Really interested to see what this does to Deliveroo. I live in central London on a pretty busy street and it's really wild how many Deliveroo drivers there are. In front of most of the popular takeaway restaurants there are 3-5 drivers waiting at any given time. The increase in delivery and decrease in normal foot traffic during the pandemic has made this really stick out.
Deliveroo already totally robs these restaurants. Even for a click and collect order where I get the food myself Deliveroo takes ~20-30%. I assume this will cause Deliveroo to either increase fees or reduce service which may inspire more restuarants to hire their own delivery people again.
Overall I think this is a good thing, especially now. These gig workers have been absolutely essential to society over the past year. People have been able to safely shelter in their home while these guys (it's mostly guys) go out and take all the risks. Let's pay them.
I feel really bad for small restaurant owners. These large delivery companies totally take over their internet marketing too, registering a domain like '<restaurant name>-<city>.com' and when you go to that website, you really have to pay attention to see that this is not the 'official' restaurant website and if you order through there, it's costing the restaurant a lot of money that they wouldn't miss out on if you'd order through their regular website. I don't understand how practices like that are legal - then again, small restaurant owners have other things to worry about than fighting a 5, 8, maybe 10 year trademark battle against huge tech companies. It's a disgusting abuse of power in my view.
This should be straight up illegal and the companies sued to hell for. If I opened a site claiming to be a bank and accepting money on behalf of that bank, and keeping 20% I'd be behind bars for fraud in no time.
Those delivery services employ many lawyers and bet on the fact that a family owned restaurants doesn't have the guts or money to sue. Truly despicable.
In Germany, if you can't afford a lawyer you are entitled to the government paying legal aid in civil cases [1]. As you are - I just realize - in many countries.
Problem is, that a restaurant owner isn't entitled to that so that even if you are a small company (self employed restaurant owner) you are toast. You could hope to have a legal insurance covering stuff like that, but not sure, if that would be the case for most insurances.
The Wikipedia article doesn't tell this (which is okay, it's not the main topic), but you have to be really poor to get legal aid in Germany. When I needed this years ago I wasn't eligible because my parents had paid into a pension insurance for me and it was worth more than 5k. This is a common problem with these schemes here in Germany. If you are really rich you have no problems, if you are really poor there exist some systems (I wouldn't say they are good, but that's also another topic). People in between? Tough luck.
If it’s limited to the poor, then the US has that through nonprofits like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legal_Aid_Society . There’s no standard, or for that matter, no single organization to look for, so it’s hard to say who exactly qualifies in any particular city.
You can, actually, make a circumstance illegal. The vast majority of regulation explicitly make circumstances illegal.
"That ladder just happened to be placed there". "The forklift happened to be parked that way". "The room happened to have too many people in it". "The fire extinguisher happened to be expired and failed to fire" -- all illegal circumstances (in various parts of the US, based on Federal/State/Local regulations)
"They needed to sue, but couldn't get a lawyer" is absolutely a circumstance we could make illegal. Making a circumstance illegal doesn't mean it will never happen, of course, but it does mean there can be immediate repercussions and fixes for it if/when it does.
You can make actions illegal, and you can make not taking an action illegal, but you can't make not having enough money illegal, because "having money" is not an action that you can mandate people take.
> "They needed to sue, but couldn't get a lawyer" is absolutely a circumstance we could make illegal.
I mean -- I guess, technically you can, but it's one of the most insulting things I have ever heard. What are you gonna do, sue them for not having the money to have a lawyer to defend themselves? Maybe take them to court for damages, caused by them not having money? Kafka would have a field day with this.
Right, I agree that's probably how it's meant, but that's not accurately described by the phrase "making it illegal".
If I make houses without a sewer line illegal, that doesn't mean the state has to lay a sewer line, it means you the owner have to take care that you get a sewer line or you open yourself up to liability.
Yes, you can. You can make it illegal for the accused to lack representation in court if they desire it, you can make it illegal for a person to walk the street without a certain minimum amount of money in their pocket, you can make it illegal for a person under age X to not be at school at a particular part of the day without a reasonable excuse, etc. It's been done. You can even always define an occurrence as an act e.g. access to justice cannot be denied, or a shed cannot be permitted to remain purple.
Maybe you mean that making a circumstance illegal doesn't necessarily prevent a circumstance from occurring?
No I'm saying the notion of illegality does not apply, and in fact leads to absurd consequences.
For instance, if you make it illegal for the accused to lack representation in court, you can then sue them for not having representation, a suit from which they cannot defend themselves, lacking representation, which then opens them up to another suit, ad infinitum!
I think there's some conflation of "regulating" and "making illegal" going on here. Mandating that the state must provide everyone with a public defender is not equivalent to "making lacking representation illegal".
You get to choose who you apply laws to when you write them. If I make it illegal for a court to proceed if they do not provide representation to a defendant who desires it, I don't have to arrest the defendant.
But you can put down legal protections to prevent this circumstance occurring. It is just like not having access to medical care because you are poor. We put protections to prevent this happening, called public health insurance.
For the sister comment: I wonder why companies are not entitled to a public defender, interesting.
But everybody should be equally able to defend themselves, or sue before a court of law, which is clearly not the case today in UK and most countries on the planet. The legislator has created complex laws that only benefit people with a lot of money thus lawyers. Which means that citizens do not have equal rights in a court of law and can't get a fair trial.
It's just like tax avoidance. It's expensive to set up but ultimately it results in rich people paying LESS taxes/wealth than poor people for those who can afford it.
Or rather "collective actions" and "group litigation orders" are a recent thing and haven't become a standard part of the legal system. Not many people on any side who understand how they're supposed to work in practice.
The UK also has a different set of priorities in its litigation culture. You can win a huge payout if you prove unfair dismissal or discrimination, but it's much harder to prove that your work contract is unfair/exploitative or that Service Provider X is operating in a shady way.
