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posted by martyb on Tuesday May 19 2020, @03:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the ...we'll-make-it-up-in-volume dept.

Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage:

In March 2019 a good friend who owns a few pizza restaurants messaged me [...]. For over a decade, he resisted adding delivery as an option for his restaurants. He felt it would detract from focusing on the dine-in experience and result in trying to compete with Domino's.

But he had suddenly started getting customers calling in with complaints about their deliveries.

Customers called in saying their pizza was delivered cold. Or the wrong pizza was delivered and they wanted a new pizza.

[...] He realized that a delivery option had mysteriously appeared on their company's Google Listing. The delivery option was created by Doordash.

[...] Doordash was causing him real problems. The most common was, Doordash delivery drivers didn't have the proper bags for pizza so it inevitably would arrive cold. It led to his employees wasting time responding to complaints and even some bad Yelp reviews.

But he brought up another problem - the prices were off. He was frustrated that customers were seeing incorrectly low prices. A pizza that he charged $24 for was listed as $16 by Doordash.

[...] He called in and placed an order for 10 pizzas to a friend's house and charged $160 to his personal credit card. A Doordash call center then called into his restaurant and put in the order for those 10 pizzas. A Doordash driver showed up with a credit card and paid $240 for the pizzas.

We went over the actual costs. Each pizza cost him approximately $7 ($6.50 in ingredients, $0.50 for the box). So if he paid $160 out of pocket plus $70 in expenses to net $240 from Doordash, he just made $10 in pure arbitrage profit. For all that trouble, it wasn't really worth it, but that first experiment did work.

[...] But we did realize, if you removed the food costs this could get more interesting.

[...] The order was put in for another 10 pizzas. But this time, he just put in the dough with no toppings (he indicated at the time dough was essentially costless at that scale, though pandemic baking may have changed things).

[...] Note 1: We found out afterward that was all the result of a "demand test" by Doordash. They have a test period where they scrape the restaurant's website and don't charge any fees to anyone, so they can ideally go to the restaurant with positive order data to then get the restaurant signed onto the platform. If we had to pay a customer fee on the order, it would've further cut into our arbitrage profits (though maybe we could've incorporated DashPass as part of the calculation).


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  • (Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2020, @07:20AM (12 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2020, @07:20AM (#996220)

    Lol foreigners

    America (texas) and Japan routinely win in the best scotch category
    America (california) beats france and italy at wine
    America beats in cheese competitions
    America wins in vodka competitions
    America beats germany in beer competitions

    Have we won in pizza? I suppose you might find a slice here and there that meets the italian standard currently, but soon this will be ours as well.

    Everything anyone else can do, we can do bigger, better, and cheaper. RIP the hallow husk that was Europe, we took all your best and brightest and all you have now is cucks and memories.

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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2020, @08:12AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2020, @08:12AM (#996227)

    You clearly manage to beat the rest of the world in arrogance and over-the-top competitiveness.

  • (Score: 5, Funny) by kazzie on Tuesday May 19 2020, @08:32AM (1 child)

    by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 19 2020, @08:32AM (#996234)

    And in baseball, America wins the World Series virtually every year!

    • (Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Tuesday May 19 2020, @10:04PM

      by sonamchauhan (6546) on Tuesday May 19 2020, @10:04PM (#996583)

      Not to mention winning in the TV ratings... RATINGS!!!!!

      And Oscar, Grammy and Emmy awards.

  • (Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Tuesday May 19 2020, @08:53AM (4 children)

    by gtomorrow (2230) on Tuesday May 19 2020, @08:53AM (#996240)

    You're so funny! But instead of modding you "funny"...

    Citations needed, and how! Otherwise, stand in line to be called out...present waiting times: ~3 hours.

    Maybe in competitions held solely in the United States your affirmations hold true.

    • In the United States you have one domestic cheese in 13 different colors and 47 different names, discounting the garbage sold as "cheese product".
    • While not Thunderbird or MD20/20, California wines can't hold a candle to even the cheapest Italian wines.
    • And while I personally am not particular for German beers, I can't believe you're saying American beer (I don't care if you're talking microbrewery or not) beats out any Anglo-Saxon/Nordic product. Then again, I can't see you snickering while posting, so I have to assume you're serious...?

    Are you gonna tell us next that the United States won the World Cup too? You are so funny!

    • (Score: 2) by Kitsune008 on Tuesday May 19 2020, @06:14PM (1 child)

      by Kitsune008 (9054) on Tuesday May 19 2020, @06:14PM (#996438)

      Well, I'm not trying to defend the deluded AC, but even you have to admit we are winning the coronavirus competition.
      More cases confirmed, and more deaths, than any other country.

      Yeah Trump, we ARE tired of your style of winning.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2020, @10:55PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2020, @10:55PM (#996610)

      LMFAO. You're just ignorant. Michigan produces the best beer in the world, hands down. California wine is overrated, but it's 1/2 the price and nearly as good. And... You know nothing about craft cheese so let's not even go there (no, I didn't mean Kraft).

      • (Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:53PM

        by gtomorrow (2230) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:53PM (#996877)

        Yeah, anonymous coward, just as I thought. I ask for citations and you just make more things up and purport them as "facts" peppered with insults.

        Yawn...we're so done here.

  • (Score: 4, Funny) by FatPhil on Tuesday May 19 2020, @09:29PM (2 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Tuesday May 19 2020, @09:29PM (#996553) Homepage
    > America beats in cheese competitions

    Is it win in grammer competings?
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Thursday May 21 2020, @12:59AM (1 child)

      by ChrisMaple (6964) on Thursday May 21 2020, @12:59AM (#997175)

      There's nothing wrong when taken in context, which implicitly supplies the missing object. Thus:

      America beats [others] in cheese competitions.

      • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday May 21 2020, @07:44AM

        by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Thursday May 21 2020, @07:44AM (#997312) Homepage
        Oh, I could work out what he was trying to say, I was asking a genuine question, which I notice you have failed to answer.
        --
        Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves