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Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

I feel really bad for small restaurant owners. These large delivery companies totally take over their internet marketing too, registering a domain like '<restaurant name>-<city>.com' and when you go to that website, you really have to pay attention to see that this is not the 'official' restaurant website and if you order through there, it's costing the restaurant a lot of money that they wouldn't miss out on if you'd order through their regular website. I don't understand how practices like that are legal - then again, small restaurant owners have other things to worry about than fighting a 5, 8, maybe 10 year trademark battle against huge tech companies. It's a disgusting abuse of power in my view.

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This should be straight up illegal and the companies sued to hell for. If I opened a site claiming to be a bank and accepting money on behalf of that bank, and keeping 20% I'd be behind bars for fraud in no time.

Those delivery services employ many lawyers and bet on the fact that a family owned restaurants doesn't have the guts or money to sue. Truly despicable.

Not having access to the justice because of shortage of money should be illegal instead.

You can't make a circumstance illegal.

But you can put down legal protections to prevent this circumstance occurring. It is just like not having access to medical care because you are poor. We put protections to prevent this happening, called public health insurance.

For the sister comment: I wonder why companies are not entitled to a public defender, interesting.

But everybody should be equally able to defend themselves, or sue before a court of law, which is clearly not the case today in UK and most countries on the planet. The legislator has created complex laws that only benefit people with a lot of money thus lawyers. Which means that citizens do not have equal rights in a court of law and can't get a fair trial.

It's just like tax avoidance. It's expensive to set up but ultimately it results in rich people paying LESS taxes/wealth than poor people for those who can afford it.

Yes, you can. You can make it illegal for the accused to lack representation in court if they desire it, you can make it illegal for a person to walk the street without a certain minimum amount of money in their pocket, you can make it illegal for a person under age X to not be at school at a particular part of the day without a reasonable excuse, etc. It's been done. You can even always define an occurrence as an act e.g. access to justice cannot be denied, or a shed cannot be permitted to remain purple.

Maybe you mean that making a circumstance illegal doesn't necessarily prevent a circumstance from occurring?

No I'm saying the notion of illegality does not apply, and in fact leads to absurd consequences.

For instance, if you make it illegal for the accused to lack representation in court, you can then sue them for not having representation, a suit from which they cannot defend themselves, lacking representation, which then opens them up to another suit, ad infinitum!

I think there's some conflation of "regulating" and "making illegal" going on here. Mandating that the state must provide everyone with a public defender is not equivalent to "making lacking representation illegal".

You get to choose who you apply laws to when you write them. If I make it illegal for a court to proceed if they do not provide representation to a defendant who desires it, I don't have to arrest the defendant.

Yeah but then you haven't made not having representation illegal, you've made not providing representation illegal.

You can, actually, make a circumstance illegal. The vast majority of regulation explicitly make circumstances illegal.

"That ladder just happened to be placed there". "The forklift happened to be parked that way". "The room happened to have too many people in it". "The fire extinguisher happened to be expired and failed to fire" -- all illegal circumstances (in various parts of the US, based on Federal/State/Local regulations)

"They needed to sue, but couldn't get a lawyer" is absolutely a circumstance we could make illegal. Making a circumstance illegal doesn't mean it will never happen, of course, but it does mean there can be immediate repercussions and fixes for it if/when it does.

You can make actions illegal, and you can make not taking an action illegal, but you can't make not having enough money illegal, because "having money" is not an action that you can mandate people take.

> "They needed to sue, but couldn't get a lawyer" is absolutely a circumstance we could make illegal.

I mean -- I guess, technically you can, but it's one of the most insulting things I have ever heard. What are you gonna do, sue them for not having the money to have a lawyer to defend themselves? Maybe take them to court for damages, caused by them not having money? Kafka would have a field day with this.

You seem to be interpreting it the opposite of how I interpreted it.

You wouldn't take action against the person without money. You'd do something to fix the situation, like provide them with a lawyer for free.

Note I don't necessarily think that's a good idea (really haven't thought it through), but that's how I interpreted th comment.

Right, I agree that's probably how it's meant, but that's not accurately described by the phrase "making it illegal".

If I make houses without a sewer line illegal, that doesn't mean the state has to lay a sewer line, it means you the owner have to take care that you get a sewer line or you open yourself up to liability.

They made not having medical insurance illegal. Quite controversial, at the time.

Replying to sister comment.

In Germany, if you can't afford a lawyer you are entitled to the government paying legal aid in civil cases [1]. As you are - I just realize - in many countries.

