceptive to Uber's scrapers to mess with their menu.

ctoth 6y ago

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.

Hydraulix989 6y ago
Many restaurant owners are not as technically inclined as you. They might also think just having a social media presence is enough.
- ctoth 6y ago
  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?

chrisseaton 6y ago

> and if you order through there, it's costing the restaurant a lot of money How does it cost the restaurant any money when they do this? The delivery companies can't unilaterally take a cut of the price, can they. I think you'll find the delivery companies mark up, and get their money that way, in this case where they don't have an agreement with the restaurant. The restaurant gets the price they ask for it.

twoslide 6y ago
An owner of a local restaurant told me he pays about 30% revenue to share to Deliveroo, as part of his agreement with them. He also runs his own delivery service, and encourages customers to use that (phoning in) rather than Deliveroo.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > An owner of a local restaurant told me he pays about 30% revenue to share to Deliveroo, as part of his agreement with them. If they've agreed to it, what's the problem? The parent comment was complaining about Deliveroo setting up without an agreement. When they do that they have to mark up - they can't take a 30% cut of the restaurant's price as the restaurant charges Deliveroo full price.
  - Shish2k 6y ago
    > If they've agreed to it, what's the problem? They’re in a position where the options are pretty much “agree to this” or “go out of business” (To which I guess the free-market response is “That’s not a problem - an independent restaurant SHOULD go out of business if they can’t compete with a website company when it comes to websites”?)
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      So Deliveroo is helping these restaurants survive the pandemic is your main argument? Or that they’d do just fine if no one had a website offering their food, but the Deliveroo website is an arms-race bleed-them-dry move?

saddlerustle 6y ago

Deliveroo and Uber Eats don't do that.

twoslide 6y ago

Agree that Deliveroo fees seem high on both ends (customer and restaurant). Wonder if this means they (a) they are inefficient (b) they have large profit margins or (c) it is actually more expensive to run than one might think. If (a) or (b), the conditions for lower priced alternatives seem high.

Closi 6y ago
The answer is somewhere between A and C depending on what you call inefficiency - Assuming 20 minutes per order (3 per hour) at a minimum wage of c£9 per hour pre-holiday and any other benefits, you are talking about £3 per delivery. They need to pay more than this, as many drive and the fee needs to cover fuel, so call it £4 per delivery or something like that, it's somewhere between £3-£4 probably. So then you add the cost of user aquisition - which is usually giving out £5 - £10 vouchers and for most of those customers to only use the service once. Clearly the first delivery is a massive loss. Then following that lots of orders are done on a free-or-low delivery cost basis (incl. Deliveroo Plus). These companies are in a land grab still so it's low margin and high competition between them and Uber Eats. Uber Eats is technically a better cost model (i.e. more efficient) than Deliveroo assuming car delivery, as you can interleave deliveries and cab rides.
- djhn 6y ago
  The pools for Eats and ride-hailing are separate in most markets.
  - Closi 6y ago
    Well that’s silly, I assume that will change.

raverbashing 6y ago

Haven't this done by any company in Europe, and yes, it is despicable

bookmarkable 6y ago

Perhaps more screenplay than solution for this particular problem, but this illuminates a reason organized crime has existed for many years. You have an underserved, unprotected group being abused by a more powerful group with huge financial backing that can twist existing laws to further the abuse. Organized crime groups step into the vacuum and build a powerful backing, including support of non-criminals in the abused group. Personally I'm surprised you don't hear of hacker groups that protect websites and social media properties of the downtrodden. GoodFellas meets Social Network.

sildur 6y ago

Could you please tell me who is registering these domains? I'm honestly interested, I don't want to use the services of such crooks.