In general, knowingly obtaining money, goods or services you know you are not entitled to is fraud/illegal.
Here's an example of someone going to jail for knowingly exploiting a glitch: https://www.inquirer.com/philly/hp/news_update/20071026_N_C_...
Of course, no one would order it. But in this situation, an aggregator could offer it and the restaurant owner could take advantage of that.
It smells like fraud, except that every individual step seems legitimate (albeit weird). I'm pretty sure you're allowed to charge ridiculous prices for common goods if you so choose...
"I want a supreme pizza, hold the pepperoni, sausage, peppers, onions, olives, sauce, and cheese".
While the restaurant preparing "partial" pizzas to ship to coordinated orders is obviously fraud, I'm not so sure "Asking the restaurant owner about their costs, then independently ordering a large number of pizzas" qualifies.
It's not your responsibility if Doordash has shit code and auditing. And given VC-onomics, it's not even clear how you would be certain this isn't "operating as intended."
Does Doordash allow customer menu modification requests? "No cheese, no tomato sauce, no onion" etc. That would also then fall under shit code and auditing :)
How so? They're making the pizzas the way the customer wants them. The 'objective' tastiness is none of the delivery middleman's business. And there's nothing wrong with offering a bad pizza for $24, as long as the customer knows what they're getting.
Way around this: private owner places his own orders as customer, pockets profits as owner. That might be legitimate - but remember: if you take legal advice from the Internet, you get what you paid for.
One could place a personal order (or 100) innocently.
One looks substantially less innocent when coordinating with a third party to place orders and transfer money around.
While that speaks to the severity of the crime (if one were proven), as you noted, it doesn't in any way impact whether that behavior is a crime at all.
If anything, the one who's committing fraud is doordash, because they're putting in "takeout" orders with the restaurant and presenting them as "delivery" orders to the customer.
Now, if I order a dough pizza for $16, in coordination with the restaurant, and Doordash pays $24 to the restaurant, and the restaurant gives me a dough pizza, and then the restaurant makes it worth my while, what do we have?
Doordash has been paid $16, and spent $24 + (cost of delivery) = (-) SoftBank money
The restaurant has been paid $24 and spent ~$1 (cost of dough pizza [1]) = ~$23 profit (minus labor)
I paid $16 (let's ignore tip). The restaurant reimburses me for that (me: $0, restaurant: $7) to make it worth my while, and then splits profits with me (me: $3.50, restaurant: $3.50).
So at the end, Doordash: -$8 - delivery cost, restaurant: $3.50, me: $3.50.
It's the reimbursement of the customer that seems... suspect.
The way to ethically monetize this would be for restaurants to target Doordash misprices, and "sell" coupons (a food box, containing only a paper coupon), good for future food orders directly through the restaurants. Then encourage all their customers to buy as much as possible.
[1] We'll say we return and recycle the boxes, being environmentally conscious citizens
You have all those elements when backblaze was shucking drives en masse, but nobody would say that was fraud in any way. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/
If you intentionally sell a product for cheaper than you buy it to build market share (I think it's fair to call this intentional when they process the payment and don't bother changing the listed price), and you're willing to sell a whole lot of that product to someone, you can't cry foul when someone profits off that.
Nobody's lying to anybody, no price fixing is happening, or anything. Doordash agreed to sell a product at a price to any of their users, and they are fulfilling the promise they made, end of story.
You could make a good argument that this was the case. The restaurant sells to doordash, who paid for a pizza with toppings.
Though none of this matters if there's a 'special instructions' box. Have a code word for bread pizza.