Using the current Android mobile app, you can't actually drill into and read reviews which makes assessing the actual quality of the restaurant difficult.
And I've found that restaurants will run their own "ghost kitchen" shadow restaurant out of their main (poorly rated) location. This delivery specific restaurant has good reviews on DD, but when you Google that restaurant name nothing comes up aside from listings on the app. And then the food arrives and it's terrible and you match up the physical address and realize it's a poorly rated Indian restaurant by a different name.
Or, you order from one of these weird ghost kitchen brands and the actual restaurant doesn't actually get your order (despite the app telling you they confirmed it) and your second driver finally tells you to cancel the order.
Is it asking too much to have a service that's transparent, functions well and have the end product taste good?
You can continue browsing a specific restaurant, and order a “discounted” item, your total price will be the sum of the discounted items. That is, up until you actually want to check out, suddenly your total jumps back to the sum of the original valued of the items. Because, apparently, that discount was only for “pro” users. It’s nowhere mentioned that is the case. And since I’m logged in, they already know I’m not a pro user.
This pissed me of so much, I documented and reported this to the local consumer council, but haven’t heard back yet.
1. You want to convert people to "pro" users so you try to show them all the money they can save by doing so.
2. Because of a bug in the code somewhere, you end up showing the discounted price in the cart until checkout.
3. Because some number of people don't pay attention and don't realize the switcheroo happens at the end this bug actually increases conversion.
4. Someone eventually notices the bug (after customers like you complain about it!).
5. When they fix it the metrics are adversely impacted.
6. The bug is now a "feature".
This is of course all very shortsighted since you are essentially burning customer trust for a short-term gain in conversion so it's bad for the medium/long term business. But the team has to hit its KPIs, which are tracked on a daily/weekly basis!
1. You (as a product owner/manager) want to convert people to "pro" users so you try to show them all the money they can save by doing so.
2. You don't care about the the experience of the non-pro users, because that's not the metric you're optimizing, so you never specify to developers what should happen when lower-class users shop, except that at the end they have to pay the full price
3. Developers build something that works like the dark pattern described above (they are incentivized by keeping their sprint goals, not by making non-pro users happy).
But I can't comprehend how this is worth it to Foodpanda, I'm an already paying customer, ordering 3-4 times a week, me not being a "pro" user should be making them money, since I pay full price, and pay delivery fees. What they've done now, is not converted me to "pro", and lost me as a customer.
Surely it would make more sense to advertise that customers can get a $5 discount, if they order for $30 or more. That way, if your order only adds up to $25, I would be inclined to order a side that gets me to $30 or more.
Uninstall DoorDash and the problem goes away for you, and if enough people uninstall DoorDash the math changes and the problem goes away for everybody. As a bonus you'll save a fortune by not paying the higher food prices and fees and you'll stop giving up some personal information in the process.
The latter. Of course, it drives users to uninstall. But it juices today’s returns. (Uber Eats does the same. Sometimes I report it to zero effect.)
Caviar used to be a high-quality service in New York; I uninstalled it after DoorDash bought them. There is an open niche for a real-restaurants-only delivery service. Also, support for legislation requiring restaurants use the name on their food license on apps. (Using fake names makes tracking down food poisoning difficult. I assume someone lying about their brand is more likely to be sloppy elsewhere.)
... but not at a sustainable price for workers and consumers. The trajectory of this industry is birthing crazy illogical things like ghost kitchens, weird liminal areas of food service that's not quite restaurant, not quite food-delivery, shaping bad human behaviors and creating dark patterns due to excess capital and perverse incentives.
Food costs. Making it, serving it, cleaning up. It costs more than people are willing to pay, maybe there's a strata of the market for whom the value is worth it, but not for the majority. Pizza delivery within a radius is successful but not everything can scale.
This seems like the most likely case, considering the other ethical problems with doordash.
https://i.imgur.com/7jwBlFG.png
Some of the name variations are pretty funny though.
These are the same fake names that the deli a block from me in Brooklyn NYC uses. Literally exactly the same.
That’s sort of fascinating. I’m realizing it just be some kind of software or vendor they’re all using to set up this ghost kitchen explosion.
