California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement | Hacker News Reader

California law bans delivery apps from listing a restaurant without an agreement

leginfo.legislature.ca.gov

1,317 pointssupernova87a620 comments

This is undeniably a good thing if you put yourself in the shoes of the restaurant.

Imagine if someone went around impersonating your business online, leveraging the good name you have built for yourself over the decades. They create ads offering your expert development services, ostensibly competing with your existing website, but with intentionally slashed pricing and a ‘creatively’ misrepresented offering (aka growth hacking). Then they subcontract the job to some crappy outsourcing firm that bungles it, but who cares, they got their cut and you signed the TOS.

Now bad reviews are piling up online about the bad experiences people had with your business, your reputation is destroyed, and your business is next.

I know it’s not a perfect analogy but try to empathize with the restaurants here.

This exact thing is happening to one of my favorite local pizza places. Very frustrating for them.

They're frustrated by free advertising and new customers?

The smart thing to do is krep taking the business and just put a leaflet in the pizza box/whatever saying ordering directly is cheaper/faster, if that's the case.

Maybe there's more involved than getting "free advertising and new customers". As in, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch."

Perhaps frustrated that someone is doing business as them using their copyright and trademarks? These companies are basically commiting fraud, and any bad experience reflexts on the restaurant, not the delivery company.

Sometimes the restaurant doesn't know that something is being ordered via another channel and cannot add sufh a slip.

That “free” advertising is competing with your own channels (without the 30% commission).

Also there are uncountable reports of them fucking up the delivery itself by not having appropriate containers, when the restaurant they are dealing doesn’t actually do deliveries. That will lose you customers and hurt your brand.

If it's such a bad deal, why is the restaurant continuing to service orders from the food delivery platform? It's not like they don't know who's placing the order.

Perhaps add a 30% markup fee for any grubhub customer or ubereats customer based on payment info or familiar faces/cars.

I’m confused. How is GrubHub getting a 30% commission out of restaurants that don’t actively partner with them?

I think they mean that other partnered restaurants get 30%. I could be misreading it though.

They inflate menu prices and add additional service and delivery fees. You end up spending $50 on a meal that should be $30, and if you were shopping by amount of money spent (as many people are) then the net result is $30 going to the restaurant instead of all $50 you were willing to spend.

Sure, but that’s not actually a commission from the restaurant. The restaurant earns the same amount regardless of if it was true takeout or GrubHub (for folks that haven’t opted in to being partners).

sorry but at some point it's on the customer. if they are so price-insensitive that they are willing to pay $50 for $30 of food, they are too lazy to cross-reference the price, or shop around, or just go pick it up themselves, then I have no issue with the delivery service milking them for whatever the customer is willing to spend.

They only do this ruse for a while, then after controlling a good chunk of the business they “sell” their services officially to the restaurant, including commission. It’s not a charity.

But it's up to the individual restaurants to agree to this. There's no automatic 30% commission. If a delivery company wants to burn their capital offering discounts, why stop them? The restaurant is under no obligation to sign a contract taking on the burden of kreping those discounts.

Very naive view. They will be “strongly incentivized” to sign once the company can threaten to pull their listing off and vanish 50% of their customer base. Nothing new here, standard growth playbook.

So then why would California force them into that very situation?

It's not just about the money. The menus, information, and other details are just wrong or go out-of-date because this pizza restaurant changes things on a daily basis. Additionally their business is not setup for take-out at scale. They do the occasional take-out but when the phone starts ringing with to-go orders they were not anticipating, they are not staffed or ready to meet the demand. They call to remove themselves and then a few weeks later they end up back on there.

Frustrated by people having terrible customer service experiences associated with their business but completely out of their control.

> The smart thing to do is krep taking

I think the smart thing to do is to trust that people who have spent years doing a thing have more insight into the topic than a random internet forum participant.

Why does that require anything other than enforcement of existing trademark law?

Because many restaurant owners don't even think about trademarks, or their names are too "generic" to be allowed to trademark.

The usual exception are the franchise operations (mcdonalds, BK, subway, kfc, ...) because these are thought from the start to be exclusive.

Because civil laws only protect people rich enough to hire lawyers.

I don't know why this is getting down voted, its absolutely naive to assume this isn't how it plays out in the real world.

It’s getting downvoted because it seems to be phrased in a deliberately inflammatory way. You can (and others downthread have) express the same idea that many restaurants can’t afford the expense in a manner more likely to lead to productive discussion.

This should not be down voted. The idea that a popular little family owned and operated Indian restaurant named "Bombay Curry" and still reeling from COVID-19 restrictions can some how sue Skip the Diehes or Uber Eats for Trademark infringement is absolutely ludicrous.

Yeah, Uber is a company which is involved in legal battles with governments all over the world. I am sure they would make it a real pain to sue them. The idea of restaurants prusuing trademark cases against Uber is ridiculous.

Yeah, this is the legal system in a nutshell. Don't think you're safe in any meaningful way because the law says so. At the end of the day you would have to litigate it yourself and that is usually not worth it unless the offense is truly egregious.

Against an adversary with deep pockets like a corporation, you can lose even if you win. This is how patent trolls extort companies, litigating a patent suite is usually a seven figure endeavor. And there's no guarantee you win. It's cheaper to pay the licensing free from the trolls, who are smart enough to make sure it's always less than the cost of litigating.

Because most restaurant owners want to be in the business of running a restaurant, not litigating some out-of-state entities with billion-dollar warchests.

Doing the former is working two full-time jobs, as is.

People tend to forget how critical resources are in our country to rights. You often need time, money, expertise, etc. to enter legal battles and if the costs of those resources outweigh the benefits, you often allow your legal rights to be infringed. Pursuit of some rights are cost prohibitive because everything in the US is so tightly tied to finances.

Many of your rights in the US are directly tied to your financial resources, not only in the sense that you have the resources to litigate or absorb failed litigation but even in the sense that those with massive financial resources essentially buy their own rights through legislation.

Let's not pretend the justice system doesn't have underlying flaws that allow justice to skew one way or another from money alone because it does. If you're on trial for a serious offense, you're probably not going to use a public appointed attorney if you can avoid it because we know how the legal system works and how financial incentives will attract better legal representation in the private sector than those for public appointment.

This idealized and fictionalized system where I can walk into a court of law and defend myself or use a public appointed counsel and 'win' as long as I've done nothing illegal or unjust is a laughable joke for many legal battles, especially those of more significance.

Them not wanting to handle their own problems is not a reason for the State to subsidize solutions for them.

The entire purpose of legislature is to legislate solutions to problems that society faces.

Not to legislate solutions to private businesses' disputes.

Business disputes are handled through the legal system.

1. The legal system is a direct product of legislature, as are the rules that it enforces.

2. It is absolutely the legislature's responsibility to step into systemic, one-to-many disputes, especially when there is a gross power imbalance between the two sides.

Despite the downvotes -- I think there is a genuine question here. There isn't the need for more laws just enforcement of existing ones.

Purporting to represent someone elses business is an egregious infringement of trademark.

I would guess that most non-chain restaurants don't own a trademark for their name. It's an expensive process that many likely can't afford.

In CA the business will get common law trademark rights in their geographical area just by virtue of doing business under that name, but they would still need to sue the delivery companies which have in house counsel for these kind of things.

In the US you are not required to register your trademark in order to enforce it. However, you do get some additional protections. The cost is $225 and it is good for 10 years

The answer is likely that our legal system is too expensive for local restaurant owners to afford the cost of suing a grubhub sized company. Restaurants are a business notoriously prone to failure and low margins. Maybe a class action lawsuit would work in this case, but mostly it’s just another case where the legal system needs to be fixed to rely less on having money for justice to occur.

Two things which would help are:

1) Allow both private and public right-of-action for most laws. If the AG is busy, I should be able to sue. If I can't afford to sue, an AG should be able to take it up on my behalf.

2) Go back to circa 1800 style courts, where you don't need a lawyer to represent you. You both make your case to the judge. Not too much procedure. Perhaps extending small claims court up to $100,000 would do much of the same.

This is what Class Actions, and Business organizations are suppose to be for

Also nothing is stopping the AG of the state from forming a Fraud case agaist the major players.

The excuse of "well the courts cost too much money" is not abated by creating even more complex laws that will still require an expensive lawyer to enforce

in reality this law is designed to protect those companies that already made billions on abusing trademark laws by making it seem like what they did was legal, a "loophole" in the law that is now "closed" for new competitors

Expect class action obviously does not work, because is not like existing laws have stopped it. But yes, the solution might not be more laws but rather overhaul of the legal system to make it possible to enforce existing laws.

Do you think there is a trademark police force that you can call to enforce your trademark? Trademark is a civil matter and realitively pretty expensive to pursue. If you're a restaurant who just laid off half your staff due to COVID, how do you engage a trademark lawyer?

It's not a genuine question.

Companies shouldn't have to manufacture lawsuits every time a hostile third party wants to screw over their customers.

This law is both pro-business AND pro-transparency.

How does it violate trademark law to say that “we will deliver food from restaurant X”? It seems clear to the customer who is providing the goods vs the service. What’s not clear is if there is an agreement, which is what this new law makes clear.

Creating and defending a trademark is very expensive.

Many restaurants would prefer not to spend this money just to prevent unauthorized listings.

They’d rather delegate the responsibility of preventing unauthorized listings to the state attorney who has more resources and expertise.

That's not true. A trademark costs around $300: https://www.uspto.gov/trademark/trademark-fee-information

Enforcing it is free: you can send your own cease and desist for free. The only time you need a lawyer is if they refuse and you want to sue them. If the court rules in your favor, you can even sue them for the legal costs and costs of damages.

> Enforcing it is free: you can send your own cease and desist for free.

Enforcing it is free if your time is free.

time, and knowledge of how to write such a letter in a way to seem "serious legal threat"

I don't think Uber Eats has a support page that says "Submit your amateur cease and desist letters here". A $300 trademark is a cheap business expense, using it to scare away massive corporations is expensive.

And when the massive corporation that rose to dominance by ignoring local laws also ignores your DIY cease & desist letter, you're out $300. Heck, they'd ignore it if a lawyer wrote it too. Filing a lawsuit would be required, which they'd also ignore and delay as much as possible, far more than the local pizzeria can afford, until there was a class action.

Sorry for the cynicism, but I really don't understand why is it ok to ask small restaurants to spend $200-300 bucks and send a cease and desist letter, but it's not ok for the law to ask investor-backed startups to make a friendly contact to those same restaurants before using their brand.

In the end it's less work for the investor-backed business, since with the C&D route they would need to register domains or create pages for restaurants that don't want the service only for their (very expensive!) legal department to receive a letter so they can delete everything.

I mean just send an email to the restaurant so they can submit an authorization beforehand... tell them the advantages, let them make the decision...

Is this something you have personally done? Because this sounds like an internet fantasy to me.

But suppose we indulge your fantasy. A restaurant owner, who is already incredibly busy, decides to figure out how to register a trademark and sends the cease and desist. The venture-backed startup's in-house counsel looks at it, sees that it was written by an amateur, and just laughs. Now what?

> Enforcing it is free:

Are you proposing to do the work of writing up and sending C&Ds for these restaurants personally gratis? That's the only way it's "free".

You're getting downvoted because somehow people think that restaurant owners shouldn't have to handle basic aspects of operating a business such as establishing a trademark to operate their business under. Without a trademark, what are they going to do if, say, another restaurant opens up a few blocks away with the same name?

(And as I understand it, you get some trademark rights just by establishing a business, so you don't have to register the trademark to sue UberEats or Grubhub or whoever)

The problem doesn't seem that related to trademarks to me. These app delivery platforms are impersonating companies, not selling their own products under someone else's brand. The food comes from where they claim it did. The issue with impersonation is that customers who got worse experience (cold food, long delivery, etc.) end up blaming the restaurant for it, even though the restaurant had nothing to do with it.

How is trading under the cover of someone else’s mark not a trademark issue? If I’m representing myself as selling “TeMPOral Pizza” for delivery, the fact that I’m actually delivering pizza made at the TeMPOral Pizza Shop isn’t entire cover.

If I opened up a shop in the mall with giant lit white Apple logos, the fact that I sold genuine Apple product inside would not absolve me of trademark infringement.

(Trademark violations are more than just counterfeit items.)

Yeah, if you try that with a megacorp, they'll drag you up and down the courts until you give up:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/09/pirate-trader-...

It isn’t working. This isn’t a hypothetical problem.

Why enforce existing law, we can you use this opportunity to create ever more complex laws to ensure stake holders that already abused to the condition the law is purporting to address can maintain their advantage and ensure no new entrants to the market

That is all this does, it protect GrubHub, DoorDash and other large players from competition

How, specifically, does this protect GrubHub/DoorDash/etc?

this law is designed to protect those companies who already made billions on abusing existing laws by making it seem like what they did was legal, a "loophole" in the law that is now "closed" for new competitors

They are not "new entrants" in the market, they have a network effect now so it will be preferable to them to sign exclusive deals with restaurants to further ensure there can not be any competition

So the alternative should be that we should continue to funnel VC money into every new predatory impersonation business?

Sometimes it really is a loophole that is now closed, and the government can’t subsequently dissolve all companies they’ve used it, they can only ask companies to stop.

The app could say "we deliver from the Greek place on Main Street" to avoid using the trademark, but still be in violation of the new law.

Also, many restaurants can't get a trademark. My favorite local place is "Joe's Pub" but I don't imagine that's a unique name.

You are skipping quite a few steps here by jumping to "impersonating a business online", which I suspect is already illegal.

This bill says that it would be illegal to pick food on behalf of someone else without the restaurant's agreement (if you're an online platform). The is no question of dishonesty or impersonation, just of offering this service.

This is quite an extreme restriction, IMHO, and seems to be a kneejerk and simplistic response to a perceived problem.

On the other hand, the problem of online reviews is separate and should be addressed specifically, IMHO. At the moment it's the wild West and a breeding ground for defamation. Maybe regulating this should get more attention from lawmakers (though I realise that in the US the 1st Amendment may make this difficult).

Why? The practice involved is in response to the absolute garbage of misrepresentation of a restaurant's telephone number to be intercepted by your own call centre's.

Because if would like to have a honest delivery service that is not faking some restaurant, with the new law you will not be able to provide such service.

It will be a lot more hassle to pick up something.

I don't think it is anyway unreasonable for such service to come to agreement with the restaurant. And absolutely beneficial for both parties.

The question is whether it should be required.

If a restaurant welcomes takeaway orders then whether you order and collect in person or hire someone to do it on your behalf is irrelevant.

That's why I think this bill is ill-thought-out.

If there are shady practices taking place then they should be dealt with with existing legislation and, if needed, with new legislation specifically targeting these practices. Instead, I suspect this will only restrict services and competition, which ultimately won't be beneficial for consumers and restaurants alike.

> If a restaurant welcomes takeaway orders then whether you order and collect in person or hire someone to do it on your behalf is irrelevant.

This is a big if, because existing outcry already belies that this assumption is actually not reality.

Besides, if that’s the case it should be super easy to call the restaurant and ask to be a partner. You can mail them stickers to advertise for your delivery platform by pasting it on their doors/windows. “Official GrubHub partner” could even be a badge of legitimacy because GrubHub needs to protect their reputation as a source of good restaurants.

It is not an assumption. It is irrelevant to the restaurant. The "outcry" is not about that, it's about shady practices and some problems with online reviews, which partly stem from said shady practices, and partly because some people are not understanding the service (this bill won't change that).

All they have to do is get permission from the restaurants.

That's an extra amount of work that keeps new, small players from entering the field. As with a lot of regulation, this is designed in a way that favors large incumbents.

Eh, food delivery is a pretty local business. In fact, if I wanted to compete with these VC-backed companies, I'd probably do something like partner with local restaurants whose food traveled well, come up with some good packaging, etc. Of course, that's not scalable and disruptive.

>food delivery is a pretty local business

?? Food is a pretty local business, but delivery is not. You could say that person delivery is local too, because people mostly transport locally, but e.g. Uber is still global.

To a first approximation, I only care about food delivery to my house. To a first approximation, I only use Uber for places other than around my house.

I grant that there are some economies of scale to having an app that companies in different cities can make use of. But I don't see that as requiring a nationwide company for the actual food delivery.

> Why? The practice involved is in response to the absolute garbage of misrepresentation of a restaurant's telephone number to be intercepted by your own call centre's.

Sure, that's bad and that should be banned. But that's not the practice banned. What got banned is me paying someone to pick up my food for me.

I could still run a website that misrepresents the restaurant's telephone number and intercepts your calls. I can take your order (at a mark-up) and relay that order to the restaurant. They'd just make me pick it up.

You could ask why would I use that service. Maybe for the convenience of being able to order from any restaurant from a single website. Maybe I wouldn't. Maybe they give me rewards points. Maybe there's a discount and they just want to harvest my data.

But really. it's irrelevant why/if I'd use the service. The problem is that the law doesn't address the one thing you've pointed out as absolute garbage. It only bans the part that isn't terrible.

That’s not what the law does. It addresses the problem GP pointed out, and it bans the service you’ve described as well. It also doesn’t forbid you from paying someone to pick your food up for you.

Here’s the relevant text:

> 22599. A food delivery platform shall not arrange for the delivery of an order from a food facility without first obtaining an agreement with the food facility expressly authorizing the food delivery platform to take orders and deliver meals prepared by the food facility.

Why should a restaurant be allowed to ban me from hiring someone to deliver for me?

Are you a delivery platform? The law only applies to delivery platforms. If you want to hire an individual contractor(or just casually pay your buddy 3$ to pick up a pizza for you) you can still do so.

Who's going to setup a food pickup business in 2021 without being an online business? "please fax your order and card details"?

This bill does not require restaurants' permission if you're not an online business, that's true, but in practice that's not really any use to avoid having to get permission.

I don’t understand what you’re getting at. The entire point of this law is to make online delivery platforms get permission from restaurants before taking orders on their behalf.

Everyone is an online business in 2021. This bill in effect requires all food order and pickup businesses to get permission from restaurants.

Clearly this looks attractive to many commenters but it won't solve any of the problems, real or not, and will only raise barriers to entry and entrench incumbents without providing benefits to consumers or restaurants (apart from allowing restaurants to seriously limit the number of customers, which is their right and some do wish to do that)

You’re phrasing it as if requiring all food delivery platforms to get permission from restaurants is an unintended side effect, but again, it’s the entire point of the law.

As to the problem this solves, there are plenty of links on HN alone detailing the harm that these delivery platforms have done to consumers and restaurants both.

Consumers clearly don't think that these platforms are doing them any harm considering how popular they are. Consumers like to be able to order from home through an app from a wide range of restaurants.

This is actually the problem restaurants are facing: How to adapt to change technology and consumers habits? A bit like traditional taxis were blown out of the water by Uber.

Restaurants don't have to offer delivery/takeaway, and indeed traditionally they don't (at least in Europe). They'll have to decide how to adapt and that may include focusing on the in premises experience instead of chasing online sales.

But, again, this bill does not solve problems, and may actually be counter-productive as already explained, and you're certainly not giving me an example to the contrary.

As a side note, and something to consider: these platforms are very good for the taxman as they make tax evasion all but impossible (and I suspect that has a financial impact on more restaurants that they wish to admit).

I'd like to focus on this particular argument, because it's a fallacy I see a lot:

> This is actually the problem restaurants are facing: How to adapt to change technology and consumers habits?

The implication is that technology is an inevitable, uncontrollable force. But of course that's not true: we create technology and the laws around it. Restaurants only need to adapt because GrubHub, et al. have decided they want to shape technology and consumer habits in a way that makes their VC investors money. It makes no more sense to ask restaurants to adapt than it does to tell tech companies that they can't change technology like this.

Put another way: delivery platforms are pissing on restaurants and telling them that it's raining. We can either tell restaurants to suck it up and carry umbrellas now, or we can tell delivery platforms to stop pissing on them. I'd prefer the latter.

That is not a fallacy. That what has been happening, is happening, and will happen. The world is always changing and this is indeed inevitable.

I am puzzled by you putting the blame on these platforms. As said consumers like the service, if they didn't these platforms would have been forgotten failed experiments by now.

Who are you to decide that this is wrong and that people should not be able to order food for home delivery?

You are also ignoring another already stated point: Restaurants are not required to offer takeaway. They do it if they so decide. If you're a restaurant owner and don't like takeaway then just don't offer it and focus on the 'traditional' experience.

It is quite neutral, really. Different, but not inherently better or worse than it was.

We should be careful not to make this an emotional and ideological issue.

The world changing is inevitable, but the manner in which it changes is not — especially with regard to technology, which is created entirely by humans.