They advertise that you'll get food from Restaurant X and that's indeed what you get. It's not fraud to resell product, you don't need permission from the original seller to do it (in fact I think that's a specifically protected right), and it's not fraud or any kind of trademark violation to describe a product as being from Restaurant X if that is a fact.
The objectionable behavior is that they represent themselves as being restaurant X, or at least present themselves in such a way that finding out that they aren’t actually restaurant X but a reseller is difficult.
edit: This got way more discussion than I anticipated. I think that even if there was a massive banner on the top of the site that told you GenericDeliveryCo was operating this website as a front for the restaurant, we are not them, etc, this behavior by GenericDeliveryCo is still damaging to the businesses they are creating websites of because they tend to absolutely bury the real website via better SEO. There’s an argument to be made that some restaurants would enjoy having a website made for them - for business or whatever other reason - but there’s no reason GenericDeliveryCo couldn’t... ask first.
Misrepresentation isn't fraud but it is still not legal. You can't pass yourself off as someone or some entity that you are not. See also: 1-900 numbers pretending to be 'the company' but actually just switchboards connecting you through to the company that they pretend to be.
Yes indeed. I guess I will use this comment to explore its objectionable properties. I think I can come up with a somewhat nuanced reason for objection (not saying this has any bearing on legality). Let me talk it through.
Here goes:
The Resturant gets paid and the customers get food. The delivery service adds value and gets paid for it. If someone doesn’t realize doordash is not the Resturant by now... who cares? As long as the restaurants reputation is not hurt... (here’s were the issues start)
To that end, if I am the Resturant, I see that I can add my own delivery service, undercut doordash by a bit, and make more money, and control my reputation by employing people who have incintives aligned with me, then great! Thanks doordash, for showing me the way.
Ah, but can I? Maybe not without forming a power group with other restaurants (or some other economic structure..?), as the cost of adding a “real employee” may be greater than the margin added by the delivery service. I need a structure that both aligns incentives between delivery service and Resturant, and is cost effective. Since restaurants weren’t already doing this, probably it has to happen at the meta-Resturant level of it can be done while preserving reputation at all. (Of course, the difficulty of it depends on the food being served, so that’s why, e.g. pizza was already being delivered.)
Mr. Wave may have meant legally objectionable as in "the objection that would be the core of the legal case" or "the legal system objects to this". Similar to how a legal complaint doesn't mean someone whining.
If they did then what do they think is the infraction or offence that is being committed? They're being objectionable by committing or infracting... what? What law or regulation would they be breaking?
1125(a)(1) is pretty unambiguous in this context. If Grubhub is using a restaurant's name to "deceive as to ... the origin, sponsorship, or approval of his or her goods", that's cause for civil action.
California also has a new law explicitly addressing this issue:
... and yes, there's an aptly-named website called https://www.grubhublawsuit.com/ describing a class-action lawsuit on this specific topic.
And no, that website isn't an infringement of Grubhub's mark if it's not likely to be confused with Grubhub's business. (It'd be a different story if Grubhub were a law firm in the business of filing class action lawsuits.)
You're allowed to use trademarks to factually describe what a product is.
Your linked law suit is about something entirely different to what's being discussed in this thread - that's about describing restaurants as shut when they aren't.
You're not allowed to use trademarks to masquerade as the other party, especially if you're then trying to conduct business as if you were that other party.
Taking a step back: is there any trademark usage that you view as infringing?
Using an example from another side discussion: I hope we can agree that if you made a laptop and called it a Macbook Pro, Apple would sue the heck out of you, and they'd be in the right. Where we seem to disagree is whether it's infringement if you set up a storefront, name it "Apple Store", and exclusively sell products that you've purchased from an Apple-run Apple Store.
My definitely-not-a-lawyer reading of this even seems like there’s a decent case to be made, by the definitely-not-legally-exhaustive “required elements” there. The goodwill is their reputation, misrepresentation is obvious, and damage to their brand would be negative reviews (“food was cold, would not buy again!”) on Google or similar sites.
> The law of passing off prevents one trader from misrepresenting goods or services as being the goods and services of another, and also prevents a trader from holding out his or her goods or services as having some association or connection with another when this is not true.
But the food isn't being misrepresented! It is the food of the restaurant. Passing off means pretending the product is something it isn't. That isn't what is happening here at all.
You and a few others seem to be under some kind of mistaken understanding that the food is 'fake' or from a fraudulent dark kitchen not actually associated with the restaurant? That's not the case. It's the actual real food from the actual restaurant, resold.
That is one circumstance covered but not the only one.
I'm not under a mistaken understanding. I'm explicitly saying that you might not have to misrepresent the food itself: if you insert yourself as an intermediary but claim to be the underlying provider, there's potential for confusion and damage to the goodwill of the underlying provider, and that is what passing off fundamentally protects against.
I don't know if it would fly, but you asked and that's a place a case might be found.
The broader point here: it's one thing to advertise selling someone else's product. It's another to _pretend to be them_.
Trademark law, mostly. If I open an Apple Store, I'm gonna get a lot of lawsuits headed my way in no time. You can't just use another company's logo and name without their permission.
Somewhere in the product description, advertising, is the word "FOR".
Lightning cable FOR Apple iPhone.
Belking trying to sell the same cable as "Apple iPhone Lightning cable" would be problematic. Leaving aside licensing issues.
The proof is in the pudding. Go to one of the websites they register for a restaurant, and see just how many references to "We are not the restaurant, but we are reselling and delivering their food". Hint: rather few.
Call the number on the website. "Hello, I can take your order for [restaurant name]!"
"Is this [restaurant]?"
"I can take your order!"
Because all of the above isn't defensible. They're not just (re) selling the restaurant's food, they are implying that they -are- the restaurant.
Behavior here becomes important. Deception and context. Why in these cases if Deliveroo/Uber/etc were comfortable with their process would they not say "This is Uber Eats, and we can take orders for [restaurant]"? This again comes back to one of those definitions of fraud, "dishonestly obtaining financial advantage (your cut of the order, inflated pricing, etc) by deception (explicitly stating or repeatedly implying that you are the restaurant)".
and other vague hand-waving answer designed to imply that you are talking to the restaurant and avoiding the answer, "No this is a call center for a delivery service".