I wonder if there’s a clever vendor out there shipping them some kind of device to keep track of all this stuff, complete with menus and an instruction guide or something.
Or, of course, the platforms themselves.
I just realized this screenshot is actually from GrubHub which I don't use anymore, so I'm not able to go back and check for further details.
There are thousands of options which are barely undistinguishable from one another - like those cheap Chinese brands that flood many product categories on Amazon. You'll occasionally find a name that stands out, like the ones you've posted, along the lines of "Thunderfuck Porn Burgers". But they don't entice me to order, since whatever the brand values being transmitted are, they are not what I'm looking for in a restaurant.
The result is that you end up ordering from the same few oldies but goodies. Occasionally, once upon a moon, a friend will tell you about a new restaurant to expand your horizons. Some of these, while good, might not stand out in this sea of shit and end up closing, so you revert back to the oldies but goodies. And so it goes.
The corollary is that this a shit business.
One restaurant which serves burgers, tacos and pizza. None of it particularly great but nice if you're feeling lazy. Problem is they split across three brands on Glovo for each food category even though it all comes from the same place.
If one of us feels like burger and the other fancies tacos you gotta pay two deliveries. That is unless you pay for a subscription of course. Someone mentioned elsewhere in this thread that Doordash officially endorses these "virtual restaurants". I wouldn't be surprised if they like the idea that it might push people to premium subscriptions to access free delivery so they get a diversity of food options.
As far as I can tell, the point of a delivery platform is to provide delivery services in a market where they traditionally didn't exist.
There's no claim they will improve the discovery experience. In fact, by obfuscating where you're actually ordering from-- making it less obvious "Oh, that's the place on Sixth where we all got food poisoning, let's not go back", they can further pollute it.
I could see saying "use the service, I want to order from Golden Lucky Dragon Palace, but can't be bothered to drive there myself", but saying "let's browse and hope to get lucky" is no better than opening the Yellow Pages to the restaurant section and selecting at random.
Ghost kitchen chain?
1. Ones that pretend to be a real brand name but serve out of an unrelated restaurant's kitchen
2. Ones that are 100% fake chains made up just for delivery apps that are used across the country
Before I order on apps I first google for the name to make sure they have a real physical location in my city and it's not a scam (yes, I believe all ghost kitchens are scams).
Browsing for a restaurant - delivery time 20-30 minutes
Adding food to the cart - delivery time 25-35 minutes
Checkout - delivery time 30-40 minutes
Payment processed - delivery time 45-55 minutes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment
Seems established and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising#Regulation_a...
May be a case for this imo ianal
But at least they tell you how much you paid for the service. The worst for price transparency is “same day” costco delivery by Instacart. They markup the prices but never tell you how much more you’re paying for their service, it’s completely hidden unless the shopper/driver accidentally leaves you with the costco warehouse receipt. Once I saw the 35% markup on a nominal $300 order, I never used same-day costco again. I knew I was paying some markup for the service (they tell you on the website that prices are higher than in the warehouse), but I could not justify that much.
I'd rather know upfront what the total will be, instead of meaningless itemised receipts with added fees that I have no choice but to pay.
Then again, there are countries that dont include sales tax on price labels, so people must prefer the hidden fees approach.
It’s a total joke, the whole point of wholesale is to save money.
I’m far too lazy to do the math, but I think I save more money Instacart shopping Aldi than Costco
They scrub most evidence of this being a white label service but it’s the same ui/ux and even the favicon is the Instacart carrot as of the time of this comment. Last time I compared my households ~$300 bill on the white labeled site was ~$450 on the main Instacart site
The most annoying thing for me is constantly getting notifications for "discount codes" that don't actually work. When I've contacted support they tell me "they're expired" or "it was a bug in the app" and they offer me a much worse version of the coupon.
If it's a bug, they've had it for months, and it conveniently is very beneficial to their engagement numbers (you enter the app, make an order, and settle for a tiny discount when the deal doesn't work).
Very frustrating to “search” on UberEats. Fine if you know the restaurant you want to order from ahead of time.
I look up the address on Street View.
