
A small restaurant owner on Google, DoorDash, and Grubhub - rmason
https://www.saddlebackbbq.com/how-google-doordash-grubhub-conspire-screw-local-restaurants
======
rmason
The author is a friend and was the original marketing director for the hosting
company LiquidWeb. He' a superb marketer and I suspect this article grew out
of his frustrations dealing with this problem.

I don't think the average restaurant owner who may not be very digitally savvy
realizes how these companies piggyback on top of their brand. I predict that
soon there will be a large class action lawsuit with thousands of restaurants
going after the delivery services for these underhanded tactics.

~~~
naravara
>I don't think the average restaurant owner who may not be very digitally
savvy realizes how these companies piggyback on top of their brand. I predict
that soon there will be a large class action lawsuit with thousands of
restaurants going after the delivery services for these underhanded tactics.

It's honestly gotten pretty bad. I almost can't find most independent
restaurants' web presences anymore because Yelp, Caviar, Google's page,
Doordash, et. al. all outcompete them on SEO for their own brands. And that's
AFTER the paid ads those same sites manage to take out.

Most of the time, I end up using restaurant menus listed on UberEats or
Doordash instead of their own websites before I call them for a delivery
because it's just impossible to find their websites. It's especially bad with
things like Chinese or Thai restaurants since so many of their names are
variations on a handful of motifs. So you might be looking for the Peking
Garden across the street, but you're just as likely to get Peking Gardens in
cities all over the country, none of which are affiliated with each other. But
the Yelp or Doordash hit is always the one right by you.

It's unfair. I want restauranteurs to be good at restauranting. The line
between their success or failure shouldn't rely on their ability to outsmart
expert SEO hustlers. It basically winds up being a shakedown that adds no
value to the customer or the restaurant.

~~~
analyst74
> It's unfair. I want restauranteurs to be good at restauranting.

Restaurants have to pay an arm and leg (often around 1/3 of revenue) for prime
real-estate; or pay higher wage in more prosperous places.... is it fair?

In the end, restauranteurs who are good at this business will thrive and those
who are not good at it will falter. Google/Yelp/DoorDash just provides
additional dimensions for restaurants to compete in. And as always, when new
technologies emerge, there are winners and losers.

In this wave of change to restaurant industry, the winners are actually
smaller restaurants at cheap locations who are previously invisible to most
potential customers but now are on equal footing with restaurants at prime
locations in terms of exposure. And in the long term, it'll shift restaurants'
expense breakdown, and those who pay too much rent will struggle because they
don't have the budget to pay for online exposures.

It doesn't mean the restaurants paying less rent will be more profitable, the
money simply goes from landlords to tech companies. And as long as restaurant
industry is a fiercely competitive market, profit margins will remain low.

~~~
naravara
>In the end, restauranteurs who are good at this business will thrive and
those who are not good at it will falter.

If the differentiating factor between success or failure is SEO rather than
location, quality of food, or service I have trouble seeing how that's a net
benefit for anyone but Google. Maybe "fair" was the wrong term. It's
encouraging maladaptive behaviors in the industry.

~~~
curryst
Why is location a net benefit for anyone but the landlords? SEO is essentially
just your digital location. It makes your restaurant easy to find and navigate
to, in the same way that a good location makes your restaurant easy to get to
(and maybe park).

------
tropdrop
> DoorDash uses our brand name “Saddleback BBQ” right in the advertisement.

> Possibly the most maddening thing is that if a customer clicks on the link,
> it does NOT take them to a webpage to order from Saddleback BBQ. It takes
> the user to a general page to order BBQ from anyone that serves BBQ. At the
> top of the list? Applebees.

This is a particularly egregious sleight of hand. It's a relatively easy
click-through to write for DoorDash, and it would result in the customer
getting exactly what they were looking for (instantly looking at Saddleback's
menu options and probably ordering). But DoorDash isn't content with
delivering what they promised! The customer must perform a _secondary_ search
within DoorDash just to find that same restaurant again, because Saddleback is
nowhere within sight on the page they've actually landed on. It's sneaky
because it _seems_ like incompetence, but the reality is that they've
absolutely done it on purpose so they can double-dip one customer and display
ads to them from restaurants that paid more to DoorDash.

~~~
dathinab
> DoorDash uses our brand name “Saddleback BBQ” right in the advertisement.

> Possibly the most maddening thing is that if a customer clicks on the link,
> it does NOT take them to a webpage to order from Saddleback BBQ. It takes
> the user to a general page to order BBQ from anyone that serves BBQ. At the
> top of the list? Applebees.

Well isn't that plain fraud? (And no adding some * somewhere with a disclaimer
doesn't make it not fraud. The point is that it _intentionally_
misguides/tricks/manipulates the user with the intention of harming the given
brand (by on-the-fly replacing it)).

EDIT(clarification): It's like going into a shop and asking for a specific
samsung tv and the salesman goes and comes back with a philipps tv saying here
is your tv, the price is .... Sure if you look clearly at it it's not the PC
you asked for but if you are in a hurry or social insecure you might still end
up buying it even through you didn't want to.

~~~
smacktoward
I dunno about fraud, but it certainly seems reasonable that it would be
trademark infringement. The name "Saddleback BBQ" is Saddleback's trademark.
If another company uses it to sell potential Saddleback customers (which these
clearly are, since they searched for that name) products from a competitor,
that seems like something a good trademark attorney would be interested in.

(The potential hitch here is that most restaurants are small businesses, and
small businesses aren't great about doing things like registering their
trademarks. But you can still build a claim even around an unregistered
trademark under certain circumstances: [https://www.nolo.com/legal-
encyclopedia/what-good-unregister...](https://www.nolo.com/legal-
encyclopedia/what-good-unregistered-trademark.html))

~~~
jjeaff
A trademark doesn't mean no one can use your name. You would need to prove
that customers are being misled to purchase BBQ from another company thinking
they are getting it from Saddleback BBQ. You can call out competitors, you can
create an ad that says "4 out of 5 doctors prefer our BBQ to Saddleback BBQ"
(assuming you've got the data to back it up).

What these companies are doing is definitely misleading but I don't think
anyone is accidentally purchasing from Applebees thinking they were getting
Saddleback BBQ.

It would be like mentioning a popular brand on your website in order to get
the search engine traffic for that brand, even though you don't sell it.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
You're right in your first para, wrong in the rest.

You can't lawfully squat a brands trademarks, neither in SERPs, domain names,
nor in real world signposts.

You can use trademarks for comparison but having a signpost - virtual or
actual - that has another brand on it is tortuous infringement. Bait and
switch is rightly unlawful.

~~~
jessaustin
"Tortious"?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
An action that is against a "tort", ie a civil law offence is "tortuous". It's
like "criminal" but for civil law.

~~~
jessaustin
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tortuous](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tortuous)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Hmm, I've been using "tortuous" as the adjective for tort for probably a
couple of decades and you're the first person to try to correct me. Clearly
I'm using what Wiktionary classes as usage that's obsolete.

Interestingly googling around the principle usage -- to mean pertaining to a
tort -- of this spelling is in UK Terms of Use. It's quite hard to search
though as often people will talk about tortuous caselaw [1], meaning 'twisting
and turning'. Both usages can be in the same document, so Google Search - in
particular - is no good here.

Spelling "tortuous": I find supporting documents from the UK Home Office [3],
the UK IPO (including in court proceedings for trademark), and in private
practice references to UK tort law, eg [2] dated 2019.

I don't consider my usage to be wrong _per se_ but will consider using
tortious in international forums (I so wanted to write "fora", lol); thanks
for the query, terse as it was.

It's possible we're all using it "incorrectly" of course. I work in the IP
sector, we might all be drinking from the same fountain (eg perhaps reading
past UK caselaw keeps us archaic).

[1] [https://www.worldtrademarkreview.com/brand-
management/signif...](https://www.worldtrademarkreview.com/brand-
management/significant-blow-cadbury-uk-court-appeal-decision-puts-purple-
colour-trademark), example of talking about an intricate case that twists and
turns.

[2] [https://thelawreviews.co.uk/edition/the-intellectual-
propert...](https://thelawreviews.co.uk/edition/the-intellectual-property-
review-edition-8/1196335/turkey) talking about an infringement of a tort, as
tortuous.

[3] [https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/references-to-
the...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/references-to-the-court-of-
justice-of-the-european-union/references-to-the-court-of-justice-of-the-
european-union-2012) , note I'm assuming the Home Office is the origin, it's
Gov, but I don't really see mention of the department that owns that data.

