It does sound like a case of "fake it till you make it", in a sense that adding restaurants without the owners' consent would be a way around the chicken and egg problem.
Not saying it's a particularly nice thing to do, I'd be super annoyed if it happened to me
Then they found out company was delivering their food without their permission.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262316/doordash-pizza-p...
> And so the story unfolds. “If someone could pay Doordash $16 a pizza, and Doordash would pay his restaurant $24 a pizza, then he should clearly just order pizzas himself via Doordash, all day long. You’d net a clean $8 profit per pizza [insert nerdy economics joke about there is such a thing as a free lunch],” wrote Roy. They order 10 pizzas this way, and it worked! The money was free, a seamless transfer from SoftBank’s deep venture capital-lined pockets to Roy’s friend’s business bank account. Eventually, in another series of what Roy hilariously calls “trades,” they just ordered pizza dough through DoorDash for $75 in pure profit.
Except sometimes they're out of the book, and so the customer never receives it. Or you damage the book between the book store and the post office, and they receive a badly damaged book.
The customer is going to be mad at the Strand, not at you. You'd be damaging their reputation.
Grubhub literally says 'shows you restaurants that deliver to you', imply the restaurant is delivering, not Grubhub. Furthermore it implies if you order, you're ordering from the restaurant- where Grubhub may have put up that ordering entirely without their consent!
Why does Grubhub have any responsibility to obtain the restaurant's consent? If I pay someone to go to the grocers and pick up some items for me, is that someone obligated to obtain the grocers' permission? Why is this situation different?
If the restaurant is offering pickup service, then to me there is no obligation on any third party to obtain permission to utilize that service and deliver the results to a customer.
Secondly, are the customers not ordering the food from Grubhub? Why would they be confused about a middle-man being present?
> ... you type in an address, we tell you the restaurants that deliver to that locale as well as showing you droves of pickup restaurants near you.
The complainants here seem to qualify under the second half of that sentence as long as they are offering a pickup service.
In some cases its because GrubHub created a website for the restaurant and they don't make it clear that it's a GrubHub site and not a site operated by the restaurant. If you call the phone number on that site, a GrubHub employee answers as if they are the restaurant.
The only reason why it took this long for gruphub is that restaurants do not have the legal resources of a company like Apple or Grubhub, not because this isn't fraud (it is).