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Comment by bgilroy26 | Hacker News Reader

>A cheesesteak costs $11 in the shop, for example, but DoorDash charged $16.95 for it.

From a customer perspective, this practice feels very disingenuous. The 5.95 should be labeled as part of a delivery fee.

If somehow DoorDash was the first link a user visited after searching for "donut plant", they would need information to decide whether to visit the restaurant or to order online.

The transparent thing to do is to list the 5.95 markup as DoorDash-imposed. That way the user can easily see their choice

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Intuitively, that makes sense, but isn't it also pretty well-accepted for a retailer, reseller, or other "middleman" not to disclose their costs?

If you go to Walmart, you don't expect the price labels to say "$0.50 Kellogg bulk unit cost, $0.80 retail storage fee"; you just expect "$1.30", and the store's costs are their own concern.

It would certainly be a nice thing to do, but we generally don't expect retailers to facilitate you buying from their supplier.

On the other hand, retailers also probably have explicit permission from vendors to resell the good, which DoorDash doesn't.

This is a good point but also an unfair comparison. Walmart consumers do not have the option of walking to the factory instead of walmart. Doordash consumers can walk to the restaurant instead of ordering from doordash.

I think the analogy holds in this respect: in both cases, you can get it from the supplier, it's just less convenient, either because of having to go there, or needing to be shipped a longer distance, or needing to buy a bulk.

(Per sibling, a more relevant difference would be Walmart's having permission, but I'm not sure that's relevant to the consumer expectation; "telling you how cheap this stuff is from the source" is the kind of "facilitating you getting it cheaper" that we don't expect retailers to do.)

> On the other hand, retailers also probably have explicit permission from vendors to resell the good, which DoorDash doesn't.

That's the biggest reason I see. In your case, Kellogg is "allowing" Walmart to resell its products.

> From a customer perspective, this practice feels very disingenuous. The 5.95 should be labeled as part of a delivery fee.

Yes it is. While possible markups are mentioned somewhere their site, we didn't know about it until months after we had been regularly ordering from doordash.

Since then we only order if absolutely necessary, and prefer to pick up ourselves or use the restaurant delivery itself.

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