~~~
jessaustin
If "tortuous" didn't already have a completely different useful meaning, I
wouldn't object. Calling harmful behavior "tortious" shouldn't be ambiguous.
I'm not sure what happened in olden times, but over the last decade "tortuous"
has dominated because of clueless spellcheck.

------
ryanwaggoner
This is a classic case of aggregation theory:
[https://stratechery.com/concept/aggregation-
theory/](https://stratechery.com/concept/aggregation-theory/)

DoorDash, Grubhub, etc. are becoming the place that customers go to when
looking for food. And if they own the customer relationship, then your
restaurant is a commodity. This is basically how I live already. I sometimes
want something specific from a specific restaurant, but more often than not, I
just want _something_ and I browse through Seamless until I see some food that
looks good and order it. I don't really know or care where it's coming from as
long as it's reasonably priced and has decent ratings.

I know how heavy the fees are, so I tried for awhile to order from restaurants
directly, but it's often _horribly_ painful. You have to call on the phone,
which is already a huge hit to user experience. Then you have issues with
noise, accents, trying to accurately convey exactly what you want with any
modifications, providing your credit card over the phone. It's just horrible
and I always fall back to just using Seamless. I feel bad, but restaurants
certainly don't seem like they're going out of their way to make the direct
ordering experience as painless as possible.

These restaurants don't have the money or expertise to develop great websites
or apps, and I don't want an app on my phone for every restaurant anyway. Nor
do I want a list of dozens of bookmarks for restaurants, without a way to
discover new ones. Not that it matters, because I think we've seen pretty
clearly that consumers as a whole are going to just go with whatever's easiest
for them. And anyone who is going to build out the infrastructure that
Doordash and Grubhub have so they can own the customer relationship due to a
superior UX is going to extract as much value as they can as well, or they
won't be able to keep up with the competition in terms of UX or ads. It feels
like a fairly intractable problem without regulation, which I'm generally
skeptical of. But maybe that's the answer here.

I do wonder if Google and Apple could add "order online" functionality to
their maps programs without too much trouble. Their interests might be more
aligned with restaurants such that they could take 5-10% instead of 30%.

~~~
thatfrenchguy
You could also go out, and get the food from the restaurant itself, instead of
having a low-wage worker do it for you.

~~~
MattGaiser
With the discounts and such, it often costs less to use DoorDash.

~~~
AlexandrB
These will go away once DoorDash needs to be profitable. At best, this is
cheese in the mousetrap. Legally, it should be regarded as predatory pricing
used to drive their competitors (the restaurants themselves) out of the
delivery industry.

------
chrischen
Not only ads but these online ordering companies go as far as to setup _fake
websites_ under _fake domains_ that make it look like an official website to
unsuspecting restaurants that did not have websites.

Previously, they would also take these fake websites and use them to claim the
official website on the Google Places listing so they can show up at the top
without much SEO.

But often their fake websites would show up organically and appear as the real
website, and then they’d take a 30% fee for “referring” the customer.

I learned about this when I was trying to sell an online ordering platform so
restaurants could setup their own websites with ordering. The problem was
sales was slow and expensive, and small restaurants weren’t savvy enough to
understand they’d need to spend a lump sum to setup their websites to fix the
problem, or even how or why the problem existed.

~~~
qppo
Isn't this fraud?

~~~
heyheyhey
Haven't heard of DoorDash or GrubHub doing it but OrderAhead was caught doing
it couple years ago: [https://www.geekwire.com/2015/exclusive-thousands-of-
rogue-r...](https://www.geekwire.com/2015/exclusive-thousands-of-rogue-
restaurant-websites-diverting-customers-to-orderahead-deliveries/)

~~~
chrischen
I know for a fact eat24 did this, and a crappy looking website called Beyond
Menu. I'm not sure if GrubHub did this (before the merger). A lot of the times
the goals of these sites were to make it look like you were ordering from the
restaurant directly, so it was a bit obscured. Order Ahead did this, but only
because frankly everyone else was doing it (they definitely didn't spearhead
it as a relatively late entrant into the space).

------
ocdtrekkie
Another thing I realized lately: I usually tip restaurants for curbside/pickup
right now since I know their staff have been hit hard. But if we DoorDash, the
tip goes to DoorDash, not the restaurant I want to support.

I generally try to order either curbside or delivery through the restaurant's
own site. I figure even if they use a third party then, they're using the one
most advantageous to their business.

I want my favorite restaurants to survive this pandemic, but I couldn't care
less about these delivery startups.

~~~
kbenson
> I want my favorite restaurants to survive this pandemic, but I couldn't care
> less about these delivery startups.

Does the tip go to DoorDash, or to the person that delivered for DoorDash? I
want the restaurants to survive too, but I have to imagine a lot of these
DoorDash delivery people were either Uber drivers or employed somewhere else a
few weeks ago until furloughed, and may have a less stable income than someone
working at a restaurant which is getting takeout orders.

~~~
d1str0
This is a question with two answers. It depends on the company.

There is lots of evidence of some delivery companies using your “tip” to cover
the base salary of their employees. So if a driver is guaranteed $5/hr, and
you tip $3, DD/UberEats/etc. will claim they only have to pay out $2 for that
hour.

~~~
uoaei
DoorDash was in trouble about a year ago for skimming tips off the top in some
strange convoluted scheme that was too ingenious to be an accident.

It appears they haven't changed that behavior yet, despite getting a lot of
bad PR and promising they will look into it.

 _Corporations are not moral agents. They cannot be shamed into acting to the
benefit of the majority, and their promises mean nothing._

~~~
ravenstine
Skimming puts it lightly. If the driver's base pay was $5, for instance, and
the customer tipped $5 through the app, the driver would receive $0 in tips
because PoorDash would use the tip to offset as much of the base pay as
possible. That's theft and borderline fraud because the term "tip" implies
that the money will go to the person responsible for delivering your food, not
Tony Xu the CEO.

~~~
BeetleB
Every time this comes up I'm always astounded that most people have no idea
how tips work.

In a lot of states, at least for restaurant workers, this is normal practice
and explicitly allowed for by law. In those states, this has been common
practice since ... forever? The laws there require restaurant owners to pay
the waiters such that their wage + tips combined should be at least the
minimum wage. If a waiter makes more than the minimum wage in tips then the
owner only needs to pay a less than minimum wage amount.

See [https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-
wage/tipped](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped)

So as an example, in Texas, if a waiter made more then $5.12/hr in tips, the
restaurant owner needs to pay him/her only $2.13/hr.

The question I have is: Why are we OK with this for waiters but suddenly get
upset when this happens to the drivers? Do you ask your favorite restaurants
their policy?

~~~
ravenstine
> The question I have is: Why are we OK with this for waiters but suddenly get
> upset when this happens to the drivers? Do you ask your favorite restaurants
> their policy?

It's not OK, and it's part of the reason why I don't often go to restaurants
even though I could afford to eat at one every night.

There is one difference, though, which is that restaurant staff are well aware
of the nature of their pay.