But that's not even the issue at hand. The actual technological change — aggregating restaurant menus and allowing consumers to order from them via one interface — is orthogonal to the discussion here. We're talking about the specific business practices that companies implementing that technology have settled upon.

I'm putting the blame on platforms because the change they're pushing involves predatory behavior without consent of the restaurants. That wasn't inevitable in any way — it was a deliberate choice made by delivery platforms to redirect money from restaurants to their investors.

> Who are you to decide that this is wrong and that people should not be able to order food for home delivery?

> You are also ignoring another already stated point: Restaurants are not required to offer takeaway.

These are both straw men. No one is saying that people shouldn't be able to order delivery. No one is saying that restaurants are forced to offer takeout. No one is even saying that delivery platforms shouldn't exist!

The point is that the onus should be on delivery platforms to get restaurants to opt in, not on restaurants to be vigilant against predatory middlemen moving in without warning. That's where this starts and ends.

That says that I can't arrange for delivery without approval to take orders and provide delivery. It doesn't imply that I need approval to take orders if I'm not providing delivery.

The misrepresentation would seem to be the big thing. Someone, let's call them Joe, publishes a list of restaurants online with links to their menus and offers to deliver for the price of the order with tip plus a $10 delivery fee. And has a clear disclaimer that they're not affiliated with the businesses. That seems pretty unobjectionable. And how would the restaurant even know? [ADDED: Subject of course to any health regulations that might apply to food delivery.]

But that, of course, is not what any of these services do.

There is still an argument that some foods just aren't a good match for delivery and, disclaimer or not, some consumers will still tend to blame Sally's Piping Hot Burgers when their burger arrives soggy and cold (or, worse, because of mishandling someone gets sick) rather than think that maybe they should have just gone and picked it up themselves or just not gotten burger take-out. So Sally should maybe have a right to refuse to sell to anyone other than the end consumer. But that seems trickier.

> And has a clear disclaimer that they're not affiliated with the businesses.

This isn’t actually clear. GrubHub’s about page:

“ Grubhub is a leading online and mobile food-ordering and delivery marketplace with the largest and most comprehensive network of restaurant partners. ”

This tells me as a customer that the restaurant is a consenting partner. This is a lie.

EDIT: a commentor below had issue with my use of the word lie here. To clarify, I meant that this is not a clear disclaimer.

> But that, of course, is not what any of these services do.

No, you're misinterpreting it - they don't claim all of the restaurants are partners, just that they have the most comprehensive network of restaurant partners.

Edit: -4 downvotes so far for highlighting a person's bad logic - good start to the New Year for critical thinking on HN; I'll assume they're projecting their anger for the topic onto me, their emotion overriding their logic.

Nowhere on their about page do they make it clear that they also have restaurants who are not their partners listed on their platform.

The given ask that there is a clear disclaimer. I’m saying it’s not clear at all, and therefore the hypothetical has deviated from reality so much that it’s useless.

There are different types of lies. A lie of commission would be like Grubhub saying “All restaurants are our partners”. The second case (which applies here) is a lie by omission. They are withholding very important information in an intentional way.

Since we’re on the topic of food: It’s like if someone asked, “Hey did you eat the whole pizza?” and you reply “I ate my three slices”. That’s true, except you also ate the other nine slices. Lie of omission.

It’s not bad logic. It’s you failing to recognize a basic tactic used by companies and four year olds and everyone in between.

Response to edit: A lie by obfuscation, or a lie by misdirection is still a lie.

If you set something up so it is easy to believe a thing, without ever stating that thing, you are still lying, it is just not obvious that you are.

There's also a matter of SEO. Grubhub is an extremely popular website who's pages will far exceed the restaurant's own webpage's rank, so even when searching for local restaurant store by name, the grubhub page will feature prominently, despite having no relation to the restaurant.

> But that, of course, is not what any of these services do.

Likely because customers don't care. Nor does this law introduce such a requirement. Instead it increases the cost of entering the delivery market, thus it protects extant delivery services from new competitors.

> So Sally should maybe have a right to refuse to sell to anyone other than the end consumer.

They can already do that; restaurants know which delivery services are placing the order.

> some consumers will still tend to blame Sally's Piping Hot Burgers when their burger arrives soggy and cold

A friend who manages an excellent restaurant says that this is indeed a problem. One of their signature dishes is fried chicken, and it is glorious. They optimize everything about the meal with the understanding that it's 15-30 seconds from the kitchen to the table. But those are the wrong choices for 15-30 minutes of travel time. You'd be better off just getting Popeye's. But who gets the negative review on Yelp? Not the delivery company.

I’m incredibly perplexed why people do this. Even pre pandemic it was patently obvious to anyone who paid attention that certain foods just don’t deliver well. Before the internet became a thing, the only places that regularly offered delivery were pizza joints and Chinese food, because both of those survive delivery well! I ordered delivery burgers once, from a restaurant close by, and learned my lesson that burgers are best enjoyed immediately and not 10 minutes later. Why should I blame the restaurant for that?

I think it's a matter of expectation more than anything. Someone who orders food from a restaurant might expect that the restaurant has recipes designed for delivery. I wouldn't expect a top quality restaurant burger when I order delivery, but I'd still be disappointed if it were a soggy mess instead of the 5-8/10 I've come to expect from decent delivery options.

I think it IS a matter of expectation, yes.

If I go and pick up something that doesn't sit around at room temperature well (let's say a milkshake), and drive 20 minutes home before eating it, I'm not going to ding the restaurant for the fact it's melted.

If, however, milkshakes are offered for takeout (reasonable), but then a third delivery party gets involved and starts offering them for delivery, anyone ordering it will have the impression of "I ordered a milkshake. It arrived to my hand melted! 1-star, bad!" Since they clearly aren't thinking enough to -not order the milkshake in the first place-.

Milkshake is an extreme example to demonstrate the point, but applies to anything that doesn't sit well (previously mentioned burger included), with the added trouble that customers are less likely to know what will sit well.

The quality of the food really isn't a binary state, though. I think most people get the idea that delivery food isn't going to be as good as having it at a restaurant, but they're expecting a middle ground if the item is offered for delivery.

Funny fact, one of the best deliveries I’ve gotten this year was ice cream. The local creamery[0] has an option to sign up for weekly deliveries. They obviously bring the equipment to keep it properly frozen (easier than a milkshake I know), and check IDs for their alcoholic ice creams. I suspect that if they wanted to, they could have pulled off milkshake deliveries, although the logistics wouldn’t scale.

0 - https://ilovethestil.com/

local = Boise Idaho. If you were wondering

I've had Jeni's delivered before, yeah. Packed in dry ice it shipped fine. But, yeah, it's packed to travel. Not just placed in someone's passenger seat for 30 minutes.

TIL alcoholic ice cream is a thing.

And it is awesome.

There’s not really enough alcohol in there to affect you; probably because it would eventually hamper the formation of ice. But having ice cream that actually tastes like coffee and bailey’s is the best.

I know a few people who own top quality restaurants. They spent a shit ton of time figuring out delivery. One in chicago does it for reheat with nice instructions on everything. Like a blue apron style setup. A bbq place just won't sell certain items ever togo. Heck maggianos obviously spent time in their take home setup.

One of the problems is that, with some exceptions, if a restaurant offers take-out at all, they probably offer their whole menu. If I look at the menu for my local Greek pizza place, I can pretty much guarantee you that their pizzas, Veal Parmesan, and salads are going to stand up to take-out (AFAIK you can't get delivery) better than their burgers, meatball subs, or calzones.

After seeing a one-star negative review for a mosquito electric zapper because it didn’t get rid of their roaches problem, nothing people do or say on internet will ever surprise me again.

A couple of times I've been tempted to order from Five Guys with one of the services I have a promo with. But then I remember that said Five Guys is far enough away that I wouldn't want to drive to it and, best case, what I receive is not going to be great. Better to grill it myself.

I've had some ok delivery burgers, but it was the actual burger place doing the delivery

Because more people than you think do not understand this and how delivery platforms work (ie. that restaurants do not control them)

If you're a restaurant and some of your dishes do not handle delivery well then you should not sell them as delivery/takeaway but only on premises. Otherwise you'll have to accept that some customers will be unhappy and leave a bad review.

I think this is a learning curve for many restaurants that are not used to this business model. Certainly in Europe it was not usual for restaurants to offer delivery/takeaway, which was only done by some pizzerias for a long time. Now these platforms are booming and the pandemic has made them critical.

> I ordered delivery burgers once, from a restaurant close by, and learned my lesson that burgers are best enjoyed immediately and not 10 minutes later.

Weird. It takes me notably longer than that to eat a burger in a restaurant, and I never notice any quality problems over that period of time.

The ten minutes it spends on your plate is a very different ten minutes than those spent tightly wrapped in foil in a car; one makes the burger a lot soggier than the other.

So the problem is how it's packed, and delivery could be done correctly. Okay, that makes sense.

It's not only about packing. If you take your first bite a minute after a dish is ready in the kitchen, it leaves a much different impression than the first bite you take after 10 minutes in a ride. The extra time spent in the delivery is always going to make a huge different in how the food tastes, at least for certain dishes (dumplings, e.g.).

Yeah. I think if you got delivered a hamburger in a restaurant that had just been sitting for 15 minutes, not under heat lamps, you'd be complaining to the waiter. I think we sort of internalize that our food is going to be getting colder etc. as the process of eating it goes on and we don't really think about it. And, as I noted elsewhere, something like soup dumplings or dumplings generally (unless you pan-fry them at home) are going to be pretty meh too in general.

A restaurant burger is a different beast than a fast food burger. Restaurants usually go for big thick patties, softer breads, and may go with more soupier sauces. A fast food burger is very thin, on a more serious bun and usually has less moisture on it overall. Even the actual burger meat itself can be different, with fast food being a fattier cheaper cut and restaurant burgers being a fancier ground beef.

And yet it still tastes good hours later as leftovers.

If you keep the bread from getting soggy, which is definitely possible (worst case pack it separately), a delivery burger can be high quality. I don't care if it's no longer perfect.

A local (actual, not American) Chinese joint makes by far the best soup dumplings in town. During the pandemic they’ve understandably switched to takeout only, but now their reviews are filled with people that are disappointed by dumplings that aren’t steaming hot inside and have holes because they stick to the takeout containers. I feel really bad for the owners - they’re forced to choose between endangering the lives of their workers or offering a subpar product.

I can't imagine getting takeout soup dumplings. They're almost getting a little too cooled down by the time you finish them in a restaurant. Dumplings that you pan fry at home can work reasonably well but, of course, a product that you have to partially cook yourself is not what a lot of people are looking for in take-out.

For the most part, they're okay, if you don't have super high expectations for the soup portion of it.

Some Chinese places near me have started selling the dumplings they make frozen as well.

The thing is I do have high expectations.

I'd be very happy with good frozen potstickers and wontons. Actually cooking them is pretty easy; I just find making them really tedious. And I haven't really found the ones I can get in Oriental markets all that great.

yeah, getting food delivered generally sucks.. You pay $30* for something that tastes like crap, when you could've made something better on your own in 20 minutes for $5 or less

* in the bay area anyway, presumably it's not this expensive out in the real world

> because they stick to the takeout containers

Technological solution: some sort of return-for-deposit Teflon-walled thermos. Only available for regular customers, of course.

I miss getting those soup dumplings hot and fresh so much that I would unironically pay for this in a heartbeat if it worked.

Before VCs started trying to buy delivery market share and take a slice of restaurant profits, the restaurants that offered delivery were the ones that were well suited for it. Others would offer take-out, but there it was up to customers to solve the travel-time problem, so people generally got take-out from nearby restaurants.

Now, though, consumers are being offered the food they love delivered to their door, with no hint that it might be a bad idea. I'm not surprised at all that they are unhappy that the thing they were sold turned out to be disappointing. I agree that if one understands all the logistical, marketplace, and culinary factors, it doesn't make much sense to blame the restaurant. But one of the glories of capitalism is that purchasers don't have to understand a thing. They just have to have money and a desire.

I think the real bad actors here are the delivery companies here, not the consumers. The delivery companies are selling something they really can't deliver. It shouldn't be up to consumers to figure all this out on an order-by-order basis.

Ironically, the main reason pizza works so well for delivery is because the drivers have specialized boxes that hold in heat, maintains the right humidity conditions, and is easy to handle.

The third party app drivers don't have this, so pizza delivered from them often arrives cold and soggy, and sometimes even smashed to one side of the box.

Who is old enough to remember the McDLT?

https://youtu.be/UTSdUOC8Kac

Dropping the McDLT was what started me on the road to not try 'new' items from fast food places very much. If I like the new offering, it's going to be cut, just like the McDLT. McDLT was my all time favorite fast food burger from the 80s.

I am.

And it was dropped because when McDonalds stopped using styrofoam they couldn't make it work any more.

There is an irony in that. We went from a society that uses styrofoam to paper cups. Never mind that styrofoam is one of the most easily recycled substances we have, while the wax on paper cups makes them destined for the landfill.

> styrofoam is one of the most easily recycled substances

Is that actually true? I've always heard to put styrofoam in trash rather than recycling.

It is.

I had a friend whose father was a chemical engineer back in the 1980s who did a study on it. The cost per cubic yard to recycle styrofoam was insanely cheap. It was just that it required a specialized process that nobody implemented because creating more was also cheap. So it wasn't recycled, but it could have been.

Is it also possible that food-contaminated styrofoam is significantly costlier to recycle than styrofoam on its own, or did this specialized process also take care of this problem?

It is not significantly costlier to recycle.

The problem is that there is no money to be made from selling recycled styrofoam since it is competing with products that are themselves extremely cheap. If we imposed a high enough tax on the original product, then it would be cost effective. However we still have the trouble that we have to collect it, separate it out from other wastes in the waste stream, and so on.

So we could recycle styrofoam. But we don't because it is not cost effective to do so. So it is viewed as unrecyclable. And for that reason we have replaced it with things that are even less recyclable.

>>> The cost per cubic yard to recycle styrofoam was insanely cheap.

No wonder. Maybe volume is not the good metric to look at when comparing styrofoam to paper.

Styrofoam is insanely bulky. The same orders could be filled with a fraction of the volume of paper.

We can recycle styrofoam? This is news to me.

You can't recycle wax paper cups. But they'll either break down in the landfill, which is fine. Or they won't, which is a form of carbon capture, which is also fine. You can also burn it for energy.

We can recycle it. But it isn't cost effective.

Still consider this. Things decompose only slowly in a landfill. But when they do, they decomposed into methane because it is a low oxygen environment. And methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 is.

Therefore "they'll break down in the landfill" is not as fine as you think it is. The fact that styrofoam will NOT breakdown in a landfill makes it ACTUALLY better as a form of carbon capture. (Although the carbon being captured is actually from fossil fuels, so at best it can be net neutral.)

How about composting styrofoam? I keep wanting to try it at home sometime!

https://livingearthsystems.com/mealworms-compost-styrofoam/

I'm not sure where you live, but here in SF, waxed paper and cardboard go in the compost bin.

And paper coffee cups can be straight up recycled here as well, with a rinse.

Paper in general doesn’t always recycle well in practice. The issue is that grease ruins batches of paper that are being recycled by literally greasing the fibers so they don’t stick together into a coherent product. This is a big issue when food grease ends up in the recycling chain, especially in the form of pizza boxes.

OT, but Indian food also travels very well.

Except for the foil wrapped naan. Toasting it briefly sometimes helps...

> I’m incredibly perplexed why people do this. Even pre pandemic it was patently obvious to anyone who paid attention that certain foods just don’t deliver well.

I don't say this with any malice, but a lot of people are just not that bright. Things that you think are "perplexingly obvious", to the point that you can't conceive of not thinking about them, just aren't to them.

More charitably. A lot of people really wanted food delivery in the pandemic who had never use it much before. And discovered, to their disappointment, that a lot of food deliveries were pretty bad.

I don't think there's any indication that this issue is new to the pandemic, is there?

I also don't have any strong opinions about this particular topic, and there could very well be some other explanation. I'm just generally remarking on the common expression of such confusion at other people acting suboptimally; sometimes it's just because most people aren't all that smart or thoughtful.

There’s certainly something to that. Before the pandemic, I would have never thought to order a burger for delivery because that’s just not what one does. If I wanted delivery, I’d go for pizza or Thai food.

But during the pandemic I wanted a burger, and getting my car out sucked (yay city living), so I ordered a delivery burger. Immediately after that subpar experience I thought “oh, that’s why ordering delivery burgers isn’t the norm” and went back to ordering noodles and pizza instead.

It’s the leap from “culturally this isn’t a common thing to do (order a delivery burger), so obviously it’s the restaurants fault that my experience wasn’t as good as it would be in store” that I don’t get.

> Things that you think are "perplexingly obvious", to the point that you can't conceive of not thinking about it, just aren't to them.

And it can take almost half a lifetime to realize this

That other people can have so vastly different brains.

Which is pretty strange given that you see can see clearly a vast spectrum of different mental capabilities (from handicap to genius) your entire life. I guess it flies in the face of cultural virtues about how hard work will set you free.

There are plenty of people who aren't very bright or capable and yet have very "free" (in the financial sense) lives and live comfortably.

Of course there are plenty of people, both bright and dull, who could live comfortably and yet stay mired in debt and distress.

People are kept separate.

In first grade, I was in the "green" reading group, with just 4 or 5 out of about 30 kids. Nothing was ever said about abilities. I just assumed that the groups were random. I was the best in the green group by far, so it seemed that I was experiencing the other extreme of mental abilities. Late in the year, something inadvertently revealed to me that "green" was the best. To this day, I have no idea how bad the other groups could have been.

I remember being the best in AP Chemistry too. I set the 15-year record for the final exam score, permanently changing the grade scaling for the class by 3 points out of 100. (old scaling would have given me a 103 but that became a 100, and even years later all the grades would be lower by 3 points) That class was about 15 out of 350 students who started as freshmen. There were other students, about 50 out of the 350, who dropped out. I don't have much of an idea of what their science classes might have been like.

> I don't have much of an idea of what their science classes might have been like.

Class "adjustment" is usually simpler than you might think. Expect the following differences as the class gets dumber:

- Less material is covered by the instructor.

- There is less of an expectation that any given material will be remembered more than a week after it was covered.

- Hints for questions asked of students in class will be more direct.

- More time is spent on watching movies with themes notionally related to the class, and on playing games (think "chemistry bingo") during class.

Note that all of these are pretty smooth continuous scales; there's lots of room for tuning.

> People are kept separate

Good point. And they "self segregate" themselves too? If there're two kids, and one is a lot brighter than the other, i think both of them will tend to get frustrated when playing together or deciding what to do -- so they'll find others to play with.

Maybe this a bit applies to emotional intelligence too.

One's whole life, one a bit chooses people with similar "capabilities", without thinking about it?

And then, from time to time, one sees in the newspapers what the vastly different people do, and get surprised: can there really be such people, where are all those people

I don’t think delivery choices really have anything to do with someone’s intelligence. Some of the most intelligent people I know have horrible diets, some to the point of nearly refusing to eat anything but a few select dishes, others just extreme laziness when it comes to food. It’s a total afterthought.

In this situation, I think it’s more that when you really want a burger, Chinese food just isn’t going to cut it. A kinda soggy burger is still better because it’s what you want.

The claim is not that you have to be dumb to want a suboptimal burger over optimal Chinese food. It's that it doesn't make sense to do so and then blame the restaurant for the burger not being as fresh as it would be if you got it in-person.

Also note that I'm not claiming that this is simply due to people being dumb. It's just my experience that, in the absence of an explanation for why someone does something "obviously" dumb, it makes more sense to accept that they're dumb than it does to be "perplexed". There's a cultural barrier against communicating openly about differences in intelligence, and it can lead to blindspots if you rely on it too much tk explain people's behavior. But it's my observation that the pendulum has swung so far to one side that many people don't even like to consider that others may be reasoning poorly.

I know people have different degrees of intelligent judgment, but you should also consider the fact that people who order online have already accepted the absurd fees and taxes imposed by the app (19% fee on Doordash, 16% on Grubhub, + tips + taxes). If you're willing to pay extra money in order to get your desired food while you're busy doing your own work, isn't it reasonable to get mad at the restaurant and the app for handling the food poorly?

> people who order online have already accepted the absurd fees and taxes imposed by the app (19% fee on Doordash, 16% on Grubhub, + tips + taxes).