Except macrumors is obviously a news/gossip site and makes no effort to pass themselves off as an actual Apple-operated website.
apple-sf.com (and the various food delivery sites being discussed) pass themselves off as the restaurant. It's not clear to a casual user that the order is being processed by a 3rd party.
Except this kind of trademark abuse absolutely does happen. There was a post on HN about it yesterday [1].
Uber successfully had an app taken down that helped drivers determine whether Uber had cheated them out of wages they were owed. The important thing is that unless the people of UberCheats have a lot of money and time to burn they can't really challenge Uber's actions here.
Hell, a few weeks ago Apple forced a company to change their logo of a green pear because they claimed it was infringing on the Apple logo[2].
And I'd hate to live in a world where you can drag anyone you want before a judge because you don't like what they're doing.
I don't like the colour of your shirt, so I'm going to say it's objectionable. It doesn't break any laws or infringe any regulations, but I want a judge's opinion on it anyway.
Why would you hate that? The judge's opinion would be "the shirt is not unlawful" and "you're wasting court time, have a fine". How would that harm you?
In the case of passing off a service you offer as begin the service of another company, there is a clear legal case to answer. And as I recall this is settled caselaw in the UK and the people pretending to be other companies are in the wrong.
Acceptability isn't usually a binary. Legality is the cutoff point at which we decide you should be punished for unacceptable behaviour, but it's perfectly possible for behaviour to be both unacceptable but legal.
Consider:
- Cutting your grass at 8am when your neighbour works nights.
- A well off person putting their child up for adoption because they don't want the hassle.
- Payday loans given to people you know won't be able to pay them off, ensuring they pay you far more than the value of the loan.
- Banks processing payments out of order to trigger overdraft fees that would otherwise not have been collected.
In many environments, fraud contains a definition of "dishonestly obtain financial advantage by deception".
Your example is flawed. It's not a crime or fraud to resell a product.
It is still fraud, not merely objectionable, to resell a product while in every way possible acting as if you are not a reseller but the original producer.
Several of the factors considered in trademark infringement are the use of the mark in commerce, that use being connected to the sale (including distribution or advertising) of the marked product, and naturally, likelihood of consumer confusion.
A pro-restaurant argument might be that these alternative websites are interfering with new and extant restaurant-customer relationships, falsely implying a restaurant-delivery co. affiliation, and that the use by the delivery co. of the restaurant trademarks exceeds nominative use. The restaurants might also argue that the distribution of food, how and under what conditions, is part of their product: a delivery company taking too long to deliver an order could harm the quality of their product.
If I created a chase-bank.com website, and allowed users to interact with their actual Chase account through it, but I took a percentage of all transactions, it would be fine?
This is untrue. A few months ago there was an article on the front page about a restaurant serving pizza that had been auto-listed by, IIRC, Deliveroo - which had put a menu online with marked-up prices and was allowing users to place orders.
The restaurant owner even discovered that, because of some inconsistency between his prices and the third-party ones, he could cause the delivering company to pay him by simply placing orders to himself.
I had visions of doing fancy CSS too, to render an accurate menu to your website viewers, but that would be deceptive to Uber's scrapers to mess with their menu.
Perhaps more screenplay than solution for this particular problem, but this illuminates a reason organized crime has existed for many years. You have an underserved, unprotected group being abused by a more powerful group with huge financial backing that can twist existing laws to further the abuse. Organized crime groups step into the vacuum and build a powerful backing, including support of non-criminals in the abused group.
Personally I'm surprised you don't hear of hacker groups that protect websites and social media properties of the downtrodden. GoodFellas meets Social Network.
> and if you order through there, it's costing the restaurant a lot of money
How does it cost the restaurant any money when they do this? The delivery companies can't unilaterally take a cut of the price, can they. I think you'll find the delivery companies mark up, and get their money that way, in this case where they don't have an agreement with the restaurant. The restaurant gets the price they ask for it.
An owner of a local restaurant told me he pays about 30% revenue to share to Deliveroo, as part of his agreement with them. He also runs his own delivery service, and encourages customers to use that (phoning in) rather than Deliveroo.
> An owner of a local restaurant told me he pays about 30% revenue to share to Deliveroo, as part of his agreement with them.
If they've agreed to it, what's the problem?
The parent comment was complaining about Deliveroo setting up without an agreement. When they do that they have to mark up - they can't take a 30% cut of the restaurant's price as the restaurant charges Deliveroo full price.
They’re in a position where the options are pretty much “agree to this” or “go out of business”
(To which I guess the free-market response is “That’s not a problem - an independent restaurant SHOULD go out of business if they can’t compete with a website company when it comes to websites”?)
For example, I like grocery stores because they deal with farmers and food distribution and save me from driving out to source my own produce from growers.
Sometimes they... might not. It's all relative the cut they demand.
So here, are food delivery companies worth ~30% of cost?
Yes, all sort of anecdotes are possible to drum up in this situation. Long term, across the entire food industry, can a ~30% cost be absorbed? Somebody is paying that, you or the restaurant, because it sure as heck isn't the delivery company.
Will the service provided by delivery (and advertising/marketing) increase volume to offset ~30%?
I don't think so, which means that because of their oh-so-useful help, means prices go up. This is needed because either customers pay more, restaurants make less, or somehow the delivery/advertising/marketing company drives more volume so they can turn around and immediately take that as their cut.
If the customers don't like higher prices, they'll stop spending. If the restaurants don't make profit after this new expense, they'll shut down.
> Somebody is paying that [30%], you or the restaurant
The customer is. They are the only one bringing money into the system over the long-run. The customer is paying for the ingredients, the property tax, the delivery, the lights, everything. The restaurant just handles the money.
Right, so when a middleman comes along that apparently requires a 30% cut, either the customer pays it (prices go up). Or the restaurant absorbs the cost (possibly partially).