E.g require any restaurant to have a brick and mortar restaurant with actual customers in it, or it’s banned. And requiring each such restaurant to have only one listed name in the app - which must be the same as the name on the sign of the physical restaurant. And clearly highlighting the age of the physical restaurant (under the current name) in the listings.
Basically: I want to use services that aren’t trying to grow quickly by inflating anything. I don’t want VC funded startups operating at a loss for growth for anything. I want to pay the true price of the service and only use services that aren’t “disrupting” by using legal loopholes or pricing to a loss to drive established actors out of markets.
Many of the Chinese places around here have different names in Chinese and English. Sometimes slightly different, sometimes seriously different. I don't find it at all surprising, the Chinese names make sense to Chinese people but are hard for Americans to pronounce. It's the same thing as most Chinese people taking an Americanized version of their name (usually just informally) because their proper names get too badly mangled. (My wife is Chinese, more than once we've had the experience of being called from a waiting room and neither of us recognized what they had done to her name. At least with my last name the butchering is pretty consistent so I don't have a problem.)
Why on earth would it matter to me as a delivery app user if I'm ordering from an ordinary restaurant or a dark kitchen? The only thing I care about is the food being good. And ordinary restaurants with actual customers in it often treat deliveries as something not really important.
These days I really hate using delivery apps. You have to dodge the ghost kitchens which isn't easy (both the fake brand name ones and the fake made-up restaurants like "It's just Wings", "F*cking Good Pizza", and "Super Mega Dilla"), you have to compare the DoorDash/GrubHub/UberEats prices to the restaurant's app prices to see which it the better deal (sometimes even if they use DoorDash for the actual delivery it's cheaper to buy through their app), and unless you are paying for the monthly/yearly subscription you can get fleeced on fees even after wading through all the bullshit to find real restaurants that have real storefronts in town.
The problem is when existing restaurants pretend they're a ghost kitchen. You order from a cool new chicken wing restaurant and get an order from Chilies. You order from a new pizza restaurant and get a box that says Chuck E Cheese on it. That's just purely deceptive.
The other thing I see is the same crap food getting sold by a variety of names that are constantly coming and going.
So yeah, I was originally in love with the idea of ghost kitchens. We have so many good creative food trucks where I live and I thought we'd get good creative ghost kitchens, but instead you get tricked into buying a burger from Hooters.
Of all of those the 3rd is the only one that I'm even slightly ok with but I feel like the incentives for these kitchens don't favor the customers and it's just a race to the bottom of using the cheapest/crappiest ingredients to make a quick buck. I don't believe there are any "delivery-only, multi-brand kitchens" in my city (yet) but there are a ton of real and fake brands being sold out of other kitchens and the results less than stellar. I think the chicken tenders I got from one them would have better if I had made frozen chicken tenders in the oven verses what I got.
I too was intrigued by the ghost kitchen idea when it first came out but so far from what I've seen it's the worst of all worlds. The quality sucks and they can easily just rebrand under a new fake name after burning their reputation. Again, the incentives are pretty gross when you think about it and I won't support it.
There is no good long-term result from ghost kitchens. The pandemic handed them a crowbar and they've wedged themselves into the landscape, and co-op/commissary kitchens are starting to push back, but now it's an infestation. There are fucking Wendy's ghost carts in my neighborhood now.
(And it turns out that the owner had been playing games with the IRS and some other government stuff. He's in jail, all their places are gone.)
Do they actually do this? I at least expect the fake brand's name or generic brand. If it says Chuck-e-cheese I'd claim order never arrived.
Consider the ratio of experiences you’ve had with any delivery app after the first order, good experiences to bad. Was the food late, cold, poor quality, damaged, or was its price marked up beyond what you initially believed?
If the same thing keeps happening and you expect different results then… well, you know what I’m getting at :)
In my city (Vancouver), a restaurant owner actually setup a local only food delivery service during the pandemic with the idea that they keep costs as low as possible to run the service and restaurants didn't charge a markup which allowed for a flat service fee for every order and the restaurants pivoted employees to do deliveries instead of laying them off. The only downside for using it for most orders was that the options tended to be higher end dining.
