Our nearest Pizza Hut delivers via Doordash whether you order direct or through DD, but if you order direct its 30% cheaper. I'm not sure who's eating the markup.
In my case, since I get DashPass through my CC (not directly paying for it), I've seen it discounted to below the price some restaurants list on their websites. I pick up all my orders myself though.
I wouldn't pay for DashPass directly, personally speaking at least. I don't use DD nearly enough to justify investing more into it vs. just ordering on the restaurant's website or calling in the order. The only reason I even use DD is because I get that as a benefit through my CC and it usually pushes the prices to same or lower as ordering directly.
I feel like schemes like this warrant a law that you're failing your fiduciary duty as a company owner and can be sued by any of the stakeholders for it if you can't prove failure to at least break even is due to genuine misfortune. Not even gross incompetence, that should just get you sacked with a dunce cap on top of having the company broken off and sold to a bidder that isn't hellbent on stripping it for parts.
That or company owners are only allowed to draw funds from the company's profits and funds coming from anywhere else, including from layoffs and corner cutting, are seized at 150% the value stolen and the company owners involved get treated as though they had committed embezzling so long as the books can indicate that the executives and owners drew more in compensation than was recorded as profit.
That's your takeaway? It's like Walmart moving into a town and undercutting indie business prices until the indie businesses close, then raising prices.
What doordash is doing is scraping restaurants' websites for prices, taking a temporary loss, then going to the restaurants saying, "We got all these orders, it's a win for both of us!" to sell the contact, then raising prices and tacking on extra fees, making money off the restaurants and the customers
Especially at the prices the bill comes out to be. I had a day years ago where my car was in the shop, so I used one of them to get lunch. A $10 sandwich ended up costing me $30, and some people do this every day. Fuck avocado toast (which is delicious), this is why people are broke.
I'm not sure the comparison is quite apt, I'm not familiar with any independent food delivery services beyond just asking your buddy to grab some snacks on the way over for a hangout or something.
But I am vaguely familiar with the idea of loss-leading and think its despicable. If no regulation is ever going stand in the way of practices, then knowing they're being exploited by folks like pizza dude makes me feel a bit better, at least.
In some ways, loss leading can be done in more or less ethical ways. For instance, a small mom n pop hardware loss leading on lumbar or hammers and taking a reasonable profit on ten penny nails. Or something, maybe a better example is the Costco 1.50 all beef foot-long dog and soda but their memberships are reasonable profit for those who would go often enough and buy enough to make it worth it. It's late and I'm tired, I hope you get the general gist. But yes, doordash is just double-dipping on the sleazy. And maybe loss leading isn't ever acceptable, but I'm simply unaware/haven't thought of reasons that make it so. I'm willing to hear any argument against any of it, though.
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The owner of a pizza restaurant in the US has discovered the DoorDash delivery app has been selling his food cheaper than he does - while still paying him full price for orders.
Content strategist Ranjan Roy blogged about the anonymous restaurateur, who is his friend - he later named the business, which has outlets in Manhattan and Topeka, Kansas, US.
Mr Roy said he first heard about the situation in March 2019, when his friend started receiving complaints about deliveries, even though his outlets did not deliver.
At that point , he discovered he had been added to DoorDash - and noticed it was charging a lower price for one of his premium pizzas.
The next time, the restaurant prepared his friend's order by boxing up the pizza base without any toppings, maximising the "profit" from the mismatched prices.
"Third-party delivery platforms, as they've been built, just seem like the wrong model, but instead of testing, failing, and evolving, they've been subsidised into market dominance.
I recognized the name AU10TIX, because I half-joked on Lemmy about a potential mass doxxing of Xitter's most vile users back in September when they announced the partnership. I assumed they'd be a target for ransomware/hackers, not that they'd just leave their admin creds out in the open.
I think the easiest solution to this is just not to have all the ”smart” features in the first place.
In regards to reducing emissions, I get that these smart features can increase efficiency, but, does that offset the emissions of manufacturing the additional hardware needed? most people won’t set up things like load shifting, or live in areas where variable priced power just isn’t a thing, so that efficiency is only really realized by a fraction of the units.
Things like heat pump heaters are incredibly efficient systems, even without the smart features. I think we would be better served by focusing on getting these made as efficiently, repairably, and cheaply as possible. And then getting them in to as many hands as possible. Packing them full of smart features will just diminish the longevity of the equipment, increase the cost per unit, and make them less accessible to the average person.
The problem is, this isn’t really up to consumers or even companies, as alluded to in blog post. Investors push for the inclusion of such features because they’re ether convinced it’s what must be done to compete, opens avenues for future subscription fees, or just because they’re invested in the company that makes the parts that enable the features.
It’s a structural issue in how investment and funding is done, and regulation will only do so much to counter the natural tendencies of the business world. We need different ways to get investment in to the production of these kinds of products.
Cleantech is a very dynamic sector, even if its triumphs are largely unheralded. There's a quiet revolution underway in generation, storage and transmission of renewable power, and a complimentary revolution in power-consumption in vehicles and homes...
But cleantech is too important to leave to the incumbents, who are addicted to enshittification and planned obsolescence. These giant, financialized firms lack the discipline and culture to make products that have the features – and cost savings – to make them appealing to the very wide range of buyers who must transition as soon as possible, for the sake of the very planet.
The author focuses on the danger of startups dying out and therefore bricking your devices, but another major problem with startups is that they are VC-backed, and those VC investors are expecting the exact same unsustainable growth that the incumbent "market leaders" are chasing in their enshittification journeys. When the startups don't die, they will also 'have' to enshittify, to satisfy investors.
It's not enough for our policymakers to focus on financing and infrastructure barriers to cleantech adoption. We also need a policy-level response to enshittification.
Sadly, this is the impossible part. Policymakers (at least in the US) will never prioritize consumers over companies.
Honestly, the best we can ever hope for is a law mandating that it's no longer illegal to modify your tech if the company who operates it dies, or shuts down the backend server infra, but this will be opposed by basically every company out there (including if not especially video game companies, who won't want to potentially have to allow people to develop and operate private servers for defunct MMOs).
I was in court the other day and it turns out that while they send us the evidence videos encrypted (and never give us the right password), the government's lawyer had it all on onedrive 🫠
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