Is this absurd? You have to balance it against the service you want, which is having someone drive to an arbitrary burger joint, wait for your order, and then drive it to your door. That's such an inefficient use of someone else's time that I'd expect to pay a lot for it. It's not clear to me that 15-20% is somehow "absurd". I get mild sticker shock on the few occasions I order delivery, but the sticker shock is directed at my own laziness, not price-gouging. Wasn't there an article on HN just yesterday calling these companies "parasites" for screwing investors, drivers, and restaurants, all in the name of delivering unreasonably low consumer prices?

> If you're willing to pay extra money in order to get your desired food while you're busy doing your own work, isn't it reasonable to get mad at the restaurant and the app for handling the food poorly?

Those standards don't extend infinitely. As the original comment I replied to says, some foods don't deliver well. If you get a burger delivered, it's probably not going to be as good as in the restaurant. This isn't just common sense; it's the type of common sense that a sufficiently intelligent person is usually not going to be able to avoid thinking about. As an upthread comment says, it's fine if you want a soggy burger, but expecting it to taste fresh off the grill is almost physically impossible.

The only way for the restaurant to get around this is by leaving items off of their delivery menu. But this would be a terrible idea: if I felt like a delivery burger, I wouldn't want a restuarant deciding for me that it's too low-quality to even be an option.

Fundamentally,the act we're talking about is complaining in a review that a (subsidized) delivered burger tastes like a delivered burger. It seems pretty irreducibly dumb to me.

Depends. If the restaurant doesn’t offer delivery, and some third party is charging you to perform delivery services for you, why is the restaurant at fault?

Invariably, the restaurant gets the blame for the failed delivery experience, regardless of whether or not they’re responsible.

As the snickers advert correctly notes: you’re not you when you’re hungry. Reason and rational thought are difficult when blood sugar is low.

> a lot of people are just not that bright.

From anecdotal observation, I wouldn’t say intelligence is the deciding factor, but impatience. People don’t pause to evaluate.

I have a friend who lashes out or gives up at mundane life problems (why is this hamburger soggy and how to avoid it) without pondering a solution or cause. Her immediate reaction is to find blame (even if herself), not to consider if and how the issue can be fixed.

But I’m confident she has the ability and intelligence to find solutions, because from what she tells me of her work—including customer and management reviews—she does it in professional settings.

> Even pre pandemic it was patently obvious to anyone who paid attention that certain foods just don’t deliver well.

Before the pandemic, many people had literally never ordered delivery before!

I for one only ever ordered carry-out, or ate at the restaurant. I live in an urban jungle of restaurants, all within walking distance; why would I pay someone to drive to a place that's within five minutes' walk?

Recent months have been educational about both the virtues and vices of delivery food. This has not been an education I would have ever otherwise received.

>> were pizza joints and Chinese food

Don't forget indian food. Much of that cuisine was specifically developed for delivery. The multitude of cultures and eating habits (vegetation, Muslim etc) in modernizing india meant that housewives would prepare hot lunches for their husbands away at work, food which was delivered by the famed Dabbawala network. Some modern restaurants are so proud of this that they deliver food to the table in metal dabba boxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala

"In the late 1800's, an increasing number of migrants were moving to Bombay from different parts of the country, and fast food and canteens were not prevalent. All these people left early in the morning for offices, and often had to go hungry for lunch. They belonged to different communities, and therefore had different types of tastes, which could only be satisfied by their own home-cooked meals. So, in 1890, Mahadeo Havaji Bachche started a lunch delivery service in Bombay with about a hundred men."

No clue about the history. All I know is: The longer it takes them to deliver my vindaloo, the better it tastes.

Amusingly, Indian food isn’t well suited for restaurant-style eating. The meal prep takes too long forcing restaurants to cut corners. It only works well with a limited, set menu.

Depends on how the chef runs the place. Indian food is difficult if one sticks to western notions of "made to order", each meal being started only after ordering. But a curry house will prep things like the curry base before opening, doing maybe 75% of the work before the first orders arrive. Then it goes quickly. In western cooking the skill is in the actual cooking, with indian food the skill comes in the non-cooking prep work.

Restaurant indian food is made in batch though. The food tastes just as fresh and often tastes better after the spices have had time to settle.

There are definitely good delivery burgers. Not every restaurant makes them good for delivery, but we have few around and they are our favorite delivery.

I'm really perplexed by what problems you have with burgers?

Burgers work really well with delivery. Used to order burgers very regularly at parties (GBK in London), it was one of the few things everybody would agree with and find good.

I can imagine that you would have troubles if the restaurant wasn't aware it was intended for delivery and gave a loose burger on a plate to the delivery guy. Gotta be put in a tight box to stay warm and in shape.

> Why should I blame the restaurant for that?

Of course, you should not and you would not

But, to paraphrase PT Barnum: no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average populous.

There are a sufficiently large portion of the customer base who either lack the intelligence or just do not care enough to figure out what is the source of the problem, and will happily blame the restaurant, and broadcast that erroneous blame in person and online. More than enough of these to ruin a restaurant's reputation and business.

That is why this law is a good thing.

My product or service, I should have the right to control it's distribution up to and including it's first sale (especially if it is not a commodity).

Why should regulation like this be enacted due to shitty consumer behavior that is evident everywhere, not just online reviews?

I really don’t know who this is helping because I’m not going to start using a more inconvenient way of ordering because these restaurants want things their way.

It’ll only result in these local businesses losing access to the $750 I pay in delivery each month.

> due to shitty consumer behavior

This is not shitty consumer behavior. It is lying... a company pretending to be another company or a representative of another company... when they are not.

If you buy a fake Toyota car and it sucks, do you blame Toyota then complain when a law is passed making this fraud illegal?

> is lying... a company pretending to be another company or a representative of another company... when they are not.

This law affects much more than that.

It doesn't because you can always ask for permission.

Forcing companies to ask for permission changes a lot. In general, it's usually bad for market competition.

If DoorDash can’t be arsed to ask for permission from whoever to deliver, then maybe it’s for the better that they don’t deliver that place. Sure, it costs more than just adding the place to their site, but the restaurant is having their image harmed by soggy food. If that restaurant doesn’t want to allow delivery, they should have that option.

It's bad for the restaurant to be harmed this way, of course. But it's not a choice between "do nothing" and "force them to ask permission". Under this law, a restaurant might refuse permission for other reasons. And some of those reasons would be bad for consumers. If a similar rule was applied to non-food items, it could be a very harmful blow to the first sale doctrine.

> And some of those reasons would be bad for consumers.

Can you give an example?

> Can you give an example?

Of a bad reason or a bad effect?

Bad reasons are a dime a dozen. Maybe they just don't want to. They don't like the idea, and they're stubborn. Or they made a deal with one or two companies and don't want to allow others, even though some customer would really prefer the disallowed ones or can't get service from the allowed ones.

For bad effects, it means that the customer can't get the food they want, even with 100% knowledge that it's a third party picking it up, and that the quality will be imperfect in a way that's not the restaurant's fault.

Here, let me quote someone else from this same comment page: "Last night I wanted w bottle of alcohol for new years celebration. I already had a few drinks so I didn't want to drive. Unfortunately no delivery service had an agreement with any local liquor stores."

And, I mean, for non-food items imagine how bad it would be if you needed explicit permission from the manufacturer to sell something on ebay. Food's not that different.

A restaurant is already allowed to refuse to sell arbitrarily. They have the right to freedom of association, just like anybody else, with narrow exceptions when it's targeted at protected classes. And restaurants are already allowed to do all sorts of things may depart from the gospel of revenue maximization.

This is the sort of thing we expect to be taken care of by the free market. If signing up with a delivery service is truly in their interest and aligns with what they want their business to be, they mostly will. And if not, that's fine.

> It’ll only result in these local businesses losing access to the $750 I pay in delivery each month.

If you're using exclusively delivery platforms and not getting delivery from the restaurants themselves, I can guarantee you that the local businesses likely never had access to the 750$ you pay. Assuming a tip of say 20% to the driver, let me take the sales tax of my local city which is around 8%, a 10% commission from grubhub with a processing 3.05% fee (plus $0.30 per order).

This means on a platform like grubhub, your 750$ you pay in delivery is paying grubhub 97$, 60$ to government, 150$ to delivery people. Restaurants only receive 443$, assuming you never take advantage of deals they offer to stay afloat, and the restaurant only pays grubhub the minimum fees (they are often pressured more or the grubhub algo will deprioritize them).

Wouldn't this be a problem for any takeout order? I know some restaurants don't offer takeout for this reason.

Some foods definitely work better than others. As others have noted, pizza usually does. And Asian stir fry type dishes are mostly pretty decent. Basic fried chicken (or rotisserie chicken) are fine too actually. They're not totally top drawer fried chicken like you get at a good restaurant that specializes in it but it's pretty good heated up in the oven. Soups. Etc.

And then there are a lot of foods that just aren't going to be good. Basically, if it's something that either cold or that you would normally consider reheating in the oven or microwave it's probably OK. Otherwise, not.

And, as others have noted, take-out you have more control over. There are some sandwiches I'll order from a local place and pickup given that I know I'll be home in less than 10 minutes. I'd be less tempted if I knew it might be sitting in a delivery car for an hour.

I was talking about the specific restaurant mentioned in the comment I was responding to.

Some food are really good for takeout. The extreme example would be Japanese Bento box. Delicious even after hours.

I was talking about the food mentioned in the comment I was responding to.

Seems the remedy is simply to not offer fried chicken for takeout, end of story. A customer picking up his/her own order to take home is certainly not arriving in 30 seconds either.

So there's nothing wrong with takeout; during COVID you might buy it takeout, and eat it at a nearby table. Even outside of COVID, you might eat it in your car. This law is to ensure the restaurant has control over whether it's the customer taking it out (and it's then up to them how long they wait to eat it), or a third party (and the customer has no control over how long it waits before they eat it).

Because otherwise, there is nothing preventing Doordash or similar from adding the location to their app. The restaurant may not offer them favorable terms, or otherwise work with them, but even without official support, Doordash interopts with the restaurant's online ordering system for pickup (or even involves a human to call it in), sends a driver to pick it up ("Here to pick up an order for Steve"), and then delivers it. Nothing the restaurant can do to prevent it.

This restaurant is in a neighborhood. The reason they offer take-out at all was because neighbors just wanted to pick something up and eat at home. That's probably not 30 seconds, but it's way different than the amount of time a delivery company ads. It's also psychologically different if the consumer is the one in direct control of the delay.

This is fair point but what stops these businesses from refusing to do food pick up. Especially, if they know food won't taste good if not consumed within a few minutes. I rather resturants remove to-go option instead of blaming delivery companies.

Legally the only way to acquire restaurant food over here atm is takeout or delivery. They can't just not offer it.

so the remedy is to implement a law that will live forever, even as we expect covid to (hopefully) recede this year?

This specific issue was an issue pre-pandemic as well. The surge in take-out has amplified the problem.

This is removing to-go option. There are apps that claim to offer delivery from a restaurant not intending to provide it.

In my friend's case, it's because people in the neighborhood sometimes like to pick things up. Why should they penalize those people just because delivery companies have without their permission decided to start advertising their food?

Agreed, and this reminds me of friend who started to carry foldable chairs and table in their car during lockdown. They would, sometimes, set those up in the parking lot of the restaurant and eat there.

However, perhaps a solution might be a labeler that prints a label with consume by time and attach the label to carryout container. Or some other kind of disclaimer on the containers. Yes, this adds burden on the restaurants but hopefully, reduces negative reviews.

Or we could place the burden correctly on the delivery company, and require them to work with the restaurant to create the optimal delivery experience. Say, by mandating that delivery companies actually have to get a restaurant's agreement before advertising their food.

Fried chicken delivers great if you leave the box open so it can vent. I tell the bar by my house this every order. The paper boxes that are standard for fried chicken are terrible for it. They work for fast food chains because it goes under the hot light to steam out for 5 minutes before going in the box. Fryer to box immediately makes a literal sauna.

Does delivery tend to be different from takeout in your experience? It does in mine. The gap between finishing prep and me eating it is much longer for delivery, except that the apps almost all lie about it. While your order is sitting there waiting for a driver for 10 minutes, they tell you, no way! It’s not our inability to get a driver there quickly! It’s the restaurant who is still wrapping up right now! If they even tell you that. Then they drop off a few other orders on the way. You end up with food you think came off the stove 13 minutes ago that actually came off like 40 minutes ago. And then you think it came out of the oven worse because the app puts all the blame and uncertainty on the restaurant.

Ordering for pickup has gotten so much easier this year. Restaurants usually will hand me my food at the door, so I only need to spend a few seconds waiting, and the food is just in way better condition when I carry it home myself.

That makes a lot of sense, but personally I wouldn't know. I refuse to use the delivery service apps. I despise them both for how they treat their workers and how they treat the restaurants. If a restaurant doesn't offer their own delivery (as e.g., pizza places used to), I'll pick it up myself.

I've been ordering in way more than I would have been comfortable with pre-covid. I never blame the restaurant, especially when I see the driver taking a circuitous route, indubitably filling multiple deliveries on the way. And I don't really blame the drivers, either, because of how their pay structure translates to incentives.

As the rare food service worker on HN, I can confirm this is exactly the case. Yesterday I watched an order from a partnered delivery service take just over an hour from the ticket printing to the driver showing up.

What’s the problem here? The negative reviews are found on this delivery service app. They would therefore help other customers know that this restaurant is less desirable to order delivery from.

That’s what both parties want.

It seems to me that this is working “as intended” and no intervention from the state is needed.

I can't envision a way you can be making this argument in good faith while actively discarding that the review is next to the restaurant's name and not the delivery service's delivery of that restaurant's food.

For people who can’t understand it, think about Amazon and the various “1 star; late” “reviews”. To think that the same won’t happen with food is wishful thinking.

But in that instance the dish wouldn’t be available for take out either.

If the restaurant sells takeout, why does it matter whether I take it gone to my house or another person’s house?

DoorDashers have a tendency to pick up multiple orders at the same time without informing me. So I’ll order food expecting it’ll take 20 minutes, then it takes 40 because the dasher decided to take 4 orders at once. With a friend, I know they’re going there and coming right back, and if not, they generally let me know and I can reconsider.

Maybe restaurant could timestamp food on packaging so customer doesn't blame them for late delivery?

Wouldn’t this also be bad as take-out then? How is the delivery even possible if they aren’t already allowing for the poor experience through take-out? If it’s meant to be served at the table then it should be table only and then it’s fine right? There’s plenty of restaurants that do this, so it’s unclear how the delivery is causing this issue. But I may just be misunderstanding.

It’s a form of domain squatting if someone lists as you, above you in search, leaving some customers frustrated and likely picking someone else, forever.

I went to pickup a take out order for my wife the other day and the cashier asked if this was a personal order? I was so confused I didn't even know how to answer and just asked "personal order meaning what". She answered, "I mean you're not with door dash or something right, you personally made the order?". It was a pretty baffling exchange and maybe this misrepresentation speaks to some of that.

There’s reports of delivery sites trying to hide that they’re delivery sites when they pick up the order. Normally a DoorDasher uses a DoorDash bag (it seems), but supposedly they don’t use it inside, and then put the order in the DoorDash bag in the car. Not sure how true it is though (it could just be people not wanting to hold up the line)

The way cashiers assume I'm a delivery driver makes me think I'm literally the only person who uses the app.

This is actually the Postmates business model; they hire a delivery person to go to a restaurant, stand in line, and make the order. At no point does the restaurant know of the buyer’s existence.

Well, minus the clear disclaimer, and also minus tipping people at the restaurant (tip goes to courier)

It’s probably because some restaurants have “banned” delivery app people. So, in this instance, the Postmate person can feign ignorance and act like they’re just ordering for a friend (which is a common thing).

With any luck, this will kill Postmates. That business model is deceitful at best, actively a scam more likely.

Postmates is so useful though. I think it's pretty clear in its marketing that it is a service that will go to a store or restaurant and buy the things you ask for, similar to the way Instacart works. Doordash on the other hand will sometimes do this without making clear which restaurants it has a relationship with or not. That causes all types of problems.

I should never be able to force Sally to make me a cheeseburger. Therefore, Sally should have the right refuse to sell to anyone. No maybe.

Using the restaurant's logo and name and in general masquerading as the restaurant's official website pretty clearly crosses the line.

> So Sally should maybe have a right to refuse to sell to anyone other than the end consumer. But that seems trickier.

Maybe restaurants should defend themselves from that by not selling some dishes in transportable packaging. Maybe 'delivery' companies wouldn't be so eager to put those dishes on the menu if they had to provide the container themselves and scoop the dish into it from a plate?

Totally agree.

And how about this: If you get food poisoning from a restaurant, you deal directly with them to resolve.

If the food has been delivered by a 3rd party, what rights to resolve would you then have?

Restaurants can simply state that the food was tainted after it left them, delivery firms can state the food from the restaurant was bad, etc etc.

I agree with the sentiment. But you basically have no recourse if you get food poisoning from a restaurant. Unless it’s a mass event, there’s no way for you to prove it was the restaurant, and even if you could prove it, your damages aren’t likely to be enough to sue.

I had an old roommate try to sue in-n-out after getting severe food poisoning. It actually went to court - the in-n-out attorney completely destroyed him, he was outgunned. They showed receipts for thousands of people who ate there that day and that there weren't any other cases reported.

Reporting food poisoning if it ever happens to you (even if minor) could be the difference between someone else being believed of being shut down.

>They showed receipts for thousands of people who ate there that day and that there weren't any other cases reported.

It makes you wonder: did the lawyer call each one of those thousands of people, did anyone get sick but didn't realize it was the burger, time could be an issue too maybe a few lettuce leaves had listeria on them but it only grew to levels after a certain time and temperature.

If that’s the case and they did not consistently fail at food safety practices, just a one-off, then we can consider it an accident like any other and the restaurant is not culpable.

Advice I wish I could give myself. Don't eat out if you can avoid it and if you do go in person, never order in.

In secret someone who cares less about your health than anyone you know prepares hundreds of meals a day and if they don't come in because they are sick they lose money. If they don't try to hide mistakes it will cost them. If they don't save the company money by picking up food off the ground or using yesterdays soup as a base for today's soup they are doing a poor job. There are very few ways a customer can prove these mistakes unless they are visible upon receipt. Poor reviews hidden from the public is the only recourse.

> using yesterdays soup as a base for today's soup

That's not necessarily a bad thing. There is such a thing as a perpetual stew [0] in which a stew is replenished with ingredients over months or even years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew

And it's not common at all in today's world, for a reason.

So your advice is basically to never patronize restaurants? Seems like an awful overreaction to something that almost never happens?

A worker coming in sick can be a safety violation if they don't wear the appropriate protective equipment (generally gloves and a mask). Picking food of the ground is a safety violation that could get a restaurant shut down, and moreover would open the restaurant up to civil torts. A restaurant is not going to risk permanent closure to save a few cents on food that falls to the ground, especially not in places where they grade restaurants on food safety.

As for using leftovers: this will shock you, but a large portion of menu items in even fine establishments use leftover items (that were not served to customers). Soups, stews, curries, etc., generally involve perpetually renewed bases, where the previous days leftovers "seed" the new day's mix. The meats in pastas and other starch-heavy dishes are usually trimmings from entrees in which the meat is the star. Meatloaves in restaurants always use leftover meats from the day before. Nearly all breads in bakeries involve the reuse of the sourdough starter, and indeed the concept of sourdough itself is premised on the reuse of the the dough.

WTF?

Nothing of what you claim is normal or typical in food service.

Source: I've worked in food service. Everyone takes health, safety, and quality very seriously.

Food poisoning has much slower onset than most people think, and, as I understand it, it’s very common to blame the wrong food.

I think it would be good to encourage everyone with food poisoning to notify a central authority to collect statistics, but blaming a specific restaurant from a single case is dicey at best.

It’s also worth noting that most people expect meat to be the riskiest type of food. In fact, lettuce is much more likely to cause food poisoning.

(Ground beef is indeed more dangerous than solid pieces, but most chain restaurants are pretty careful about their HACCP and are likely to cook it properly. Your average large burger chain won’t serve rare beef patties even upon request.)

Food poisoning usually takes 10-15 hours from meal to symptoms. That gives you only a couple of meals to consider.

About ten years ago one third of the office (50 people out of 150) called in sick, it was pretty clear which meal and which restaurant was the culprit.

Except when the food poisoning is due to toxins and not pathogens, e.g. scombroid poisoning.

Identifying the culprit is certainly easier when you have a whole group of victims.

At the least, one can work the problem to a resturaunt. Not always possible, due to how these things can go, but more possible than when other parties are involved.

This is precisely why I do not use these services.

When I go get the food, I know what happened from pickup to plate. Given how health care works right now, I definitely want to know about all that.

