Comment by bko
6 years ago
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.