Problem is, that a restaurant owner isn't entitled to that so that even if you are a small company (self employed restaurant owner) you are toast. You could hope to have a legal insurance covering stuff like that, but not sure, if that would be the case for most insurances.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aid#Germany

The Wikipedia article doesn't tell this (which is okay, it's not the main topic), but you have to be really poor to get legal aid in Germany. When I needed this years ago I wasn't eligible because my parents had paid into a pension insurance for me and it was worth more than 5k. This is a common problem with these schemes here in Germany. If you are really rich you have no problems, if you are really poor there exist some systems (I wouldn't say they are good, but that's also another topic). People in between? Tough luck.

If it’s limited to the poor, then the US has that through nonprofits like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legal_Aid_Society . There’s no standard, or for that matter, no single organization to look for, so it’s hard to say who exactly qualifies in any particular city.

IANAL, but isn't this exactly why class action lawsuits exist?

Class action isn't really a thing in the UK.

Or rather "collective actions" and "group litigation orders" are a recent thing and haven't become a standard part of the legal system. Not many people on any side who understand how they're supposed to work in practice.

The UK also has a different set of priorities in its litigation culture. You can win a huge payout if you prove unfair dismissal or discrimination, but it's much harder to prove that your work contract is unfair/exploitative or that Service Provider X is operating in a shady way.

It's not fraud though, is it?

They advertise that you'll get food from Restaurant X and that's indeed what you get. It's not fraud to resell product, you don't need permission from the original seller to do it (in fact I think that's a specifically protected right), and it's not fraud or any kind of trademark violation to describe a product as being from Restaurant X if that is a fact.

The objectionable behavior is that they represent themselves as being restaurant X, or at least present themselves in such a way that finding out that they aren’t actually restaurant X but a reseller is difficult.

edit: This got way more discussion than I anticipated. I think that even if there was a massive banner on the top of the site that told you GenericDeliveryCo was operating this website as a front for the restaurant, we are not them, etc, this behavior by GenericDeliveryCo is still damaging to the businesses they are creating websites of because they tend to absolutely bury the real website via better SEO. There’s an argument to be made that some restaurants would enjoy having a website made for them - for business or whatever other reason - but there’s no reason GenericDeliveryCo couldn’t... ask first.

Ok but see how we've slipped down from full-on 'fraudulent' to just 'objectionable'? People are allowed to be objectionable if they want to.

Mr. Wave may have meant legally objectionable as in "the objection that would be the core of the legal case" or "the legal system objects to this". Similar to how a legal complaint doesn't mean someone whining.

If they did then what do they think is the infraction or offence that is being committed? They're being objectionable by committing or infracting... what? What law or regulation would they be breaking?

Trademark law, mostly. If I open an Apple Store, I'm gonna get a lot of lawsuits headed my way in no time. You can't just use another company's logo and name without their permission.

> You can't just use another company's logo and name without their permission.

I'm afraid I think you're mistaken.

You're allowed to use someone's trademark to factually describe the product you're selling. You don't need the owner's permission to do that.

If you're selling an actual Apple laptop, you can use the trademarks 'Apple' and the Apple logo to describe it.

If you're selling an actual Bob's Burger, you can use that trademark and logo to describe it.

It could be eye opening to create an applestore-sf.com and try selling apple laptops there.

Or macrumors.com for a website about Macintosh computers! They'd surely shut that down since it uses a registered trademark! Oh no wait...

Except macrumors is obviously a news/gossip site and makes no effort to pass themselves off as an actual Apple-operated website.

apple-sf.com (and the various food delivery sites being discussed) pass themselves off as the restaurant. It's not clear to a casual user that the order is being processed by a 3rd party.

Except this kind of trademark abuse absolutely does happen. There was a post on HN about it yesterday [1].

Uber successfully had an app taken down that helped drivers determine whether Uber had cheated them out of wages they were owed. The important thing is that unless the people of UberCheats have a lot of money and time to burn they can't really challenge Uber's actions here.

Hell, a few weeks ago Apple forced a company to change their logo of a green pear because they claimed it was infringing on the Apple logo[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26184352

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26084387

Think about chargers.

Somewhere in the product description, advertising, is the word "FOR".

Lightning cable FOR Apple iPhone.

Belking trying to sell the same cable as "Apple iPhone Lightning cable" would be problematic. Leaving aside licensing issues.

The proof is in the pudding. Go to one of the websites they register for a restaurant, and see just how many references to "We are not the restaurant, but we are reselling and delivering their food". Hint: rather few.

Call the number on the website. "Hello, I can take your order for [restaurant name]!"

"Is this [restaurant]?"

