Comment by bko

Where I live, one company has taken over all meal delivery nationally. After destroying the competition, this company had started raising prices each year. They ask for a percentage (13%, rising each year) in an industry where the margins are already very thin.

They money grab got a lot worse after they pushed out all the alternatives and just like with Google, everybody has to play by their rules or they'll be mostly undiscoverable for a large portion of the general public. Their delivery people are still underpaid, but by increasing their percentage of the bill they take for themselves they're now turning a profit. It's gotten to the point where companies are not even allowed to lower their prices when people use other delivery systems (or the restaurant's own personnel) which are cheaper.

The company only got this large because they could afford making losses for many years. Now other companies such as Doordash are trying to cut into the market as well, using hundreds of millions of foreign cash flows and putting business owners under even more pressure. Had there not been a company doing this since 2014, Doordash or any of its competitors would have taken the market regardless.

Predatory Pricing absolutely works... when you have a working business model and capital to back it up.

Walmart and McDonalds are masters of this approach.

Uber is a long-term play at disrupting cabs/transportation cartels and incorporated self-driving cars into a non-literal roadmap. They're in it for the long play, and even if they hemorrhage money for a while longer it may, in fact, play out in their favor.

It only works if you have an easy path to monopoly once you price your competitors out. A company like WalMart or Amazon can leverage their returns to scale on logistics to actually price out Mom&Pops. That way, even after the drive the small stores out of business it’s just not worth it for anyone else to try to cut in unless they can also operate at WalMart scale and afford to bleed money for a while until WalMart gets tired of undercutting them.

But there are no appreciable logistical or operational efficiencies in how these delivery services operate. And there aren’t any barriers to entry. The workforce is completely fungible so they aren’t locked in. And just the fact that delivery services are popping up like mushrooms suggests it doesn’t take much to start one up.

In theory they could eke put some advantages to scale that keep out upstarts by using machine learning to optimize delivery routes or something. But I doubt that gets them the kind of efficiency gains they would need to actually turn a profit. From what I’ve seen, it looks like their main attempt to freeze out competition is just coming from flooding your search engine hits. I don’t know how sustainable that is either.

> My original comment said its not okay to steal from a company even if you don't like that company.

Your original comment said it was wrong to exploit a bug, to which the parent poster retorted that this was a feature and not a bug.

Here, you've gone further to claim that this behaviour is stealing, and I'd like to explore that for a minute: what possible moral or legal right does Doordash have to an operating profit when it deliberately operates at a loss?

By all accounts, this below-cost pricing is predatory behaviour on Doordash's part, not the customer's: they seem to break into a market by offering delivery at a subsidized rate, then they take data based on those rates and try to strike fee arrangements with restaurants. At first glance, it seems like they sell themselves based on inflated numbers from the discount period, without disclosing that they were in fact offering customers a discount.

I see no ethical fault in beating a (sophisticated!) predator at their own game, but where do you reach the alternative conclusion?

How do you define "stealing"?

On Wall Street this is called arbitrage.

If you don't want to lose money on sales, don't sell for less than your cost. People buying your product is not "stealing".

My comment also stated that it's not stealing if you order from a business that decided to operate in a way that causes them to lose money if you order with them.

Investors know that the company they're investing in will lose a lot of money and the know about the business practices that basically give away money in order to gain popularity. It's not their money anymore after they gave it to the company. It's true that if the company goes bankrupt they lose out, but they can prevent losing that money by not investing on companies handing out free cash.

The software itself is not unethical, the business practices Doordash/Uber/Yelp/etc. follow to make their software popular are. The problem is that these companies seemingly can't make a profit without using huge investments to crush the local competition. If they were to act ethically, I would have no problems with these companies.

Also, taking away future profit is not stealing, it's part of the risk of doing business. Don't stuff your money into risky business ventures if you don't want risk.

It's quite sad that pension funds are investing in these predatory businesses but protecting their investments because they're too big to fail undermine the entire concept of competition in capitalism.