However I am under the impression that restaurants are NOT operating at a 30% profit margin, and cannot absorb this middleman cut entirely on their own.
It remains to be seen if sales volume goes up enough to offset this. Otherwise the middleman cut will be paid by the customer and thus prices go up.
FWIW, I don't think the middleman adds enough value to demand a 30% cut. So I personally opt out of that and order directly from a restaurant and also pick up in person.
>The restaurant just handles the money.
I thought they were providing the labor for the actual service/product the customer wants. Without that, there is no product for the middleman to attach to and deliver.
I can't edit and add to my comment... so new post.
Basically what I think we're dancing around, is that perhaps the current business of model of restaurants is busted and has to change, post covid. The old model is rent a large space for indoor dining, cook/serve the food, sell high margin alcoholic drinks ;), plan for a steady stream of events/holidays (valentine's day, mother's/father's day, etc), try to locate near other office workers for a steady lunch customer base, and so on.
Maybe that doesn't work as well post-covid due to work-from-home a large shift to ordering out. I mean rent alone has got to be eating restaurants alive, when they don't need as much space now.
As far as middlemen and delivery, restaurants themselves are middlemen if you look at meat/produce being the actual materials and me, the hungry customer, wanting the spend cash for a product - but now eating at home.
Perhaps the new restaurant future is the rent smaller work spaces, or team up with other restaurants and have a booth with shared/common space, and serve mostly with delivery in mind. There's a place like this in my local large city, with a dozen or so vendors that rotate a little bit, sharing a large common area. It was packed every time I went, in the before times... not sure how it is doing now (website says they are mostly doing delivery so I suppose it is still up and running).
In which case a restaurant factors in the delivery fee/cut as an expense. Basically juggle it so part of the fee comes from not having to pay as much rent, and perhaps this delivery need is part of the new business model. Folks can still come by in person to get out of the house and save a bit, but factor in the majority of customers will order delivery.
I don't actually work in this industry so I don't know what actual numbers look like, but I do listen to the Planet Money podcast and a recent episode was about a restaurant that had to close due to high rents! It ended with the former owners wanting to open a new restaurant, but only if they owned the building.
I think it’s just too hard to organize drivers and delivery. I’ve never experienced a restaurant where their own delivery drivers are as fast, efficient, smart as Uber/etc.
I’d rather just go pick it up myself than use restaurant delivery.
I’m sure there may be exceptions somewhere, but even in Manhattan the deliveries that work for the restaurant sucked.
I think it’s that there’s no simple feedback loop.
An example is my local mom and pop pizza place. They used to have a few teenagers who would wait tables and drive deliveries. They meant well and tried hard, but it would take a long time for delivery. I’m a 15 minute walk and it would take two hours for two pizzas. If something was off I could talk to the owner and that took a long time but it was never anything bad enough to fire the poor driver, nor should they be. So the poor delivery lingered on.
They switched to Uber and deliveries went to 15-45 minutes. Not perfect but much better. Also easier to enter the order on my phone than calling it in.
Any time the food is cold or off, it’s easy to rate and get fixed.
It’s like taxis vs Uber rides. Taxis did have some advantages, but it way better now. Generally Uber drivers make more than taxi drivers, but there were some owner operator taxis (super rare at least in NY where almost all cabs are owned by big firms) who are losing out.
Have you... actually ordered from a restaurant that's done self-delivery for more than 5 minutes?
I've never, not even once, seen the same driver from one of these services.
This is a huge problem, because every mapping service directs them to an automated exit-only gate that nobody anywhere has the power to open for them -- certainly not if they just sit there for 5 minutes helplessly then chuck it out the window and drive off.
On several occasions I did not even receive a call, text, or any other indication to expect to find my food a thousand yards away sitting in the rain in a parking lot.
They are delivery dilettantes, with no knowledge of their delivery area, no oversight, no guidance.
Most of them have no fixed delivery area, they just follow the next call until they end up two hours away in another county they didn't even realize existed within the borders of their fine state until that evening.
I have received orders so delayed there were legitimate food safety concerns -- upwards of 3 hours from the time of preparation.
3 of the 4 delivery services I have tried did not take responsibility for so much as a single one of these failures to deliver.
2 of them charge more than double menu price for most items on most menus because they added the full base price of an item to (the full base price of an item plus the full upgrade price of an item) in an intentional and deceptive manner.
I informed them of this repeatedly and went up a completely scripted escalation chain that very obviously started in another jurisdiction and very obviously said exactly what I was later informed after requesting a point of contact for service of process was absolutely not their policy (specifically: they have my money now so I can go and find something convenient with which to fuck myself)
I have to conclude that either you've been trying to order take out from the hardware store and been sorely disappointed that your pizza never arrived or must live in alternate reality filled with sunshine, rainbows and GrubHubs that aren't openly defrauding their delivery partners, customers, and shareholders
> Have you... actually ordered from a restaurant that's done self-delivery for more than 5 minutes?
Yes, of course. Aside from the example I gave where I used their self-delivery for 10 years before switching to this new gen.
And I suppose I’ve ordered from about 500 self-delivery restaurants, although I don’t keep a log.
It sounds like you’ve had some bad experiences and they aren’t like mine. I have had really bad experiences with doordash and grubhub where they wouldn’t fix problems, but Uber is about 75% responsive that is so much better than self-delivery.
From first principles it seems like self-delivery can’t compete unless they are really into delivery. Because they can’t scale well beyond their drivers on hand and it’s not possible for them to send out 10 orders at once, etc
I have used several delivery services, and my experience in two major metro areas has been that they are virtually indistinguishable from restaurants that have delivery people. The single biggest difference is that they tack on their own fee- a minor inconvenience since they take the orders online and so are less likely to get it wrong.
Why? Because I wanted the meal I paid for to be on time and hot? For the record, I tip extremely generously on the delivery apps as I recognise the importance the riders are doing during the pandemic.
