Hacker News Reader

Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

> If you think of it as Doordash buying the pizza and then reselling it to you

Isn't this basically impossible to do legally in the U.S.? Wouldn't you run into trouble both with IP law and food safety laws around reselling prepared foods?

View on HN

This exact arbitrage, performed by Doordash, was exploited.

https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage

IP law, no, for the same reason nothing stops me from reselling the Ralph Lauren shirt I bought as a Ralph Lauren shirt, so long as I make no pretenses of being Ralph Lauren, and I make no modifications to it. The good is the same, IP protected good. I'm just re-selling it.

Food safety? There might be some restrictions related to food handling, but to my understanding they're mostly pretty rote food handling safety training stuff that I'd hope delivery companies provide anyway.

It's the opposite — you're legally protected to resell anything you buy and the seller can't stop you. I'm not sure if food has any caveats, but in general, IP law cannot stop you from reselling an item.

It's called the First-Sale Doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

If you're in a jurisdiction that taxes prepare food, then the government is going to be unhappy about missing the tax on the second sale.

This has been happening for a good while. There are loads of instances of food delivery companies creating unauthorized websites for restaurants with a phone number and url owned by the delivery company. They are literally buying the food and reselling it to you at a markup.

If it's illegal nobody cares.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com