Most DoorDash drivers didn't realize that they were being gypped. I know this
because, when I was driving for GrubHub, I would sometimes bump into DoorDash
drivers and I would ask them about DoorDash's pay model. Most didn't have a
clue that they were getting tipped but that the tip was disappearing into the
pockets of DoorDash. I'm sure that DoorDash had something about that in 6 pt
font somewhere, but not everyone will read or even comprehend that. Unless the
customer asks if you got the tip, there was no way for a driver to even know
if they had a tip when that tip did not exceed their base pay. At least
restaurant workers know that there are tips and can see the full amount. Until
this came out, a lot of drivers considered DoorDash to be supplementary
because the customers were "stingy", when in fact that may not have been the
case.

But no, I do not ask my favorite restaurants their pay policy. Perhaps I
should.

EDIT: Another key difference between restaurant workers and food delivery app
drivers is that customers of DoorDash almost always tip ahead of time, so it's
not as if the driver can do much if anything to improve their chances of
getting a bigger tip. With traditional tipping, it's implied that an advantage
in being paid mostly in tips was that better service could equate to more pay.
DoorDash a few years ago was taking advantage of people's common understanding
of what it means to tip someone and keep both prices and costs down, with the
driver being the one to get screwed and not even realize it.

~~~
BeetleB
> Another key difference between restaurant workers and food delivery app
> drivers is that customers of DoorDash almost always tip ahead of time, so
> it's not as if the driver can do much if anything to improve their chances
> of getting a bigger tip. With traditional tipping, it's implied that an
> advantage in being paid mostly in tips was that better service could equate
> to more pay.

It is implied, but generally not the reality. The correlation is fairly poor:

[https://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...](https://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1110&context=articles)

[https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4067&co...](https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4067&context=luc_theses)

[https://www.thisamericanlife.org/245/transcript](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/245/transcript)

I think the _real_ question is why we tip some service professions and not
others.

~~~
uoaei
> customers of DoorDash almost always tip ahead of time

A tip before you receive a service is indistinguishable from a bribe used to
prioritize your service.

I don't understand why this is the norm, and why so many people play along. It
would be so much more sensible to tap the user on the shoulder after the
delivery to ask them for their tip.

~~~
BeetleB
> It would be so much more sensible to tap the user on the shoulder after the
> delivery to ask them for their tip.

That would be as problematic as what you described.

------
uoaei
If you don't like certain business practices, vote with your dollar!

I refuse to use delivery apps because they skim ~10-20% off the top of my
orders. I understand the utility of DoorDash -- there are a lot of customers
who want the single interface and can't be bothered to search for a restaurant
individually. But if you care _at all_ about this sort of thing, with a simple
search you can find the phone number of the restaurant you like and call them
up. There will always be someone by the phone, this is how restaurants
operated for 50+ years! The ordering process is, paradoxically, easier and
less time-consuming than going through DoorDash. I find the app to be slow,
with way too many menus and scrolling. Even the browser interface is kludgy
because they insist on making huge buttons that take up a large part of the
screen, so I can only consider like 4 options at a time on my screen. It's
been easier for me just to get a PDF of the menu, read off the stuff I'd like,
and go pick it up 20 minutes later. Bonus -- the restaurant gets 100% of your
tips. In this era the rent-seeking behavior of these app companies really
becomes apparent. It's not easier to do it through them -- they add no real
value. Clearly they don't add value for the small restaurants either: they're
shafting the small ones in favor of those who have a corporate structure and
throw millions of dollars into ads.

Stop feeding the ad platforms that use sneaky tricks to make the profits they
promised to their investors. It's a self-perpetuating cycle if you keep
letting them feed the VCs' expectations to the detriment of the people, the
end users.

~~~
djsumdog
Voting with your dollars doesn't really work. You are and ant and the people
who feel like you are a small percentage.

I stopped shopping at Wal-Mart around 2007, and Amazon in 2016. My purchased
don't make a dent. I share my opinions and know several others who don't shop
at Wal-Mart, but I remember during the 2008 financial crisis, people who had
previously refused to shop at Wal-Mart were doing it again, verbally hating
it, because they had kids and tight budgets and they saving nearly a $1/item
on some things.

We can try to affect things with our purchases and advertising those decisions
to others, but honestly, they don't even compare in the slightest to the power
of corporate advertising at scale.

~~~
bhupy
> Voting with your dollars doesn't really work. You are and ant and the people
> who feel like you are a small percentage.

Couldn't you say the same thing about actual voting, though? In an election,
what difference does your one vote make, in the grand scheme of things? Has
there ever been an election where the margin was low enough that your one vote
would have made a real difference?

~~~
djsumdog
Oh absolutely! Especially in non-representational voting systems like in the
US. Australia has order of preference (ranking) so you can't throw your vote
away and NZ has MMP to evenly distribute half the party seats by % of the
population that votes for them.

American voting is pretty next to useless. I did a whole video on that:

[https://battlepenguin.com/politics/video/does-voting-
make-a-...](https://battlepenguin.com/politics/video/does-voting-make-a-
difference/)

~~~
uoaei
I like the ongoing debate between different voting schemes. I prefer approval
voting over other things like RCV/IRV -- it reflects "average" percentages of
approval directly and results in the least dissatisfaction, averaged across
the population. No spoiler effects, which still exist in FPTP and RCV.

The most interesting and IMO overlooked part is how easy it is to communicate
to the voter how they should vote. Approval voting is easy -- at the top of
the ballot just say "check the box next to each name of the person who you
approve of, and check as many as you like".

------
MattGaiser
Reading this article, I realized that DoorDash and UberEats now own me as a
customer.

I have never been particularly picky about my restaurants. Chinese food is
Chinese food. McDonalds vs Wendys is not something I have strong feelings
about. Plenty of places have good ribs. Obviously there are places I will
avoid due to bad experiences, but I am not highly opinionated as long as I
find the food tasty. I am one of those people who would go to a different BBQ
place if I found a cheaper one or a more interesting menu.

Even when I don't want to cook, I don't search for a particular food item
anymore and probably take the top DoorDash deal half the time. Even within
that, I don't choose a restaurant anymore. I choose food and am generally
satisfied with whoever DoorDash has to supply that food.

That is a major shift for the food industry if even a small percentage of
people are like myself as it means I must be won as a customer every single
time I order and can easily have any restaurant in my quadrant of the city
(rather than just going to the local one).

~~~
zerocrates
This is so interesting to me because I just _never_ use these services. I
think I've ordered on Grubhub's website maybe once, and I've never used
DoorDash or UberEats, and I eat a _lot_ of takeout. Though I don't do much
delivery and maybe it's really just down to that.

The context of these (perfectly valid) complaints often comes down to, "wow
this is a parasitic business model and we hate these guys, but we _have_ to
use them" from the business owner, and I guess I've just never gotten how much
of the market they've apparently eaten up.

I'll use the restaurant's own online ordering system (a lot of the ones I've
visited lately are using the Toast POS system which seems to include online
ordering, and I've used some of the apps and websites of the bigger chains),
or call them, but the generic apps just seem like an unnecessary middleman and
I can't quite get why I would use them, and that's without even considering
that they're skimming off the restaurant's profits. It's also quite rare that
I want "just anything" within some category vs. some specific restaurant.

Maybe there's something I'm missing...

~~~
conductr
I’m in your camp. Don’t use it much. But not a heavy take away user in
general. I have a preference for fresh food even if it’s McDonald’s (10 minute
old McDonald’s is worse to me). I don’t even like drive thru much and they
proliferate in Texas.

That said, when I order delivery (usually pizza), I just call. I feel like any
amount of web/app UI, doing the ordering and account creation/management is a
huge hassle. The telephone is easy and fast. It’s like Alexa except with a
real human. Y’all should try it out /s

But seriously, I’m a little older (that weird pre-millennial gen), but I find
it crazy/funny how extreme the younger generations avoidance of voice calls
has become. I don’t like talking on the phone, but sometimes it’s the best UI.

