> It's leveraging it's market power to make money rather providing customers with any value... feels like society needs to come up with a new word, new idea
The term economists use is "rent seeking behavior". There's a more interesting data play here, but I'll get to that in a sec.
Now, ostensively the value is driving traffic and increasing number of customers.
What they're actually doing is the blitzscaling playbook: become the only channel people go to online when looking for restaurants (last 10 years) and now monetize the captured audience (next 10 years). Because as people have moved online, what else are you going to do? Take down your yelp page?
That's the pessimistic take.
The optimistic take is the data play here. It's confusing, because they said two opposing things:
> Grubhub says it retains these recordings and uploads them to the private page that restaurants use to manage their service so that restaurants can audit them and dispute any errors. Grubhub says it does not use the recordings for any other purpose.
vs.
> "There is a restaurant on the Upper East Side that serves sushi. We worked with them and we said that there's a trend for poke bowls. We suggested that they start adding some of these items to their menu,” Grubhub senior vice president Kevin Kearns said at the hearing. “They did this and within one month, they doubled their orders, and within three months they 7x’ed their orders to 1,600 orders a month..."
So the data play is aggregating what people are ordering and turning that into analytics. Now that 15% take isn't just the cost of online rent, but it's also your cost to get insight into what everyone around you is ordering.
That said, the next question is whether the indian restaurant around the corner is actually going to use grubhub analytics to optimize their menu by placing their matar paneer higher up because that's what's being ordered at similar indian places and grubhub's telling them they can improve conversions by 6.3%, but that's effectively what some engineer or PM at Grubhub thought up.
If that story is believable, then it's a more-than-just-rent-extraction narrative. It's still kinda shitty, but that's why you sell jeans and shovels, not become a gold miner.