This is going to happen too. Someone will push it, mistake made, lax process, something.

IDK, this seems more like a mixed-bag to me on account of being opt-in instead of opt-out. Absolutely I agree that businesses should be able to easily opt out of being listed on a given delivery platform if/when it causes problems for them.

But on the flip side, I've observed a lot of restaurant owners not having the time, energy, or know-how to set up even basic online things that could really boost their business.

I would expect that many restaurants really benefited from Doordash adding their menu to their website without their knowledge (even if some have, in net, suffered).

Going straight to opt-in seems like it could hurt some businesses.

Not to mention, of course, any new entrants! This law will make it much harder to compete with "the next Doordash".

If they don’t have the time/skill/capital to handle online business on their own, then they can set up a partnership with these companies. That is a minimal effort, no?

The key thing is this deals with a predatory practice.

> But on the flip side, I've observed a lot of restaurant owners not having the time, energy, or know-how to set up even basic online things that could really boost their business.

Isn't part of being a successful business knowing where to put your energy as a business owner? You're saying that restaurants don't necessarily have the ability to make the best decisions for their business, therefore they should be able to opt-out and not opt-in. The flip side of this argument is that these apps can cause undeserved damage to a restaurant's reputation. How do you know what's best for restaurants?

You're arguing that the onus should be on the restaurant to opt out whenever a delivery platform causes problems, but the onus should be on the delivery platforms to create a product that restaurants, not just consumers, want to use.

This is already the case with bigger companies. As is the usual case with a lot "disruptive" firms, that "growth hacking" comes from exploiting some regulatory loophole that no one else has seen yet (e.g. most things related to the "sharing economy").

I'm pretty sure if I just declared myself to be a sales partner (idk the term?) of Cisco, IBM, Oracle, etc and just resold their gear, I'd be in hot water legally because my actions would reflect on them.

There is nothing illegal about purchasing hardware products from those companies and then selling them on to other customers, even without a formal sales agreement in place. This is the first sale doctrine. However software is different and licenses can't necessarily be resold.

And, of course, many hardware products do have software components these days. But, yes, in general you can resell hardware without a formal agreement. You just can't claim to be an authorized partner or reseller given that implies certain training levels, etc.

>I'm pretty sure if I just declared myself to be a sales partner (idk the term?) of Cisco, IBM, Oracle, etc and just resold their gear, I'd be in hot water legally because my actions would reflect on them.

This is pretty much how local governments buy IT gear. Put out a "I want a router" low volume RFP that the tech companies don't want to bother with, and some local vendor will resell to you. Ideally, they're getting a volume discount and sharing some of it with you at least.

But don't those vendors have to have some sales agreement with Cisco? I'm guessing they don't after reading about it a bit more, but I'm just surprised.

Yes they do. They have a special website and phone line to order goods at a discount (in volume) and to get direct support/return.

Cisco/HP/Oracle/VmWare/Microsoft are all about sales network. Partners take care of the sale and they can take care of the installation on site and the servicing.

I'm sorry to say but B2B sales companies have nothing to do with restaurant delivery at all. It was a really really bad comparison.

> Isn't part of being a successful business knowing where to put your energy as a business owner?

If you own a small restaurant... are you really in it to be a tycoon of industry? Or are you passionate about the food and the community?

I know I want to spend as little time as possible thinking about sales and marketing, and just focus on improving my product and making my customers happy.

Most small restaurants fail within a year of opening. It’s a very tough business.

Some app claiming that you are partnering with them for delivery when that is not the case is not necessarily positive for a business given potential reputational risk.

> Most small restaurants fail within a year of opening. It’s a very tough business.

Why is that? Seems straightforward - exchange food for money. Why's that so difficult to make work?

As far as I can tell, every home for sale or rent in america requires a kitchen. So basically everyone is in competition with them.

1. there's lots of competition. restaurants are an extremely common business in existence and to start.

2. product market fit. you think your cooking is good. Do other people think your cooking is good? Do other people think your cooking is worth coming back for in a week, a month, or a year? You can try and do trendy things in food but these trends come and go quickly.

3. Rent and capital costs. It is expensive to fit a space for a kitchen, so you probably took a loan for that. Landlords are trying to squeeze every dollar they can out of you. There may be cheaper options than a leased space like a food truck or a sidewalk stand, but if they're even legal where you are the permits aren't cheap and there's usually a long waitlist. And better locations with more foot traffic cost more money.

4. Labor & management. Most people do not have experience running a restaurant's operations, which have to be tightly managed to both keep expenses down and keep service at decent levels. Bad service will turn customers away for good and bad word of mouth can snowball.

5. Margin. The tendency for new restauranteurs is that they underestimate their expenses and how much margin they need to be making. Prices need to be right for the market you're trying to serve, but you also need to not scare away too many customers. What pencils out in a home kitchen is not necessarily what pencils out in a restaurant.

> I know I want to spend as little time as possible thinking about sales and marketing, and just focus on improving my product and making my customers happy.

That's fine and understandable, but you also have to weigh the risks of delegating those responsibilities to external parties that don't necessarily care about your success because they have thousands if not millions of customers. Not to mention the restaurants that don't want any part of the delivery platforms altogether because they don't like what they're seeing.

In an opt-out model, the restaurant has to take time to deal with (and possibly remove themselves) from a platform that didn't ask for their business, potentially dealing with upset customers along the way. Wasn't the whole point of this idea to reduce time and energy spent on these kinds of activities to focus on the food and the community? If you had no idea that you were on one of these platforms and an angry customer reaches out to you, how does that benefit the restaurant?

It's really strange to see a collectivist for-the-greater-good argument being applied in a business sense here because it's based on two incorrect underlying assumptions: that every business owner wants the same thing (automated marketing and logistics services handled by one provider), and that platforms will always act in the best interests of their users. As a hypothetical business owner, shouldn't I have the right to prevent delivery platforms from using my restaurant without my permission? Say I get a bad experience with a delivery platform once, and I remove myself. Now I have a keep a lookout for any other platform that wants to use my name, all because those platforms made the argument that they know what's best for the restaurants and then didn't measure up. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

> As a hypothetical business owner, shouldn't I have the right to prevent delivery platforms from using my restaurant without my permission?

> The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

We certainly agree on both of these counts!

> Not to mention, of course, any new entrants! This law will make it much harder to compete with "the next Doordash".

Well of course the law will make it much harder to compete to be the next predatory, deceitful company that pretends to be small businesses! That’s the whole point of this law. Some business practices are unethical and relying on them to grow should be made illegal.

Yeah, like I said, restaurants should absolutely have easy and fast recourse against predatory platforms.

The heuristic, "but will restaurant owners ask to be delisted because of this?" should be a powerful force for keeping overly aggressive product managers in check.

I worry that the bill misses the point that these platforms can also be a free or low-cost source of new business. As a small business owner myself (albeit e-commerce), free new customers doesn't sound so bad. (Obviously, for many established businesses, it's just cannibalization of their existing base - but that's not true for all businesses).

It’s true that these platforms can also be free or low cost sources of new business. GrubHub et al can still mail/call/etc. them an offer to become a partner, with stickers and a “congratulations we’d love to do business with your business”.

Totally. That's what'll have to happen instead. But it's more expensive (cost to restaurant ultimately goes up) and annoying.

If it’s costs more for the restaurant to do business with GrubHub then now they have the law on their side to decline to do business with GrubHub on account of it being too expensive.

>The heuristic, "but will restaurant owners ask to be delisted because of this?" should be a powerful force for keeping overly aggressive product managers in check.

You can just build a second or third site and relist the restaurant thereby avoiding the opt out law. Finally you can build an aggregator that allows customers to search all of your sites at once. The room for loopholes is too big.

I think your anger is blinding you to the fact that this law doesn't actually address any of those concerns.

Will there be a "next DD"? It seems that they were hard pressed to make money despite the pandemic. Who wants to pick up the baton and continue losing money?

What I don’t understand is: Uber at least had a vision (self driving) that VC could look forward to. What’s the end goal of these delivery apps that just bleed money?

> Going straight to opt-in seems like it could hurt some businesses.

So, Facebook is indeed right when they say Apple’s opt-in tracking prompt will hurt small businesses?

Can you explain how this has anything to do with tracking?

Opt-in doesn't mean the delivery business has to just sit around hoping that restaurants will reach out to opt-in. A delivery business can contact the restaurants to ask them to opt-in.

Now that I think about it, I think this law could also hurt competition even amongst established players, allowing them to squeeze restaurants even harder.

Imagine platforms A, B, and C. Platform A approaches Daisy's Cafe offering an amazing deal on a delivery partnership, as long as the Cafe agrees not to use any other delivery companies. Daisy asks around and hears great things about Platform A, so she says yes – what a win!

Months later, the quality of Platform A starts going way down – food is delivered to the wrong addresses, delivered cold, etc. All of the restaurants in Daisy's area also deliver with Platform A, so the local customers don't use other platforms – she's stuck. If she switches, she'll lose almost all her delivery traffic overnight.

Now imagine if Platform C did delivery for her without an agreement signed. Daisy isn't breaking the agreement with Platform A when customers order through Platform C! She'll still lose business when she stops working with Platform A, but not as much, so it's an easier choice to make.

In this scenario, predatory platforms are more likely to squeeze restaurants if agreements must be signed, because exclusivity can be enforced.

Of course, the simple patch here is to disallow exclusive delivery platform contracts, but I don't see that in this bill.

We’re at a point with this pandemic that those who will purchase with delivery platform have likely developed some form of affinity towards a preferred vendor or two.

A bigger issue is that few restaurants will survive through the extended statewide shutdowns. Delivery is meant to be a small route of generating revenue, rather than the sole revenue stream. The overhead costs of a retail storefront and operations will destroy most restaurants, if it hasn’t already.

Separately, these delivery apps and services are terrible, unprofitable businesses. None of the platforms have turned a profit despite the once in a lifetime opportunity with all customers being locked inside... all these platforms are optimized to run on VC money as they are garbage ventures that cannot make money. The IPOs are rushed to give VC money a way out of the ticking timebomb.

Unless you think the pandemic has created a significant shift in consumer behavior with respect to takeout--like it probably has with grocery delivery--it's hard to see how delivery companies unable to make money over the past year will do so in the future. And I'm not sure why people would change. The overall take one hears is nice to have (even essential in some views) during pandemic, but expensive and unreliable.

The fact is that mainstream, even upper middle class, consumers won't en masse pay enough for some sorts of services to work when extended beyond the niches when it already does work.

What’s preventing them from doing this today?

I'm definitely under the impression that exclusivity agreements exist in this industry today. But the fact that some delivery apps list restaurants that haven't signed up with them reduces the power of the exclusivity (since some delivery traffic is coming from these other, "unofficial" apps).

Some delivery platforms masqueraded as restaurants to customers and customers to restaurants. How can they opt out if they don't know it's happening?

It reads like what dropshippers did.

I realize you're not suggesting this, but it unnerves me that the way to deal with a weak link in a business is to commandeer that business and blow it out of the water. That's the whole "disruption" culture. All it shows is that a weak business can be destroyed, not that a strong one can be built up.

For a restaurant to work, those basic online things have to be coupled to the production and delivery subsystems. The whole machine has to work. This can only be tested by building a working restaurant.

How is a business to reasonably identify all the different platforms listing their info without their permission? Opt out isn't a good model.

There's also a _ton_ of these businesses that aren't tech savvy. It's way too big an ask

Was impersonation legal in California before this law?

No, but this protects small restaurant owners regardless if they are a legal entity with trademarks to protect.

If my resturant didn’t sign up for a middle man, don’t force yourself in between. That seems reasonable

Careful there... Apple (or any manufacturer) could say the same thing about Ebay. Any sports team or band could say it about Stubhub. Nike could say it about StockX.

I think we can carve out an exception specifically for food and food services. Why? Because of the extremely limited shelf life of hot food. That’s what sets it apart from your other examples.

Actually, Stubhub is a little complicated in that, for example, sports season tickets can have conditions attached to them. Stubhub has lost a couple of court cases around that.

The law does not set any health standards on food delivery platforms.

Restaurants will have to sign up with each delivery platform, and/or delivery platforms will have to sign up each restaurant. Either way, the net effect will be to protect the extant food delivery platforms from new competition.

Lots of items have incredibly short shelf-lives as well. I spent nearly a decade in the live event ticketing industry so I'll focus on that.

A significant precent of ticket sales are last minute. A friend tagging a long or someone waiting for prices to drop. Food spoils and looses quality fast, but so do good from many industries. I think carving out an exception for food is potentially a slippery slope.

It would probably be better to carve out exceptions for any item that could potentially be worthless after some amount of time. Live event tickets, food, travel, etc.

Your "why" is totally arbitrary. Shelf life? Why not dollars? Apple could say it should receive extra protection because it loses 1000+ dollars every time an unauthorized MacBook Pro or iPhone 12 is sold outside of the channels that it controls. (I don't believe that is entirely true, but it's how Apple would argue it) Whereas unauthorized food deliveries are dealing in the tens of dollars, and further, the restaurant is never totally cut out of the loop, since previously-consumed food can't be resold.

The distinctions are only arbitrary in the fantasy world where an iPhone is remotely similar to a burger.

Food products, especially restaurant foods, are regulated differently than non-food consumer goods. And have been for over a century. There are licensing requirements, safety requirements, and other rules that apply to restaurants that don't apply to other businesses.

And those "arbitrary" laws make all the difference in why unapproved middlemen should not be allowed for restaurant foods.

> There are licensing requirements, safety requirements, and other rules that apply to restaurants that don't apply to other businesses.

none of which are addressed in any way whatsoever in this new law. nor does this law add any licensing or safety requirements for the delivery person or delivery platform.

Then let's amend it so those things are there.

Additional licensing and safety requirements aren't required.

In requiring the delivery platforms to get permission from the restaurants, the delivery platforms are deemed agents of the restaurant and therefore are subject to any existing requirements that apply to food delivery.

IOW, the food safety rules now apply to Uber Eats, GrubHub, etc., without requiring a redundant set of new laws.

None of those examples claim to be, or otherwise tey to make you think they are, an official outlet for those goods.

Sure they do, of course ebay hosts used items but they also promote direct manufacturer-to-customer sales for many products. Stubhub actually does sell plenty of seats that were never otherwise available to the public, further, with their stadium maps and use of team names, etc, plenty of people might assume they are buying tickets via an official or authorized channel. StockX you likely have a point -- but it still doesn't mean that Nike approves of it and wouldn't try to shut it down if given some statutory assistance meant to target restaurants but written a bit too broadly.

I would argue that the average person would not consider ebay an official vendor for a brand like Amazon. Ebay is set up to make the seller prominent. (Moreso than amazon does, I would argue.)

I haven't used StubHub in a while, but if they have move to being a first party distributor in some cases, i could see some confusion arising for a consumer.

The funny thing is, Amazon is a terrible example, since lots of stuff there is actually being sold by 3rd parties, not by Amazon itself, and not with any authorization from the manufacturer.

example: https://www.amazon.com/Rolex-Datejust-126303-Silver-Bracelet...

would you shell out $13,000 for this watch from "AUTHENTIC WATCHES"? Are they authorized to sell Rolexes? Do they have any "arrangement" with Rolex? Would Rolex honor its warranty after this sale? Is the watch even new?

My point is that amazon makes it difficult to see who exactly youre buying from and to know that you're getting it from that seller under many circumstances.

Also, there is the first sale doctrine, so they most likely do not need to be "authorized" to sell by Rolex unless you can only purchase a rolex by signing away the roght of first sale. (I'm not sure that's possible to do and am sure it's come up with Tesla, but haven't looked for any relevant cases.) (Whether or not you trust that seller enough to give them that kind of money is a separate issue; I do not.)

This isn't about these companies reselling food, its about them acting as an agent of the restaurant when they are not. They're also not selling me a "cheese pizza" for delivery and giving me one from a local place, they're selling me "company X's cheese pizza" for delivery, when Company X may not want their pizza delivered and has no knowledge of their listing by this company acting as their agent.

It would be the same thing if the delivery company was operating as a resale marketplace for used food ;)

The First Sale Doctrine [1] is what prohibits Apple or any manufacturer from preventing me selling my Mac on eBay.

It used to be that you could buy or sell airline tickets to people. There used to be ads in the newspaper classifieds. The airlines are very happy that that's not possible now.

Absolutely many companies in many industries would be happy to prevent people from doing X, both from a quality control and profit-maximizing perspective.

But if I buy a ticket from StubHub or a scalper on the street, the experience should be the same. Having a delivery company insert themselves into the process means they make accept orders where they don't have enough drivers, have to transport it too far from the restaurant to the customer (many/most restaurants have limits on delivery area for time/quality), etc.

So this seems completely different because the delivery companies are inserting themselves into the process as though they were endorsed by the restaurant.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

But they're not forcing themselves in between. All the customers you already had are still going directly to you. They're just widening the pool of potential customers.

By lying. In-N-Out is infamous for dealing with this. They sued one of the delivery sites for trademark infringement. “But why?” you might ask. Because customers are dumb sometimes and would blame In-N-Out when their food arrived cold of their milkshakes melted.[a]

Sure, In-N-Out was getting more money, but it was hurting their brand (which caused money loses). They never approved being on the site, but that didn’t stop the site from lying and pretending In-N-Out was a “partner”.

[a]: Think Amazon with the stupid 1-star reviews for being “late” or “shipping box damaged”. It hurts the brand of the product being sold.

Sure, I completely agree. They shouldn't lie.

I was arguing that they're not "forcing" themselves in the middle of any transaction. They're a separate route for the transaction.

Seperate route for A transaction, not THE transaction.

The difference is setting expectations and how they are managed.

The restaurant is able to set and manage expectations when people deal with them. They are not able to do that with other agents, unless that relationship has been established and mutually agreed to.

If doing that came along with the outside service, such as what one might experience with a general courier or agent, it is not cheap.

And people get what they pay for and associate it with the restuarant, who did not set and manage expectations appropriately.

Total mess.

Unless you think GrubHub are forcing themselves in the middle of a transaction that was going to take place anyway, I don't think we disagree.

GrubHub are offering a service where they go and pick up your food for you from a place that offers takeaway but not home delivery.

That sounds fine, I can't imagine anyone having an objection with that service, even if the restaurant hasn't signed up for it.

The problem is that GrubHub are making people think they're dealing directly with the restaurant, not that GrubHub are picking up food from restaurants that didn't sign up for it.

The problem isn't that GrubHub are sitting in the middle of a transaction between a customer and a restaurant. The problem is that they're (maybe) lying about it.

As long as they are completely up front about being a courier, and they are doing something to insure food safety, and they deal with the establishment as any other customer, I am sure some people would use the service.

People did it with TaskRabbit, and one could get more than food done that way.

The resturaunt charges xx.xx

You are paying service yy.yy

For a total of zz.zz

Personally, I won't. Unless I talk with the restuarant, I have no idea about availability, time to prepare, etc...

And frankly, I can get my food. I know what it costs for someone to do that and not be way underpaid, and would rather not see people underpaid.

And let's be honest: they will do everything they can to capture traffic, and will end up handling deals that would have gone to the resturaunt and will then leverage all of that. Hell, I would!

So, no. Not interested. Perfectly happy to support my locals directly.

Yes I don't see how this isn't 'passing off' in a trademark sense, when I hear about some of the worst offenders.

I used to order directly from a local Chinese restaurant quite regularly, but when they appeared on Just Eat I ordered from there instead (convienence and laziness on my part). I never thought to ask if they'd actually joined or if Just Eat had added them without consent.

More pondering than a serious question; would it make a difference if they didn't rely on the original business name and reputation? For example, if I created a fictitious "Lucky Dog Chinese" and in fact delivered food provided by the "Lucky Cat Chinese" would that be disagreeable? Almost like dropshipping for restaurants.

California law wouldn't prohibit that.

The next step is "ghost kitchens".[1] These are commissary facilities that advertise as restaurants but only deliver. The ousted Uber CEO tried to get into that business, but not much seems to have come of "Cloud Kitchens".

Some of these seem to be new ways to get people to work for too little. The delivery service is just the landlord; they rent people who want to run a restaurant a kitchen space, sell them raw materials, and deliver the product. Doordash has one in Redwood City. They have Rooster and Rice, and Chick-Fil-A franchisees. That's near me, and it was sad to see gig drivers waiting for their specific order to be ready. If they were employees being paid for waiting time, the next driver would get the next order, to minimize paid waiting.

[1] https://www.fermag.com/articles/9618-7-Ghost-Kitchens-You-Ma...

There are a number of these ghost kitchens in my area available on Uber Eats, some of which are pretty good.