~~~
mydongle
I used to work at a pizza place and often times phone orders will actually
disrupt the pizza making since pizza makers have to go take the calls if there
aren't any or not enough delivery drivers (who are the primary call takers).
It takes just one problem customer to hold up a pizza maker for enough time
and cause a huge pain.

Not saying you're wrong to call though, just a little random anecdote.

------
codazoda
> when you order delivery from one of the large delivery partners like GrubHub
> or DoorDash - not only do you pay a delivery fee, service fee, and a
> generous tip to the driver. But we restaurant owners also pay...these fees
> can range from 15% to 35% of your entire order.

If these fees are too high, then why accept orders from these providers? If
you don't get enough orders otherwise, then these services are providing
value. If you do, then simply refuse to discount for these providers and
handle the orders yourself.

This post, and others like it, seem like they're asking consumers to avoid
these services, but it seems like it would be much easier for restaraunts to
refuse to participate.

~~~
m-ee
These services will go out of their way to place orders against the
restaurants will if they choose not to accept them. Even going as far as
having employees call in phone orders while posing as regular customers.

~~~
forgotmylogin2
So what? Then the restaurant doesn't have to pay a fee.

If the problem is that the delivery services are charging high fees to
restaurants, then terminating the relationship with the delivery service
solves that problem. If the delivery service wants to make orders like a
normal customer without any discounts, that's good for the restaurants.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
No, because by doing so, the delivery services are effectively injecting
themselves into the middle of the relationship between the customer and the
restaurant. Over time, most customers will launch the app when they're hungry
in general or for a type of food, and if they don't see a specific restaurant
there anymore but they do see competitors that have decent ratings, they'll
just order from them.

~~~
forgotmylogin2
That's a lot of businesses. The local liquor store "injects themselves"
between you and Budweiser when they sell you beer. It's not inherently evil or
unethical to act as a middleman, especially when you provide additional value
that the original business does not.

~~~
battery_cowboy
Yes, the unethical part is stealing the Google search results, taking the tips
from the drivers instead of distributing them, etc. All the stuff you heard
about over the past years. If they had an ethical business, we wouldn't be
reading this article.

~~~
MVorlm
There's no "stealing" or theft here. Based on this article, and the comments
on this thread, advertising is part of the package/contract. Restaurants can
simply not partner with these services.

~~~
battery_cowboy
The restaurant owners aren't knowledgeable enough in this area to understand
the harm from the contracts, they're not dumb, but they don't realize the
power they give to the company. That's an unethical practice, to take
advantage of someone like that.

------
shadowgovt
From the article:

> The “Advertisement” is much larger than our own “order” button where someone
> can order directly from our website or get directions to our location.

Doesn't this complaint ignore the fact that the first organic search result is
Saddleback BBQ's own home page, complete with six deep links (including the
"Ordering" link)? Text that directs user flow into Saddleback BBQ's page takes
up about half the screen.

~~~
devindotcom
Search results differ widely between regions and users. FTA: "If a person in
Lansing goes onto Google search..."

No reason for companies to target users outside the Lansing metro area, no one
in Boston is ordering BBQ from Michigan. If you're not in Lansing, you're
probably not seeing the same results as the people this post refers to.

~~~
shadowgovt
Sure, but I'm not in Lansing (or anywhere near it). And both an incognito and
logged-in search give me the same thing for the search query in the article.
I'm not talking about the contents of the map sidebar; I'm talking about the
big "Saddleback BBQ |" link in the main results and its children.

While it's true I do not see the ad (probably because I'm outside the
targeting area), even with the screenshots shown in the article, there are two
order buttons on the page that deep-link to Saddleback and one ad link. Their
complaint seems to be "The ad is more eye-catching than [ed: one of] our order
links"... Yes, but it's also flagged as clearly an [AD].

------
HaloZero
I don't think Google discourages this in any major capacity. I will say that
Grubhub and DoorDash certainly have an ethical quandary. It certainly doesn't
look good from a PR standpoint but I imagine it's a common practice.

Not a case that Google does but for Apple's App store ad system. I've worked
at Lyft and I know years ago the top ad for searching Lyft was Uber and vice
versa in the app store. Both companies would pay for advertisements against
the other. But it was cheaper to trade jabs than defend your search term.

~~~
jeffbee
There is no ethical dilemma here. They are simply choosing the unethical
option.

------
aloukissas
Most tech/VC folks: DoorDash, UberEats, GrubHut, etc are great for
restaurants!

Most restaurant owners: these guys are squeezing us of almost all profit
margin with the argument "good luck doing any business without us" (platform
fees are often 40% of the ticket, or more).

Huge disconnect of realities.

~~~
Jommi
Haven't really seen the former ever. Any links to those kinds of comments?

~~~
aloukissas
Follow any investor on Twitter. Any negative comment that reads like "delivery
startups are bad for the restaurants" turns into "yes, but look at all the
revenue they're bringing". The more I talk with restaurant owners (almost
daily), I'm convinced that a competitor that looks like Shopify (mostly fixed
cost vs huge % of the check) will come in. And they may be many of them,
perhaps local (not nation/global-wide like today).

~~~
Jommi
Any links?

------
someonehere
For those saying they don’t want to tip through the app because DoorDash keeps
the tip. Choose Other and put $0. Give the driver a cash tip. I have a friend
who delivers for Whole Foods and he says it’s better that way because the
payout on tips doesn’t get borked in the system or slip into the pockets of
the delivery service.

Yes I know we’re trying to avoid contact with items between people, but it
could be easy to protect you and the delivery person with some hand sanitizer
or wipes.

Just my two cents.

------
bryanmgreen
Pro Tip: For any company you really love that is smaller in size and not a
global powerhouse, before you purchase, contact them and ask for their
preferred purchasing platform.

For most restaurants, just call to place an order.

------
gaogao
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200515173159/https://www.saddl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200515173159/https://www.saddlebackbbq.com/how-
google-doordash-grubhub-conspire-screw-local-restaurants)

------
mharroun
I keep seeing things like this, people hating on the delivery companies.
Customers moving to takeout and restaurants moving to self delivery.

Its pushed me to have my quaranteen/layoff project be to create a competitor
that supports only self delivery and takeout but has the order, management,
aggragation functions, and crm of the competition for a low flat fee (plus cc
fees).

~~~
Eridrus
Not to stop you from doing this because competition is good for businesses,
but this exists. ChowNow is a commision-free piece of software anyone can buy
for a flat monthly fee. Slice is a pizza-focussed app that charges a flat fee
per delivery. I have no idea why they're so focussed on pizza rather than the
general market, but do what you know, I guess.

~~~
steveklabnik
Former Slice user here. They're focused on pizza only because they started as
a pizzeria in Staten Island. They know their vertical. Part of the mission is
specifically to help pizzerias.

I only stopped using them because I moved away from NYC.

------
itsbenweeks
I wish it was just this. A friend of mine works in an upscale deli here in
Boston. Their employer doesn't partner with DoorDash, yet GrubHub
--interchanged because they both do this-- still lists them. What happens
instead of a printed order from their system? They instruct the delivery
person to place an order at the counter, wait for it, and then deliver it. All
this seems fine, if DoorDash wants to hire people to proxy face-to-face
interactions so they can up-charge 20% for a caprese sandwich on ciabatta
bread, more power to them. I understand the value of it. But it gets squishy
in places.

What happens if an ordered and paid for item is out of stock? My friend's deli
has excellent ciabatta and it sells out daily. DoorDash leaves this problem to
the delivery-person, and delivery people can't cancel orders.

