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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

> The End game is to be the dominant food ordering platform in any given town where you get to dictate rates like 25%.

You fight back by calling your order in and having them deliver it or pick it up yourself. I do this 99%* of the time as I refuse to pay a web server $8+ order+delivery fee for a meal that costs the same. It's absurd to think that people are so lazy that they cant pick up a phone or walk a few blocks/cycle/drive to get their meal.

*save for the rare late night drunk+high AF Dominoes orders.

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I really hate this sort of argument... that people who use the newer, more convenient, technology are just lazy and should keep using the old way of doing things.

Why stop at delivery apps? Why are lazy people driving cars instead of just riding horses? Why are you ordering things online instead of just going to the store? Why are you farming using that tractor instead of a horse drawn plow?

Small conveniences add up. I don't want to live in a world where we aren't allowed to make things slightly easier.

Because sometimes the net result of individual optimization (predatory food delivery apps) is social deoptimization (local restaurants close).

And for the same reason that we don't allow health insurance to charge people different rates on the basis of their genetic profiles, the exercise of government prerogative to optimize for the greater good, on behalf of all, is apt here.

Whether or not this particular approach is the best way to produce that good is a valid debate.

We don't even let health insurance to charge people different rates based on pre-existing conditions anymore, which is what drove health insurance premiums through the roof.

Healthcare premiums were steadily marching higher from the 1970s onwards, and continued to do so post-ACA at about the same annual growth rate.

Almost in perfect correlation as one by one pre-existing condition limits were legislatively banned over the years. And ACA eliminated almost all remaining pre-existing conditions, so of course it drove insurance costs and pricing sky high.

Except it didn't.

See Exhibit 1 at https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2018..... The "sky high" jump you portray doesn't exist. It's been a quite steady annual rise.

If pre-existing conditions were the primary cause for premium increases, the ACA's one-fell-swoop removal of them would've had far more significant impact on that chart.

Limits on pre-existing conditions mainly affect individual policy pricing, corporate health insurance are already pooled and because of that always had fewer pre-existing condition limits.

The whole reason for health insurance in the first place is for healthy, wealthy, or young people to pay for unhealthy, poor, or old people.

That’s the whole reason for any kind of insurance. It’s a mechanism for lucky people to pay the costs of unlucky people. And even lucky people pay for it it because you never know how your luck will change.

If you take your idea for a pricing model to the extreme, everybody pays pretty much what they need to cover their own costs, which could be extremely low or extremely high. This is no different than if nobody had insurance at all.

No, that’s the reason for government to provide necessary medical care to those who can’t afford it.

Insurance is pooling of risks so participants in the pool are insured against medical costs they can’t afford.

The difference is statistically, most people are going to get old. Lucky is if you either don’t need insurance when you’re young or you live to be old.

That's fine, just pay a fair price for the service.

I always tip well, and I am not going to pay Grubhub more than they charge... that isn't going to help the situation.

Many of these platforms charge a fee for phone calls to the restaurant too.

Platforms like Seamless go so far as to set up websites for restaurants (that often have better SEO than the restaurant's original website), so the phone number listed routes through Seamless, helping to ensure they get their cut of any order.

Then it seems like a good legal remedy might involve labeling requirements for advertising by third-parties?

This cap... is not that.

If a restaurant doesn't comply, wouldn't this be fraudulent representation?

AFAIK last time it came up people mentioned that they were allowed to do that because of a clause in their EULA

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321705

No one is forcing the restaurant to accept the fee, and if they do, then the restaurant should charge higher prices to offset it.

Otherwise google maps and Apple Maps is sitting right there not charging any fees for the phone number.

I think you misunderstand.

There are a number of restaurants listed on Yelp in my area for whom the phone number listed is answered by GrubHub. I refuse to deal with GrubHub, so I make an effort to search for a direct number, but it is often difficult to find.

I'm not sure how GrubHub is getting themselves set as the primary number for restaurants in Yelp, but it's happening.

maybe it has something to do with GH buying Eat24 from Yelp for stock? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

actually it was all cash nm https://qz.com/1045776/grubhubs-purchase-of-yelps-eat24-may-...

The solution to that is using google maps or Apple Maps or duck duck go or a phone book.

If people don’t understand that a middleman adds cost as an adult, then that is an education issue.

>If people don’t understand that a middleman adds cost as an adult, then that is an education issue.

I think the point is that middlemen are now using deceptive business practice to obscure the fact they are involved and in many ways cannibalizing direct business to the restaurants using "dark patterns". In the case of middlemen changing the phone number of the restaurant on services like Yelp/Google Maps without the consent of the restaurant should be fraud...its almost like I go to a bank and put my ATM machine in front of the bank ATM machines and charge customers withdraw fees...then claiming well I am a 3rd party of course I had fees (even disclosed it in order to proceed), while ignoring the totality of the circumstances.

