Comment by bko
6 years ago
My original comment said its not okay to steal from a company even if you don't like that company. Your post is a lot of words about why you don't like that company. You don't directly address my claim that its unethical to steal from a company even if you don't like the company.
And then you make a weird point that software can be unethical (e.g. phising software) and this somehow applies to Doordash. Just to get this straight, making peer to peer scheduling software used for deliveries is unethical? And because of that, its okay to steal from their investors (including many US investors and pension funds)?
> 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?
Would it have crossed the line if the OP had tweaked the Italian places website (say for example setting a 0 height div) to include fake prices intended for the scraper to misinterpret?
For me I think it would have. Which makes me pause to consider whether I find the whole scheme too close to the ethical boundary.
I disagree. In the case of this submission, the restaurant was getting negative reviews due to poor delivery (e.g. not keeping food warm) - all of which were the fault of DoorDash, and the restaurant had no control over it.
Doordash is exploiting and harming the restaurant so that Doordash can make money. I think it's totally fine to make changes to your own site to thwart this. Doordash is in full control of this. They're the ones scraping the site, and they're the ones who should pay the price if they do a poor job.
1 reply →
I think it is a bug. I think they relied too heavily on automation and scraping to get a list of all the restaurants, menus and prices. From the original article:
> My first thought: I wondered if Doordash is artificially lowering prices for customer acquisition purposes.
> My second thought: I knew Doordash scraped restaurant websites. After we discussed it more, it was clear that the way his menu was set up on his website, Doordash had mistakenly taken the price for a plain cheese pizza and applied it to a 'specialty' pizza with a bunch of toppings.
So I don't think its a feature.
> what possible moral or legal right does Doordash have to an operating profit when it deliberately operates at a loss?
It doesn't have an operating profit whether you exploit the bug or not. Doesn't mean its okay to steal from them. Even if they do deliberately lose money (e.g. first Uber ride free up to $10), exploiting it is unethical (e.g. tricking Uber into thinking you're on a new phone).
The rest of your argument is again, why you don't like Doordash or why Doordash is unethical. I won't address this point because I think its unethical to steal from an unethical company so their ethics is irrelevant.
If I think Walmart is unethical, is it okay shoplift from their stores?
This is the crux: does it count as stealing to accept the offer of a contract which causes the offering party to lose money?
My answer is no. They offered the service at a certain price, you accepted it. Whether either party profits or not is not part of the contract.
So no theft has taken place. If you want to claim that's it's unethical to take the free money that they're offering, you need to provide a justification for why that is. The onus is on you.
The only way I can see you attempting to justify it is by saying that it involves taking advantage of unforeseen consequences of the contract. But as has been pointed out, they fully intended to lose money, so that doesn't work.
Arguing from the position where you define the ethical framework and then refuse to engage in any discussion about whether that framework is correct is kind of tautological.
In this case a homeless shelter ended up with a lot of pizza (which I'm presuming they consented to receiving), a local business got a cash injection and the OP got some perks. Under your ethical framework a bunch of silicon valley types had to find some other way of pissing $20k up the wall.
I know which outcome I prefer, though I personally wouldn't have done it.
> If I think Walmart is unethical, is it okay shoplift from their stores? You've made a false equivalence here, a more correct question would be: "If Walmart prices a gallon of milk at $0.25, either by mistake or for the purpose of getting people to buy milk at Walmart and not their local grocer, and I buy 100 gallons to give to people who can't afford milk right now, is that unethical?" ...to which the answer is, no, that's not unethical, you paid the price listed on the tag and Walmart (conceivably) paid the dairy farm their usual rate, so the only company hurt was the one that made the mistake or predatory pricing move.
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.