"I can take your order!"

Because all of the above isn't defensible. They're not just (re) selling the restaurant's food, they are implying that they -are- the restaurant.

Behavior here becomes important. Deception and context. Why in these cases if Deliveroo/Uber/etc were comfortable with their process would they not say "This is Uber Eats, and we can take orders for [restaurant]"? This again comes back to one of those definitions of fraud, "dishonestly obtaining financial advantage (your cut of the order, inflated pricing, etc) by deception (explicitly stating or repeatedly implying that you are the restaurant)".

and other vague hand-waving answer designed to imply that you are talking to the restaurant and avoiding the answer, "No this is a call center for a delivery service".

I would hate to live in the world you imagine where every single awful thing that isn't obviously illegal is considered acceptable by society.

And I'd hate to live in a world where you can drag anyone you want before a judge because you don't like what they're doing.

I don't like the colour of your shirt, so I'm going to say it's objectionable. It doesn't break any laws or infringe any regulations, but I want a judge's opinion on it anyway.

See?

Why would you hate that? The judge's opinion would be "the shirt is not unlawful" and "you're wasting court time, have a fine". How would that harm you?

In the case of passing off a service you offer as begin the service of another company, there is a clear legal case to answer. And as I recall this is settled caselaw in the UK and the people pretending to be other companies are in the wrong.

> The judge's opinion would be "the shirt is not unlawful" and "you're wasting court time, have a fine". How would that harm you?

It wastes the time of the defendant and the legal service, which harms society.

It imagine it's also super stressful and expensive for the defendant to go through, even when it's thrown out.

So you'd be wasting the judge's time with a frivolous lawsuit the same way you're wasting our time with a frivolous starwman?

Legality already is society’s measure of what’s acceptable. If you want to change the standard then you do so by changing the law.

Acceptability isn't usually a binary. Legality is the cutoff point at which we decide you should be punished for unacceptable behaviour, but it's perfectly possible for behaviour to be both unacceptable but legal.

Consider: - Cutting your grass at 8am when your neighbour works nights.

- A well off person putting their child up for adoption because they don't want the hassle.

- Payday loans given to people you know won't be able to pay them off, ensuring they pay you far more than the value of the loan.

- Banks processing payments out of order to trigger overdraft fees that would otherwise not have been collected.

Trademark infringement is a big one, and yes, it can be applied even if the trademark isn't registered.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1125#a

1125(a)(1) is pretty unambiguous in this context. If Grubhub is using a restaurant's name to "deceive as to ... the origin, sponsorship, or approval of his or her goods", that's cause for civil action.

California also has a new law explicitly addressing this issue:

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

... and yes, there's an aptly-named website called https://www.grubhublawsuit.com/ describing a class-action lawsuit on this specific topic.

And no, that website isn't an infringement of Grubhub's mark if it's not likely to be confused with Grubhub's business. (It'd be a different story if Grubhub were a law firm in the business of filing class action lawsuits.)

You're allowed to use trademarks to factually describe what a product is.

Your linked law suit is about something entirely different to what's being discussed in this thread - that's about describing restaurants as shut when they aren't.

Whoops, the Grubhub class action lawsuit in this context is

https://www.classlawgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/Grubhub-Cla...

You're not allowed to use trademarks to masquerade as the other party, especially if you're then trying to conduct business as if you were that other party.

Taking a step back: is there any trademark usage that you view as infringing?

Using an example from another side discussion: I hope we can agree that if you made a laptop and called it a Macbook Pro, Apple would sue the heck out of you, and they'd be in the right. Where we seem to disagree is whether it's infringement if you set up a storefront, name it "Apple Store", and exclusively sell products that you've purchased from an Apple-run Apple Store.

"passing off" is a common law tort. If there's confusion, it could well fall under that.

There's also a very large body of trademark specific law which may specifically address this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_off

> The law of passing off prevents one trader from misrepresenting goods or services as being the goods and services of another, and also prevents a trader from holding out his or her goods or services as having some association or connection with another when this is not true.

But the food isn't being misrepresented! It is the food of the restaurant. Passing off means pretending the product is something it isn't. That isn't what is happening here at all.

You and a few others seem to be under some kind of mistaken understanding that the food is 'fake' or from a fraudulent dark kitchen not actually associated with the restaurant? That's not the case. It's the actual real food from the actual restaurant, resold.

That is one circumstance covered but not the only one.

I'm not under a mistaken understanding. I'm explicitly saying that you might not have to misrepresent the food itself: if you insert yourself as an intermediary but claim to be the underlying provider, there's potential for confusion and damage to the goodwill of the underlying provider, and that is what passing off fundamentally protects against.