Why can't delivery people on GrubHub cancel orders? For the same reason that
Uber Drivers can't see their fare's destination until they get in the car.
DoorDash doesn't want their delivery people to cherry-pick only the costliest
orders with the choicest tips. That would leave a good portion of customers
without food.

So, the delivery people are left to call whoever ordered on their phone about
this. If there's any confusion from the delivery person and their ability to
convey the nuances of this problem --that GrubHub promised something they
couldn't deliver-- then the delivery person is left to pay for orders that
DoorDash users don't cancel.

My friend has been given more than one upset delivery person's phone which has
an angry GrubHub customer on the other end. So, while a DoorDash customer may
have wanted to avoid a phone call, the customer is now hungrier and upset at
somebody who would have been able to sell them their sandwich for 16% less and
had actual knowledge about what kind of bread was still available because they
wanted to avoid the phone call that they're now having. Usually not a big
deal, but if you're already working a crowded deli-counter during the lunch
rush; it certainly cements the uselessness of these platforms.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
It’s also a losing strategy long-term, because many of your _existing_
customers will start just using GH to order, and eventually GH will own that
relationship, not you. In the customer’s mind, “want food = Grubhub app”, not
deli.

------
virtue3
I worked for a restaurant reservation company I don't feel like naming.

Anytime the user had gone to the restaurants website, or used their website to
make an online reservation, there was a significant reduction in our fee (like
~75%). That's because the user DID NOT use our network for discovery.

Using advertising like that to drive to a generic page where you show
competitors first is really underhanded. I get that you want your kickback
from Applebee's but c'mon.

A lot of this crap is just not fair to restaurants, and taking that HUGE of a
cut from a restaurant AND gouging my ass in fees and then stiffing drivers in
bullshit policies where my "tip" goes towards their minimum wage is horse shit
(looking at you doordash).

------
JulianWasTaken
Fully agree this kind of practice is disgusting on the part of the platform
sites.

And yet as someone who will never use each individual restaurant's website --
same as for retail, I just don't have the time except if one particular brand
becomes an overwhelming part of my wallet spend -- it seems we have to be
eying for a world where we do have aggregators making all these places
available in one stop, but which aren't actively harming their individual
pieces. At least for folks in the same boat I am.

~~~
lotsofpulp
I go out of my way to cut out as many middlemen as possible to ensure I
receive the best service possible.

------
oneiftwo
Everything remotely related to adware is just gross. It's hard to believe that
after 10 years of this nothing has changed and the tricks are as dirty as
ever. Totally unethical industry and I can't wait for the bubble to collapse.

~~~
rochak
How long have you been waiting? I think it is here to stay given how quickly
it has become prevalent in real life as well as the web. We just can’t do
anything as long as we are dependent on them for anything. It sickens me as
well, but it can’t be avoided.

------
205guy
Here's another example of dark patterns: "Grubhub is still charging some
restaurants phone fees, even if you call directly"

[https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/Grubhub-is-still-
chargin...](https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/Grubhub-is-still-charging-
restaurants-phone-fees-15273491.php)

Relevant excerpt: "Grubhub generates a phone number for each restaurant on its
platform, which redirects you to the restaurant's own phone line when you call
it. However, they are able to charge a fee for that redirection. In some
cases, Grubhub collects a fee even when a call does not result in an order."

"Grubhub phone numbers often appear higher in Google search results than the
restaurant's own line, which can lead even customers who don't use the app to
dial the redirect."

------
cs702
Wow, the entire advertising chain here looks like a completely unnecessary TAX
on restaurants and consumers:

* A restaurant pays the advertising fee to DoorDash/GrubHub but the money is used to divert organic searches _for the restaurant_ to DoorDash/GrubHub instead. The restaurant gets nothing for that advertising fee. In fact, it _loses_ valuable organic traffic online.

* A consumer searches for a restaurant, but the first result is for a paid link to DoorDash/GrubHub. The consumer gets connected to these middlemen instead of the restaurant as intended. The search engine and DoorDash/GrubHub charge their cut for inserting themselves into the transaction.

The only term that in mind describes the act of extracting rents in exchange
for providing no value or even subtracting value is... _extortion._

~~~
rossjudson
When I first started using food apps I thought they were great, and never
really considered the flow of money.

One day I ordered from a kebab place through an app, and went to pick it up
myself. When I got there the owner asked me -- hey, why didn't you just call
me? I replied that the app was really convenient, etc. He told me that the app
was charging him 15% for my order, even though I was picking it up myself.

So that was an eye-opening moment, and I haven't felt the slightest urge to
use a food app since, if I have the option to get it myself or if the
restaurant has their own delivery service.

------
pcmaffey
I've found the most effective way to place an order is to call directly. And I
hate talking on the phone.

It seems backwards, but I don't want to give aggregators my business or my
data, and most local websites either suck or require I retype all my data.

Calling is most analagous to just ordering at the counter.

~~~
projektfu
They've also figured out how to scam the restaurant on that one.
[https://www.engadget.com/2019-08-06-grubhub-is-replacing-
res...](https://www.engadget.com/2019-08-06-grubhub-is-replacing-restaurant-
phone-numbers-on-yelp.html)

------
johnklos
1) We (technical people) need to stop being afraid to call companies evil.
This isn't just an example of a company that does the profitable thing over
the right thing - it's just an example of chosen behavior that almost always
prioritizes profit over everything else.

Once it's socially acceptable to call companies evil, people will start being
less surprised by behavior like this, and they can start to make more informed
decisions. Using Doordash, GrubHub and Google should ALWAYS be considered a
calculated risk. The same can be said for Yelp, Facebook and others. "Do what
we say, or suffer the consequences of our indifference once our game is played
out on you."

2) Anyone who writes something like this might consider spell and grammar
checking.

------
strictnein
More great "innovation" coming out of Silicon Valley. Congrats folks, you're
really at the cutting edge of screwing over the little guy.

~~~
strictnein
More "innovation":

[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/venessawong/grubhub-
pho...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/venessawong/grubhub-phone-order-
call-fee-coronavirus)

    
    
      > “If a customer calls to place a coffee order, we’re paying a $6.42 fee — for a coffee.”

------
genidoi
On a more general level this kind of predatory behavior seems to the natural
progression for internet conglomerates who specialize in connecting aggregate
eyeballs / wallets to distributed vendors. It's not just delivery either,
eBay, Amazon, AirBnb etc, they all absolutely squeeze vendors and there is no
appeal process whatsoever if anything goes wrong with your account.

I wish there was a better way. It's quite sad to see how the internet has
these seemingly intrinsic highways to organizational psychopathy built into
it.

~~~
chillacy
Oh this was happening pre-internet as well. Anonymous manufacturers get
squeezed by brand labels, brand labels get squeezed by retail stores,
franchise owners get squeezed by the franchise...

------
jessaustin
DoorDash and Grubhub might be the villains of this piece, but in general
Google don't need any help to abuse the trademarks of small businesses. It's
common (as in, I've seen this in multiple industries in small rural
communities in my state) for AdWords advertisers to bid on their local
competitors' actual business names, and thus appear _above_ those businesses
in searches for the exact names of those businesses. Then naive would-be
customers are calling the wrong phone numbers and using the wrong driving
directions. If they intended to drive to Alice's Donuts and end up at Bob's
Donuts instead, they're obviously just going to buy something at Bob's. I
think some younger Google users are aware of this phenomenon, but it's not a
majority and above a certain age no one understands it. After all, on most
phones the AdWords content is the only thing visible without scrolling. How
many 70-year-olds can reliably scroll their phone, even if they know of the
concept?