Some of the best Nashville hot chicken I've ever had has been delivered from a place simply titled "Nashville Hot Chicken Shack". Googling them, I couldn't find anything about them. Not even putting in the street address gives me anything. But I did find out the address belonged to another restaurant, which let me realize that they were a ghost kitchen using that restaurant's kitchen facilities. And then I noticed in the app that the restaurant's name was mentioned in small print, which finally confirmed it.

It's also undeniably a good thing for customers as well. Using an unexpected intermediary in a transaction is a terrible experience. If I see a restaurant on GrubHub then I want to know that that restaurant wants orders coming through GrubHub. Otherwise, I'll be much better off calling up the restaurant directly. As it stands, I currently have to use Google Maps as my restaurant portal, using the restaurant's website or phone number to figure out how to place orders. Only if their website is or links out to a 3rd party like GrubHub do I then actually use GrubHub.

But if GrubHub only showed restaurants that were actually delegating their delivery to GrubHub, then I could use it as a portal. Right now it's not trustworthy for that purpose.

Honestly, I had thought that it was a partnership. For one, only a rather small subset of the restaurants in my area show up on Grubhub. I imagined that outsourcing the delivery function of their business would be a net win.

Around where I live, the listed restaurants seem to be mostly chain fast food restaurants. The local pizza place I order from doesn't seem to be listed nor are most of the other local take-out restaurants I would recognize the names of from driving by. I've looked because one of my credit cards gave me a free DoorDash subscription and there's literally nothing I'm interested in.

I don't understand why trademarks are insufficient to prevent this. Why didn't restaurants file a class action lawsuit against food delivery services to stop misusing their names?

I think this law is great, but it kind of legitimises impersonation unless explicitly banned by law.

I think this is just a practical matter: the legal system is not as accessible as you might hope it is.

Not to mention the delivery apps dishonestly jack up listed prices, as seen on these 2 screenshots taken within the same hour: https://i.imgur.com/2HVXhvZ.png

Then they have the guts to charge: - delivery fees ON TOP of that - then a service fee (WTF? you just charged for delivery service) - then a CA driver benefits of exactly $2.00 (why is it an exact whole number? is every cent of that going toward health insurance?) - small order fee - rush hour fee ...

The key issue around all of this is transparency. Itemize costs, be clear how much money goes to each party, and state up front if you’re not affiliated.

In n Out has been a notable hold out from delivery apps for this reason.

"This is undeniably a good thing if you put yourself in the shoes of the restaurant."

Maybe. I have no idea.

What I do know is, the following statement is 1A protected free speech:

If you pay me enough money, I will drive to the Novato In'N'Out and buy a cheeseburger and deliver it to you.

I offer this delivery service to anyone who wishes to negotiate my (extremely high) delivery rates.

This is posted in a public place (is a listing) and I have no relationship with In'N'Out and no plans to establish one.

Now what ?

Apple is a private company, not a public entity. AFAIK, your "free speech" is not protected here.

Companies are people too.

You are clearly not a "food delivery platform" which this explicitly concerns. Obviously you can pay people to run errands for you, including picking up food and people can advertise their services.

Yes, of course that is the case but a "real" delivery service is only one or two contortions away from "publishing" their "listings" in a way that is just like what I wrote.

This law only applies to online businesses. So while this effectively stops businesses from providing this service without permission it does not prevent what you describe.

Then you’ll be breaking the law, as I understand it. Not every statement is protected under free speech.

If a private pilot asks his friend if she wants to go on a trip and split costs, that’s legal. If he posts the offer in a public place, it’s illegal. There is a ton of precedent for this type of restriction of speech.

What if I put myself in the shoes of the consumer?

Now if a restaurant doesn't offer delivery, can I still get delivery?

Yeah it's extremely weird. Nintendo will call lawyers on you if there is even a hint of a trade mark violation yet when restaurants are directly being defrauded there is no recourse.

The difference being: Nintendo has entire buildings full of lawyers just waiting for the go-ahead to crush out your life with lawsuits, while Pam's House Of Burgers has trouble making payroll every week and has never hired a lawyer since its founding.

We're at the onset of some kind of disruption of this norm around IP: If it's possible to automatically detect copyright violations, it's also within reach to give users tools that procedurally generate an infininum of infringing content, none of which can be litigated profitably by the corporation("swarm of bees" effects).

It's very much deniable.

This now forces restaurants to sign an agreement and start paying a commission. Previously, they got a free delivery service at no cost to them. Now they either have to pay or lose business. This is bad for the majority of restaurants.

While I do agree with the original post, I don't like the verbiage "undeniably a good thing" as they are saying there is no denying that what I am saying is true. And to think you know everything about an issue means you aren't willing to listen to different view points. Nothing I ever say is undeniable.

Oddly, that bill says nothing about impersonating restaurants online. Looks like the delivery services are still free to squat on restaurant web space and perhaps helpfully point out that delivery is not available (when in fact it is, just not from that service). That's an interesting way of forcing an owner into "agreeing" with the delivery service.

I seem to remember that back in the sweet usetobe before the internet one of the big catsup companies (Heinz? Hunts?) started suing restaurants for the common practice of watering down their catsup bottles that sat at the customer table. The catsup company was worried about people forming a negative intial impression of their product based on the watered down bottles. The restraunts argument was that once they bought the catsup bottle they were free to do what they wanted with it.

Don't know how that suit came out but this seems like the same deal here.

I think it would have been much better to outlaw misrepresentation and advertising without prior agreement (ie the pizza place that did not agree to partnership should only pop up in the search results if the user searches for it) and there should be a warning mandated like "Startup Inc is not affiliated with the Moms and Pops Pizza. If you proceed, we will place your order by calling PHONE_NUMBER and pick up your order from ADDRESS". It should still be legal for the end users to have a service do chores for them including picking up food but only if there is no confusion on the side of the user what is happening here (incl. the fact the pizza may get cold through a no fault of Moms and Pops Pizza).

Edit: oh, the law would also outlaw food picking apps from delivering from Walmart too ("The code defines food facility [...] as an operation that stores, [...] or otherwise provides food [...] at the retail level.")

Agreed. Misrepresenting the relationship with the restaurants is the problem, not the existence of the delivery service.

As written, the bill seems so poorly thought out that I wonder if the authors has some alternate motive. Regulatory capture, maybe?

Also, this doesn’t ban setting up fake websites to take orders, and then forwarding them to hapless restaurant owners.

Honestly, just enforcing existing trademark law would be more effective.

I think "shall not arrange for the delivery of an order" in § 22599 pretty much bans taking orders.

But yes, it does not ban setting up fake websites, unfortunately. So a food delivery service can still put up a fake website only to tell a user on a landing page "we are sorry, Moms and Pops pizza does not take orders online, how about a slice of Jack and Jill's pizza instead?"

That's just fraud though, if they are representing themselves as Moms and Pops

Fraud and perhaps trademark infringement

I've noticed that Doordash can sometimes do the opposite: if I search for a particular dish or genre (pizza, grilled cheese, pasta, Chinese take out, etc.) I'll often get restaurants that I can't pull up by searching for the name. I thought they were punishing or something, I just now realized they might be doing it to hide from search results or to hid the fact that the restaurants are listed...

I actually think those are the cases where they do have an agreement with a restaurant owner. Usually it's a made-up restaurant name for marketing, since the concrete implementation is a different restaurant's kitchen or a ghost kitchen.

Like I'll search for "salad" and the address is listed as some pizza place, but it comes in a special bag that matches the online restaurant name.

> the law would also outlaw food picking apps from delivering from Walmart too

Only if Walmart doesn't consent.

There was a post a few months go about a pizza place that started getting customers complaining about their food arriving cold and damaged: except they didn't offer delivery. They discovered that a popular search engine was offering free delivery. The story ended with them ordering dozens of pizzas from themselves to themselves and making a nice profit.

The story: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262316/doordash-pizza-p...

How did they made a profit off this?

They delivered pizza base with no toppings. The base was just so the boxes weren't empty.

EDIT and Doordash got the price wrong (I forgot about that).

Doordash priced the pizza at $16, but the pizza place charged $24. Presumably a 'growth hack' to get more users.

The pizza place, seeing the difference, bought pizzas for $16 and received $24 from Door Dash, so for each purchase they were $8 better off.

They also ordered plain pizza dough in larger quantities, for more profit. Presumably because they didn't have to actually make the full pizza.

That makes more sense than someone just offering a free delivery.

Technically they didn't have to make any pizzas at all.

I always felt like the story about the dough was embellished a little bit to avoid being charged with fraud.

They had to produce something that could legally be called a pizza to at least fulfill the purchase contract with DoorDash and avoid making themselves legally liable.

But what would probably have worked would be to pull this off with two restaurants, each ordering pizzas from the other, with them sending the same physical pizzas around all the time. Cold and old pizza is still legally a pizza, just a bad one.

That reminds me of the Raines sandwich. "Minimum viable sandwich"

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/raines-sandwich

So this is "Minimum viable pizza"

Before clicking on this I thought it was going to be about Cuomo's order in this summer that all restaurants offering drinks had to be served with food. I went to at least a couple outside bars that were serving half a piece of white bread with a slice of American cheese on it for your "meal"

They have to claim that they made something that met the definition of pizza, but with the “buyer”, driver, and store colluding they could just lie.

The first buyer is DoorDash however, and if they somehow want to take vengeance on you after you managed draining their funds in an otherwise perfectly legal way, they might just use the non-fulfillment of their initial purchase contracts as a wedge to take you to court (of course this assumes they somehow learned about that detail of your plan). I don't know if they would have any luck with that, but it's easy to prevent this from happening by actually delivering something that's basically a minimally viable pizza.

They could simply make a single pizza, and then deliver it to themselves N times.

Reading through the article again, it is strongly implied that a lot of stores may have a similar arbitrage issue and the DD os getting taken to the cleaners over it. That and I don't think there are any legal issues over this as there were no contracts signed. If anything DD is the one in legal trouble over it.

How would is that ever going to work long term? Most pizza places I frequent offer free delivery, or very cheap delivery once you get pizza for two people. The “growth hack” will never work when you compete with your supplier.

Even if this was somehow going to work, once Doordash has pushed others out of the market, then they would need to raise the price significantly, pushing many to just do pickup themselfs.

More suprising, to me, is that it was ever legal to list resturants without and opt in.

Growth hacks are never about sustainably growing a business, they're just there to fatten it up before parading it in front of the VCs.

Of course by growth hacking, we're talking about the act of using unethical practices against users to boost certain metrics.

The goal is to kill the competition, no local delivery service can compete with a few million in VC funding. Once you are the only delivery in town you can raise the prices all you want and force the local restaurants into one sided deals on your terms. It also has a rather questionable legality

When it's goods and not services (delivery is the service here, I guess, not the food as a good), usually it's termed dumping, and I'm fairly sure it's illegal. I don't know if that language ever gets used for services.

> no local delivery service can compete with a few million in VC funding

A simple ordering form on the restaurant's own website always gets preference from me and seems to usually end up being the first result on Google/Google Maps.

No, part of the problem here is that the big delivery company will always win in SEO.

It doesn't in my experience. Google Five Guys near you, the actual first result ignoring ads will almost certainly be their website or even its order form. Same for every local restaurant with an order form I've tried it on.

A lot of "local restaurant order forms" are actually sites set up by the likes of GrubHub, Uber Eats, etc. Not all of them, but it's one of the sneaky ways they use to insert themselves.

But people like you and me are in the minority.

Most young people I know, when they want to order takeout, go directly to their preferred delivery service on their smartphone, select from what comes up, and consider nothing else.

It’s not clear how that’ll work in the long run, since there’s no protective moat to protect GrubHub once they’ve outspent their competitors. Pizza companies can re-hire delivery drivers if GrubHub tries to charge monopoly prices, and the bigger chains are fully capable of making their own ordering apps.

At this point I currently order my takeout through at least 3 separate small competitors to GrubHub. That these exist while GrubHub is still trying to use VC funding to push everyone out of the market makes me doubt that they’ll be able to recoup their investment without new competitors arriving.

Similar story but with Door Dash. Explanation: Door Dash charged lower than actual price, so owner placed an order and sent just plain dough. Their profit was higher than cost of making the pizza.

https://themargins.substack.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitra...

Now that's what I call making dough!

for even more profit become a doordash driver and exclusively ‘deliver’ these pizzas.

lol. That's nice. I can see from the trademark point of view, it makes sense to stop other people from listing your business in their list, brands should be protected. But providing a service for customer should be legal. It would be the same as Taxi drivers should be able to pick you up from your home to a business without the permission of the business.

The difference between what delivery services like Doordash and what Taxi companies are doing is that Doordash is holding themselves out to be the company.

There's several instances where Company A has had Service Provider B set up a website in the name of Company A, update Google Listings to replace the Phone number and website of Company A with their own version of the site.

Then when an unwitting customer calls the number given, they're actually talking to Service Provider B, not Company A.

Taxi services don't hold themselves out as the personal driver service for the company you're going to.

I totally agree with you. The business of Doordash should be legal while the exact practices you described above are illegal.

The problem is how to allow the former while preventing the latter, in a way that is reasonable for small businesses.

Just prosecute the fraudulent misrepresentation of the restaurant.

Lawsuits aren't cheap both in terms of time and money.

The state prosecutes crimes.

Not if there isn't a law that is being broken.

You mean like "fraudulent misrepresentation"?

But I bet I can’t start a taxi service and call it Uber Shuttle Service for job applicants and build a website with Uber logo, phone number, and everything and when job applicants call me I pretend to be Uber?

Hey why stop there? maybe I can ask the job applicants for their personal information letting them believe they are talking to Uber and if they look like good candidates, I can build a website with information I gathered from them and start my own employment agency, call it quadruple bites or something and then call FAANG companies and offer to place candidates...

I think a big part of the problem is the misrepresentation/false advertising.

However, the goal I think is more sinister. For example, I believe Walmart decides how much it wants to pay suppliers who want to have their stuff sold at Walmart. If a delivery app is big enough, it can dictate the prices and terms of sale with a restaurant and demand deep discounts and forbid restaurants from making the deal public. The challenge is how does a delivery app become big enough to do that? Feels like a chicken and egg problem.

Yes. That's unfortunately how internet business work these days, use 'strategy' to dominate the market, and it has the power to dictate terms and profit from it. Although Walmart market dominance are protected with the shops and locations they own, apps such as Uber or Doordash where it is mainly a utility, the market dominance is not protected in any way. Once they start to charge more to make a profit, consumer can always go for an alternative app for it.

Reminds me of the story of Don Johnson, a professional blackjack player who made $6,000,000 in one night.

Because he is a known high stakes player, the Tropicana casino in Atlantic City invited him over and gave him a discount ("loss rebate") on chips.

Because of this 10% rebase on loss, even when his blackjack win-rate was below 50%, he would still make more money that what he lost.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/04/the-man...

My understanding is DoorDash started out by listing restaurants without their permission. Now DoorDash has this legislation which will protect them from any new startup who tries to do the same thing. (The assumption being it will be much easier for DoorDash to obtain permission than it would be for a nascent startup.)

First-mover advantage has slowly evolved from being a social and economic head-start to being a declaration of candidacy for the patronage of regulatory capture.

Bingo!

Maybe a solution would be to add revenue thresholds. It does seem like many of the new age of internet based companies do seem to exist solely b/c of their ability to circumvent regulation. Uber with employment laws and Airbnb with hotel regulations come to mind.

I admit that I have yet to reconcile my own somewhat conflicted feelings about these recent bills (e.g. the one voted on in Nov 2020 about drivers as contractors, versus this one).

For example, I'm in favor of regulating tech companies from misrepresenting restaurant menus as their own, and extracting a hefty margin off restaurants' barely-surviving profits by merely being a middleman aggregator. Yet on the other hand, I don't think that tech companies are improperly classifying delivery people's labor as contract work and need to be stopped.

Maybe it's that the first is an involuntary participation without someone's agreement, while the 2nd is someone agreeing to work under given conditions?

My opinions are evolving still.

"Maybe it's that the first is an involuntary participation without someone's agreement, while the 2nd is someone agreeing to work under given conditions?"

It's an old debate, the "lochner era" debate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_era).

"Agreeing on conditions" is not enough to make something fair. You may agree because you are desperate and you need cash, you may go straight to voluntary serfdom...

Society and policy makers are fully entitled to disrupt "private contracts" when those contracts are not in line with the greater good.

That’s an argument, but many think this doesn’t work in practice.

Antitrust cases are a good example of this type of thinking working well in practice.

“The greater good” is clearly not the actual legal requirement...

I don't understand how couriers are extracting any margin from restaurants.

They don't. They make their margin by fleecing investors.

Their negative margin.

Right now restaurants are in a damned if you do damned if you don't situation with the various delivery services out there.

If the restaurants explicitly agree to do business with grubhub and the like, they have to give the delivery service a 10% cut. The delivery service also takes a percentage cut on the customer side. I think there's the expectation that the restaurants keep charging the delivery service the same amount for food being delivered as they charge anyone who orders food from the restaurant and picks it up. This forces restaurants to raise the price for all their customers to pay for that 10% cut.

Have you noticed that the prices for food via delivery are higher than the price for food you pickup? That's not due to the restaurant charging the delivery service a discriminatory price, that's actually the third way that the food delivery service takes a cut.

Now, as a restaurant owner, you look at all these facts and decide that the delivery companies are fleecing you. You decide you'll use the waiters and waitresses you already had on staff to deliver the food to your customers, and you'll charge them something like $5 for delivery. Not really that unreasonable, given the circumstances, right?

Well, what happens in those cases is that the delivery companies will list the restaurant anyways. And they'll offer free delivery. And they'll charge less for your food online than you charge them. They take the financial hit so later they can come to the restaurant owner with the data to show that they really need the delivery service after all. They'll undercut your business to get a greater market share. They've got lots of VC money to burn, that you, as a restaurant owner, can't compete with.

Through all of this, customers will leave negative reviews on Yelp, for the restaurant, when the wrong food is delivered, or their food is cold, or their order was delivered to the wrong place. The reputation of the restaurant takes a hit due to the third party's shoddy delivery people.

That's what this law is attempting to address.

So in the second scenario, you get to keep on selling food for full price and the delivery companies generate business for you for free, but it's a bad deal because .. a few people might leave bad reviews on yelp when something is clearly DoorDash's fault? It sounds like a good deal to me. You get bad reviews from idiots no matter what anyway.

In the second scenario you will not be able to pay the waiters you had on staff before the pandemic. There's nothing for them to do (assuming the restaurant moves to carryout only, as is currently mandated in DC.) You get paid for the food from the delivery service, but you don't see any tips.

> a few people might leave bad reviews on yelp when something is clearly DoorDash's fault?

If you don’t have a good set up for delivery, the bad reviews will not be “a few” and it will certainly be more than what you would’ve otherwise had. There are examples of restaurants receiving literally dozens of negative reviews from this in a short period of time.

Thanks for giving so much more color. I'm only focusing on one specific argument, though. I am not ignoring what you are presenting but challenging an invalid claim on profit extraction.

A courier service is extracting profits no more than a waiter or waitress is. Whether it's staff (waiter) or contractor (courier), both are providing "delivery" services in exchange for fees. A waiter offers internal delivery within the restaurant. A courier offers external delivery to the home. Counting the courier's myriad cuts and how it monetizes its services isn't revealing profit extraction. You're revealing how couriers are paid for their services (10% of the bill + market premium).

The courier price (in the app) isn't the same price as the one when you physically go into the restaurant. IIRC its 25~35% higher.

Source - good friend is a restaurant owner.

If I buy something from you for $10 and then sell it to someone else for $15, I haven't taken anything away from you. You have your price and I have mine.

Yeah, but if my marked up $15 thing you sell to someone else is crappy because of your handling, and now the customer associates my name with expensive, crappy product, my brand has been spoiled by you.

You're presenting an issue that I agree with you about but unfortunately what you are arguing is a conflation of issues. The comment I am responding to is one that I've seen/heard in the context of courier services in that there is a profit extraction. I ask people to clarify but they never seem to do so. Instead, there's an echo chamber repeating what others have said without taking a moment to think about whether the argument is valid.

What you are referring to isn't about profit extraction. It's about brands, reputation, distribution rights, etc. These are valid, separate concerns not related to the question I'm asking.

The profit extraction argument is invalid until proven otherwise.

And yet most people don't struggle to realize that when your UPS chucks your package at your house and it breaks, that's UPS' fault, not whoever you ordered from.

This whole argument revolves around a very uncharitable assumption that people are incredibly stupid and incapable of comprehending that the creation of the food and the delivery of the food are handled by two different parties.

