There are a number of restaurants listed on Yelp in my area for whom the phone number listed is answered by GrubHub. I refuse to deal with GrubHub, so I make an effort to search for a direct number, but it is often difficult to find.
I'm not sure how GrubHub is getting themselves set as the primary number for restaurants in Yelp, but it's happening.
>If people don’t understand that a middleman adds cost as an adult, then that is an education issue.
I think the point is that middlemen are now using deceptive business practice to obscure the fact they are involved and in many ways cannibalizing direct business to the restaurants using "dark patterns". In the case of middlemen changing the phone number of the restaurant on services like Yelp/Google Maps without the consent of the restaurant should be fraud...its almost like I go to a bank and put my ATM machine in front of the bank ATM machines and charge customers withdraw fees...then claiming well I am a 3rd party of course I had fees (even disclosed it in order to proceed), while ignoring the totality of the circumstances.
"The solution is high-resistance individual actions to address a situation with no societal benefit created by a company with more money than you can even begin to visualize."
This is the sort of thing one says to either feel very, very clever about themselves or because they don't want things fixed. Which is it?
I don’t consider using a browser or google maps or Apple Maps to search name and phone number of a restaurant to be high resistance.
If people want to give their money to middlemen because they are too lazy to call or use a search website, that is their problem. We don’t need laws around every single idiotic behavior people do, and if they find value in paying an app maker an extra $10, so be it. I’ll continue to do the common sense thing and spending 30 seconds calling them because I can’t afford $10 to door dash for what is a useless service to me.
How much money they may or may not have is irrelevant.
Otherwise google maps and Apple Maps is sitting right there not charging any fees for the phone number.