I don't know how this practice has failed to inspire class-action lawsuits.
Perhaps Google can argue that they don't _intend_ to make billions of dollars
in this obviously illegal way and it should really be AdWords customers who
get sued for trademark infringement.

------
dvduval
An advertiser that advertises advertisers and monopolizes Google AdWords. I
have the same thing in my industry where there are a couple of "directories"
that sell advertising in my industry. They take the top couple of spots on
Google AdWords. You click on their ad, and then you have a list of
advertisements. This is a poor result for the end user. They have to click
more times just to get to what they were looking for. Why can't Google just
provide the best search results in the first place?

------
bvandewalle
I don't get those delivery companies (Doordash, Grubhub, etc).

Even with a first-timer promotion, a meal would end up being close to 25% more
expensive than ordering directly with the restaurant.

I'm happy to order directly with a local restaurant on the phone, drive 10
minutes (especially now with no traffic) and get my food on my terms. I end up
paying way less and the restaurant keeps the full dollar amount. It's a no-
brainer win-win situation. I wish more people would order directly with
restaurants.

~~~
neop1x
Some fastfoods, with quick preparations and basic food can actually benefit
from services like DoorDash. If they don't like technology, are not marketing
specialists, live mostly offline, then it can bring them many new customers.
So I think it's up to the restaurant to decide. Premium restaurants may have
money and skills to have their website with their delivery ordering system and
returning customers. It varies, I guess...

------
atarian
This looks more like a huge oversight than a malicious decision. I can't think
of a good reason why a company advertising deliveries for a specific
restaurant would redirect to a listing of similar restaurants. As an end user
that would really annoy me; it's not like I'm going to change my mind and
order Applebee's instead.

The only other explanation is that Applebee's is paying the delivery companies
a fee to capture SEO acquired by them, which would be really scummy.

~~~
d0m
I guess the idea is that once you try doordash, you'll want to stay there
because you have more choices and better product. Doordash can control the
whole experience as well as send you emails, push notifications, etc. to bring
you back in.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> "We believe online diners are becoming more promiscuous," Grubhub CEO Matt
> Maloney and CFO Adam DeWitt wrote in a shareholder letter, noting that
> Grubhub diners were once known to be extremely loyal, but new diners have
> often already sought out a competing online platform

[https://fortune.com/2019/10/28/promiscuous-grubhub-
customers...](https://fortune.com/2019/10/28/promiscuous-grubhub-customers-
just-helped-lower-the-companys-value-by-1-2-billion-in-minutes/)

------
jgurewitz
This is a classic example of how affiliate marketing is generally bad for
businesses. For a local restaurant it may seem appealing to only pay for
demand generated, but your partners are better than you at intercepting your
existing demand and charging for it. If you have a trademark on the brand you
would be able to get Google to take down the advertisements. If businesses are
looking to generate demand, paying on a CPM basis via FB for example is a
better outcome.

------
g_sch
I think the author's frustration here is warranted, but it's directed at the
wrong part of DoorDash/GrubHub's product strategy.

Advertising on competitor listings is a bread and butter marketing strategy
that happens everywhere. If you're a BBQ restaurant owner, you _want_ to
advertise on your competitors' branded keywords because it's an obvious place
to acquire new customers.

The underhanded move on the part of food delivery platforms like GrubHub,
DoorDash, Caviar, UberEats, etc., is that they increasingly are nudging their
users to _completely remove the restaurant brand from the loop_. Open up one
of the apps and notice a few things about the user experience they're pushing:

\- foregrounding "dishes" and "cuisines" rather than specific restaurants

\- hiding/burying the ability to just browse a list of restaurants, instead
opting for themed or algorithmically generated collections of restaurants and
dishes.

I get the distinct sense that DoorDash, GrubHub, and the other delivery
platforms want their users to think of the _platform_ as the source of the
food, rather than the restaurant. "Let's get some ribs delivered from GrubHub"
rather than "Let's get some ribs delivered from Saddleback BBQ via GrubHub".

This makes perfect sense for a company operating a two-sided marketplace - you
ideally want to become indispensable to both sides. Restaurants need to
realize that the marketing opportunities the platforms are offering will only
provide them value as long as they're not entirely captured by the platform.
And since restaurants have much lower brand recognition and far lower
marketing budgets, it's going to be tough to fight back.

------
bsenftner
It amazes me the larger world is just figuring this out. Dark business
patterns has been every delivery company's #1 business model from day one,
regardless of what they have been saying. Their behavior has always included
these types of dark patterns. Why anyone uses these loud frauds has always
been beyond me. And that goes twice for the people tricked into being a gig
worker for them.

------
1024core
> Being that we are partners of DoorDash and GrubHub,

Well, then stop partnering with them! If they continue to use your name, issue
a C&D order!

~~~
steveklabnik
> Well, then stop partnering with them!

At the end of the article, they are saying they may do just that. It's also
not clear to them that this will stop this particular issue.

> If they continue to use your name, issue a C&D order!

I don't own a restaurant, but I've worked in food service. If I were this guy,
I wouldn't want to start a legal battle with a company that's much, much
larger than I am.

~~~
djsumdog
> If they continue to use your name, issue a C&D order!

Not to mention it's probably in the DoorDash/GrubHub agreement. That's
probably how they get away with using that trademark.

> Well, then stop partnering with them!

Say you hate books-a-billion and you want to only sell at mom and pop
bookstores. Good for you, but what if that kills 70% of your revenue?

When talking about trying to make a living and pull in enough to stay afloat,
these people often don't have the choice. You don't publish your ebook on
Amazon Kindle and only on Barnes and Nobles Nook, you cut yourself out of a
huge revenue stream.

~~~
jdminhbg
> Say you hate books-a-billion and you want to only sell at mom and pop
> bookstores. Good for you, but what if that kills 70% of your revenue?

Then it sounds like books-a-billion is providing a pretty valuable service to
you.

------
DoreenMichele
_the customer could have just gone to our website and ordered directly from
our online ordering store and we would not be charged a commission to GrubHub
or DoorDash._

Is there anything we can do to start a counter movement to help restaurants
figure out how to get people to more reliably type in the name of the
restaurant they are interested in and order directly? (Or some other work
around? I would love to start an app for my small town that lists "What's open
now" for example.)

I support gig work, but for various reasons I'm not a fan of services like
DoorDash. I don't think such services are a good thing at all for anyone
involved and I'm happy to support some means to give push back against such
and try to find a way to help protect restaurant owners from these predatory
business models.

------
cbsmith
The title is misleading. This is only _one_ of the ways...

~~~
dang
"Conspire to screw" breaks the HN guideline about titles, so I've edited it to
make it less baity. It's a bit generic now though. If anyone suggests a better
title, we can change it again. "Better" means more accurate and neutral, and
preferably using representative language from the article.

------
xphilter
I investigated a case similar to this a few years ago (as an attorney). The
problem is that most of these restaurants already signed contracts with the
tech company that gave away a lot, including rights like this. And because
it’s B2B, it’s hard to play the “unsophisticated consumer” card.

------
Zetaphor
Anyone else find it peculiar that he keeps calling Lansing a small town?

It's not only the capital city of the state, but it's generally divided in
peoples minds into the four cardinal directions, so North Lansing, South
Lansing, East, and South. This is important because each area is not only
fairly large, but is also very different culturally from each other.

In fact East Lansing (still Lansing!) is the home of Michigan State
University. That's hardly what I'd call a small school in a small town. East
Lansing is practically a city unto itself.

Out of the 300 municipalities in the state of Michigan, Lansing is the 5'th
largest by population.

I understand he's trying to evoke a certain emotion, but to anyone who is even
remotely familiar with the area it comes off as pandering and dishonest.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I live in a town of about 16k people. I don't think we have any of those
delivery services.

But those services tend to mostly be in the biggest metro areas. Lansing is
relatively small from that perspective.