I don't know if it would fly, but you asked and that's a place a case might be found.

The broader point here: it's one thing to advertise selling someone else's product. It's another to _pretend to be them_.

"goods and services"

The service of delivery is what is being passed off.

My definitely-not-a-lawyer reading of this even seems like there’s a decent case to be made, by the definitely-not-legally-exhaustive “required elements” there. The goodwill is their reputation, misrepresentation is obvious, and damage to their brand would be negative reviews (“food was cold, would not buy again!”) on Google or similar sites.

> People are allowed to be objectionable if they want to.

Isn't that what we (should) have judges for?

I mean, if a judge blindly follows the letter of the law, we can replace him/her by a computer.

But you need some kind of infraction or starting point if you want a judge to consider it.

'They're being objectionable' is not a reasonable starting point. 'They're being fraudulent' would be... but they clearly aren't being fraudulent.

Misrepresentation isn't fraud but it is still not legal. You can't pass yourself off as someone or some entity that you are not. See also: 1-900 numbers pretending to be 'the company' but actually just switchboards connecting you through to the company that they pretend to be.

Yes indeed. I guess I will use this comment to explore its objectionable properties. I think I can come up with a somewhat nuanced reason for objection (not saying this has any bearing on legality). Let me talk it through. Here goes:

The Resturant gets paid and the customers get food. The delivery service adds value and gets paid for it. If someone doesn’t realize doordash is not the Resturant by now... who cares? As long as the restaurants reputation is not hurt... (here’s were the issues start)

To that end, if I am the Resturant, I see that I can add my own delivery service, undercut doordash by a bit, and make more money, and control my reputation by employing people who have incintives aligned with me, then great! Thanks doordash, for showing me the way.

Ah, but can I? Maybe not without forming a power group with other restaurants (or some other economic structure..?), as the cost of adding a “real employee” may be greater than the margin added by the delivery service. I need a structure that both aligns incentives between delivery service and Resturant, and is cost effective. Since restaurants weren’t already doing this, probably it has to happen at the meta-Resturant level of it can be done while preserving reputation at all. (Of course, the difficulty of it depends on the food being served, so that’s why, e.g. pizza was already being delivered.)

In many environments, fraud contains a definition of "dishonestly obtain financial advantage by deception".

Your example is flawed. It's not a crime or fraud to resell a product.

It is still fraud, not merely objectionable, to resell a product while in every way possible acting as if you are not a reseller but the original producer.

It could be argued it's misrepresentation or passing off under UK law

Several of the factors considered in trademark infringement are the use of the mark in commerce, that use being connected to the sale (including distribution or advertising) of the marked product, and naturally, likelihood of consumer confusion.

A pro-restaurant argument might be that these alternative websites are interfering with new and extant restaurant-customer relationships, falsely implying a restaurant-delivery co. affiliation, and that the use by the delivery co. of the restaurant trademarks exceeds nominative use. The restaurants might also argue that the distribution of food, how and under what conditions, is part of their product: a delivery company taking too long to deliver an order could harm the quality of their product.

So just to look at this from another perspective.

If I created a chase-bank.com website, and allowed users to interact with their actual Chase account through it, but I took a percentage of all transactions, it would be fine?

This discussion has cropped up before.

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24931128

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25114024

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625232

100% agreed.

Look (listen?) for the cagey answers:

"Is this Restaurant X?"

"I can help you place an order!"

"But is this Restaurant X?"

"I can take your X order when ready!"

On the apps I use, they now have a disclosure about this before you press "Order".

A customer won't order through 3rd party app if the restaurant doesn't partner to sell through them. Same case for internet marketing.

What you should feel bad about are the excessive commission fees charged by those delivery apps.

It's not always obvious to users that the restaurants listed on these apps are not the real restaurants themselves.

> the restaurants listed on these apps are not the real restaurants themselves

This isn't what is happening.

The food still comes from the actual restaurants.

True. But that was not my argument.

This is untrue. A few months ago there was an article on the front page about a restaurant serving pizza that had been auto-listed by, IIRC, Deliveroo - which had put a menu online with marked-up prices and was allowing users to place orders.

The restaurant owner even discovered that, because of some inconsistency between his prices and the third-party ones, he could cause the delivering company to pay him by simply placing orders to himself.

I had visions of doing fancy CSS too, to render an accurate menu to your website viewers, but that would be deceptive to Uber's scrapers to mess with their menu.