If that's the case, the more important thing to do here is cut off the average person from any financial instruments. They're incapable of assessing a simple two party process, they're certainly incapable of accessing the stock market, and allowing them access is predatory. /s

Either you make poor decisions on your own or pay someone to make poor, or deceptive decisions on your behalf. Pick your poison.

I don't think this particular law (AB2149) is just a b2b issue, which is how I interpret your opinion to be. I think that this is a consumer issue as well. For example, as you said, I think unapproved listings are more prone to misrepresent menus and hours, especially the latter during these turbulent times. In one extreme instance, I've also seen a delivery site start listing a restaurant that has never been open for business.

This is such a great law, I wish my State would enact something similar. The real link to my local chinese restaurant is the 3rd link down. The apps links are always first. The only way I know it's the real site is if "pick-up" is offered as an option. I'd much prefer the restaurant got the full margin, than some app.

Even then, I’ve caught Seamless showing restaurants as being closed or not having delivery when they’re open and they do, just not through Seamless.

I wasn’t sure if this was sloppy or malicious, but it costs restaurants customers in a pandemic.

While I agree that impersonation or platforms showing up first in search results is bad, whether the restaurant gets the full margin is a separate issue and currently correlates negatively.

A restaurant that's being impersonated without any agreement/permission will get the full margin, because the platform has to buy at retail prices.

A restaurant only loses money to commissions when they have an agreement with the platform, and that agreement very often also allows the platform to set up those pages that show up first.

So a law requiring platforms to get permission to deliver might end up with fewer restaurants getting full margin!

always entertaining how regulation unintentionally acts to increase barriers to entry for incumbents. in this case closing the barn doors almost a decade after the horse left the stable. you couldn't pay politicians enough for the favors they perform in earnest.

edit:to elaborate, the growth hacks of the likes of Doordash and Postmates doing exactly this got them their start, now it will be illegal to compete with them using the same methods they used. I understand there are also brand protection concerns for the small restaurants. have to weigh the tradeoffs.

What do you mean? In this case small businesses were being abused by delivery apps. Once these apps captured the customers of the small business, they converted the customers to their alternative offering restaurant. This is a good piece of legislature unless I am missing something.

How were businesses being abused?

Do you mean customers use the app to order from X-Pizza, the app then prominently lists Y-Pizza and now X loses customers?

The main issue that I saw was:

1. Customer orders from Big Don’s Pizza (but it’s actual door dash) 2. Pizza arrives late, cold, and on fire. 3. Customer swears to and at Big Don that he’ll never buy from them again. 4. Dominos wins.

Customer orders pizza from SmallCorp through BigCorp.

BigCorp pizza arrives late, with wrong order because BigCorp transcribed it wrong, or because BigCorp's courier failed to double check all the items.

Customer gets incorrect and incomplete order from BigCorp.

Customer calls BigCorp to complain.

BigCorp tells customer to contact SmallCorp if they have an issue.

So now SmallCorp has an issue where even though they correctly fulfilled the order sent to them by BigCorp, the customer (who they have no record of) is unsatisfied.

I've experienced this personally from both of the "red letter" food delivery apps.

Just as bad is when they screw up and add "pick up" as an option for a company who never agreed to take pick up orders. Last week I ordered meals for my family, arrived at the place, they had no record of me placing the order because they did not do business with BigCorp.

DoorDash and Postmates would deliver from every restaurant, whether or not they had a relationship with that restaurant. This helped them grow quickly. A DoorDash competitor that started today would not be able to grow that way because it is now illegal to deliver from a restaurant without the restaurant’s consent. DoorDash is already large and has a well known brand, so this doesn’t hurt them. It does hurt future competitors, for whom the cost of developing a relationship with every restaurant is cost prohibitive.

That makes sense, I see that point, but I think that stopping the bleeding is more important. Moreover the new set of rules can also benefit small competitors in the delivery space by allowing them to sign exclusive agreements with small businesses.

It may hurt future competitors but the law is still good because it protects the reputation of local businesses. This is like complaining that its illegal to pollute the local river. Or those arguments from backwards nations that they should be allowed to pollute like the western world did in the 1900s. Yes, that makes you money, but individual profits are rarely collectively beneficial.

Yea, I do wonder if this will shut the door on any future high growth independent startups in the space to be created locally.

DoorDash started their business doing exactly this in Palo Alto, and likely wouldn’t have been able to raise the funds or grow at the pace they did without this strategy.

On one hand, you could say good, these sorts of businesses are exploitative. But I’m not sure that the industry is a net negative as a whole, and this law could shut the door on a more sustainable model.

It seems like an agreement or explicit description of what is happening (the delivery service is providing the food, not the restaurant) is going to be part of any sustainable model.

> Doordash and Postmates doing exactly this got them their start, now it will be illegal to compete with them using the same methods they used.

Waiting for a company with even worse practices, to be able to compete most effectively, doesn't seem like a net win.

The barn door needs to be closed. I don't care if it means there won't be more doordashes if the only way those companies can exist is by scamming customers and exploiting restaurants. I don't see why this is a problem. They're called "growth hacks" for a reason. If your concern is that people won't be able to compete with DoorDash now without breaking the law, maybe DoorDash should be penalized for past misbehavior... If you follow this "but banning this will prevent competition!" logic to its conclusion now it's logically inappropriate to make all sorts of things illegal because fraudsters got rich doing them and it would prevent competition.

Personally I think it's possible for delivery apps to succeed without breaking the law. Similarly I believe a cab-hailing app can succeed without breaking the law. The fact that the big players in both markets have made "regulatory arbitrage" and lawbreaking a core part of their business model (protected by massive amounts of venture capital and highly paid lawyers) is not a reason to get rid of the laws they broke.

I agree with you on cab-hailing given that cabs were such a miserable experience in so many cases. (Though I expect usage will certainly go down as prices rise and coverage may get thinner as a result.)

I don't know about prepared food delivery. Dominos makes it work well. A lot of Chinese restaurants do, usually for a pretty small delivery radius. But there are a lot of things that just don't have a critical mass of people willing to pay for what 30 minute delivery costs. (On the other hand, the consensus seems to be that grocery delivery, or just pickup, is going to stay fairly common going forward.)

It does seem messed up that we see a bad behavior, create a law to ban that behavior, and the law's biggest beneficiary is the company doing the bad behavior.

On other hand should then the bad behaviour be allowed to continue forever? Isn't something late better than never?

Yes but if you don’t also punish the companies who did the bad thing then you end up just giving them a moat.

I’m of two minds about our legal system in this regard. It’s nice that you don’t really ever have to be worried about getting punished for things you did in the past suddenly being declared illegal but in doing so it rewards entities who have no conscience. And large groups of people acting together are quite good at silencing individual consciences.

yea right now we are simply incentivizing going after unregulated space as aggressively as possible before laws are written for them. writing regulation after the deed is done tackles symptoms while fueling root cause.

Exactly. If I'm in California and I want to challenge the incumbents with my cool new idea about how to do delivery better, now I can't. There's no way to effectively scale a sales team in the beginning to reach out to all these restaurants. And as you said, all the successful incumbent players already used this strategy to become big, now this won't materially affect them. They already have sales agreements in place with all the biggest sellers on their platforms.

The incumbents spent a lot of investor money to get where they are today.

DoorDash, for example, started in San Francisco with something like 75 restaurants. That feels doable even with this bill. Today DoorDash is worth something like $15 billion. If you actually have a better idea and can execute, you will find investors.

> There's no way to effectively scale a sales team in the beginning to reach out to all these restaurants.

Sure their is. There's a whole system dedicated to it. You make a brochure describing the service you want to offer to the restaurants. There are then companies that will print as many copies of that brochure as you ask them to, put them in envelopes, and mail them to addresses on a list you provide. (There are companies that will make the list for you, too).

Combine that with phone calls to the restaurants you think would be most beneficial to get on your service. Three salespeople using phones could contact 10% of the restaurants in Los Angeles in under a month, and all of them within a year.

Restaurant delivery is local. You don't have to compete with the incumbents nationwide right from the start. You can do it one city at a time.

> growth hacks

Tech speak for: breaking the law.

But hey, money, so who cares if we ruin a bunch of lives and make the world a worse place? Isn't that what technology is all about?

Move fast and break people.

I think "growth hacks" are "anything goes short of breaking the law".

If companies need to exploit small businesses to compete, they shouldn't be in business in the first place. Boo hoo to all the stillborn future door dashes who wont be able to exploit local businesses.

Doesn't that apply equally to every single law ever written? In a just world maybe the incumbents would pay something, but "somebody found a new way to hurt people, and it wouldn't be fair to everyone else who also want to hurt people but haven't yet" doesn't really address the actual problem - that people are being hurt.

Yet another law to reduce competition in the delivery space and help existing monopolies. I'm sure GrubHub and DoorDash are cheering.

Indexing and aggregating data is already covered by numerous laws. If Google can aggregate restaurant listings without permission then why can't others? Linking is ok, showing a call button is ok, but delivering isn't?

The law around copyright is clear: you can't copy a restaurants menu without permission the same way you can't copy someone's blog post. This should be enough.

If I want to pay a service to drive, purchase and deliver something for me it should be a human right, the same way that anyone should be able to walk into a restaurant and order without being refused service.

Why don't restaurants want delivery companies doing this? The typical argument is bad Yelp reviews. Instead of blaming delivery companies why not blame Yelp for not authenticating their reviews? Same way that you shouldn't be able to leave an Amazon review without buying the product you shouldn't be able to leave a yelp review without booking a table at the restaurant. It's Yelp's fault for not authenticating reviews. Restaurants should be benefiting from delivery companies distributing their products, and there is nothing preventing them from offering direct to consumer deliveries themselves

> Why don't restaurants want delivery companies doing this?

Why can't delivery services ask for permission before listing food from restaurants first? Why do they feel the need to impersonate restaurants, steal their menu, their trademark while never disclosing to the client that the restaurant has absolutely no part in that deal? Why can't delivery services behave in an ethical fashion that doesn't involve fraud?

When your business model is so rotten you need to lie on both ends to make money (restaurants and clients), well you shouldn't be in business at all.

Why can Google aggregate websites without author permissions?

Data protection laws already exist.

I'm not arguing it's good or bad. I'm just saying that since the laws won't be applied retroactively it equates to creating a huge barrier for new startups entering the field. Instead of promoting competition, existing leaders will be able to put ever more pricing pressure on restaurants.

> Why can Google aggregate websites without author permissions?

Because you can't even tell the difference between a fraudulent delivery business and a search engine aggregating a bunch of links? OK...

And yet, this is how everything else in the world works.

I'm free to go buy 12 packs of Coke and resell them. I don't have to ask Coke if I can sell their product. I can even drive and deliver them to people if I want.

> Why do they feel the need to impersonate restaurants, steal their menu, their trademark while never disclosing to the client that the restaurant has absolutely no part in that deal?

Steal is a misleading term, as it implies that the restaurant is not able to use that menu. Delivery services are extracting and copying the information in the menu. They don't even show photos of the menu as far as I'm aware.

I don't see anything unethical here. They offer delivery of goods. You pay them, they pay their supplier (the restaurant), and they deliver you the goods. It's not any different than a restaurant, except their service is delivering food instead of converting raw ingredients into food.

If this is really unethical, why aren't we targeting drop shippers? They're even worse, they actually rebrand the goods so you can't tell who actually manufactured it. They play the exact same role; their only service is providing delivery for goods someone else manufactured.

> I'm free to go buy 12 packs of Coke and resell them.

12 packs of Coke isn't prepared food.

That's the difference between you buying and selling cans of Coke and DoorDash reselling some sushi without the restaurant's approval.

It is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it does make it harder for newer businesses to enter the space. However, from what I have been able to piece together, the real culprits here are DoorDash and GrubHub, by listing restaurants without permission/agreements in the first place, necessitating the creation of this law. You're probably right that GrubHub and DoorDash are cheering at the moment, unless the law gets applied retro-actively (though I highly doubt that).

> Indexing and aggregating data is already covered by numerous laws. If Google can aggregate restaurant listings without permission then why can't others? Linking is ok, showing a call button is ok, but delivering isn't?

Searching for information on the internet and having food delivered are not the same experience; I'm usually not "hangry" when my search results take too long to come up, and/or are not what I was expecting. Even so, I usually blame Google for the bad results. It "should" be the same for food delivery services as well, where people "should" blame DoorDash/GrubHub, but that rarely happens. For better or worse, it is the restaurant that takes the blame, and risks losing future business.

Most people I have spoken to regarding this issue were under the assumption that the delivery service already had agreements in place with these restaurants. A lot of these people are business owners themselves, and were surprised to find out that no such agreements existed; much like I was when I first found out about this issue.

> The law around copyright is clear: you can't copy a restaurants menu without permission the same way you can't copy someone's blog post. This should be enough.

True. It "should" be enough, but in practice, it rarely is. Most companies operate knowing that legal processes are lengthy and expensive and take that into account when modeling their business practices.

> Why don't restaurants want delivery companies doing this? The typical argument is bad Yelp reviews. Instead of blaming delivery companies why not blame Yelp for not authenticating their reviews?

When you're a small-business owner losing business due to the activities of some third-party service you did not authorize to represent you in the first place, you're usually not looking to blame another third-party service for the bad reviews you didn't know you were getting; especially one whose "business-model" was to blackmail restaurants to take down bad reviews. As a business owner, it is my right to know my customer and know anyone who is (mis)using my brand without my permission.

> Restaurants should be benefiting from delivery companies distributing their products, and there is nothing preventing them from offering direct to consumer deliveries themselves.

A handful of restaurants I order from on DoorDash/GrubHub usually have their own delivery crew. It isn't a requirement for every restaurant to offer delivery. Elsewhere in this thread, there was the issue of certain food items (usually the restaurant's speciality) having very precise kitchen-to-table time requirements. It is hard for a restaurant owner to control their product when they don't have any control over the delivery process. And when they choose to not have delivery, they are bypassed entirely by these third-parties. Seems perfectly fine for the restaurant to fight back against such practices.

EDIT: fixed typo

Market forces will have the opposite effect: leaders in delivery will monopolize further and have even more pricing power, taking ever larger share from restaurants.

Instead we could have had lots of delivery companies competing on price.

Apple may want to control the purchasing experience by only selling their products at Apple Stores. Should I not be able to pay someone for the service of going to the store and buying an iPhone? Is food really that different? This issue already exists in e-commerce: as a buyer do I complain to the delivery service such as UPS or the seller?

True. It is sad that market forces may and likely will have the opposite of the intended effect. Personally, I like the idea of having more options to have healthier competition in the market.

It is also true that the issue is very similar to the one you describe in the e-commerce world. However, I would argue that food delivery is specifically very different from most other products/services. Food is a need; not a want, and poor experience usually produces a stronger-than-usual emotional response... we have all been "hangry" at some point in time. IMO, that specific emotional response is the key differentiator. Hangry customers that are usually unaware of the nuances of the food delivery industry and its practices, usually end up blaming the restaurants. It also doesn't help that feedback mechanisms built into most delivery apps are limited (although I've seen improvements in that area in more recent times).

Lately, I just call the restaurant and do a pickup order. I get the food a lot faster and I don’t end up paying $40 for a $16 pizza. There are some times when delivery is great, maybe I’m sick or have had a couple beers, or don’t have my car; but those times are few and far between (for me). DoorDash and friends have convinced folks that delivery food is great. I think it kind of sucks.

If cloud-provider X is providing a managed-service A , which is otherwise available as an open-source project Y. Does X need an agreement from Y to run the managed service ? If X does a bad job of providing value from Y, isn't X showcasing Y in a bad-light as well?

software licenses allow for this, so in this scenario there is generally already an agreement between the creators and the consumers / distributors over what uses of the product are considered fair.

Depends on how Y is licensed. A lot of open source projects are now specifically adding clauses preventing AWS etc. from offering their product as a hosted service.

Well, pseudo-open source licenses. They're certainly not OSI approved, which is the benchmark most go by. And it's not really a "lot," in part because most organizations won't touch open source software that isn't on a usually fairly short list of licenses approved for use.

This feels kind of like some sort of regulatory capture by DoorDash, etc now that they are big enough.

Is there any way that this wouldn’t stifle any new competition?

This was my thought too. This law is a huge barrier to entry for any new delivery apps in California.

Not that unreasonable I guess?

Even an App is free, it doesn't mean you can distribute it without permission? I would say the case apply to restaurants as well. I can see good restaurants leverage this to negotiate favorable terms with platforms.

If a person decides to buy a pizza from X and then sell it to Y, don't they have a right to?

It's a good question. There's two parts to it, whether the law allows for that, and whether or not the law should allow for it?

There are certainly some classes of items/products/services that allow X to legally bar Y from selling it to Z: airline tickets, sub-leasing apartments, software etc.

I think the core issue here is that some platforms were creating websites and phone numbers to impersonate the companies. In practice it's a man-in-the-middle attack. This is what the law seems to intend to stop.

I'm pretty sure that if I falsified a website to resell services or products on behalf of a larger company I would get slapped by a lawsuit, trademark or otherwise, but it seems that for small restaurants the government felt it needed to step up.

Then why not make impersonation illegal? If they enforce making reselling illegal proactively they can enforce making impersonation illegal just the same.

This is overreach. I would be rightly pissed if I lived in CA.

Someone else has mentioned that impersonation is certainly already illegal, and the right solution would be prosecution instead of making a new law, and I agree. I'm not from CA/US so I have no idea why the legislators felt the need for a new law.

Part of this is that it’s really expensive to litigate that nuance in court because even if you believe you’re correct, a company like GrubHub can continue to do business for years and years while dragging this out through the courts. Especially because of covid, many cases like this are already backed up and GrubHub could probably be happily continuing to fleece small businesses for over half a decade.

Also, if a judge for whatever reason doesn’t agree with it, say, “if the government wanted trademarks to be enforced in this manner they’d pass a law about it, no deal” (this happens Eg. An argument that made it all the way up to the Supreme Court, taking years and years to do so, is that discriminating against trans people isn’t discriminating on the basis of sex because if legislature intended it that way they’d say it more explicitly in law. Imagine how many trans people were fired for being trans while this thing was going through the courts.) then now you have to pass legislature again.

Impersonation is illegal, but GrubHub would argue that their logos are everywhere on these menus and it’s clear that they’re acting as agent.

To resolve this under existing law we’d need to wait for a lawsuit to roll through the courts. The legislature passes laws all the time that are somewhat duplicative to clarify their intent. The law isn’t a normalized database, and that actually speeds things up.

>GrubHub would argue that their logos are everywhere on these menus and it’s clear that they’re acting as agent

Which is obvious to anyone who can and does read text. It seems to me that CA protects businesses not from impostors, but from illiterate who cannot differentiate delivery from production and they just rush to review on completely separate review platforms (it is wrong even if delivery contracted with production beforehand, imagine an angry customer reviewing bricks from a brick factory because a reseller brought them half a trailer of bricks broken in half). I bet that when you call a number, they even introduce as “grubhub support”, not as a restaurant. Not only this law treats a symptom rather than a disease, it also allows established monopolies who first used this “loophole” to retain their status in the future.

As of the problem as a whole - restaurants with their own delivery usually have a much worse service than aggregators’. Claims that “they just take our markup” is nonsense, because in practice people do value predictability and ratings of separare delivery services, while they cannot really stick a lever into many different companies that produce nice food but their delivery guys simply suck “because it’s small place and they have to meet ends”. The alternative is not their own delivery, the real alternative is to shutdown. Pandemic changed markets and fault tolerances drastically and those who ignore these facts are unlikely to bloom in it anyway.

I don't think so? Its that you cant claim to be an agent of a company if you have no financial/contractual connection with the company. Image some sleazy guy went around town pretending to work for you. Its illegal.

I think the issues is a problem of transparency. I deliver for Postmates and I really think that most of the customers don't really understand that they might be ordering from a restaurant that isn't partnered with Postmates. The knock on effect is that often the menu isn't really correct, so the customer gets their order "wrong" and calls the restaurant to complain.

It seems like a form of passing-off, which has long been regarded as worthy of proscription.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but companies (and individuals) pass off things all the time. Shipping is perhaps the most obvious example. If I'm an eBay seller and ship something to you, once I give you a tracking number, it's mostly between you and UPS. (Unless, e.g., an item was improperly packed and UPS won't honor a claim, etc.)

That isn't the case with these delivery services.

If ANYTHING is wrong with your order, they will refer you to the business that cooked the food unless you blow them up on the phone.