So I figured that's why he framed it that way.

------
fulldecent2
Many business owners are frustrated by this. Suckers will call GrubHub and
DoorDash to complain. When you call them you are entered into a workflow where
you are talking to a human or robot that is trained to do the minimum for you
to prevent you from suing them. They are doing unethical and/or illegal things
so they are prepared for pissed off people and this is an expense on their
business plan.

Instead, just sue them. Even if you have to file by yourself, without hiring
an attorney.

Reading a sad blog post is fun. But reading "I just sued GrubHub because they
are violating me -- I'm not sure what I'm doing, can anyone else relate or
help?" is front page news in the 21st century.

------
mfer
I tried the same thing in both Bing and Duckduckgo. In Bing there was no
Grubhub and in Duckduckgo there was an ad in the sidebar that took me directly
to the restaurants page on Grubhub (not a higher level page).

Was just curious to compare across search engines.

------
acomjean
That google "business name" sidebar has got to go. I volunteer at "somerville
open studios" a once a year event where artists open their studios.

Google has recently been showing the sidebar for "somerville studio" a photo
studio. I get that google is confused and no amount of business registering
seems to change that (we're a registered non-orofit, but don't have a physical
space...) But they're showing the "Open time" and a bunch of sidebar info in
the main feed (we're open at 7am.. but the event starts at noon).

When that sidebar works its kind neat, but when it fails it fails
spectacularly.

------
Quanttek
Cached version:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=firefox...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=firefox-
b-d&ei=dfO-
XoeCPZHbsAfPvYmoAw&q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.saddlebackbbq.com%2Fhow-google-
doordash-grubhub-conspire-screw-local-
restaurants&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.saddlebackbbq.com%2Fhow-google-
doordash-grubhub-conspire-screw-local-
restaurants&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQA1C1H1i1H2CBIWgAcAB4AIABaIgBaJIBAzAuMZgBAKABAaoBB2d3cy13aXo&sclient=psy-
ab&ved=0ahUKEwjHkK3z0rbpAhWRLewKHc9eAjUQ4dUDCAs&uact=5)

------
giorgioz
They can legally register a trademark (costs 500$ once and is done online).

After trade-marking competitors can still bid for your trademark but they
can't write the trademark words in the title or content of the ads.

These two links explain how trademark vs ads works:

[https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en](https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en)

[https://www.brandverity.com/blog/google-ads-trademark-
rules-...](https://www.brandverity.com/blog/google-ads-trademark-rules-101)

------
tacocataco
If you don't tip cash, GrubHub takes back the hourly they pay the driver.

Say you get $10 an hour delivering for GrubHub. You earn $10 in delivery fees
and credit card tips in that hour. How much do you think the driver gets? It's
$10. GrubHub gets to say "your whole tip goes to the driver!", But never says
they claw back the drivers hourly making them free for GrubHub to employ.

Tip cash, or literally don't tip at all. I never saw my credit card tips the
whole year I worked for them.

------
skny
The post seems to misinterpret that Doordash + Grubhub are somehow in cahoots
with Google to skim off of restauranteurs. What Doordash & Grubhub are doing
is an extreme form of "growth hacking" that doesn't have any considerations
for the collateral damage it creates - they should be held accountable for
that. Google here is just the provider of a tool that they abuse, they need to
work on ensuring that this form of abuse should not be possible.

To deduce that there's a conspiracy between Google + Doordash is taking it a
bit too far..

------
broknbottle
Whoa quite the surprise to see this posted on hacker news. I used to work with
Travis for a few years. He was pretty much never in the office and if I did
see him, he was usually hiding in the fish bowl.

I also lived in Cherry Hill Downtown Lansing for three years about two blocks
from Reo town. The food at Saddleback was decent but never knocked my socks
off. Now crack chicken, east side fish fry, astros pizza and Olympic broil,
those places had some food that brings back memories

------
x3blah
"They are redirecting those customers to their platform where they can
purchase from a competitor or they can charge us a fee to provide food to that
same customer. Whereas the customer could have just gone to our website and
ordered directly from our online ordering store and we would not be charged a
commission to GrubHub or DoorDash."

Here he refers to Grubhub and DoorDash as "competitors" with the restaurant.

Yet at the conclusion of the story he refers to them as "partners" with the
restaurants who pay them.

"DoorDash and GrubHub have a long history of screwing their partners."

These companies are "middlemen". That description in fact fits a large number
of "tech" companies. It is a common theme when we look at the "tech" industry.

A few days ago food delivery, including Grubhub, was discussed on HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23169597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23169597)

One commenter argued that companies like Grubhub exist in "fake markets" that
would not exist were it not for VC funding.

Another argued that these markets are not fake because these companies have
managed to be profitable and deliver returns to investors.

Not sure what you all have experienced, in my experience with restaurants and
delivery, the owners always seem to prefer customers who order directly from
the restaurant, not via a middleman. However, I can sense that they feel
compelled to sign up with the middlemen for fear of losing business.

HN commenters seem to enjoy comparing first page search results on Google
versus alternatives such as DDG. Try this one out. Search for your favourite
restaurant. On Google, I see more middlemen than I see on DDG, including a
result for "[restaurant-name].business.site" which I believe belongs to
Google. I don't see that result on DDG.

Imagine if the telephone book Yellow Pages listed multiple numbers for each
business, some of them not belonging to the business but to middlemen who
would "make calling easier". Even more, imagine it changed the order of the
listings according to a "secret" methodology instead of presenting them in
alphabetical order.

------
mahdix
I see this: Forbidden You don't have permission to access this resource.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an
ErrorDocument to handle the request.

------
kelnos
> _The problem is that if we cancel, does that mean they will actually stop
> stealing customers that are looking for our restaurant and directing them to
> our competitors?_

At least in this scenario, since there's no contract and no advertising
agreement, Saddleback could sue them for trademark infringement if they keep
advertising using the Saddleback name. Of course, lawsuits suck and cost time
and money that I'm sure the owner doesn't have to spare.

------
szaslan
This is really frustrating to read and I know the importance of ordering
direct when you can, but the hardest part for me was trying to find
restaurants around me that actually offered direct online ordering.

I helped build a site to try and solve that:
[https://foood.com/](https://foood.com/)

It's mostly restaurants in the Chicago area right now but trying to grow as
fast as possible everywhere

------
TechBro8615
What’s amusing to me is that many of these techniques were well documented on
Blackhat SEO forums circa 2010. These companies just normalized and scaled
them.

------
corny
This looks like the same thing Etsy has been doing since early this year.
[https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/26/21155193/etsy-
advertising...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/26/21155193/etsy-advertising-
program-angers-sellers-cut-of-sales)

Ad landing pages feature prominent links to competitors' products at the top
of the page.

------
princevegeta89
Wow, this is unbelievably blatant. How can they even use the advertise the
restaurant without their consent on Google? These ads almost look like spam to
me like those old internet generic ads. Most people wouldn't click those, and
even if they do, they would back off after all they see is a generic landing
page which is not about the original restaurant they were looking for.

------
mangofizzy
It is certainly not fair for restaurants to pay for ad fee when it is not ad
for themselves, but I think calling it conspiracy is a little of stretch.

------
Jestar342
This is happening in other industries, too. Google have recently launched a
Hotels API where hotels, B&Bs, vacation rentals, etc can upload their prices
and other data to Google, and Google will decide when to show that info to the
user. So searching for "hotels in New York" will now be fronted by a giant
Google widget that will capture your traffic and not a list of hotel websites.

~~~
pb7
What's wrong with that? Hotels make money from people booking, not being on
their website. If this helps people find what they're looking for and convert
into a stay, that's great.

