is just amplified by digital tech.

I have been thinking for a long time that, if Martian landed on Earth, they would soon die of laughing at our stupidity. The true story below is one of the things that would have that effect.

Buy pizza for 24$, sell it for 16$ = profit!

Three years ago, a pizza restaurant in Kansas that had never had any contact whatsoever with Doordash, specifically because the owner did NOT want “delivery as an option for his restaurants”, started receiving complaints (including bad online reviews!) about Doordash deliveries of their pizzas.

The owner checked, and “realized that a delivery option had mysteriously appeared on their company’s Google Listing. The delivery option was created by Doordash itself, without asking”.

Besides, he found that pizza that he charged $24 for was listed as $16 by Doordash, because “Doordash had mistakenly taken the price for a plain cheese pizza and applied it to a specialty pizza with a bunch of toppings”.

Not believing what he was seeing, with help of a friend the owner “called [Doordash] 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."

“It worked”

Next step, just for the fun of it, they placed another order for 10 pizzas but “this time, he just put in the dough with no toppings, [netting] $75 in riskless profit: $240 from Doordash minus ($160 in costs + $5 in boxes)."

What causes all this?

A horribly warped, embarrassingly idiotic usage of digital technology, of course. Or, stealing one last quote from the original story:

“You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It’s used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses."

Now, first of all please read the original story for all the details, plus extra explanations in the comments like this:

“delivery platforms are not actually in the business of delivery. They are in the business of finance. In many ways, they are like payday lenders for restaurants and drivers. They give you the sensation of cash-flow, but at the expense of your long term future and financial stability. Once you “take out this loan” you will never pay it back and it will ultimately kill your business."

Then, look around for similar opportunities, and whenever you find them… order pizzas, sushi or whatever it is like there is no tomorrow, of course delivered to the nearest food bank or charity!