Perhaps more screenplay than solution for this particular problem, but this illuminates a reason organized crime has existed for many years. You have an underserved, unprotected group being abused by a more powerful group with huge financial backing that can twist existing laws to further the abuse. Organized crime groups step into the vacuum and build a powerful backing, including support of non-criminals in the abused group.

Personally I'm surprised you don't hear of hacker groups that protect websites and social media properties of the downtrodden. GoodFellas meets Social Network.

> and if you order through there, it's costing the restaurant a lot of money

How does it cost the restaurant any money when they do this? The delivery companies can't unilaterally take a cut of the price, can they. I think you'll find the delivery companies mark up, and get their money that way, in this case where they don't have an agreement with the restaurant. The restaurant gets the price they ask for it.

An owner of a local restaurant told me he pays about 30% revenue to share to Deliveroo, as part of his agreement with them. He also runs his own delivery service, and encourages customers to use that (phoning in) rather than Deliveroo.

> An owner of a local restaurant told me he pays about 30% revenue to share to Deliveroo, as part of his agreement with them.

If they've agreed to it, what's the problem?

The parent comment was complaining about Deliveroo setting up without an agreement. When they do that they have to mark up - they can't take a 30% cut of the restaurant's price as the restaurant charges Deliveroo full price.

> If they've agreed to it, what's the problem?

They’re in a position where the options are pretty much “agree to this” or “go out of business”

(To which I guess the free-market response is “That’s not a problem - an independent restaurant SHOULD go out of business if they can’t compete with a website company when it comes to websites”?)

So Deliveroo is helping these restaurants survive the pandemic is your main argument?

Or that they’d do just fine if no one had a website offering their food, but the Deliveroo website is an arms-race bleed-them-dry move?

Sometimes middlemen serve a useful purpose.

For example, I like grocery stores because they deal with farmers and food distribution and save me from driving out to source my own produce from growers.

Sometimes they... might not. It's all relative the cut they demand.

So here, are food delivery companies worth ~30% of cost?

Yes, all sort of anecdotes are possible to drum up in this situation. Long term, across the entire food industry, can a ~30% cost be absorbed? Somebody is paying that, you or the restaurant, because it sure as heck isn't the delivery company.

Will the service provided by delivery (and advertising/marketing) increase volume to offset ~30%?

I don't think so, which means that because of their oh-so-useful help, means prices go up. This is needed because either customers pay more, restaurants make less, or somehow the delivery/advertising/marketing company drives more volume so they can turn around and immediately take that as their cut.

If the customers don't like higher prices, they'll stop spending. If the restaurants don't make profit after this new expense, they'll shut down.

> Somebody is paying that [30%], you or the restaurant

The customer is. They are the only one bringing money into the system over the long-run. The customer is paying for the ingredients, the property tax, the delivery, the lights, everything. The restaurant just handles the money.

Right, so when a middleman comes along that apparently requires a 30% cut, either the customer pays it (prices go up). Or the restaurant absorbs the cost (possibly partially).

However I am under the impression that restaurants are NOT operating at a 30% profit margin, and cannot absorb this middleman cut entirely on their own.

It remains to be seen if sales volume goes up enough to offset this. Otherwise the middleman cut will be paid by the customer and thus prices go up.

FWIW, I don't think the middleman adds enough value to demand a 30% cut. So I personally opt out of that and order directly from a restaurant and also pick up in person.

>The restaurant just handles the money.

I thought they were providing the labor for the actual service/product the customer wants. Without that, there is no product for the middleman to attach to and deliver.

The last line was a callback to the original quote: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/henry_ford_122318

I can't edit and add to my comment... so new post.

Basically what I think we're dancing around, is that perhaps the current business of model of restaurants is busted and has to change, post covid. The old model is rent a large space for indoor dining, cook/serve the food, sell high margin alcoholic drinks ;), plan for a steady stream of events/holidays (valentine's day, mother's/father's day, etc), try to locate near other office workers for a steady lunch customer base, and so on.

Maybe that doesn't work as well post-covid due to work-from-home a large shift to ordering out. I mean rent alone has got to be eating restaurants alive, when they don't need as much space now.

As far as middlemen and delivery, restaurants themselves are middlemen if you look at meat/produce being the actual materials and me, the hungry customer, wanting the spend cash for a product - but now eating at home.

Perhaps the new restaurant future is the rent smaller work spaces, or team up with other restaurants and have a booth with shared/common space, and serve mostly with delivery in mind. There's a place like this in my local large city, with a dozen or so vendors that rotate a little bit, sharing a large common area. It was packed every time I went, in the before times... not sure how it is doing now (website says they are mostly doing delivery so I suppose it is still up and running).