~~~
Jestar342
The user doesn't see their website. The content is loaded to google, google
gets advert traffic, etc. etc. as well as the stuff outlined in the article.
That's what is wrong with it.

~~~
pb7
There are thousands of hotels in New York. Nobody is going through thousands
of links, unique websites, retyping the same dates and details into different
forms. They’re going to the same top website that paid the most for SEO. The
user doesn’t want to see their website. The user wants to see all the relevant
details of all the options that match their criteria so they can hand over
their cash to the best one, not the one that has put the most money into
building a website. That is what modern search is. That is what Google is
doing.

------
pmorici
I was under the impression that it was against Google's ad rules to use the
trademarks other than your own in your ads. Are they not applying their own
rule consistently to these food delivery services?

[0] [https://support.google.com/google-
ads/thread/8702273?hl=en](https://support.google.com/google-
ads/thread/8702273?hl=en)

------
idid
cached version:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:b4DOuG...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:b4DOuGeTelQJ:https://www.saddlebackbbq.com/how-
google-doordash-grubhub-conspire-screw-local-
restaurants+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)

(current link returns a 403)

------
zwilliamson
Is there a way as an end user I can filter out all results driven by DoorDash,
GrubHub and the likes on Google Search? Or perhaps would I be better off using
DuckDuckGo?

Seems like this might be neat browser extension to help people get search
results that point you directly to a restaurant website. Perhaps following the
ad blocker concept; restaurant middleman blocker.

------
agustif
How hard would it be to make an open source framework for restaurants to be
easy to setup/use instead of the alternatives?

------
lastofus
If I wanted to start a grassroots local competitor for collecting delivery
orders without screwing over restaurants, what would be the best way to handle
payment processing? Using Stripe + manually sending money via ACH doesn't
sound sustainable. Would AML/KYC laws start to apply for this sort of thing?

~~~
MattGaiser
Why couldn't you use Stripe? DoorDash does.

------
flibble
This sort of anti-marketplace sentiment is making mainstream media on the
other side of the Atlantic. Today’s Sky News coverage
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vbt-l-
RnQZo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vbt-l-RnQZo)

Disclaimer - I’m the bald guy.

------
gabagoo
Why do these gig companies have to function like racketeers? I don't
understand why everyone from Grubhub to Uber to Airbnb feels the need to "take
a piece of the action" in the way they do. There are smarter profitability
models, it's just so lazy.

------
imaadrashied
Might be a specific issue for this restaurant. Tried googling several
restaurants in SF that are open at the moment and the link from google to the
delivery company goes directly to a page for that restaurant, not a generic
page for the type of food.

------
ummonk
Does the contract with DoorDash and Grubhub allow them to use the trade name?
Regardless, if Saddleback BBQ does cancel, I would assume it would be very
much illegal for DoorDash and Grubhub to advertise using that trade name.

------
masonic
Would there be any legal issue for a restaurant to _banish_ external delivery
runners?

i.e. refuse to serve those using Doordash garb or luggage, those who don't
show the same credit card used for purchase, etc?

------
mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE
How much in a restaurant's cost is (food and its preparation) vs (rent, decor,
service and marketing)? I bet less than a half. If they only had a kitchen,
they would be totally ok with this arrangement.

------
excalibur
> small town

> small town

> small town

It's the state capital. It may not compare to the antics of stay-at-home
protestors, but your insistence on describing the city this way when
surrounded by so many ACTUAL small towns is still pretty embarrassing.

------
helen___keller
I can understand the author's frustration, but that's a doordash ad, not a
Saddleback BBQ ad - it's unrelated to the advertising fee that the author pays
to be on the platform from my understanding that fee is for appearing in
searching on the platform.

The ad on google is for the platform itself. Doordash paid google to pick out
queries with words like "bbq" and redirect them to doordash queries for "bbq".
That has nothing to do with saddleback BBQ -- except, that for some awful
reason, the ad is placed in the sidebar full of saddleback BBQ information
instead of the main search results.

I'd say this is less conspiratorial and more evidence of incompetence. Still,
I feel for the author.

------
WayToDoor
I'm getting a 403 Forbidden, here's a backup link that works :
[https://archive.is/sNLho](https://archive.is/sNLho)

------
nabeards
I've never used DoorDash nor Uber Eats, and the one time I used Grubhub was a
disaster. Don't use these services and you can help stop this insanity.

------
coliveira
Whenever you read "disrupting" industry X, the real way to read this is
screwing local businesses involved in that industry. So, no surprises here.

~~~
a3n
And disavowing responsibility for their workers.

------
cosmodisk
The restaurants are equally to blame here. It didn't take long to realise that
it's more profitable to deliver food to a broader audience than just serve 15
table each evening. Very few restaurants knew how or were willing to invest in
marketing,internet reach and so on. Now a lot of them are no more than a nice
thumbnail in these websites. I don't even know where those place are- all I
know is somewhere within a few miles.. However, having written all this,the
type of stuff mentioned in the article isn't doing any favours to anyone.

------
ljsmith93
And this is why I don't use any of these terrible services. Order direct with
the business using THEIR phone number & pick it up.

------
HumblyTossed
I do curb side. I've read enough bad things about DoorDash, et al that I
choose not to do business with them.

------
masonic
Actual title is "How Google, Doordash, and GrubHub Conspire to Screw Local
Restaurants".

------
ffritz
I’m getting a 403 when trying to access.

------
KoftaBob
Are there any food delivery services that aren't scummy? Would love to support
those instead.

------
gabrielrdz
It's so ironic that Google's original motto was "Don't be evil".

------
socrates1998
I avoid all of these app's and order directly from the restaurant themselves.

1) All of them add to the cost of the bill way more than I think is a good use
of my money.

2) Driver's don't get paid very well.

3) Restaurants get screwed.

Sure it might mean I have to go out and pick up the order instead of getting
it directly delivered, but it's really not that big of a deal.

------
ypeterholmes
Seems like this is a Google problem more than DoorDash or GrubHub, because
it's google that allows people to advertise against your own business name.

So that's the legal question- what part of your own name do you own on a third
party platform? And what if that platform (google) has a monopoly on web
searches?

------
chrisked
403\. Can’t access in Europe.

------
bork1
as of ~15:45 PDT 5/15 searching saddleback bbq lansing on Google and DDG the
links in the advertisements go to the restaurant's website, not GrubHub or
DoorDash for me

------
Apofis
This is just how Adwords works. Funny, Google seems to have removed ads for
the BBQ keyword. Doordash was just putting up ads for any query that contained
the word "BBQ".

------
JGM_io
Is everybody getting an 403?

Anyone has a copy of the article?

------
Jommi
Why would I tip before I order the food?

------
fishingisfun
it doesnt help that many restaurants have terrible sites

------
a3n
Yes! More middlemen! /s

As participating capitalists, shouldn't we be shunning any company that adds
friction where there was none?

This really brings to mind the mafia elbowing in for a cut of the operations,
or the whole contract, and adding nothing but extortion and shoddy work.

~~~
AlexandrB
Startup capitalism seems quite different from traditional capitalism. Instead
of profitability, the main qualification for a successful startup seems to be
a good story for investors. Then, with VC money in hand, traditional pricing
signals can be distorted by subsidizing the service - sometimes for years.
Whether the big business that results at the end of this process is viable,
valuable, or even desirable to customers is impossible to tell until the
subsidies run out and the startup has to try to make a profit. At that point
no alternative may exist because smaller, independent competitors have been
driven out of business by a series of VC-fuelled market distortions.

------
arkitaip
Article and entire domain returns 403.

~~~
zadki3l
Here you go:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200515203018/https://www.saddl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200515203018/https://www.saddlebackbbq.com/how-
google-doordash-grubhub-conspire-screw-local-restaurants)

------
fmakunbound
Wouldn't be a tech company unless it created another serfdom.

