To a first approximation, I can't really see why Place and Pay should be illegal. It's basically paying the neighbor kid to go pick up some dinner for you, writ large.
It "competes" with any delivery service a restaurant runs, but if the restaurant offers takeout at all, it's hard for me to see why the market should care who is doing the taking out.
To me it gets 'shitty' when they do this without disclosure. I have no problem with placing an order with GH and having them place the order for me, but when they masquerade as the restaurant and try to hide that from the customer is where the problem comes in.
Last month the grilled chicken place gave me chicken which wasn't grilled. I called them (they have a national call centre), and the store manager called me shortly after, to apologise.
Following day they sent me chicken.
Last week I was at a pizza place at night. An angry customer called, they got the other wrong. I listened to the store manager for about 4-6 minutes trying to explain that this was the 3rd-party service that got it wrong.
That service doesn't have an agreement with the store/chain, as they have their own delivery service.
Is the extra admin worth it? I don't think so. It's unethical behaviour from the tech companies.
We had the same experience with GH once(and never again as we canceled). The food arrived and was completely inedible. The restaurant sent out a vindaloo that was the most unnatural red color, like they had dumped a bin full of chili flake in it.
Grubhub pointed the finger at the local restaurant, and the local restaurant pointed the finger at GH for not specifying the level of spiciness. In the end the only way to resolve the problem was to do a chargeback because neither merchant would take responsibility. We didn't have the business relationship with the restaurant. So I'll never use GH for anything because when something goes wrong they absolve themselves of responsibility.
And I'm skeptical of any other company that acts as a base middleman like they do.
Even worse, then the customer -- thinking the restaurant messed up -- writes a poor Yelp review for the restaurant, not understanding the game of telephone went wrong.
> To a first approximation, I can't really see why Place and Pay should be illegal. It's basically paying the neighbor kid to go pick up some dinner for you, writ large.
The service itself isn't illegal, but impersonating the restaurant is.
I mean it's not fraud to blame your suppliers for problems that are the supplier's fault. It doesn't magically mean you're representing them. My local grocery store was out of tempeh because the factory they buy it from shut down due to a COVID scare. It doesn't mean that I suddenly think my grocery store is speaking as the supplier.
It certainly feels like fraud if that so-called supplier never agreed to be a vendor in the first place. If the line to check out at the grocery store was 2 hours long, you wouldn't blame the company who packaged the tempeh. If a mobile food order takes 2 hours because it requires someone to act as a proxy for the customer, then the blame should fall on the middleman service.
So I don’t really get the issue then. If my business is making custom computers and I buy parts from Microcenter then they’re my supplier whether there’s a business agreement or not. And telling my client that a part they asked for is sold out and so there will be a delay isn’t fraud.
It’s not at all my issue if my client is frustrated at Microcenter because of the delay and it’s not my job to protect their reputation so long as I’m truthful.
If my order is delayed because the driver is stuck at the restaurant waiting for my order because the restaurant hadn’t stated yet then that’s on them. Had I driven there myself I would be just as annoyed.
If my order is delayed because they can’t find a driver or there’s a problem with the ordering then that’s on the delivery company.
Apologies for the 2 day late reply, I forget to check my comments on HN far too often.
The issue isn't when a restaurant drags their feet with an order, it's when they don't know the order even exists until the courier shows up. So not only do you have to play a game of telephone with your delivery driver placing your order, but that order is only paid for & made once that driver get there.
None of this is clear from the apps I've used. There's no indication whether you're ordering from a restaurant that has a backend receiving orders in realtime or if it's a "place and pay" order. Customers will reasonably think the restaurant is to blame, when it could've very well been the fault of the driver.
it is lying to the customer by misrepresenting the price and performacne of the restaurant. When GH messes up, the implications are rarely for GH, they are for the restaurant which gets a bad review by the customer.
There can be a big difference in time between the people who pickup food and bring it right back to their place and the GH employee who has it sitting in their car for 30 min before he gets to your place. This can make the experience worse and hence hurt the restaurants reputation.
Or when the driver does multiple orders at once. That’s really upsetting. Because I’ll get a notification that the driver is approaching with my order (about a minute away), and then they proceed to drive past my house into a neighborhood 5-10 minutes away, and then come deliver my food 15-20 minutes after it was picked up.
If the driver is going to do multiple orders at once, I should be informed of this.
Perhaps there is a case to be made here around how reasonable person principle should be applied, because the defense can argue that only an idiot blames the company cooking the food when the independently-contracted delivery guy is too slow.
If they can hinge a case on whether the reasonable person can tell the difference, there's meat on the bones, but I don't see this case ending with Grubhub's business model being declared illegal (only with clarifications as to how to maintain the reputation protection aspect of trademark against the nominative fair use aspect of trademark).
No lawyer but demonstrating that "only an idiot blames the company cooking the food when the independently-contracted delivery guy is too slow" seems quite challenging, people leave reviews for all kinds of random, unrelated reasons.
I would never make a bet on peoples inability to be idiots.
Especially so when the independently contracted delivery guy impersonates the restaurant. A reasonable person will assume that the website restaurant-xyz.com connects them to the restaurant xyz and if they place an order, they are placing an order with that restaurant, not an independent contractor.
Hey, if it's just fast food why does the market even care who prepares it? How long till these food "delivery" services just capture all the addressable market masquerading as a bunch of uninformed, non-participating restaurants and make the food they deliver? Why are they leaving all this extra margin on the table?
Pizza is not fast food. And every pizza place makes their pies differently. They're not completely commodified, at least not for people ordering regularly.
As for actual fast food, while the process is optimized to the extent possible, that optimization usually involves the restaurants having their own supply chain of specific ingredients. Grubhub would have to gain access to the same ingredients to successfully impersonate chain restaurants.
What I can see them doing is just launching 100 different fast food brands selling the same food cooked in the same dark megakitchen, because why not, DDoSing consumer choice with fake brands is par for the course these days.
"The market" doesn't have opinions any more than "the environment" does.
Market participants all care for different reasons.
As far as assuming the business identities of "non participating" restaurants, that sort of thing has a long history - it is a favorite of various organized crime rings.
So in that sense, it does seem a natural fit for GH.
They'd rather just run the last delivery step and suck up all the profits. Let the sucker restaurant owners assume all the cost of setting up operation and crafting a menu only to run it on no margins.
It "competes" with any delivery service a restaurant runs, but if the restaurant offers takeout at all, it's hard for me to see why the market should care who is doing the taking out.