Comment by noego | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noego | Hacker News Reader

> “The consumer believes that a discount has been his right, not a privilege”

It seems disingenuous to frame this "rebellion" as a moral issue. It isn't. It's a business issue. Business owners are free to evaluate their partnerships and pricing strategy on the basis of what is going to best benefit their revenue/profits. And consumers are free to evaluate potential restaurants/apps on the basis of many factors including price. Trying to argue that someone is acting immorally by wanting a discount, is nothing more than crying wolf.

> "Another sore point is customer data. Neither Zomato nor Swiggy shares customers’ names and phone numbers with the restaurant that fills the order, citing privacy concerns. Restaurant owners said that left them with no way to market directly or build long-term relationships with their best customers."

Thank God for that. The last thing I want when I order food online, is for every single restaurant I order from to start spamming my phone/email. This fact alone has lifted Zomato a few notches in my eyes.

If you want to build a direct relationship with customers, put an 8.5"x3.5" glossy flyer into the food order bag with your delivery phone number and your web site address on it, and hope I don't throw it out.

If you call me up directly, I will be annoyed.

Or your menu! Even in the age of delivery apps people still keep around takeaway menus.

No, no, no, no. No!

What about the trees?

If you are ordering food delivery (with plastic utensils, food containers, foil wrap etc) instead of cooking yourself (which is more economical), you don't care about trees.

This is a logical fallacy. The fallacy of relative privation.[1]

Just because you ordered food and didn't cook at home doesn't imply you don't care about the environment. Perhaps you cook at home most days but on this particular day you were going to get home from work late and still needed to have dinner ready for your family. You still want the food delivery to be as environmentally friendly as possible. Thus I eschew being given paper plates, styrofoam containers, etc when I order out (as I can simply use my reusable ones at home with that food).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

You are missing the point.

Whether you care about trees or not, the environmental impact of a paper menu (especially if it’s just a regular piece of office paper, rather than a glossy magazine-style page) is negligible compared to the rest of a delivered meal (well under 1/1000 of the total).

Argumentam ad Lorax.

(Disclosure: I barely know anything about the restaurant business.)

If you can't fit your entire menu on one tri-folded sheet of letter-sized paper [with readable print size], it's time to do a statistical analysis on your orders, and cut all the dishes that don't get ordered enough to recoup the costs of offering them. Move them to the infrequent specials menu, if you really can't stand to never make them again.

If I recall correctly, one of the major reasons single-location restaurants fail is menu bloat. Diners take longer to decide what they want. It's harder to identify the dishes that are least profitable. Prep is more complicated. The order management system might require additional button presses to navigate between pages.

And put the restaurant equivalent of keyboard shortcuts on the menu. As a customer, I like being able to order by number, particularly by single-digit numbers (or single letters). "Give me a number one, a number four, and a number eight, hold the mayo."

I can think of a few restaurants that I quit going to after they trimmed my favorite items off their menus.

Taco Bell dropping dat XXL burrito ;_;

One key business insight is realizing that some customers cost more than they bring in.

That may or may not apply to those restaurants, but a restaurant can't be everything to everybody. They might do better by not trying.

Consider this applied to tech companies: you need to make very different decisions if you want to start a free social media site versus a webapp aimed at businesses.

I've seen a ton of Kitchen Nightmares videos and menu bloat seems to be a pretty common criticism, to the point where now if I go to a restaurant I'll get a bit worried that the food is going to be bad if the menu is big.

Correct, it's one of the largest warning signs I've learnt to look out for when fixing a restaurant.

I've been to a few chinese restaurants in the Bay Area that have nailed this. Especially the ones near commercial and office areas. Menu has tons of images with a number on every image. A list next to those images running from top to bottom with a comprehensive list of names and ingredients with a number for each dish. Ordering for new and regular customers is a breeze, fast and I believe low error rate as well.

As a food consumer, there's no amount of "relationship" you can build with me. Your food is good or it isn't. If the food is good and priced well, I'll reward you with continued business.

I think this is more a problem of the business owner believing that remaining in business is a right, not a privilege.

Every issue is/becomes a moral one in India :) .

We see this issue being played out again and again across industries from Amazon, to Uber, to food delivery. Why are business's so naive to think they can tame the beast and profit only to end up feeling helpless when it has gained traction ?

I won't hold Zomato as a guardian of user privacy. It is not to protect the user's privacy but to be the sole arbiter of how to profit from that data. They had a pretty big breach last year which leaked all the user's info. Looks like people have forgotten that fiasco.

Does Zomato use customer name and phone to advertise to the customer?

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