I will never ever willingly tolerate that two hour delivery again. At any price or discount. It was a week night and we were starving by the time the food arrived and it screwed up our routine for the day.
I would pay a reasonable premium to have that meal delivered to me on time and hot.
So really, deliveroo/uber eats created entirely new business. A friend who runs a restaurant said he thought they were the devil and was never going to join them until the pandemic but he said he is now a believer. Adapt or die.
As for drivers earning a liveable wage, I am for that and maybe regulation is required, who knows but you bet your ass the more efficient business with huge economies of scale will have more power to pay their drivers properly than indie mum n dad restaurants.
> bet your ass the more efficient business with huge economies of scale will have more power to pay their drivers properly than indie mum n dad restaurants.
The only thing we've seen these "economies of scale" doing the last decade is the exact opposite, namely using all their muscles to pay workers as little as possible.
The broader picture is that all of the money to pay the driver comes from the customer. If the driver-restaurant system isn’t creating enough value for the customer to pay them a living wage, they won’t get it. Either they’ll get a lesser wage, the company will go out of business, or both.
That anecdote was immediately relatable to many of us who have gotten late, soggy, cold food delivery.
No. Your premise seem to be that this anecdote is correct and that that is the inevitable result of non gig-job delivery. I'm pretty sure that there's a lot of anecdotes out there with bad Uber Eats deliveries too.
I did (and do) not argue it’s inevitable, but it is quite common in my experience.
My solution to their failure is to go pick it up myself, including purchasing some of those red insulated delivery boxes for our family use. It makes takeout much more enjoyable when the timing is predictable and the food almost as high-quality as if served on-site.
As a customer, my concern is with a goods and services I’m buying. The restaurant’s relationship with its employees, food suppliers, and power company is their concern, not mine. If a restaurant wants to pay $100/hr or any other legal wage, that’s their business, not mine.
It’s inarguably self-centered but entirely practical. I can’t review the employee handbook, employee promoter score, supply chain sustainability reports, and corporate social responsibility policies of everyone I order so much as an $8 pizza from.
Agree that Deliveroo fees seem high on both ends (customer and restaurant). Wonder if this means they (a) they are inefficient (b) they have large profit margins or (c) it is actually more expensive to run than one might think. If (a) or (b), the conditions for lower priced alternatives seem high.
The answer is somewhere between A and C depending on what you call inefficiency - Assuming 20 minutes per order (3 per hour) at a minimum wage of c£9 per hour pre-holiday and any other benefits, you are talking about £3 per delivery. They need to pay more than this, as many drive and the fee needs to cover fuel, so call it £4 per delivery or something like that, it's somewhere between £3-£4 probably.
So then you add the cost of user aquisition - which is usually giving out £5 - £10 vouchers and for most of those customers to only use the service once. Clearly the first delivery is a massive loss. Then following that lots of orders are done on a free-or-low delivery cost basis (incl. Deliveroo Plus).
These companies are in a land grab still so it's low margin and high competition between them and Uber Eats. Uber Eats is technically a better cost model (i.e. more efficient) than Deliveroo assuming car delivery, as you can interleave deliveries and cab rides.
It's 2021. If I were opening a restaurant in <city> I think the bare minimum I could do would be to register the base domain?
Okay, let's assume I don't. I'm still getting people ordering that wouldn't otherwise order? because I didn't have a website?
Still just don't see what's wrong here.
I don't want to mention that I'm blind in every frickin HN post but I'm blind, and Uber Eats and etc. are great. and there are restaurants that I specifically know that are in my neighborhood and they are not available on Uber Eats. And I don't order from them because I can't accessibly, so they lose my business presumably because they have opted out. Then there are other restaurants that are local and on Uber eats, and I order from them and feel absolutely fine that I have given the restaurant a sale it wouldn't have otherwise had and employed someone sitting in a car that otherwise had nothing to do. For a minor marginal cost, the restaurant made an extra sale and I got my food. If the restaurant did not want to make this transaction at all, it would not. So everybody came out ahead? I got food, Uber got money, the restaurant got money. What's wrong here?
It's like the old argument so many have made about piracy. Uber eats turned a person who otherwise wouldn't be buying food into a sale. Who lost here?
Also, let's say that registering bobs-pizza-chicago.com is wrong. If so, this applies just as much to JebBush.com redirecting to Trump's website, and all the permutations you can think of there. We either solve domain squatting in the general case, or admit that it's shitty but just as okay when done to a restaurant as when done to your least favorite website or political figure.
It's very unfortunate that restaurant websites are often so terrible that sometimes they don't even include a proper PDF to check the menu, I can imagine it really makes it impossible for people with special needs to get the info they want or to order, I myself almost always only go to restaurant websites as a last resort because they tend to be awful unless they belong to some big chain.
There are of course some site builders restaurant owners can use to improve this, but since, as others have said, they are not always tech savvy they probably don't know, best thing to improve accessibility I can think of is that local commerce boards create some sort of recommendation or guidelines on how to setup a business website following best practices with a list of easy to use builders for such.
What sucks about the domain squatting is that those large corps will have much better SEO capabilities, so even if someone owns register bobs-pizza-chicago.com and make sure it works they could just make chicago-bobs-pizza.com or some variant and beat them in SEO and steal their traffic, even if they were required to provide some banner saying "this is a doordash website" most people wouldn't care and order anyway.
I have friends who own medium-sized restaurants in a couple different major EU cities.
They all have domain names, and web sites sort-of, but none of them thinks anything matters besides Facebook and to a lesser extent Instagram. The web sites are rarely, if ever, updated. Of course right now they are all forced to close anyway; but pre-Covid at least one of them tried to take the web site seriously and gave up after a while, everybody used Facebook anyway.
One of these owners is my age, the others are younger. I even know a guy who owns a catering company and doesn't bother with a web site.
This is a response to the first sentence of my comment, which I strongly appreciate. But I don't understand how it fits with the rest of my questions?
