![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Buzzfeed reports on a little-known Grubhub tactic, where it gets hold of Yelp and Google listings for restaurants and then replaces the phone number listed there with one of its own. The result is that customers trying to help the restaurant by ordering directly are still causing the restaurant to have to pay Grubhub.
TL;DR: Don't use a phone number from anywhere but the restaurant's own official site to call it.
I found that Buzzfeed article via this far more entertaining one at The Margins, describing a slightly less awful tactic from Doordash. Sometimes, Doordash sets itself up so that people can order delivery from places that don't have Doordash contracts. The fun starts when the columnist learns that not only has it done this to a pizzeria owned by a friend of his, it's listing prices significantly lower than the pizzeria charges, opening up an arbitrage opportunity.
I should explain the term "Softbank-triggered" which appears in that article. Softbank is a highly successful Japanese bank whose "Vision Fund" has become the latest and biggest source of Silicon Valley venture capital, i.e. money which gets shoveled into money-losing companies in the hope that they can eventually stop losing money. Softbank's general investment strategy is that when Son Masayoshi, its CEO and founder, sees a company he likes, he invests an insane amount of Vision Fund money in it. And then he invests even more insane amounts of money in its competitors, causing a race to the bottom that guarantees a ton of money is essentially set on fire, plus deleterious effects on the market itself that The Margins examines later in the article.
Softbank's best-known monetary inferno is WeWork. Currently the two of them are trading lawsuits over a bailout that was planned a few months ago before the economy fell apart. The lawsuits themselves are highly technical, but the tech and finance worlds are stocking up on popcorn in the hope of juicy disclosures about what the hell any of the principals in the whole WeWork saga were thinking.
Anyway, I found the Margins article via this Matt Levine column at Bloomberg. Levine rounds out the story by suggesting how the arbitrage can be taken to the next level, if you have two businesses and a Doordash driver willing to collude, and picking up the theme of market dysfunction:
TL;DR: Don't use a phone number from anywhere but the restaurant's own official site to call it.
I found that Buzzfeed article via this far more entertaining one at The Margins, describing a slightly less awful tactic from Doordash. Sometimes, Doordash sets itself up so that people can order delivery from places that don't have Doordash contracts. The fun starts when the columnist learns that not only has it done this to a pizzeria owned by a friend of his, it's listing prices significantly lower than the pizzeria charges, opening up an arbitrage opportunity.
I should explain the term "Softbank-triggered" which appears in that article. Softbank is a highly successful Japanese bank whose "Vision Fund" has become the latest and biggest source of Silicon Valley venture capital, i.e. money which gets shoveled into money-losing companies in the hope that they can eventually stop losing money. Softbank's general investment strategy is that when Son Masayoshi, its CEO and founder, sees a company he likes, he invests an insane amount of Vision Fund money in it. And then he invests even more insane amounts of money in its competitors, causing a race to the bottom that guarantees a ton of money is essentially set on fire, plus deleterious effects on the market itself that The Margins examines later in the article.
Softbank's best-known monetary inferno is WeWork. Currently the two of them are trading lawsuits over a bailout that was planned a few months ago before the economy fell apart. The lawsuits themselves are highly technical, but the tech and finance worlds are stocking up on popcorn in the hope of juicy disclosures about what the hell any of the principals in the whole WeWork saga were thinking.
Anyway, I found the Margins article via this Matt Levine column at Bloomberg. Levine rounds out the story by suggesting how the arbitrage can be taken to the next level, if you have two businesses and a Doordash driver willing to collude, and picking up the theme of market dysfunction:
In the old economy of price signals, you tried to build a product that people would want, and the way you knew it worked is that people would pay you more than it cost. You were adding value to the world, and you could tell because you made money. In the new economy of user growth, you don’t have to worry about making a product that people want because you can just pay them to use it, so you might end up with companies losing money to give people things that they don’t want and driving out the things they do want.
