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.
This would be a simple provable thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.