It just shows how much VC money these larger services waste on their shitty services that get more and more expensive when maybe a couple of people were able to deliver the a better experience in a few months at the start of the pandemic. Unfortunately it seems like the service is shut down now as it always says "ordering unavailable", so maybe it wasn't that sustainable as a business.
In many ways, the pandemic worked as a catalyst for changes that were long overdue anyway. Yes, these changes were all the more beneficial in that specific situation. However, that doesn't mean those changes and the huge benefits they provided beyond the immediate response to an emergency become irrelevant once that emergency is over.
For example, while dining out, with fine dining in particular, is at least as much about the experience as it is about the food and having that experience on site in a nice restaurant absolutely is preferable to just having the food delivered to your door, this doesn't have to be an either-or proposition: Why not complement your usual offering with high-end delivery and take-out?
Since at least the Black Death, pandemics have also served as an accelerator for innovation and this one certainly is no different in that regard. The least we can do is to make use of that momentum and the opportunities it provided us with in addition to all the hardship.
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, after all.
Not sure if it's still working out for A.J.'s Pizza, but that it did at any time should tell you everything you need to know about DD's internal structure; there is no there there.
[0] https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage
In particular, his third law: “A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.”
> I sold microwave meals on Deliveroo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k47u9tduwb8
$20 for a big mac meal.
$30 for a large pizza.(might offer the driver like $5-$6 with tip.
I've stopped ordering delivery and pick it up myself now.
I had another one when travelling. I used skyscanner (flight comparison site), the cheapest flight took me through what must have been 3 forms and 30+ questions taking several mins to fill out. When you get to check out they say the price has now increased since you started the checkout (incuding fury and panic) and suggesting you accept the increase before the price goes up again! I quickly did a new comparison and funily enough the first price was still being shown on the comparison site. I opted for the second cheapest option and no such last min price increase was administered and I thought i'd doged a bullet. Sadly not, when I got to the airport to return home I found that the agent I had gone with had not booked my luggage on the retun flight, que a £50 surcharge to get it on last min. I am still trying to get my money back from them and the flight was in April. Unfortunately the comparison site model has encoraged agents to 'show' the lowest price at apparently any cost - some up the price last min others book your luggage only one way.
This is not limited to tech or internet companies. I found a worrying and annoying dark pattern in jewllery. Many companies use their own measurement lettering systems and there is a surprisingly large varience between companies, so you think your wife is size x and you order the ring but it turns out to be a different size which means you have to send it back to be resized (for a fee of course) and they know that you won't quibble because you don't want to look cheap in front of your partner for what is probably an emotionally driven purchase.
Compaines are literally in the business of extracting as much money from you as they can for the least resistance, so unfortunately unless people write reviews or share their expereinces it's business as usual.
https://get.doordash.com/en-us/blog/virtual-restaurant-brand
They seem to be used frequently as decoys to allow restaurants to drop bad reviews though.
DoorDash itself is predatory and harmful to local restaurants and worldwide labor practices.
If you are a developer and a product manager asks you to implement a dark pattern, you should raise objections at every step of the process, implement it slowly and with defects, and talk about it publicly to shame the company. We're holding the shovel. Make dark patterns expensive.
In your case I'm glad you have an option that works for you. At the end of the day it's a case by case value analysis. I'm so viscerally against things like tips and service charges I'd rather just buy a frozen pizza from the grocery store and snack on that or do takeout than support something like doordash. I think a lot of people need things like doordash less than they think they do, so I like sharing examples of how that can be done.
And why would they change when people who know this still use their service?
All these Silicon Valley companies get away with this stuff because people value the convenience over the small businesses getting screwed over.
In what way would this benefit the organization?
Its great sentiment and I would agree, though i fear the reality is "The squeaky wheel gets replaced"
The only item that is 30% off is the restaurant’s merchandise.
I will say that Thusbezorgd is often more expensive than just going directly to a restaurant's website. But also we find restaurants that we like and keep ordering from them. I typically know precisely where my food is coming from because I physically know where the restaurant is.
(My crunchy friends still criticise them for being an oligopoly that squeezes restaurants though, which may well be true.)
Functions well: How dutifully can one shop, and hand/machine-wash plates after eating?
