What was the deal? You pay 5,000, the owner gave you back your 5,000 and kept the 15,000 as profit from door dash? The owner made a massive profit and the shelter gets free food and it didn’t cost you anything?
> The owner made a massive profit and the shelter gets free food and it didn’t cost you anything?
We’re in the midst of a pandemic. The restaurant stays afloat, nothing more. The shelter got a donation, and I got promises of comped deliveries and catering.
It cost me $5,000; it cost DoorDash over twenty thousand.
That’s fine, I wasn’t trying to expose you, I just wanted to understand. It looks like everyone is happy, the restaurant gets cash, the shelter gets food, and you get... a lot of pizza for the rest of your life! I don’t think I’ve eaten 5,000$ worth of pizza in my life so far haha
In the SF Bay Area a 14" pizza from Round Table or better is $20+. Trash pizza is still $5 each or whatever, yes, but where do those savings come from? How do they maintain the price when flour is in such short supply?
This seems very unethical. The fact that you don't like Softbank or DoorDash or the gig-economy or that you're sending pizza to homeless people is irrelevant. The fact is you're exploiting a bug to personally benefit at the expense of investors.
Why wouldn't you apply the same principals of ethical hacking, where you would notify the party of the exploit?
I'm confused. Doordash is knowingly reselling an item for 75% off and someone bought many of the items. No one was defrauded; everyone in the transaction was paid what they wanted to charge, and everyone got what they paid for. What is unethical here? Are you saying it's unethical to take advantage of a sale?
It's nog a bug, it's a feature. Doordash uses investment money to evaporate competitors, take over the market and then raise prices for restaurant owners once they gain control. It's a tried and proven concept.
Paying part of the meal is part of that strategy. They know full well that large orders and large amounts of transactions cost them more money and they're betting on nobody actually doing this. They're selling products below the cost of production at this point, something that I would argue should not be allowed in ethical capitalism. Investors know fully well what they're investing in, and of not, they've either not kept their responsibility on reading about the company they're investing in, or the company itself is pulling massive investment fraud.
Play shit games, win shit prices. If they don't want to lose money like this, maybe they should have a business strategy that isn't oriented about purposely losing money to bankrupt competitors. They easily could've set a reasonable limit of say $200 dollars to their cheaper transactions but they chose not to.
Would I go full ethical when finding exploits for an inherently unethical company? Would I dutifully report flaws to companies selling "adult supervision" apps used by controlling spouses? Would I give "bank phishing on demand" websites a 90 day trial period? I don't think so. Making such software is perfectly legal (in many jurisdictions) but is rarely ever ethical. Ethics would need to come from two sides for me to consider responsible disclosure. I have flooded several phishing databases with fake information, got some of them over their resource limit and shut down as well, and I don't feel the smallest bit of regret.
Where I live, one company has taken over all meal delivery nationally. After destroying the competition, this company had started raising prices each year. They ask for a percentage (13%, rising each year) in an industry where the margins are already very thin.
They money grab got a lot worse after they pushed out all the alternatives and just like with Google, everybody has to play by their rules or they'll be mostly undiscoverable for a large portion of the general public. Their delivery people are still underpaid, but by increasing their percentage of the bill they take for themselves they're now turning a profit. It's gotten to the point where companies are not even allowed to lower their prices when people use other delivery systems (or the restaurant's own personnel) which are cheaper.
The company only got this large because they could afford making losses for many years. Now other companies such as Doordash are trying to cut into the market as well, using hundreds of millions of foreign cash flows and putting business owners under even more pressure. Had there not been a company doing this since 2014, Doordash or any of its competitors would have taken the market regardless.
This is the biggest problem with the reality of predatory pricing compared to the theory of it: after years of undercutting your competitors, you're finally ready to jack up prices and take a profit....just as a new competitor comes in with a new infusion of cash and undercuts your artificially inflated price. (Remember, you can't just turn any old profit, you need a large enough profit to offset the years of purposefully selling at a loss.)
Surely at some point the competition (assuming a lack of innovation to drive down prices) will realize THEY don't want to be the ones who lose money for years only to get unseated when they're ready to jack up prices? How many times can this cycle repeat?
Predatory Pricing absolutely works... when you have a working business model and capital to back it up.
Walmart and McDonalds are masters of this approach.
Uber is a long-term play at disrupting cabs/transportation cartels and incorporated self-driving cars into a non-literal roadmap. They're in it for the long play, and even if they hemorrhage money for a while longer it may, in fact, play out in their favor.
