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I disagree - large cuts to delivery services were hurting restaurants long before COVID, and the predatory practices of the likes of Grubhub and DoorDash have been well documented here on HN in the past.


I don't doubt that restaurants are paying big fees to the delivery companies, but the delivery companies are still losing money on every order. The predatory pricing is that they're charging too little, not too much. That's how you get this pizza arbitrage stuff. Now some of the other practices of the delivery companies like setting up fake web pages for restaurants are really objectionable, but I think that what's happening now is a separate problem.

Ultimately though, the problem of the pandemic is that restaurants need customers to pay for both the dining room and the delivery, and that's just too much money. If you're running a cloud kitchen, you don't expect to be able to get the same amount of money for a meal as a sit down restaurant, but the sit down restaurant is now providing the same product as the cloud kitchen.




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