I understand your friends think a social media website is enough. This doesn't mean they need to accept having a website created for them. It sucks that they have to opt out of local delivery services, but it also sucks I have to opt out of junk mail. I still don't understand where the evil is here? It's legal for people to create websites that look and feel similar to existing websites. If this is a problem let's fix it! if it's not, let's not focus on restaurants?
It totally doesn't! Excepting the case where the first sentence introduces an idea and the rest expand upon it.
Let's assume that restaurants don't want people to order their food through delivery. Why don't they just opt out? If they aren't opting out, then clearly the people buying the delivery are paying the same as any other takeout customer? Where is the problem here? What is the thing that gets people so very offended on behalf of restaurant owners? I actively want to understand this!
> If they aren't opting out, then clearly the people buying the delivery are paying the same as any other takeout customer? Where is the problem here?
If people have to pay a large markup, they may end up ordering less food. Or maybe ordering from another place because this one seems too expensive.
The offense comes from delivery companies forcefully inserting themselves between customers and the restaurant. Why not just let customers go to the delivery company's website to order, if that's what they wanted? Why is it necessary to deceive customers?
If you owned a restaurant called Fred's Diner, you might have a website called freds-diner.com.
If a delivery company gets the domain freds-diner-restaurant.com, then they're competing for your traffic.
And their domain might end up higher in Google search results, leading customers to order there. So I don't think it's necessarily the case that they're getting customers they otherwise wouldn't have.
Customers that are only willing to order from Uber Eats etc. aren't going to look for the restaurant's website anyway, they'll just go through the delivery company's website.
The problem is that it's misleading for consumers. If you go to bobs-pizza-chicago.com it's reaosnable to assume you're ordering directly from Bob's pizzas, not some middleman who's gonna take a big cut to pass your order on to Bob's and deliver.
What's wrong is that Deliveroo is making a profit while exploiting workers, who work for them but don't have worker protections. Other delivery companies do have employees with standard benefits (Just Eat in Spain IIRC) and they provide the same service. It's possible, just less profitable.
The consequences would be union negotiated salaries are applicable as well as other perks of being employed (sick leave, vacation, etc.) and time spent waiting at a restaurants is counted as work.
Poor restaurant, having all these people lining up to buy food at the price they specify themselves. What a robbery ...
Dude I don't know what you think business is, but restaurants aren't slaves: they mark whatever price they're comfortable with on their menu, generate margin, and if they don't like it, they close the door, or heh, refuse service to Deliveroo. It's not robbery if the client would never even have heard of you without it, and god the indian restaurant two streets away I discovered after 5 years missing it thanks to Deliveroo knows who they owe this new addicted client to :)
You just described a ghost kitchen, a restaurant without a store front. Honestly, I don’t like delivered food that much. It’s usually cold, often gets screwed up (e.g. regular Pepsi instead of Diet Pepsi), and maybe low quality in general. I’m already hesitant to order with Deliveroo most of the time anyway, and if prices go up, I might just finally learn to cook.
Deliveroo pulled out of Germany when it was decided that their drivers weren't self employed. In their absence, we were left with a terrible service called Lieferando ("deliver-ando"), which were not more expensive, but have an unimpressive app, with little incentive to keep you updated on a timescale or deliver things in a very timely manner (leading to colder, soggier food).
However, in the last year or so, that's all changed (in Berlin at least) with the introduction of the Finnish "Wolt" (which everyone here is pronouncing like "volt", but come to think of it, perhaps should be pronounced the English way). Like lieferando, they have salaried employees, but the app is much more akin to the deliveroo experience, with people who are on-time and great pictures/food etc. Prices are comparable with what deliveroo had before.
I'm sure VC money has something to do with the ability to execute, but assuming that deliveroo had the same, it doesn't seem impossible to run a food delivery service with real employees without huge price hikes.
TBH, I find it pretty amazing that anyone with a semblance of a kitchen hasn't been cooking over the past year. I admittedly don't have a lot of good options around where I live but I haven't gotten delivery in years and don't get takeout--from my local pizza place--very often.
Sure, but you could always do that and be delivery-only without paying anyone. I think the service you're getting here is primarily the exposure of being on a popular platform.
So do it? I really don't see the problem. I get that Deliveroo puts you on their platform even if you don't agree (the apps where I live don't do this), but if that's the case the restaurant is still getting the full price for selling their food. The customer pays the extra 20%.
Which means they might order less food than they would have with lower prices. Or that they might decide it's too expensive, and order from another restaurant.
Yeah, there should be a regulation that lets restaurants opt-out, or enforces price transparency on the delivery company's app (must show both original price from the restaurant in addition to final price).
> Delivery companies are free to buy and resell product from restaurants and add their own markup.
Which is fine. I think the problem is that they are representing themselves as if they are the restaurant, not a reseller. Customers might go to the website the delivery company setup (restaurant-name-location.com instead of restaurant-name.com or whatever their pattern is) instead of the restaurant's website, see the high prices, and decide to try a cheaper place.
A customer buys from a restaurant on a platform, gets the food served cold, and instead of blaming the platform for bad coordination, blames the restaurant for serving it cold, or blames the driver for serving it cold, often by publicly posting on the same platform which screwed their order, hence deflecting blame from the platform onto the driver or the restaurant.
> Last touch of any transaction gets all the blame.
That's exactly my point - and your last touch is the Deliveroo worker. So take it up with them. They can then take it up with the restaurant if it was the restaurant's fault, but that's their job as the reseller.
With on-premises service a restaurant must hire waiting staff and manage the tables (tablecloth, dishes, cutlery, etc).
Preparing food for takeaway actually saves a lot and that's why restaurants that traditionally offer takeaway in addition to on-premises service often offer 10-15% discount for takeway as a matter of course.
Deliveroo is not "robbing" restaurants if they charge 20%...
Are you sure the discount is not due to different taxes applying? In my country, there is a 19% tax on most goods and services, but only a 6% or so tax on food. Sitting down means you pay the high tax, and takeout means you pay the low tax.