American Airlines famously killed upstart after upstart that attempted to fly out of Dallas Love Field. They kept a lease on two gates, but left them unused almost all of the time (AA generally flies out of the larger Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport). Whenever any new company tried to start new service out of Love field, American would open those two gates, match routes exactly to the startup, and charge substantially less, clearly incurring a loss for each plane flown. As soon as the new company was driven into bankruptcy, AA would again shutter those gates, leaving them available to crush the next company that tried to start at Love Field. See, e.g., Legend Airlines.
Right, so then the startup should sell nonrefundable tickets several weeks in advance. As soon as American starts flying those routes below cost, move your own planes to a different route, book all your passengers with nonrefundable tickets on the American flights and pocket the difference. As soon as they stop, start flying those routes again.
There is presumably some regulatory burden preventing someone from doing this. Maybe you can't move planes from one route to another so easily etc. But then that's how the company does it. Without that method of forcing the new competitor to incur unrecoverable costs, they can't do it.
It's theoretically possible to have a natural market barrier like that, but in practice to be a barrier that large it's nearly always a regulatory compliance issue. The law says you can't sign up customers on long-term contracts, preventing new competitors from locking in customers at the current price rather than the below-cost price. The law says an ISP has to serve the whole city and not just one neighborhood, increasing the startup capital required by a factor of a hundred. The law prohibits adversarial interoperability, so you can't distribute your own apps unless you can manufacture your own phones.
Can you imagine how furious people would be if they found out their airline put them on their cheaper competitor's flights and kept the difference? Rationality be damned, they'd be out for blood. I can hear the screaming already. Good luck.
Of all the ways I can imagine self driving cars becoming a reality, Uber creating a fleet of honest to goodness self-driving taxis seems to be about the most far fetched.
On balance of probability, I think that is just a bullet point to keep the juicy AI flavoured investment funds flowing.
> How can you call McDonald's predatory pricing? They have been cheap and profitable for decades.
Their pricing and food is a gimmick, didn't that movie The Founder and the subsequent articles from various outlets pretty much lineout how Mcdonald's actual business model relies on Property Management and franchising? [1]
The food, competitively priced (questionable food costs and sources are the bigger story not told) or not is only the hook/marketing costs to get you to show up in Corporate's business model, the real money is in leasing the property and the brand name to the Local owner.
Personally speaking, I had the misfortune of eating at Mcdonalds during this COVID shutdown on more than one occasion as grocery stores were closed by the time I got off work.
And other than nostalgia for what was once a haven of my childhood, I cannot bring myself to put that stuff into my body without feeling nausea afterward. Everything is overly sweet, or salty; I remember the pickles and the fries from the happy meal being pretty decent as a kid in the 90s that went down with the Hi-C orange soda, having had one of those value-meals ($15 is hardly a value mind you) as an adult with the same items was atrocious.
It only works if you have an easy path to monopoly once you price your competitors out. A company like WalMart or Amazon can leverage their returns to scale on logistics to actually price out Mom&Pops. That way, even after the drive the small stores out of business it’s just not worth it for anyone else to try to cut in unless they can also operate at WalMart scale and afford to bleed money for a while until WalMart gets tired of undercutting them.
But there are no appreciable logistical or operational efficiencies in how these delivery services operate. And there aren’t any barriers to entry. The workforce is completely fungible so they aren’t locked in. And just the fact that delivery services are popping up like mushrooms suggests it doesn’t take much to start one up.
In theory they could eke put some advantages to scale that keep out upstarts by using machine learning to optimize delivery routes or something. But I doubt that gets them the kind of efficiency gains they would need to actually turn a profit. From what I’ve seen, it looks like their main attempt to freeze out competition is just coming from flooding your search engine hits. I don’t know how sustainable that is either.
My original comment said its not okay to steal from a company even if you don't like that company. Your post is a lot of words about why you don't like that company. You don't directly address my claim that its unethical to steal from a company even if you don't like the company.
And then you make a weird point that software can be unethical (e.g. phising software) and this somehow applies to Doordash. Just to get this straight, making peer to peer scheduling software used for deliveries is unethical? And because of that, its okay to steal from their investors (including many US investors and pension funds)?
> My original comment said its not okay to steal from a company even if you don't like that company.
Your original comment said it was wrong to exploit a bug, to which the parent poster retorted that this was a feature and not a bug.
Here, you've gone further to claim that this behaviour is stealing, and I'd like to explore that for a minute: what possible moral or legal right does Doordash have to an operating profit when it deliberately operates at a loss?
By all accounts, this below-cost pricing is predatory behaviour on Doordash's part, not the customer's: they seem to break into a market by offering delivery at a subsidized rate, then they take data based on those rates and try to strike fee arrangements with restaurants. At first glance, it seems like they sell themselves based on inflated numbers from the discount period, without disclosing that they were in fact offering customers a discount.
I see no ethical fault in beating a (sophisticated!) predator at their own game, but where do you reach the alternative conclusion?