> The solution to that is using google maps or Apple Maps or duck duck go or a phone book.

You can try.

https://www.yelp-support.com/article/How-did-the-information...

> Yelp provides Apple with access to some of our business page information

Yelp also provides DDG results.

"The solution is high-resistance individual actions to address a situation with no societal benefit created by a company with more money than you can even begin to visualize."

This is the sort of thing one says to either feel very, very clever about themselves or because they don't want things fixed. Which is it?

I don’t consider using a browser or google maps or Apple Maps to search name and phone number of a restaurant to be high resistance.

If people want to give their money to middlemen because they are too lazy to call or use a search website, that is their problem. We don’t need laws around every single idiotic behavior people do, and if they find value in paying an app maker an extra $10, so be it. I’ll continue to do the common sense thing and spending 30 seconds calling them because I can’t afford $10 to door dash for what is a useless service to me.

How much money they may or may not have is irrelevant.

Apple Maps returns results from Yelp, which sometimes have GrubHub's interposed phone numbers in them. So your very own solution doesn't work.

You are falling for the okeydoke.

Break these assholes' backs and we are all in a better place.

"You fight back by calling your order in" -- if they are offering free delivery through an app, all you are doing is paying inflated prices to subsidize their delivery customers. If they are not offering you an explicit called-in or picked-up discount, you're not really helping anyone except all those people using the app.

I've noticed more and more restaurants in the Seattle area are listing higher prices for the GrubHubs/UberEats (some have explicitly told me during pickup to just call it in if I want to save some money). The picked up discount already exists within the app. So what you're saying is starting to happen as restaurants wise up.

I am really glad to hear that! I can only hope that this practice spreads. I want there to be a viable business model in the restaurant delivery business, but it has to be actually viable, which most likely means that it will have to be local approaches.

That makes no sense. Maybe normally ordering at my favorite place nets them about $5. I don't want any gig economy startup cutting into that profit, when I pay it. I understand it is worth it for the restaurant to take GH orders and net $3 on them, I just think using that service is the wrong option.

I care about supporting my favorite local eats. Same reason we should all be tipping full even when getting take out. Support your local restaurants. Many are about to go out of business.

Sometimes it’s really hard to do this though. I recently wanted to order from a sushi place and I couldn’t find the paper menu with their number so I searched DDG. The first three or four things I clicked on weren’t the direct website of the restaurant. And only one was an ad.

I get that for some of these small local restaurant owners the margins are tight and I’ll do my best to make sure my money goes directly to them and not GrubHub/Yelp/Uber but I also understand that most of these places aren’t run by front-end developers and SEO experts. I’m not sure what the answer is but I also don’t think it’s always quite as simple as you’re making it out to be.

The answer is another tool that reduces friction to setting up a website. I'm friends with a bunch of bands that don't have websites, but they do have facebook pages! Why? Because they're free and they do what the band needs from a website.

A restaurant doesn't need more than a page with contact info and link to a pdf menu. But even standing that up is a massive hurdle for <people who don't browse HN casually>.

I'd rather pay the 10% than touch facebook with a 10-foot pole.

In my experience, most restaurant staff get super upset about this -- especially if you ask them to bring your order out. Restaurant owners need to be more clear with their staff about needing to support this.

I have not experienced this at all. If anything, restaurants has been appreciative I picked it up because they made more money from the sale.

I've never had a restaurant employee get upset about taking a take-out order.

They'd likely expect a couple bucks tip for a curbside pickup, though.

Sounds like a restaurant that doesn't want to stay in business.

> It's absurd to think that people are so lazy that they cant pick up a phone or walk a few blocks/cycle/drive to get their meal.

You don’t have kids. Calling me lazy because I don’t have time to load up for small children in the car to drive a few miles then have to wait 0-25 minutes — potentially having to get out of the car and unloading said four kids to pick up the food, then reloading them to return home. Such an assumption that I am “lazy” is just bullshit and represents a failed understanding of a good portion of the market. We aren’t all childless adults sitting around smoking pot playing XBox waiting around for a key lime pie to be delivered. (Not saying you are, but that people who value their time more than the delivery costs are “lazy” is exactly the point you are making.)

I am happy to pay 25% for the time I am saving. It’s the same reason I don’t wash my own car: sure I could do it, but I have more valuable uses for my limited time.

Very true - I think it's important to be careful we don't generalize our own experience to others.

If people ARE paying 25%, (i.e. 60% of US consumers order at least once a week [1]) then the service is valuable enough to them (for whatever reason) to pay that much.

[1] https://upserve.com/restaurant-insider/online-ordering-stati...

> You don’t have kids. Calling me lazy because I don’t have time to load up for small children in the car to drive a few miles then have to wait 0-25 minutes

My mother did that all day long when we were children.

She also didn't have a choice because delivery apps didn't exist

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