> they will refer you to the business that cooked the food unless

This hasn't been my experience. Every time I've used Grubhub or Postmates and used their form to submit an issue with an order, the services have always either refunded me the issue or provided credit. I've never had to deal with the restaurant, unless I wanted something outside of money.

It's been my experience multiple times or I wouldn't have mentioned it

If you have a complaint, they just refund you right away. I think they know customers could start issuing chargebacks through the credit card company and they wouldn’t have a way to defend themselves against that.

Nope.

"Passing off" in this context doesn't mean something being passed to another party, like a sportsball player making a pass.

Rather, it's a common law term for selling an item while misrepresenting its origin [1] - for example, if an ebay seller claims to sell real rolexes and sends out fake rolexes, they have 'passed off' the fakes as real. This can happen even in the absence of registered trademarks.

Of course, most of the historical examples are of copycat products - but the definitions used on Wikipedia sound like it might cover misrepresenting restaurant partnerships - particularly if the restaurant's reputation is besmirched by inept deliveries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_off

Then the law should be about making it clear status of the restaurant. Just forbidding everything seems like wide sweep action that can stifle a lot of other good/innovative business models. Not something government should do.

It is far more unpredictable to litigate based on intent and public perception.

If an app displays a phone number but doesn’t say it belongs to the restaurant, is that making the current partnership clear or unclear? It’s a question left to precedent, which means there is a chance the legislation would not have teeth.

Instead of throwing restaurant owners into that mess, the new law we have today forbids a specific set of provable behaviors.

All the law has to say is that the delivery service must note next to their restaurant advertisement that they are not affiliated with or an agent of that restaurant.

This would be a simple provable thing.

Even if there's no real impersonation involved, the reality is that a lot of consumers, understandably, are going to sort of lump the food as delivered as something the restaurant has responsibility for. After all, none of us have a lot of patience for companies that take the attitude of "Not our problem. This other company was responsible for that. Take it up with them."

This is especially true here as, historically, restaurants were responsible for their own delivery. To most people, these services are just something that the restaurant contracted out for and is still basically on the hook for.

> as something the restaurant has responsibility for

Exactly. It's not unreasonable for customers to make the assumption that a restaurant has entered into an explicit contract with a delivery service, the same way we hold them accountable for the ingredients they select. It's a very different mindset from something like postal delivery from FedEx or UPS, where we are more likely to treat each party as separate entities.

If everyone behaves then there is no problem with this setup, however if the middleman is improperly suggesting that y is buying directly from X when they are taking a cut then perhaps a reasonable solution is to ban middlemen altogether.

I believe every country has laws against distributing food if you don't have some sort of approval from some sort of health and safety department.

If you do it once, nobody is going to care, but if you try and make a business out of other people's food, you'd best be compliant.

Not if you're using X branding to market the pizza to Y.

Especially, not if the pizza being resold doesn't live up to X quality standards because it got cold.

Try reselling from any major fast food restaurant, they'll stop selling to you, and if you paid different people to do the pickup, I bet you would get sued.

Is that true? I've never used any of these services but, around where I live, I'd say most of the listed restaurants are national fast food chains. Of course, these companies may well have agreements will all of them.

They have, but not if they pretend to be X or to be somehow contracted by X to do deliveries if that is not actually the case.

absolutely; but they can't pretend to be X at all

If a person decides to open their home kitchen and sell food to the general public, don't they have a right to?

If they get a license first. As long as the license process is reasonable and non-discriminatory, what's the issue?

Threads like this one remind me just how different the US is from Europe. It's astounding to think that it was even possible until now for delivery apps to operate in this way, or that this is somehow a controversial issue.

Thanks to the lobbying system, most laws and regulation in the US serve to protect and enrich moneyed interests beyond all else. If something is actually collectively beneficial to the wider populace, its a happy accident. Politics in the US make much more sense when understood through the lobbying lens.

Yeah there was that infamous study: "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

Maybe I don't understand the issue correctly, but several services exist in .cz that you call, tell them „I need X from shop Y“ (any shop, incl. food) and they will go there, buy it and deliver it. I don't think this should be forbidden (yes, I get potential quality complains mistakenly directed to the restaurant, but you already have the same problem with any external delivery service or reseller...).

Example of such service (they even have an English website): https://idodo.cz/en/products/dodo-courier/

(of course the impersonating issue is different)

This is great news. One of my customers owns a small chain of pizza restaurants. One of the delivery apps kept hounding them to sign up, but they already offer delivery, so they repeatedly declined. Eventually the app listed them on the app without their permission, using their logo and everything, and set the prices lower than what it was sold for. Every time an order came in, someone from the app would call the store and place an order for pickup and then one of the drivers would pick it up.

Disgusting business practice.

This seems like a very broad solution to a very specific (albeit large) problem. The main thing I keep seeing mentioned is impersonation. That can be solved without requiring explicit agreements, and may be counterproductive in some cases.

Imagine Joe’s Tapas actually needs to rely on deliveries during COVID and isn’t equipped to do it themselves. With this law they’d need an explicit contract with GrubHub or the like and that would surely include “we can do business using the Joe’s Tapas name for X”. There’d be no room to change the contact and even less protection for Joe’s Tapas having their brand ruined.

Why not solve the more narrow impersonation problem? Explicit transparency requirements and hefty fines for companies that run aground of them.

In N Out sued one of the delivery services. I forgot which one. Essentially they didn’t want their brand to be ruined by shoddy drivers delivering cold and soggy food. I agree that this is needed.

What’s exactly the issue here?

In my eyes, I’m paying for a service that does the ordering as well as delivery of food.

What’s the difference between me calling in and having to physically drive to a location to pick it up and doordash doing the ordering on my behalf and then having one of their drivers get it for me?

These companies copy my menu, images and all. Mark up the prices incredibly. Market my menu to customers with inflated prices as if they are the restaurant prices. Then they also charge a delivery fee on top.

Customer drives by the bricks a week later and keeps driving because I have terrible prices.

Worst of all I have no idea the transactions are happening, and the companies are directing drivers to not divulge they are not the actual customer.

Curious how they are getting your menu?

Do you have a website and they scrape it? Or did they physically pay a mechanical Turk or some similar process to type it out, then mark it up 20%+?

I think they probably Turk it with drivers, and just hand jamb it with the menu board photos.

Looks like this is from Lorena Gonzalez, the author of the notorious AB5. Like that law, it seems rather too broad. By my reading it would ban a hypothetical app that worked on behalf of customers to deliver orders, even if the app explicitly mentions it is not affiliated with the restaurant or business. This doesn’t seem like a good thing for Californians.

By the look of it, this gives restaurants full control over how their product reaches the customer. It basically outlaws competition in the food delivery market, to the obvious benefit of restaurants and incumbents.

There is an obvious problem in how many of the food delivery companies represent the restaurants they deliver from, but this goes way beyond addressing that particular problem.

Glad this is just a CA thing.

Only problem with this is definitions. Why does it need to refer to "online delivery platforms" when it could refer to anybody that poses to deliver the food for you without express permission of the business owner?

I mean, if the worry is that the owner should be able to have say in how the food is to be delivered, it should not matter how the actual order was made, whether it was through online platform, by phone, mail or pigeon?

So, if I somehow do this without "online" component then it is fine?

Why does half of the law need to be so specific and reactive instead of setting principles for how people should live and cooperate together?

Imagine US Constitution referred to unimpeded travel by horse or train or by foot instead of unimpeded travel in general.

It’s trying to avoid rolling in other small scale activity that should be allowed. If I tell my kids’ soccer team that I’ll pick up 15 McDonalds burgers for them, I’ve “arranged for the delivery of an order” under the law’s definition, so I’m in trouble unless the definition of “food delivery platform” exempts me.

Are you commercially providing a service of picking up burgers? There is already a clear distinction in law between commercial and non-commercial activity.

Obviously my single sentence isn't yet enough to be standalone law. But you rightly pointed non-commercial activity could be exempt from this restriction.

I can imagine somebody picking up burgers and delivering them to homeless people. I believe this could be exempt as non-commercial activity.

There are again questions, what if Uber decides to pick up burgers and deliver them to homeless? One could say that even if deliver it for free it is still commercial activity (because they obviously stand to gain PR which has a value). Also they can just ask a burger place for permission to buy burgers from them for homeless people, I see no problem with that.

Also all attempts at distinction of small and large scale seem to have issues with them. First is the arbitrary definition of what small and large scale is.

Then what if you are wealthy man and decide to feed all homeless in LA for Christmas? I guess you could try to get permission from the owner of the establishment but I don't see why you shouldn't just be able to decide, in a spur of the moment, to send a dozen of your minions to various establishments and just buy the stuff.

What then if Uber decides that their minions who deliver goods are actually small businesses providing the service on its own and use Uber's platform as a service to coordinate them with buyers? How would large/small scale operation be defined?

To summarize, I think:

- commercial / non-commercial distinction is better than large/small "scale" (however defined),

- non-commercial organizations and private individuals should not be subject of this law

- commercial activity most likely is calculated to gain something from this whether the delivery is or isn't paid for by the consumer and so I think it should not be exempt,

- "small scale" commercial activity can probably be perverted by corporate lawyers.

- if the law is restricted to online platforms, there is possibility corporations are going to work around it so that it does not meet the criteria of online platform.

California got this right. Credit where credit is due.

When I saw the YC post about praising DoorDash and Airbnb, it was clear that YC endorses doing borderline illegal things in the name of growth. Same with Pg’s posts of how to create billionaires.

In a way he’s not wrong, about hacking taken to a whole new level of messing with entire cities and industries.

But as a greater society, without proper regulation, we’ll have a dystopia. The rich are insanely rich while the median has barely gone up. The pie is much larger compared to 10 years ago, but most of it is captured by a fair few.

It is not a great world to be in if it continues for the next 100 years, which it’ll likely be as technology divides us into haves and have -nots.

It just blows my mind how, reliably, selfish people end up in positions of power. They then work the system to increase wealth or power as much as possible, everything else including the environment that we all live off of be damned, because you will be dead in 50 years anyway.

Where are the altruists? Chanting in some buddhist temple? Why are things so evil?

in a lot of ways a lot of the billionaires are the robber barons of our times. having multiple billions in wealth doesn't seem to be compatible with a healthy society and seems to be a failure of that society. the sheer scale of even one single billion dollars compared to a million dollars is absurd. a million seconds of time is almost 12 days. a billion seconds is 32 years of time.

I’m completely fine with apps listing restaurants without permission. But ONLY if the app makes that explicitly clear.

To falsely pretend to offer a sanctioned service is fraud imho. There’s all kinds of issues with this. Such as who to blame if an order is incorrect. Or who to complain to when prices suddenly increase.

This law kinda sucks. But the status who is fraud at worst and dishonest at best.

As far as regulations go this one seems mostly fine.

F that! Last night I wanted w bottle of alcohol for new years celebration. I already had a few drinks so I didn't want to drive. Unfortunately no delivery service had an agreement with any local liquor stores.

As long as a delivery service doesn't pose as the store itself, there should be no issues. The laws in this country are a out of control.

I’ve come to just not give my business to restaurants that don’t want to exist in the modern world. It’s a high risk, low margin business. The fact they don’t want to support any type of delivery with these apps shows to me they don’t care about staying in business.

“Support local” goes both ways.

This is great; the practice is incredibly deceitful, harming both customers and restaraunts.

Postmates still has me blacklisted from their app after advertising one of my favorite Mexican places to me with this kind of scam, when they didn't have correct prices on their app, they tried to charge me the difference after I placed the order.

How about opt-in for _literally everything_? That's called consent, a concept Silicon Valley doesn't understand.

That’s a good slogan but there needs to be delineation of who is and isn’t involved. It turns out to be the central question. If I buy a book from Amazon and want to sell it on eBay, who needs to opt in? I certainly shouldn’t need your permission as you’re not involved. Is the paper manufacturer involved in me selling the book on eBay? Is the author? The publisher? Amazon? Me taking something I buy on Amazon and selling it on eBay has a pretty direct analogy here (sell what I buy from local pizza co to my app users). Asking for opt in is just a different way to phrase it, unfortunately.

That said, I’m glad for this law. Maybe it’s not perfectly worded but it’s a net good. What the delivery companies were doing was such blatant exploitation of everyone involved and I’m glad to see it go.

I usually disagree with flick of the wrist legislation from CA but this is a win! Unfortunately, this will likely just lead to google and these delivery apps actively suppressing search / SEO for restaurants that refuse to use their platforms :(

I was first about to say this was bad because it arbitrarily restricts FOIA, but on actual reading of the legislation this makes sense: the delivery apps are deceptively representing themselves to their own customers as agents of the businesses in question.

It's basically identity theft. Should have been banned from the beginning.

Normally I am pretty anti- whatever california does. This time I'm super pro it. This is a great way to look out for the little guy getting bullied by the bigger ones. Would love to see 100x more of this.

I agree with this law in principle but i hate that it is getting implemented at a state level with specific industry language. Broad federal consumer protection laws could be expanded. For example, misrepresenting an affiliation with a business by omission could be made an offense regardless of the industry. The test would be "would a reasonable person think this (intermediary) is affiliated?". This is inspired by Australian Consumer Law.

I am not sure this will hurt delivery apps as much as restaurants, seems to me like it would compel resturants to enter into contract with delivery services (giving them an upper-hand) else they lose business. Maybe pre-covid that might have been survivable.

Perhaps I am too narrow of a demographic but since covid hit I order pretty heavily from delivery services and I have completely ignored resturants I like simply because they don't offer delivery or are not listed with a delivery service.

Edit: typo

It doesn't surprise me that Lorena Gonzalez pushes bills like this. She is currently running for Secretary of State; it would be great if she leaves the legislature.

This is a good idea, I’ve heard how unscrupulous some apps have been to effectively hijack the identity and contact points of private businesses without consent.

It’s one thing to want to own the demand for food, it’s another thing to take it away from small business owners.

It’s worth going out of your way to order by a verified phone number, or recommend small restaurants install their own affordable platform like gloriafoods and keep their margins during the pandemic.

Why though? Do we need government at this level in business?

This law is dated September 24, 2020. If it has indeed been the law for around 3 months now, any ideas if/how much this impacts Doordash, Uber Eats and others? From my own research, it looks like these delivery companies do have a number of restaurants listed on their platform that they don't have any explicit agreements with, yet have not heard/read anything to the effect of litigations based on this law.

It has to be said, that the combination of Delivery app incompetence and exploitative business models working in tandem with Government corruption and lack of aid for the Food Industry in the US its a fucking miracle it has lasted this long at all.

I'm afraid to say that the Industry to me will never be the same, and what it is today even as it defies Shutdown orders will not be enough for it to be close to what it was as the finance channels are breaking down before our eyes--take out models are less than ~10% of revenue from what a normal 100% service brought in. I always thought the Industry needed to be disrupted as it was wasteful, abusive and over all toxic in many ways. But the fact that so many are resrtin to Gofund me crowdsourcing then actual food sales screams that we've seen the same thing happen to the Restaurant Industry that happened to the Health Care Industry. I've been in both and the parallels are quite obvious to see.

But what we've seen with COIVD is the systemic take-down and consolidation of the Food Industry from both Private (and I use that word loosely) and Public sides which only really benefited the massive Corporate players who benefited from PPP and have the resources and financial and legal wherewithal that small private restaurant owners can't afford. Wallstreet and VC firms like Softbank also made out like bandits with such poor models like Doordash IPO.

I'm sad to say this but I think the US will be a culinary wasteland in all but the food truck and high end dining end points, everything in between will be sucked up by large corporations and Ghost kitchen models. We had made so much progress that one can't help but feel entirely dejected about it, especially now as Food Education is even more dire than ever as 70% of all Americans are classified as fat and obese [0].

I just hope people support their local farmers and begin cooking more at home then continue to pour money into what has clearly been a hi-jacking of small entrepreneurial people trying to advance the very low standard of culinary edification in the US in relation to Europe and Asia.

It's a sad situation, but I'm retired as a chef for good now I'm glad to say I exited at a high that I think will never be seen again.

0: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm

What's wrong with CA? It seems to me that state tries it bests to kick innovation out, and start another tech ecosystem somewhere else...

If impersonating is the reason they couldn't have just regulated a requirement to clearly list if the ad is by the owner or a third party, and not throw away the baby...

> If impersonating is the reason they couldn't have just regulated a requirement to clearly list if the ad is by the owner or a third party, and not throw away the baby

Because so many people will never comprehend that the lisitng is by a third party and go on to give the restaurant a bad review.

Also some foods don't travel well and are made for immediate consumption. Even if the customer recognises that the listing is made by a third party - they are more likely to blame the restaurant for the sub-par food.

Leaving the decision to the restaurant to opt-in is the best move IMO. Rather than have "disrupters" come in - damage the brand reputation and then leave the damage control bit to the restaurant.

I’m surprised some firm didn’t put together a class action given there’s precedent: https://www.eater.com/2015/11/11/9714840/in-n-out-doordash-d...

I wonder what the secondary consequences will be. The gig worker law had some nasty secondary consequences for musicians and such. These regulations really seem to hurt the little guys.

That said, the law is short and doesn't even go to deeply into what an "agreement" is. So maybe it's ok?

well, the gig worker law never got to do it's intended thing, first cause the stays, then cause prop 22, so now it should just be repealed. Had it, at least the distortions for musicians that are also Uber drivers would have been the same.

I would by the other's argument that this is about preventing misrepresentation. In fact, perhaps it should have already be covered by trademark protections anyways.

This is a silly law. If someone feels like sending a courier to buy take away then that should be legal.

The problem is not sending a courier. You can use Apps to send someone there without a problem.

The problem is them impersonating the restaurant and giving customers the impression that the restaurant is offering the delivery service themselves.

Someone else posted the below excerpt of the law that also prohibits couriers (who are not impersonating anyone) unless they have permission from the restaurant. That seems like a ridiculous restriction to me.

I don't think sending someone to perform a task is the same as taking an order, though. The restaurant is still the one taking the order for the food itself in the case of a courier.

Also the law seem to only include "food delivery platforms", which exclude couriers.

(Of course, I might be wrong, but it seems that the intent of the law is to stop impersonation, not couriers).

Why can't I pay someone to place an order and pick it up for me? Can't I have someone go shop on my behalf at non-restaurant businesses? And if so, isn't it reasonable that a menu of options be shown with items and the costs? I agree that there should be transparency about who is delivering the food, there should be no impersonation of the restaurant, no false listing of phone numbers, and so on. But allowing restaurants to deny a courier without prior agreement seems like a government overreach.

I think you misunderstood my reply: I don't think the law is forbidding someone making an order on your behalf and picking it up for you. I doubt it will affect normal courier services.

What I believe the law is forbidding is the lack of transparency, the false listing of phone numbers and taking orders on behalf of someone else.

EDIT: Btw, I'm not downvoting you as I can't downvote replies. I have upvoted to counter it.

I disagree with this law, like I've disagreed with many laws before it: the creation of a specific law implies that what came before was not fraud. It was fraud. Prosecute it as such.

Offering to courrier food from place A to B, including ordering the food from place A, should not be illegal. Pretending to be A to engage in that business is fraud, because you pretended to be A. It's that simple. This law is a giveaway to the companies that have already engaged in fraud.

Good point, I agree with you.

The problem is that if food isn't handled correctly it makes people sick. This law is about food safety.

Unless there is some rather serious context I'm missing - and as I said in another comment - the linked bill says:

> A food delivery platform shall not arrange for the delivery of an order from a food facility without first obtaining an agreement with the food facility expressly authorizing the food delivery platform to take orders and deliver meals prepared by the food facility.

I don't think you can use Apps to send someone there without a problem. They have to get 'express authorisation' from the restaurant before they can accept your order. That is silly.

As I answered to another poster, I believe the keyword here is "take orders".

You can't take orders on behalf of others, but you can freely arrange for someone in an app to "make an order" for you and then fetch the meal. That's my interpretation.

Of course it could/should be better worded, though.

EDIT: Also, someone also mentioned that courier apps are not "food delivery platforms", so the first few words of the paragraph you quoted already excludes them.

> You can't take orders on behalf of others

This law does not say that at all. It's completely silent on whether the platform can take orders. It prohibits a single specific action, and that action is arranging for the delivery of an order.

> you can freely arrange for someone in an app to "make an order" for you and then fetch the meal.

You can arrange for them to make an order if you want to. That's allowed. But "fetching" sure sounds to me like they are delivering the order. They can't deliver it unless they have the specific authorization from the restaurant.

The text that has been quoted all over this thread does say "to take orders and deliver meals". Sure it could be better worded, but it seems that the intent here is quite clear: to stop the practice that was being done by DoorDash/Postmates.