In which case a restaurant factors in the delivery fee/cut as an expense. Basically juggle it so part of the fee comes from not having to pay as much rent, and perhaps this delivery need is part of the new business model. Folks can still come by in person to get out of the house and save a bit, but factor in the majority of customers will order delivery.

I don't actually work in this industry so I don't know what actual numbers look like, but I do listen to the Planet Money podcast and a recent episode was about a restaurant that had to close due to high rents! It ended with the former owners wanting to open a new restaurant, but only if they owned the building.

A Chinese restaurant in Lambeth tried disabling uber eats a few years back and running their own delivery service.

Our food arrived TWO HOURS after ordering and cold.

I'd really rather NOT go back to the old way.

I think it’s just too hard to organize drivers and delivery. I’ve never experienced a restaurant where their own delivery drivers are as fast, efficient, smart as Uber/etc.

I’d rather just go pick it up myself than use restaurant delivery.

I’m sure there may be exceptions somewhere, but even in Manhattan the deliveries that work for the restaurant sucked.

I think it’s that there’s no simple feedback loop.

An example is my local mom and pop pizza place. They used to have a few teenagers who would wait tables and drive deliveries. They meant well and tried hard, but it would take a long time for delivery. I’m a 15 minute walk and it would take two hours for two pizzas. If something was off I could talk to the owner and that took a long time but it was never anything bad enough to fire the poor driver, nor should they be. So the poor delivery lingered on.

They switched to Uber and deliveries went to 15-45 minutes. Not perfect but much better. Also easier to enter the order on my phone than calling it in.

Any time the food is cold or off, it’s easy to rate and get fixed.

It’s like taxis vs Uber rides. Taxis did have some advantages, but it way better now. Generally Uber drivers make more than taxi drivers, but there were some owner operator taxis (super rare at least in NY where almost all cabs are owned by big firms) who are losing out.

Have you... actually ordered from a restaurant that's done self-delivery for more than 5 minutes?

I've never, not even once, seen the same driver from one of these services.

This is a huge problem, because every mapping service directs them to an automated exit-only gate that nobody anywhere has the power to open for them -- certainly not if they just sit there for 5 minutes helplessly then chuck it out the window and drive off.

On several occasions I did not even receive a call, text, or any other indication to expect to find my food a thousand yards away sitting in the rain in a parking lot.

They are delivery dilettantes, with no knowledge of their delivery area, no oversight, no guidance.

Most of them have no fixed delivery area, they just follow the next call until they end up two hours away in another county they didn't even realize existed within the borders of their fine state until that evening.

I have received orders so delayed there were legitimate food safety concerns -- upwards of 3 hours from the time of preparation.

3 of the 4 delivery services I have tried did not take responsibility for so much as a single one of these failures to deliver.

2 of them charge more than double menu price for most items on most menus because they added the full base price of an item to (the full base price of an item plus the full upgrade price of an item) in an intentional and deceptive manner.

I informed them of this repeatedly and went up a completely scripted escalation chain that very obviously started in another jurisdiction and very obviously said exactly what I was later informed after requesting a point of contact for service of process was absolutely not their policy (specifically: they have my money now so I can go and find something convenient with which to fuck myself)

I have to conclude that either you've been trying to order take out from the hardware store and been sorely disappointed that your pizza never arrived or must live in alternate reality filled with sunshine, rainbows and GrubHubs that aren't openly defrauding their delivery partners, customers, and shareholders

I have used several delivery services, and my experience in two major metro areas has been that they are virtually indistinguishable from restaurants that have delivery people. The single biggest difference is that they tack on their own fee- a minor inconvenience since they take the orders online and so are less likely to get it wrong.

> Have you... actually ordered from a restaurant that's done self-delivery for more than 5 minutes?

Yes, of course. Aside from the example I gave where I used their self-delivery for 10 years before switching to this new gen.

And I suppose I’ve ordered from about 500 self-delivery restaurants, although I don’t keep a log.

It sounds like you’ve had some bad experiences and they aren’t like mine. I have had really bad experiences with doordash and grubhub where they wouldn’t fix problems, but Uber is about 75% responsive that is so much better than self-delivery.

From first principles it seems like self-delivery can’t compete unless they are really into delivery. Because they can’t scale well beyond their drivers on hand and it’s not possible for them to send out 10 orders at once, etc

> because every mapping service directs them to an automated exit-only gate

You know that you can easily fix this, right?

This comes across to me as very self-centered. Perfect service over having the drivers earning a livable wage?

