Or just regulate the dumb behavior of these dumb start ups to not distort the market in dumb damaging ways,
I don't need these services badly at all. But since they exist, and are predatory, they "naturally" interpose themselves between the restaurants and their customers unless great effort is made by both the restaurants and all of their customers to avoid it.
It's not a question of wanting or not wanting the services. Some of these companies are so nasty and predatory that they are very, very hard to avoid.
Otherwise, sure, you just go get the food yourself in your ca--oh wait, ride hailing. In a taxi? On a bike? Within walking distance? But yes, just go to the restaurant, unless there's a global pandemic that requires many people to not leave their homes.
I have eaten food that was not cooked in my home no more than six times since February. All but one of those times were takeout. I'm well aware of how both kitchens and takeout work. I'm very privileged in that sense.
However, I was practicing empathy. Many people do not have the options I do, and I'm not sure mockery is the best way to think about them.
You mentioned both delivery and ride hailing in your initial comment, so I made the starting assumption that you were talking about someone who doesn't have a car. If you don't live within walking distance of a restaurant offering takeout, and you don't have a car, how do you get takeout?
In the suburbs where more than half of Americans live, access to restaurants within walking distance isn't ubiquitous. Many restaurants in my state remain closed, including in my case, both of the restaurants within walking distance.
So, much of America cannot eat out, and some percentage don't have cars or can't drive due to injury or fear of the pandemic. That leaves cooking at home, yes, from groceries they've had delivered or taken public transit (quite the disease vector) or via ride hailing. And it leaves food delivery.
GrubHub reported 22.6 million "active diners" in Q4 2019. That's a small number compared to everybody in America who eats, but it's not a tiny number. And GrubHub isn't the only food delivery company.
My bottom line is that it may be easy for you or I to avoid food delivery or ride hailing services, but that is simply not true for everyone, and it's not even a value shared by everyone.
If you want food delivery, and many people clearly do, it can be very hard to avoid GrubHub and Doordash due to their slimy and unethical practices. If you don't want food delivery, then clearly this issue has nothing whatsoever to do with you.
Prosecute the dumb startups for breaking the law. Don't force everyone to comply with some stupid pricing regulations and fill out a trillion forms when they're not doing anything wrong. Legislators should legislate, law enforcement should enforce laws. Regulators will just be captured by private equity and forced to set rules to that make the regulatory burden higher and higher for new companies, unless they have "friends" who can "cut" the "red tape", which means being financed by these predators.
Regulation is the lazy answer for politicians who want to have no understanding of the issues of business responsibility, and just pay some unaccountable "experts" to decide what is acceptable.
Unless you are referring to some of the anti-trust laws which are actually criminal statutes? In that case I'm on the same page that we should actually start enforcing those.
Regulations do have the force of law, theoretically, but rarely have the ability to enforce at scale, and would much rather deal with a couple of giant companies rather than try to deal with a variety of different companies, so there's a natural push back in that direction.
There is this misconception that the absence of regulation is bad. But that is not true for sane appropriate rules. Absence of public rules is not a vacuum of rules but a universe where rules are made by the strongest.
Also laws do often not prescribe details but empower regulators to manage the details. There may be laws against predatory pricing. There is also case laws against predatory pricing. But markets also evolved and it us extremely costly and time consuming to prosecute monopoly cases based on principles (read up on e.g. the case against IBM way back). It is more efficient to put in place industry specific rules which then can be enforced with much simpler reasoning.
I could not disagree more strongly. If you could point me to a rule that meets these criteria I'd love to see them -- all the rules that I've had to deal with in my professional life have been contrived to benefit the small number of companies actually capable of complying with them, rather than supporting the end goal of the regulation directly, and most of the time, allowed sufficiently large players to circumvent them entirely.
Antitrust legislation is hard to enforce, costly and time consuming, as you say, but it should be hard, and it should be time consuming, because the alternative is that you outsource the hard and time consuming parts to the industry, which is just "weaponizing the complexity" -- the cost to comply does not scale linearly with the benefits, so small players are just wiped off of the board.
(Note: I think you got confused with the double negatives in your first sentence -- you say "There is this misconception that the absence of regulation is bad" but I think you mean "There is this misconception that regulation is bad" or "There is this misconception that the absence of regulation is good". Not that I agree with you, but the rest of your post argues for sane regulation rather than deregulation)
How long do you spend in jail for making a nonstandard screw?
Standard contracts are industry standards (mostly) not government or regulated. Where contracts abut government function is enforcement and to some degree limitations and exclusions on what contracts are allowed to cover.
US health care is not easy to one-line, but I think you’d be hard pressed to argue that the space is not heavily regulated already, and yet mysteriously still has tons of problems.
Safety regulations I’ll grant you are probably a net benefit to society. Largely because limitations of liability make the situation too asymmetric.
I assume that the proposed regulation here was larger in scope than the Portland City Council rule, especially since that rule does not do anything to correct the market distortion -- arguably, it makes it worse, by mandating that they undercut economically viable approaches, rather than just letting them do so. That was what I was addressing.
This particular rule is innocent enough on the face of it -- it has only two requirements [1]; that they cannot charge more than 10% of the purchase price, and that they cannot reduce payments based on compliance with the first part. To enforce this (especially given how broad the definition of a delivery service is) will be a supreme act of discretion, and clarifying this rule and eventually handing it off to the local commissioners of the counties' health departments for enforcement will complete the slide into the endless land of bureaucracy.