It depends on the jurisdiction. In the UK I believe that hot food is taxed in the same way whether it is on-premises or takeaway.
Anyway, at least in the UK and some other EU countries there is no obligation to lower the price because tax is lower (since prices to consumers are inclusive of all taxes) so if tax is indeed lower it can be a bonus for the restaurant (on top of cost savings), which makes Deliveroo's fee even less of a "robbery".
Many of the restaurants on Deliveroo were/are already exclusively takeaways though. I think that in many cases these services have the whiff of rentier capitalism. A third party has inserted themselves into a situation where you previously dealt directly with the restaurant with the intent of extracting value by making both sides dependent on them.
The other factor here is the absurd losses these players are chasing. The capital being pumped in to prop them up feels like a hugely distorting factor that is hiding the actual costs of the sector and preventing new entrants/alternatives from entering the market.
The upside is convenience. I definitely prefer paying by card/web based ordering but I wonder if there's a way of providing the benefits of these services without handing control over to that middleman.
> Many of the restaurants on Deliveroo were/are already exclusively takeaways though.
That's not my impression, but the pandemic has had a radical effect.
> I wonder if there's a way of providing the benefits of these services without handing control over to that middleman.
There is but again this has a cost and if you're an independent restaurant it may make more sense to outsource all of this by using a platform. Some platforms allow you to only use them for handling online order taking and payments (Just Eat?) if you think handling delivery in-house makes sense (but I think it often does not).
> Some platforms allow you to only use them for handling online order taking and payments (Just Eat?)
Deliveroo allows this too, but frankly I'd happily pay a premium to have those restaurants deliver using Deliveroo rather than themselves, as when it's the restaurant themselves you lose visibility of how far along the delivery is in the app. As a result, for restaurants that deliver themselves that will count against them when I consider where I want to order from.
> I assume this will cause Deliveroo to either increase fees or reduce service which may inspire more restuarants to hire their own delivery people again.
Before Deliveroo (and similar services) restaurants (in UK/Europe since you discuss London) did not offer delivery at all.
Handling the whole order (which these days means online/through an app) and delivery in-house is costly and restaurants use Deliveroo because it makes commercial sense.
Generally the issue is that, on the one hand I don't think that people are willing to pay much for delivery while, on the other hand, delivery is very low productivity and it's not viable to pay delivery drivers much for this.
As someone else commented 20-30% of an order is not crazy compared to the cost of serving on-premises. Moreover, Deliveroo can only charge this to restaurants if they have a deal with them.
Low productivity and cost pressures are also why "dark kitchens" are developing: They save on the cost of having a full-blown restaurant geared for on-premises service and they cut travel times for drivers (they can go to a single location and collect from multiple collocated kitchens).
> Before Deliveroo (and similar services) restaurants did not offer delivery at all.
This is far from universally true, especially Asian takeaways typically hired their own driver, but the practice was also commonplace for many actual restaurants too
I'm not in the US but delivery apps are mainstream here as well, and pretty much every restaurant had their own delivery people (we call them motoboys here). Weird to learn that it's not the case everywhere.
I would be careful with the "learn" bit. I think almost every HN topic involving an internet based service ends up with claims that X didn't exist before X.com made it possible.
In this case it is factually true, certainly in Europe but probably in other regions, too.
I think perhaps many commenters here are very young, so when I say restaurants did not deliver they cannot remember how it was 20 years ago. Order over the phone for delivery was limited to a few types of food places (mostly pizza and fast food made by the same establishments).
As an online platform Deliveroo was perhaps not the first (Just Eat is older, though not as focussed on delivery) but in the UK (and perhaps Europe) they really made that service explode. Note, though that I did mention Deliveroo and similar services in my original comment, not only Deliveroo. I think this is also linked with the rise of smartphone and apps, which, really exploded in 2007 with the first iPhone. The same goes with Uber.
And in France I was starting to see a few local delivery companies, they would own the mopeds and hire the drivers for a few restaurants and pizza joints at the town level. I guess all of these are dead now.
Traditional restaurants (in UK/Europe) did not offer delivery, for them Deliveroo or similar is their first foray into delivery, which is made easy because Deliveroo handles everything.
Delivery for traditional restaurants has become a thing in the last 10 years or so when online services popped up.
In Poland many traditional restaurants did offer delivery through websites such as pyszne.pl and pizzaportal.pl since at least 2010. They hired their own drivers at the time, the switch to 3rd party delivery services happened here fairly recently but restaurant-owned cars are still common.
This question has been bothering me for a very long time now, does a food delivery platform really require the 20-30% fee to operate? If so, what justifies it? Or is it because of the spike in demand due to the pandemic so they can get away with it?
Food delivery is labor intensive. 20-30% is probably unreasonably high for a big order, but if you're only ordering a couple of dishes that percentage probably makes sense.
This. Every "expensive" service can largely be traced back to the sheer cost of having someone on their feet all the time to perform it. 20% of my typical takeaway order price would require one complete delivery every ~30 mins to earn a living wage in my city - that sounds pretty reasonable.
"Let's pay them." Ok, with whose money? I am all for good pay for everyone. The problem begins when we detach the pay from the value created by the worker. In many cases worker may become too expensive to hire. So trying to force business to pay more may result in less people having job.
Lots of businesses aren't viable due to the costs of business being greater than the price people would be willing to pay. Pay isn't being detached from the value of the worker, what's being said is that if you're unable to produce enough value from the worker in order to pay them well enough to live then your business isn't viable.
Gig economy companies like Deliveroo are particularly hostile to their labour force. Without fixed wages for employees they're directly incentivised to flood the pool of workers with as many people as possible. The consequence of this is that delivery times are lower, but the compensation available to each employee is greatly reduced compared to traditional delivery models.
The same could be said for child labour or health and safety regulation. If a child is desperate enough to work why shouldn't we let them? Why don't we allow workers to choose to work for companies that put their wellbeing at risk?