Drivers aren’t likely to sustainably earn a livable wage by delivering cold food two hours after it was expected either.

Why are you going after the one-data-point anecdote instead of the broader picture?

The broader picture is that all of the money to pay the driver comes from the customer. If the driver-restaurant system isn’t creating enough value for the customer to pay them a living wage, they won’t get it. Either they’ll get a lesser wage, go out of business, or both.

That anecdote was immediately relatable to many of us who have gotten late, soggy, cold food delivery.

No. Your premise seem to be that this anecdote is correct and that that is the inevitable result of non gig-job delivery. I'm pretty sure that there's a lot of anecdotes out there with bad Uber Eats deliveries too.

I did (and do) not argue it’s inevitable, but it is quite common in my experience.

My solution to their failure is to go pick it up myself, including purchasing some of those red insulated delivery boxes for our family use. It makes takeout much more enjoyable when the timing is predictable and the food almost as high-quality as if served on-site.

As a customer, my concern is with a goods and services I’m buying. The restaurant’s relationship with its employees, food suppliers, and power company is their concern, not mine. If a restaurant wants to pay $100/hr or any other legal wage, that’s their business, not mine.

> is their concern, not mine.

Well. This is self-centered to me. I don't want to buy anything from anyone who doesn't treat people with dignity.

It’s inarguably self-centered but entirely practical. I can’t review the employee handbook, employee promoter score, supply chain sustainability reports, and corporate social responsibility policies of everyone I order so much as an $8 pizza from.

There's nothing opaque about the labour relations of the gig-economy.

Why? Because I wanted the meal I paid for to be on time and hot? For the record, I tip extremely generously on the delivery apps as I recognise the importance the riders are doing during the pandemic.

I will never ever willingly tolerate that two hour delivery again. At any price or discount. It was a week night and we were starving by the time the food arrived and it screwed up our routine for the day.

I would pay a reasonable premium to have that meal delivered to me on time and hot.

So really, deliveroo/uber eats created entirely new business. A friend who runs a restaurant said he thought they were the devil and was never going to join them until the pandemic but he said he is now a believer. Adapt or die.

As for drivers earning a liveable wage, I am for that and maybe regulation is required, who knows but you bet your ass the more efficient business with huge economies of scale will have more power to pay their drivers properly than indie mum n dad restaurants.

> bet your ass the more efficient business with huge economies of scale will have more power to pay their drivers properly than indie mum n dad restaurants.

The only thing we've seen these "economies of scale" doing the last decade is the exact opposite, namely using all their muscles to pay workers as little as possible.

I don't know what the OP meant, but if the customer is paying a markup for the food, then they might end up ordering less food.

Agree that Deliveroo fees seem high on both ends (customer and restaurant). Wonder if this means they (a) they are inefficient (b) they have large profit margins or (c) it is actually more expensive to run than one might think. If (a) or (b), the conditions for lower priced alternatives seem high.

The answer is somewhere between A and C depending on what you call inefficiency - Assuming 20 minutes per order (3 per hour) at a minimum wage of c£9 per hour pre-holiday and any other benefits, you are talking about £3 per delivery. They need to pay more than this, as many drive and the fee needs to cover fuel, so call it £4 per delivery or something like that, it's somewhere between £3-£4 probably.

So then you add the cost of user aquisition - which is usually giving out £5 - £10 vouchers and for most of those customers to only use the service once. Clearly the first delivery is a massive loss. Then following that lots of orders are done on a free-or-low delivery cost basis (incl. Deliveroo Plus).

These companies are in a land grab still so it's low margin and high competition between them and Uber Eats. Uber Eats is technically a better cost model (i.e. more efficient) than Deliveroo assuming car delivery, as you can interleave deliveries and cab rides.

The pools for Eats and ride-hailing are separate in most markets.

Well that’s silly, I assume that will change.

Could you please tell me who is registering these domains? I'm honestly interested, I don't want to use the services of such crooks.

Deliveroo and Uber Eats don't do that.

Haven't this done by any company in Europe, and yes, it is despicable

It's 2021. If I were opening a restaurant in <city> I think the bare minimum I could do would be to register the base domain? Okay, let's assume I don't. I'm still getting people ordering that wouldn't otherwise order? because I didn't have a website?

Still just don't see what's wrong here.

