> It's falsifying the restaurants prices.
It's marking them up... yeah. Is that a problem? Do you realise when you go to a store all the products are 'falsified' by marking them up on top of what the producer sells them to the retailer for?
It's marking them up... yeah. Is that a problem? Do you realise when you go to a store all the products are 'falsified' by marking them up on top of what the producer sells them to the retailer for?
Doordash or whatever says 'for $x we will put a WhateverBurger burger into your hand'. As long as that's what they achieve, this seems fundamentally honest to me.
As a consumer I don't really care where that $x goes to - Doordash, WhateverBurger, delivery person... doesn't seem my business to interfere in people's private financial agreements.
The diner gets offered a deal and can take it or not.
The restaurant gets offered a deal and can take it or not.
The delivery person gets offered a deal and can take it or not.
Seems to me like everyone is acting ethically here, and everyone is accepting a deal they're presumably happy with. If they aren't, they can turn it down and go elsewhere.
That's not what they do, though. The receipt shows line items with a cost for the food, a fee for the service, and a delivery fee.
The problem is there's an additional fee for the service hidden in the supposed cost of the food; customers don't actually know what Doordash's cut really is.
But why would you care? I don't need to know the bill of materials for all my transactions. When I buy a coffee I don't expect to know how much they paid for the beans.
If you wanna say "delivering a pizza will cost you $20" and leave at that, fine. If you tell me the Grubhub fee is $5 and it's actually $10, I'm upset.
...but this is exactly how other industries already work and everyone's fine with it!
When you buy a TV from Amazon they both mark it up and also charge you delivery!
And they didn't give you the option to save by managing delivery on your own!
Why don't you get mad at Amazon for marking up products as well as charging delivery?
What percentage of customers do you think understand that Grubhub is marking up their food?
>If they aren't, they can turn it down and go elsewhere.
That's precisely the problem. Some of the restaurants customers are turning it down and going elsewhere because Grubhub has misrepresented their prices.
Why do they need to care about the markup? If the burger price seems like a good deal, go for it, otherwise don't.
> Some of the restaurants customers are turning it down and going elsewhere because Grubhub has misrepresented their prices.
Well then that seems like the situation is fixing itself due to everyone's free ability to do what they want? So why are we complaining?
Why don't you answer the question?
>Well then that seems like the situation is fixing itself due to everyone's free ability to do what they want? So why are we complaining?
In what way is the situation being fixed?
Well I'm not the one who cares about it. I don't understand why anyone else would. So I can't answer it!
> In what way is the situation being fixed?
People who don't want to do business with Doordash don't have to. If you don't like Doordash you can just forget they exist. It's not a problem.
And let's not act like this law was passed because of consumers- this is restaurant owners trying to have their cake and eat it too.
Doordash or whatever says 'for $x we will put a $y WhateverBurger burger into your hand,' but $y is already higher than a WhateverBurger costs. People are left thinking that $x isn't that high a cost for delivering a $y burger, but the actual delivery cost is $x plus some percentage of $y, so both the numerator and denominator are falsified.
They're lying about their value proposition.
So add $x and $y together. If that price works for you go for it, if not, don't.
A markup plus a fee is already a common thing. It's done so that there is a minimum to cover expenses plus something that can vary with higher value items because you can get more profit from people who are willing to pay for more luxury items. It's not strange or unusual or a foreign concept to anyone already living in a Western economy.
I don't see why you'd care how they arrive at the final price. Just look at the final price.
These vendors are distorting that signal by misrepresenting the price. If it were clean-cut, and the original price were still visible, and the delivery as a separate 15-20% fee, then fine, I could do exactly what you suggest. Is it or is it not worth it to have this delivered right now?
But it's not. Let's say I see an arbitrary restaurant serving the kind of food I'm in the mood for, say Vietnamese food. I can then look and see the price to know roughly what quality of food to expect: Is it closer to $10 or $30 for an entree, since those are two very different things.
The total price might not even matter to me. But if I order a $20 entree with an extra delivery fee, and what shows up is a $10 entree, then that's a problem and most people will believe that the restaurant offers terrible value, because they were lied to by the intermediary.
That's the issue. It's not "am I will to have my In-N-Out burger delivered for $6 extra," it's "with Doordash lying to me about these restaurants I've never been to, I have no idea whether this is worth doing or not until I've already paid and accepted delivery."
But that’s just not true. Branded products vary in price on different retailers. A can of Coca-Cola can be wildly different prices in different places. Are you not used to this as a consumer?
> Having a 3rd party, which may still add value to both the brand and end-user, interject and abstract from the brand's determined prices is unethical, period.
I don’t understand - have you never bean to a supermarket or a department store before? They sell other brands in their store. Do you not realise they’re also marked up?
I think everyone else is playing dumb!
They're telling me they're shocked that a business would mark up a product they buy from someone else to re-sell? And I think it's a bit off they're calling it 'unethical'. It's no different to what other companies do all the time and people consider it acceptable and the only distinction is the label of delivery/retailer?
The restaurants do it themselves! They resell wine with their own markup plus charge a service fee!
Also, this is a luxury product we're talking about - restaurant food delivered to you home. Why are people so aghast that they're having to pay a marked-up premium for it?
Imagine you’re selling chocolate that you want people to associate with luxury/wealth. To achieve this you might want to limit resellers to be 5 star hotels and luxury stores rather than the 1 dollar store.
Of course you can. What makes you think you can't?
People are free to resell any goods they own (exceptions for things like controlled substances, other things with regulations etc.)