The reason is that it ends up not being a choice of the worker at all, incentives align in such a way that these are no longer an "option" but instead a replacement of existing work/choice that had much better outcomes for the worker than the replacement. A great example of this would be "voluntary" exemptions from overtime protections in the UK. There is a default limit on the maximum amount of overtime most workers can undertake. The employee can optionally agree to lift this limit. In practice every employee is given a form to sign along with their employment contract that agrees to lift this limit. It no longer becomes a choice of the worker but one of management.
The same thing happened with "zero hours" contracts. Theoretically they allow employees to be more flexible in how much they work. In reality they remove the ability for workers to plan time or budget due to uncertainty in how often and when management decides they will be working. The key thing is that this replaced the existing, more reliable, system of work not because employees chose it as an option, but because employers unilaterally switched to it.
I'd argue further that the gig economy itself is both a cause and a symptom of economic instability in the lower working class. It emerged from the inability of this group to find to find enough stable, well paying work. It accelerates that economic instability by forcing workers into an even more precarious position. With a zero hours contract the economic uncertainty came from the fact that you didn't know when you'd be working. With gig work you know when you'll be working but you won't know what you'll be paid. This is a fundamental shift in the social contract of employment, in that the risk of loss is born by the employer and in exchange the employer keeps any profit. In the gig economy the employer shifts that burden onto the employees without a corresponding shift in control/profit.
I mean, I think there's two possible situations, depending on whether something is due to worker choice or company choice. I agree that in a situation where everyone is offering shitty conditions, outlawing shitty conditions makes sense. But in a situation where some companies offer shitty conditions, and lots of people decide to go away from their existing companies and work for the shitty companies, then you have to at least entertain the notion that you were wrong about what makes a job shitty.
In that sense, having some companies with shitty conditions offers an important safety valve to learn that regulations were misguided.
> and lots of people decide to go away from their existing companies and work for the shitty companies, then you have to at least entertain the notion that you were wrong about what makes a job shitty
There's a lot of churn in the job market, so people go in and out of work frequently. They may spend a few weeks or months claiming unemployment benefits. In the UK that would be Universal Credit, and some people claiming UC were forced into working zero hour contracts for companies like Uber by the DWP.
This is only holds true if there are more jobs than workers and working these jobs is preferable to unemployment. The reality is that the vast majority of workers are dependent on the decisions of whatever corporation will take them in order to maintain some standard of living.
In your example if we had no unemployment safety nets at all then any form of labour would be justifiable because some workers would choose it over begging/starvation. In fact it is this very argument that is used to justify why people should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery. I believe the preferable alternative to this is to improve those safety nets such that people are able to make a choice on whether that work is worth doing, free from coercion.
> But in a situation where some companies offer shitty conditions, and lots of people decide to go away from their existing companies and work for the shitty companies, then you have to at least entertain the notion that you were wrong about what makes a job shitty.
The problem is that if those shitty conditions allow the company to outcompete, competitors are eventually forced to match those conditions. If we get rid of labour regulation and I start employing children for £0.30/hour my competitors are forced to take a similar step or I'll destroy the majority of them on price alone.
The gig companies do exactly this by shifting the risk of loss on to the worker and relying on information asymmetry between themselves and the worker on the effects of worker competition in order to retain them. In models of traditional employment the company hires and schedules its workers based on forecasted need. If the company mistakenly hires more workers than needed they suffer a reduction in profit. If a gig company "hires" too many employees, the employees make a lower hourly wage and the company increases customer satisfaction due to quicker delivery/ride times. This shifting of risk is what makes gig companies dangerous to the existence of other jobs regardless of whether they're preferable in other ways.
Gig companies are directly incentivised to maximise the "supply" of workers which results in a situation where each additional person signing up reduces the potential earnings of participants in the same area. This is advantageous to the companies but not the workers and that's something that isn't immediately obvious, we have to hope that enough people realise before it becomes the only option.
What makes this even worse is that these companies are burning huge amounts of capital dumping prices/inflating payouts in order to disguise the true costs of their business. The result is that stable businesses are squeezed out artificially.
> In that sense, having some companies with shitty conditions offers an important safety valve to learn that regulations were misguided.
This wouldn't tell you that regulations were misguided unless they happened to be in violation of those regulations. I think that while imperfect public opinion/democratic vote is a much better option than "the invisible hand" for deciding which regulations are valuable.
We pay either way. The question is whether we pay to subsidise businesses that otherwise would not be viable by compensating through the welfare system, or whether we make them actually compete on equal terms with companies that pay well enough for their workers to earn a living wage.
>or whether we make them actually compete on equal terms with companies that pay well enough for their workers to earn a living wage.
Is this what's actually happening here? Are there delivery/cab companies paying a fair wage that's being out-competed by uber? To my knowledge delivery/cab companies don't pay a fair wage in general.
Depends very much on the company. In London there's a huge variety of private hire operators ranging from ones that are almost certainly worse than Uber - but also much smaller - to ones that do have well paid fully employed drivers.
The reason the smaller ones haven't faced more attention is that these actions usually require the person who wants employment status themselves to raise the issue and be prepared to take their employer to tribunal or court.
i'd be interested to see how much the pay of the delivery rider could be increased, while keeping the company profitable, if you only reduced “key management personnel” compensation to a manageable level.
is it really normal for a CEO to earn a thousand times more than a normal employee? a hundred times?
Where I live being a delivery driver is not really a job for an adult. It ranges from 15 year old kids on ebikes to 25 year old students on scooters. Minimum wage for this group is pretty low it wouldn't make that much of a difference.
Deliveroo already totally robs these restaurants. Even for a click and collect order where I get the food myself Deliveroo takes ~20-30%. I assume this will cause Deliveroo to either increase fees or reduce service which may inspire more restuarants to hire their own delivery people again.
Overall I think this is a good thing, especially now. These gig workers have been absolutely essential to society over the past year. People have been able to safely shelter in their home while these guys (it's mostly guys) go out and take all the risks. Let's pay them.