I don't want to mention that I'm blind in every frickin HN post but I'm blind, and Uber Eats and etc. are great. and there are restaurants that I specifically know that are in my neighborhood and they are not available on Uber Eats. And I don't order from them because I can't accessibly, so they lose my business presumably because they have opted out. Then there are other restaurants that are local and on Uber eats, and I order from them and feel absolutely fine that I have given the restaurant a sale it wouldn't have otherwise had and employed someone sitting in a car that otherwise had nothing to do. For a minor marginal cost, the restaurant made an extra sale and I got my food. If the restaurant did not want to make this transaction at all, it would not. So everybody came out ahead? I got food, Uber got money, the restaurant got money. What's wrong here? It's like the old argument so many have made about piracy. Uber eats turned a person who otherwise wouldn't be buying food into a sale. Who lost here?

Also, let's say that registering bobs-pizza-chicago.com is wrong. If so, this applies just as much to JebBush.com redirecting to Trump's website, and all the permutations you can think of there. We either solve domain squatting in the general case, or admit that it's shitty but just as okay when done to a restaurant as when done to your least favorite website or political figure.

Many restaurant owners are not as technically inclined as you. They might also think just having a social media presence is enough.

This is a response to the first sentence of my comment, which I strongly appreciate. But I don't understand how it fits with the rest of my questions?

I understand your friends think a social media website is enough. This doesn't mean they need to accept having a website created for them. It sucks that they have to opt out of local delivery services, but it also sucks I have to opt out of junk mail. I still don't understand where the evil is here? It's legal for people to create websites that look and feel similar to existing websites. If this is a problem let's fix it! if it's not, let's not focus on restaurants?

Why would a response have to address everything in a comment, especially when it goes rambling like that?

EDIT: Note, the comment I’m replying to grew by about 300% after I posted this.

It totally doesn't! Excepting the case where the first sentence introduces an idea and the rest expand upon it.

Let's assume that restaurants don't want people to order their food through delivery. Why don't they just opt out? If they aren't opting out, then clearly the people buying the delivery are paying the same as any other takeout customer? Where is the problem here? What is the thing that gets people so very offended on behalf of restaurant owners? I actively want to understand this!

> If they aren't opting out, then clearly the people buying the delivery are paying the same as any other takeout customer? Where is the problem here?

If people have to pay a large markup, they may end up ordering less food. Or maybe ordering from another place because this one seems too expensive.

The offense comes from delivery companies forcefully inserting themselves between customers and the restaurant. Why not just let customers go to the delivery company's website to order, if that's what they wanted? Why is it necessary to deceive customers?

This is my experience.

I have friends who own medium-sized restaurants in a couple different major EU cities.

They all have domain names, and web sites sort-of, but none of them thinks anything matters besides Facebook and to a lesser extent Instagram. The web sites are rarely, if ever, updated. Of course right now they are all forced to close anyway; but pre-Covid at least one of them tried to take the web site seriously and gave up after a while, everybody used Facebook anyway.

One of these owners is my age, the others are younger. I even know a guy who owns a catering company and doesn't bother with a web site.

What's wrong is that Deliveroo is making a profit while exploiting workers, who work for them but don't have worker protections. Other delivery companies do have employees with standard benefits (Just Eat in Spain IIRC) and they provide the same service. It's possible, just less profitable.

The problem is that it's misleading for consumers. If you go to bobs-pizza-chicago.com it's reaosnable to assume you're ordering directly from Bob's pizzas, not some middleman who's gonna take a big cut to pass your order on to Bob's and deliver.

It's very unfortunate that restaurant websites are often so terrible that sometimes they don't even include a proper PDF to check the menu, I can imagine it really makes it impossible for people with special needs to get the info they want or to order, I myself almost always only go to restaurant websites as a last resort because they tend to be awful unless they belong to some big chain.

There are of course some site builders restaurant owners can use to improve this, but since, as others have said, they are not always tech savvy they probably don't know, best thing to improve accessibility I can think of is that local commerce boards create some sort of recommendation or guidelines on how to setup a business website following best practices with a list of easy to use builders for such.

What sucks about the domain squatting is that those large corps will have much better SEO capabilities, so even if someone owns register bobs-pizza-chicago.com and make sure it works they could just make chicago-bobs-pizza.com or some variant and beat them in SEO and steal their traffic, even if they were required to provide some banner saying "this is a doordash website" most people wouldn't care and order anyway.

If you owned a restaurant called Fred's Diner, you might have a website called freds-diner.com.

If a delivery company gets the domain freds-diner-restaurant.com, then they're competing for your traffic.

And their domain might end up higher in Google search results, leading customers to order there. So I don't think it's necessarily the case that they're getting customers they otherwise wouldn't have.

Customers that are only willing to order from Uber Eats etc. aren't going to look for the restaurant's website anyway, they'll just go through the delivery company's website.

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