Would it have crossed the line if the OP had tweaked the Italian places website (say for example setting a 0 height div) to include fake prices intended for the scraper to misinterpret?
For me I think it would have. Which makes me pause to consider whether I find the whole scheme too close to the ethical boundary.
I disagree. In the case of this submission, the restaurant was getting negative reviews due to poor delivery (e.g. not keeping food warm) - all of which were the fault of DoorDash, and the restaurant had no control over it.
Doordash is exploiting and harming the restaurant so that Doordash can make money. I think it's totally fine to make changes to your own site to thwart this. Doordash is in full control of this. They're the ones scraping the site, and they're the ones who should pay the price if they do a poor job.
I think that is a fair point which I wasn't really accounting for. Doordash should really get permission from restaurants before inserting themselves as a middle man, even on a trial basis.
Also, it occurs to me that if the artificially low prices resulted in doordash recieving more orders than would be usual, I doubt they would have disclosed that in their dealings with the restaurant. Though that is hypothetical and still suffers from the two wrongs don't make a right issue.
I think it is a bug. I think they relied too heavily on automation and scraping to get a list of all the restaurants, menus and prices. From the original article:
> My first thought: I wondered if Doordash is artificially lowering prices for customer acquisition purposes.
> My second thought: I knew Doordash scraped restaurant websites. After we discussed it more, it was clear that the way his menu was set up on his website, Doordash had mistakenly taken the price for a plain cheese pizza and applied it to a 'specialty' pizza with a bunch of toppings.
So I don't think its a feature.
> what possible moral or legal right does Doordash have to an operating profit when it deliberately operates at a loss?
It doesn't have an operating profit whether you exploit the bug or not. Doesn't mean its okay to steal from them. Even if they do deliberately lose money (e.g. first Uber ride free up to $10), exploiting it is unethical (e.g. tricking Uber into thinking you're on a new phone).
The rest of your argument is again, why you don't like Doordash or why Doordash is unethical. I won't address this point because I think its unethical to steal from an unethical company so their ethics is irrelevant.
If I think Walmart is unethical, is it okay shoplift from their stores?
This is the crux: does it count as stealing to accept the offer of a contract which causes the offering party to lose money?
My answer is no. They offered the service at a certain price, you accepted it. Whether either party profits or not is not part of the contract.
So no theft has taken place. If you want to claim that's it's unethical to take the free money that they're offering, you need to provide a justification for why that is. The onus is on you.
The only way I can see you attempting to justify it is by saying that it involves taking advantage of unforeseen consequences of the contract. But as has been pointed out, they fully intended to lose money, so that doesn't work.
Arguing from the position where you define the ethical framework and then refuse to engage in any discussion about whether that framework is correct is kind of tautological.
In this case a homeless shelter ended up with a lot of pizza (which I'm presuming they consented to receiving), a local business got a cash injection and the OP got some perks. Under your ethical framework a bunch of silicon valley types had to find some other way of pissing $20k up the wall.
I know which outcome I prefer, though I personally wouldn't have done it.
> If I think Walmart is unethical, is it okay shoplift from their stores?
You've made a false equivalence here, a more correct question would be:
"If Walmart prices a gallon of milk at $0.25, either by mistake or for the purpose of getting people to buy milk at Walmart and not their local grocer, and I buy 100 gallons to give to people who can't afford milk right now, is that unethical?"
...to which the answer is, no, that's not unethical, you paid the price listed on the tag and Walmart (conceivably) paid the dairy farm their usual rate, so the only company hurt was the one that made the mistake or predatory pricing move.
My comment also stated that it's not stealing if you order from a business that decided to operate in a way that causes them to lose money if you order with them.
Investors know that the company they're investing in will lose a lot of money and the know about the business practices that basically give away money in order to gain popularity. It's not their money anymore after they gave it to the company. It's true that if the company goes bankrupt they lose out, but they can prevent losing that money by not investing on companies handing out free cash.
The software itself is not unethical, the business practices Doordash/Uber/Yelp/etc. follow to make their software popular are. The problem is that these companies seemingly can't make a profit without using huge investments to crush the local competition. If they were to act ethically, I would have no problems with these companies.
Also, taking away future profit is not stealing, it's part of the risk of doing business. Don't stuff your money into risky business ventures if you don't want risk.
It's quite sad that pension funds are investing in these predatory businesses but protecting their investments because they're too big to fail undermine the entire concept of competition in capitalism.
Interesting take, but I think the compensation only takes it from an act of charity down to exchanging favors, which isn't unethical in itself. The very act of buying a pizza is a quid pro quo. This money for that pizza.
This reminds me of the scene in Silicon Valley where Richard bankrupts a similar delivery service that's not profitable in a specific use case by ordering a huge amount of Pizzas.