End product tastes good: taste food while you're preparing it (and the food is safe to eat)
Home-cooking is a good start to OP's requirements
That's not actually the expensive part. The expensive part is the greedy investors behind it and their attempt at monopolizing the industry (which thankfully is failing).
“Let’s use UberEats instead, DoorDash doesn’t have reviews”.
If you don’t know what it is, either go by car or don’t order it.
If you haven't seen it and knows where it is then don't order from it
Nowadays I can order straight from the app, simply pay for my pizza, the service fee, tax, delivery charge, and tip. Wait a little while and it comes straight to my door.
Sure, now it costs a little more, but that money is going straight to the guys that deliver my food. That's great for everyone.
Ha ha, sorry that isn’t the case. Door dash etc are actually killing some restaurants by impersonating them, forcing huge discounts on what they will pay, and of course notoriously stealing from their delivery people.
Me. Specifically, before they bought Caviar [1].
No fake restaurants. Dedicated delivery staff who were on time and friendly. Differentiated offerings from Seamless.
[1] https://help.doordash.com/dashers/s/article/Caviar-x-DoorDas...
Pizza and Chinese food delivery has been a thing long before doordash, and the quality of directly employed delivery seems to be much higher.
If a restaurant doesn't have delivery I'll just making a to-go order and go pick it up.
It's one of life's exquisite pleasures. You'll save a ton of money. Massively improve your health. It really impresses any potential partner - many a lifelong relationship started in the kitchen not the bedroom. Cookbooks are recipes are really fun. Surely my fellow hackers, don't we love to know how things work and be in control?
Poorer nations spend much more time per capita on cooking. India averages 13 hours per week. The average American male spends two and a half hours per week (20 mins per day) in "food preparation". We all have equally "busy" lives, yet our labour is distributed in different ways.
The 'first world' problems I am poking fun at (in a light way so please don't take it so much to heart) is known as "Time Poverty" [1].
My serious point is that western "oh so terribly busy" people allocate labour that preferences sitting in traffic en route a job sitting at a desk over cooking food. Cooking feels beneath us, because our time feels so valuable, in turn because we are robbed of it trying to be "productive". That is really unhealthy, mentally and biologically. It is a symptom of "affluenza" [2].
So rather than being "condescending" I am politely inviting you to descend amongst those of us with dirty hands from chopping vegetables (those weird shaped plants you mum used to ruin supper with :)
Especially from snobby "hackers" with who lack a sense of perspective and empathy to other people's situations.
There is one day a week that my wife and I both have a ton of meetings. At the end of the day we are both exhausted and neither of us want to cook. We frequently order food on this day. That's not a moral failing.
You need to go shopping for food, you need to pick ingredients, manage "freshness" so that food doesn't go off and plan what meals you'll cook with the ingredients you bought. It would create situations where I had to choose between going out after work to a restaurant or letting food spoil.
You also need to clean up after cooking, either washing dishes by hand or loading/unloading the dish washer. If you use the dish washer, it creates a "task" in the future where you need to unload it. If you wash them by hand, it takes a long time.
I never really thought about all those things before, but when I stopped cooking/shopping it was like a huge mental load was lifted and I was free. I am much happier with this lifestyle and so is my SO.
But I don't really like delivery services because they deliver things in plastic containers and are bad for the environment. I prefer meal replacement powders and eating at restaurants. That being said, some delivery places are better than others when it comes to packaging waste.
This reminds me of Rob Rhinehart's (Soylent) old (now deleted) blog post about groceries:
>I have not set foot in a grocery store in years. Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears.
Still quoted here: https://www.businessinsider.com/soylent-ceo-rob-rhinehart-qu...
But here's the thing: I live in HK — so I just pay for a full time domestic helper who takes care of all of that (though the main reason is to have someone to take the best care of my dog). All in cost is <$1000/mo. I never have to worry about any unpleasant chores whether it's keeping the house spotless at all times, laundry, post office visits, etc. And as far as cooking, I send her on grocery runs, use as many dishes as I want to be the most comfortable cooking, and don't worry about any cleanup. It's wonderful.
I could easily spend more than that on restaurants (and I still do), but overall the value here is a no-brainer.
There are dozens of things I would rather do in my limited time than spend time cooking.