Look at how the law is formulated: "A food delivery platform shall not X without Y."

X is the action the law allows or prohibits.

Y decides whether the action is allowed or not.

If "authorization to take orders and deliver meals" exists, then they can deliver. If "authorization to take orders and deliver meals" does not exist, then they cannot deliver.

"take orders" does not appear in the law anywhere else. It's only in the phrase "authorization to take orders", and in that context the law is only checking if that authorization exists. This particular law does not say when taking orders is allowed or prohibited. This law does not care if a platform is taking orders. It cares about whether the platform delivers, and it cares about whether the platform has "authorization to take orders and deliver meals".

Edit: Pretend for a second the law said "A food delivery platform shall not arrange for the delivery of an order from a food facility without first obtaining an agreement with the food facility expressly authorizing the food delivery platform to own puppies and deliver meals prepared by the food facility."

Would that law have any effect on whether the food delivery platform can own puppies? Nah. The restaurant has to say "you are allowed to own puppies" before the platform can deliver, but that law is not imbuing the puppy clause with any other power. It neither allows nor disallows actual puppy ownership.

So my main point is not that a platform should get cheeky by trying to take orders but not deliver, or something.

It's that even if they're not taking orders, this law blocks them from delivering. If they don't have the authorization, they can't deliver, end of story. The restaurant didn't say they can have a puppy, so they can't deliver, and it doesn't matter whether there actually is a puppy.

Like I already said, it could be better worded, but, to me, its intent seems to be quite clear. You make good points, but I still have a different interpretation.

Sure would be nice if the law mentioned something about impersonating the restaurant rather than merely adding restrictions on who can be a courier.

What’s even sillier, every company doing this in California was getting consent from the restaurant to publish a number as if they were said restaurant BEFORE this law was even conceived. Of course, it was a click-wrap agreement that nobody read.

You could still do that without the app listing the restaurants without their permission.

There is a clear exploitation happening here, I think it's right to find a way to stop it. We should get better at iterating on policy though, maybe this doesn't work out or stops some other kind of less exploitive business from operating and they need to adjust it.

What is the exploitation exactly?

Exploiting the customer my misrepresenting a restaurant as a partner when they are not.

The delivery platform represents a business relationship with a restaurant that doesn't exist, and uses it to pull value out of the services the restaurants offer. As a business you get to choose which other businesses you work with, and on what terms. In this case they haven't given the restaurant the opportunity to negotiate terms.

It's new ground sure, but I think it's pretty clear that the delivery platform is a service provider to the restaurant and as such the restaurant should have some negotiating power. What if they want a cut of the delivery fee, or guaranteed delivery windows for their customers? Probably wouldn't get it, but that's a negotiation they should be able to have.

I'm not sure I understand the suggestion. Why shouldn't a courier service be allowed to list a business to get something from. That's like saying "people can't use mapping services". This doesn't feel like exploitation to me but maybe I don't understand your position fully.

A courier can still collect food. They can’t impersonate the restaurant anymore.

The law prohibits a courier from being commissioned to place an order, collect it, and deliver it to you. It’s just criminalizing a perfectly legitimate form of arbitrage. The law isn’t about couriers impersonating restaurants either, because that’s just fraud and it’s already illegal. It’s just another example of a terrible law created at the behest of businesses that aren’t competent enough to keep up with changes in the market. But why would they bother when they can just seek a legislative solution?

This is going to sound a bit curmudgeonly, but why should hospitality bend over to some tech middlemen? Not every industry needs to "innovate" their way into surviving the VC bubble's attempts to disrupt it. Hospitality is a fundamental service that's been provided for centuries, and is a cornerstone of the economy.

Second to that, the law doesn't prohibit it, it just makes the delivery service seek an arrangement first. I am not terribly saddened by the fact that the delivery platforms have to do some groundwork instead of just web scraping a bunch of menus and making money off splitting all the risk between restaurants and customers.

If these companies provide such a valuable service for people who can't get up from their computers to get or cook food, I'm sure restaurants will be lining up to sign up for their services.

> This is going to sound a bit curmudgeonly, but why should hospitality bend over to some tech middlemen?

Because that’s what their customers want, and providing something that their customers want should probably be one of the most important things for a business to do.

The only genuine harm that can be caused to these businesses by the delivery companies, is if the delivery company is legitimately impersonating the restaurant. Which as I said, would already be illegal.

The actual “harm” that this law addresses is somebody making a profit of providing a service that the restaurants think they deserve a cut of (just because?...). Hilariously, this type of arrangement is the most beneficial thing the restaurants could have. Because they’ll find if they’d try and make one of the arrangements with a company like UberEats, that what actually happens is the delivery company will be demanding a cut of their revenue instead.

Criminalizing a type of customer based on whether they intend to on sell the product after purchase is just entirely stupid. It’s one of the many stupid laws we have that only seek to protect dead business models that consumers no longer want. Just like the DMCA and all of the car dealership laws we have.

Their customers want easy delivery options that's definitely true. But if you could ask them if they think restaurants deserve a chance at fair negotiations they would probably also say yes.

All the bill is asking for is cooperation up front, not afterwards if at all. It's not criminalizing the business model of DoorDash and friends, it's just forcing them to treat their business partners like business partners.

I think it's fair to say I have some bias here though. I am a little bit too cynical toward these companies to believe they're just out here trying to better the world. They're doing their best to spin a buck before going public and peacing out. Case in point, DoorDash just IPOd with no profit and no projection for profitability, even in it's best case scenario (massive increase in online ordering).

So obviously the service is extremely useful, people find it useful while it's subsidized but no one has yet bared the full cost of these platforms.

In my opinion we need to protect existing businesses who are profitable and thus have a proven place in the economy, while these disruptive companies flail about free from the shackles of actually fitting into the economy, just in case it turns out they wouldn't.

If you’ve sold something, why would you expect to have any right to negotiate what the buyer plans to do with it? The delivery businesses have simply found some value that customers are willing to pay for. If the restaurants want to capture that value for themselves they have every right to attempt to do so.

It’s also silly to say that these delivery apps are trying to make the world a better place. They’re just providing a service to consumers. They’ve certainly changed the takeout food market significantly (and in a way that is very beneficial to consumers). But they’ve also made it harder for takeout food businesses to operate, because they’ve massively increased the competition they face. Takeout restaurants used to only compete with other nearby take out restaurants, for the business of customers within a convenient distance from their location. Now they have to compete with businesses from miles away too.

This is fantastic for consumers, which is generally who should benefit most from these sort of regulations. This law is an absolute affront to consumers, and serves only to protect bad businesses from having to address innovation. It’s understandable that these businesses want a slice of that value, and I’m sure you could tell a very sympathetic story about them. But they did nothing to create this value, and the law shouldn’t exist to shield them from competition.

In practice, every single one of these services has impersonated restaurants and harmed many of their reputations by doing so.

Perhaps the law is poorly written. That happens sometimes; more often when you behave in a way that invites regulation.

None of these Uber-for-X things are an issue at small scale, like a courier or other type of shared assistant ordering and delivering a pizza for you. Absolutely no one cares no matter what the letter of the law is. (And it's not really a food delivery platform at that point anyway.)

The problem is when it's a growth-oriented SV company.

Oh boy I love selective enforcement.

Scale does matter. There are a ton of things that people can and do do for a bit of cash under the table like give a haircut even though they don't have a license, rent out an apartment to a friend of a friend for a few weeks because you'll be traveling, etc. And those same things would probably be a problem if they were pursued as an ongoing business. Which, the general silliness of some occupational licensing aside, I don't really have a problem with.

The silliness of haircut licenses existing seems like a very reasonable thing to have a problem with.

Do you have a reason for why you think that is the problem?

Well, it should be clear that the restaurant has nothing to do with the delivery service.

You shouldn't be able to exploit the restaurant brand, logo and reputation without their consent, otherwise they wouldn't have any mean to protect themselves from bad reviews that would damage their image even in other platforms.

This happened to a friend of mine who is a restaurant owner. One day he gets a call for take out, for "Jeff" lets say $60. A DoorDash courier shows up (nothing indicating they are from DoorDash, restaurant assumes this is the customer) and attempts to pay with a credit card. Credit card comes back declined. Courier mentions he's going to step outside to get the issue resolved and will be right back. Half an hour goes by, another call comes in for the exact same order, $60. Another courier comes in, acts like he placed the order, tries to pay with a similar looking credit card, gets declined. 2nd courier leaves without the food. The owner thinks its some time of scam. When the third exact same order comes in via phone, the owner starts asking questions. All three were for the same DoorDash customer, all called in on the phone by DoorDash assuming the identity of the customer who placed the order via the DoorDash website using a menu that DoorDash just found online and posted on their website. It was an outdated menu with outdated prices. Apparently DoorDash would load their credit cards with the exact amount for the purchase (based on outdated prices) so both couriers cards were declined for the purchases. Meanwhile, the actual customer is waiting over an hour and a half for their order to be delivered and the restaurant owner has to eat 2 $60 sales because the food is no longer presentable. Owner was never contacted in advance by DoorDash regarding any business relationship, they just found a menu and included it on their site. Ultimately I believe they covered the cost of their screwup, and the restaurant owner required they pay over the phone when calling in the order before any food was made. I would absolutely consider this exploiting the restaurant brand and reputation without consent.

They've been known to go as far as buying domains for the restaurants and hosting the menus on them, basically inserting themselves as a middleman, then threatening the restaurant with consequences if they don't pay up for the favour.

This might be accompanied by the service taking their cut out of every meal ordered through the site, forcing the restaurant to lose money on the orders.

That's not just listing, it's a racket.

GrubHub was caught doing this, I believe.

The linked bill says

Nothing there is talking about apps or listings.

That wording leaves room for personally arranged general couriers in my opinion, but that would end up getting defined in court at some point down the road.

I think key question here would be definition of "food delivery platform". Generic courier service or personal assistant or even taxi driver is likely not to qualify under such title.

The linked bill is not verbose, it is effectively 4 paragraphs.

> Food delivery platform” means an online business that acts as an intermediary between consumers and multiple food facilities to submit food orders from a consumer to a participating food facility, and to arrange for the delivery of the order from the food facility to the consumer.

Say you're the restaurant, I'm the delivery guy. I pickup your meals and deliver them to your customers. On the way the meals go cold (or hot) and get damaged. Your customers aren't happy and want their money back.

My actions have made your service look bad, your customers unhappy and cost you money. You didn't know I was delivering your food!

As someone who is working on food delivery in Europe it's weird to even consider someone delivering food without the restaurants approval. I guess it's the only way to scale extremely fast but still it seems counterproductive to me.

Isn't this exactly the kind of thing trademark laws is supposed to cover?

I'm pretty sure that if you tried to resell food at scale from a major fast food franchise without proper licensing, you would get sued.

The major fast food franchises aren't the people this law is protecting, its Joe Blow's Pizza Shack that can't afford a lawsuit against Doordash.

Trademark law could prevent me from pretending to be the restaurant. If they had a defensible trademark and time and money to litigate.

It doesn't really prevent me from acting as a middle man. I'd need to be careful about using their trademarks and making it clear that I'm not connected.

The concept of first sale certainly applies, although health code makes it complex. There's also the concept of the right to refuse service.

On the one hand the law seems overly broad, on the other there was apparently no way for restaurant owners to protect their names against bad third party delivery services.

> If someone feels like sending a courier to buy take away then that should be legal.

Should it be legal for a business to ban somebody for any non-protected reason?

I'm not very familiar with delivery apps or how they work, but they were allowed to do this before? How would that ordering process work? Would someone make an order and then the courier call it in and then pick it up?

Yep! They just call it in and someone picks it up. I think even if its a loss, its a form of intimidation. "See, we're the gatekeeper to your customers now, so you better sign with us so we get 20-30% of your revenue. Also we'll list your menu in our app with $1 added per item that we pocket on top of that and charge the customer a service fee on top of that."

Its an ugly business model.

HN is so strangely anti tech and anti startup at this point. I'm not sure exactly who's on the platform at this point. Unemployed OSS devs bitter that everyone else in the valley is making more money than them?

I don't really view this as anti-tech or anti-startup at all. These kind of laws make sense regardless of whether a small or large company is committing the offense.

People sick of all the terrible, exploitative, world-worsening things that modern tech companies seems to be all about?

Yea I’ve noticed this too. HN is starting to feel more and more like my social surroundings here in Sweden.

On the other hand my social surroundings are obviously picking up some aspects of HN. Maybe culture is converging globally in a lot of ways?

anti tech... it's called fraud. The "We're just an app" excuse needs to die already. It has absolutely nothing to do with tech, everything to do with an unethical business model. Absolutely nothing to do with technology.

How is this anti-tech or anti-startup? This doesn’t have anything to do with tech at all. I would welcome talking about purely technical subjects, like distributed database innovation. There’s nothing technical about impersonating a restaurant?

This will be overturned based on First Amendment and Free Speech Grounds.

Maybe, if the headline matched the content. From the bill:

>A food delivery platform shall not arrange for the delivery of an order from a food facility without first obtaining an agreement with the food facility expressly authorizing the food delivery platform to take orders and deliver meals prepared by the food facility.

I don't see anywhere mentioned about not being able to "list" a restaurant. Just that you cannot actually perform the delivery. Presumably, you could still lie and list a restaurant that you don't deliver for.

If you can't see how this is a good thing for local businesses, I would suggest that you never attempt to start one of your own, purely for the well-being of your potential customers.

That's more than just preventing apps from listing a restaurant. I don't think delivery services should be able to represent restaurants without an agreement like many of them currently do, but I think this goes way too far.

This basically outlaws competition in the food delivery market.

EDIT: A food delivery service essentially buys food from a restaurant, then resells it to the customer. Is there any precedent for outlawing sale of a legal product to a business?

This is great. Postmates tricks you into thinking the restaurant is on their platform but then you get charged high fees because they have a Postmate go there and order in person.

I'm disappointed that there has been no crackdown on deceptive advertising by the apps, which seems to be the root cause of the problem.

The only sad part is that this gives existing food delivery apps a stronger foothold now that they are established

Thereby ensuring that the dominant companies stay dominant, because they just upped the barriers to entry.

Always count on government to do the opposite thing to what might actually fix the problem.

The actual problem is not that delivery apps list without consent. The actual, real problem is that they use their dominance to take their cut.

Without that dominance we could easily see another app & another app until that margin is a mere cloud fees + 50% sort of markup.

But now... restaurants can go on paying through the nose.

Reasonable in scope and protection. Unusual for California, but better for everyone involved. Great.

The "uberfication" startup model had/has the same internet economics magic that dropshipping, crowdsourcing and such had, but for VC backed startups.

As usual, XKCD captures the jist: https://xkcd.com/1060/

Users order food. App for that. Food is delivered by non-employees. HR is an app. Suppliers don't have to know they're suppliers. The CEO can focus on visionary statements.

A software business has magic economics because they don't need capital assets (and therefore capital investment) and they don't have marginal costs. Just software development. Uberfication minimizes even that.

It's looking pretty uninspired at this point. Let's step back and think of the problem space. Food. Takeaways. Unless it's soylent or vegan meat, startup founders seem to consider actually making the food beneath them.

The amazing thing is how much money you can lose while doing so little.

I guess funneling money from investors to landlords by way of software developers is more expensive than it looks.

> startup founders seem to consider actually making the food beneath them.

Ghost kitchens are the next big space.

Great way to shut out any new competition in the space.

Not everything has to be solved with a new law.

In fact, most things shouldn’t.

The legislator has to act when the private sector refuses to behave ethically. I don't see any problem here. DoorDash and co created the problem with their unethical business model, which is at the expense of restaurants they list on their own website without any kind of agreement whatsoever. They should have stuck to restaurants who agree to do business with DoorDash.

Why does this even have to be a law boggles my mind.

I think there are laws against impersonation already. If I went around purporting to sell services in the name of Microsoft, their lawyers would act quickly.

Not that I disagree with this new law

Maybe the apps thought they were doing the restaurants and users both a service, but not every restaurant always feels that way.

no, this was just another means of money extortion. they masquerade around like the companies they're preying on, then effectively blackmail those companies for connecting them to these customers.

unnecessary man in the middle. they're essentially the capitalist version of the cymothoa exigua parasite species.

If customers prefer using a single "middle man" for a category of products or services instead of going to each company directly, then somebody's going to cater to that.

> cymothoa exigua parasite species.

Well, that's an interesting TIL.

The law is not just about impersonation, it says the platform can't arrange for delivery of food without having an agreement with a restaurant. So if it's not impersonating anybody, and just orders food on your behalf with you knowing it's a middleman, that would still violate the law, if I understood correctly. I think that wouldn't normally be illegal because it's not generally illegal to do things on others' behalf (there would need to be misrepresentation of some sort), so if they want to ban that they would need a law.

This is the entirety of the law, by the way:

I'm not even sure it's buying on anyone's "behalf" either. But rather just buying and then reselling goods.

I think the intention though, is to stop say a Doordash from listing a restaurant's menu on its (DD's) website and making it seem like the restaurant is consenting to having delivery of its food with whatever margin DD feels like adding on top of it. (Also by the way, shadier practices too, like hijaking/publishing a false restaurant phone number that diverts to DD instead of the restaurant.)

Yes, hence, impersonation

The issue here isn't "did delivery apps sometimes impersonate restaurants" (which is why you think this law is redundant), but rather "does this law ban things other than impersonation" (yes, and hence why others are saying a violation of the law need not constitute impersonation).

The point is that the stated reason for the law is impersonation, which is already illegal, but under the guise of cracking down on impersonation of restaurants, the law does much more.

> The point is that the stated reason for the law is impersonation

Is it? I don't see anything in the text about impersonation.

It's not terribly difficult to put together the arrangements with businesses who are amenable. DD and friends are just annoyed they'll have to do some minor business relations work instead of drawing value out of a business and then palming customer support off to them, while they never knew they were ever part of the transaction in the first place.

It puts the restaurants back in a position of control over their own business operations, I think that's fine. If you want to work with the business to draw value from them, you'll have to arrange it. People are looking at this like it's the customer versus the restaurants, it's not, it's about mediating the relationship between two commercial operations and the vast majority of law is about just that kind of thing.

The law is taking a food safety angle: restaurants have a duty of care to their customers, which extends through the delivery chain.

This seems like a stretch to me. If I am using a courier service to get food, I know that there are two different parties involved and that the restaurant's own standards cannot be guaranteed. Safety is, as ever, a way to generate political expediency for otherwise bad ideas.

This in effect says that it is illegal to pay someone to collect your own food from a restaurant without the restaurant's agreement (only if the service is offered online, though)

This does not make much sense.

Legislators should not rush into kneejerk and populist reactions.

No, it is just illegal if that someone pretends to have some sort of reseller contract with the restaurant in order to acquire you as a customer.

If you go to some guy, ask him to pick up food for you and the guy agrees for a fee, that's okay. But the incentive must have come from your side, and the guy must not have used the name of the restaurant to advertise for his services or even pretend to be a "part" of the restaurant.

Legislation often is widely different for the same eventual business act, depending on how the parties came together. It's not new stuff, real estate agents have had such huge difference for ages (at least in Germany, but I assume that other countries also differentiate depending on who initially hired an agent, even though eventually, the agent ends up having contracts with the selling and buying party).

The link states: "This bill would enact the Fair Food Delivery Act of 2020, to prohibit a food delivery platform from arranging for the delivery of an order from a food facility without first obtaining an agreement with the food facility... "

No question of pretending anything, just literally of doing what you suggest (food pickup for a fee, if that is arranged through an online platform)

Using the names of the restaurants you are able to collect from in order to describe your service is obviously fair use of the names.

Look closely. It is just illegal for the food delivery platform to arrange for a delivery. It is NOT illegal for YOU to arrange for a delivery to you, even if you do that through an online platform. Go to Craigslist and offer some dollars to anyone who picks up your food at a takeout place and delivers it to you.

You don't have a problem at all with this new legislation, unless of course you want to be the shady middleman. But that's kind of the purpose.

This is a rather disingenuous take.

There is nothing shady in arranging food deliveries. This bill is ill-thought-out.

In which way is my interpretation "disingenuous"?

This is an industry operating outside the scope of what restaurants have ever offered. Once delivery companies began making a lot of money with courier services, people created a story of exploitation and market manipulation. The reality, however, is that food service providers want in on the action: the bill gives providers bargaining chips to negotiate getting a cut for services that they never offered before. A consequence to this change is that while the restaurants do not face losses due to courier services, the courier services will lose as a result of the bill. Courier services now have a legitimate claim against the state and restaurants. It's time to go to the Supreme Court.

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