Ask HN: What's up with these DoorDash dark patterns?

I have a (not really serious, but kind of) theory that metrics driven organizations stumble into various dark patterns through software bugs. In this case, that would look like:

1. You want to convert people to "pro" users so you try to show them all the money they can save by doing so.

2. Because of a bug in the code somewhere, you end up showing the discounted price in the cart until checkout.

3. Because some number of people don't pay attention and don't realize the switcheroo happens at the end this bug actually increases conversion.

4. Someone eventually notices the bug (after customers like you complain about it!).

5. When they fix it the metrics are adversely impacted.

6. The bug is now a "feature".

This is of course all very shortsighted since you are essentially burning customer trust for a short-term gain in conversion so it's bad for the medium/long term business. But the team has to hit its KPIs, which are tracked on a daily/weekly basis!

I've had kind of similar things before with DoorDash or UberEats. They'll show I have a discount or some amount off ($5 usually), and then only once I'm ready to actually submit my order the full fine print shows up that I needed to have a subtotal of $30, $40, or whatever. Maybe that's fine for a family but for one person it stinks to think "oh cool I've got a discount" and I waste my time thumbing through restaurants and putting together an order only for it to not be worth it.

Amazon does this bullshit all the time with VAT.

> DoorDash doesn't want to invest in preventing what is basically fraud on their platform or they've discovered that they actually make more money if they enable it

The latter. Of course, it drives users to uninstall. But it juices today’s returns. (Uber Eats does the same. Sometimes I report it to zero effect.)

Caviar used to be a high-quality service in New York; I uninstalled it after DoorDash bought them. There is an open niche for a real-restaurants-only delivery service. Also, support for legislation requiring restaurants use the name on their food license on apps. (Using fake names makes tracking down food poisoning difficult. I assume someone lying about their brand is more likely to be sloppy elsewhere.)

> or they've discovered that they actually make more money if they enable it and let it continue no matter how terrible the experience is for the people who order food.

This seems like the most likely case, considering the other ethical problems with doordash.

Totally, I imagine they incentivize / encourage bad restaurants to appear as ghost kitchen brands on their platform, and to algorithmically inflate reviews so that most averages appear to be over 4.0.

Wait.

These are the same fake names that the deli a block from me in Brooklyn NYC uses. Literally exactly the same.

That’s sort of fascinating. I’m realizing it just be some kind of software or vendor they’re all using to set up this ghost kitchen explosion.

I wonder if there’s a clever vendor out there shipping them some kind of device to keep track of all this stuff, complete with menus and an instruction guide or something.

Or, of course, the platforms themselves.

Where I live (Spain), delivery restaurants have also become a total clusterfuck.

There are thousands of options which are barely undistinguishable from one another - like those cheap Chinese brands that flood many product categories on Amazon. You'll occasionally find a name that stands out, like the ones you've posted, along the lines of "Thunderfuck Porn Burgers". But they don't entice me to order, since whatever the brand values being transmitted are, they are not what I'm looking for in a restaurant.

The result is that you end up ordering from the same few oldies but goodies. Occasionally, once upon a moon, a friend will tell you about a new restaurant to expand your horizons. Some of these, while good, might not stand out in this sea of shit and end up closing, so you revert back to the oldies but goodies. And so it goes.

The corollary is that this a shit business.

Is this even legal? In the country where i live you need to first register a business and can't make up funny names out of your mind directly into DoorDash

Weird, I've seen some of those exact names on delivery apps in Minneapolis.

Ghost kitchen chain?

I think that was just the restaurant owner having fun while making sure every part of their menu showed up as a restaurant search result

I guess if you ordered from "deli belli" you can't do a chargeback for food poisoning.

Are you sure that’s not just all ghost kitchens? Or maybe a parking lot for food trucks?

linking to relevant terms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment

Seems established and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising#Regulation_a...

May be a case for this imo ianal

Try Mod Pizza, in Seattle. Great price, unlimited toppings, they do not offer exclusively gluten free but they have the option and IMO they are very accurate. - no issues yet. I would order from their website over the doordash app, but if the promo works for pickup, it probably would be cheaper. I was for a while ordering them on Doordash for $6 picked up w/ unlimited toppings, and $3 of that was for the gluten free option.

That should be downright illegal.

> The worst for price transparency is “same day” costco delivery by Instacart. They markup the prices but never tell you how much more you’re paying for their service

I'd rather know upfront what the total will be, instead of meaningless itemised receipts with added fees that I have no choice but to pay.

Then again, there are countries that dont include sales tax on price labels, so people must prefer the hidden fees approach.

Even with membership, I’ve never paid less than $300 on Costco Instacart.

It’s a total joke, the whole point of wholesale is to save money.

I’m far too lazy to do the math, but I think I save more money Instacart shopping Aldi than Costco

I get these for Uber Eats all the time. I’ve just stopped using the app. If they’re not going to treat their customers with some dignity then I don’t want to be a customer.

> I usually Yelp the names

I look up the address on Street View.

Same name as the sign???

Many of the Chinese places around here have different names in Chinese and English. Sometimes slightly different, sometimes seriously different. I don't find it at all surprising, the Chinese names make sense to Chinese people but are hard for Americans to pronounce. It's the same thing as most Chinese people taking an Americanized version of their name (usually just informally) because their proper names get too badly mangled. (My wife is Chinese, more than once we've had the experience of being called from a waiting room and neither of us recognized what they had done to her name. At least with my last name the butchering is pretty consistent so I don't have a problem.)

> E.g require any restaurant to have a brick and mortar restaurant with actual customers in it, or it’s banned.

Why on earth would it matter to me as a delivery app user if I'm ordering from an ordinary restaurant or a dark kitchen? The only thing I care about is the food being good. And ordinary restaurants with actual customers in it often treat deliveries as something not really important.

There's nothing inherently wrong with ghost kitchens. A restaurant that only serves food for delivery is completely valid.

The problem is when existing restaurants pretend they're a ghost kitchen. You order from a cool new chicken wing restaurant and get an order from Chilies. You order from a new pizza restaurant and get a box that says Chuck E Cheese on it. That's just purely deceptive.

The other thing I see is the same crap food getting sold by a variety of names that are constantly coming and going.

So yeah, I was originally in love with the idea of ghost kitchens. We have so many good creative food trucks where I live and I thought we'd get good creative ghost kitchens, but instead you get tricked into buying a burger from Hooters.

I second that experience - our local (high-endish) restaurant had both deliveries and take-out at the start of the pandemic, and completely wiped the floor with any crappy delivery services in our area. Then, once the pandemic finished, they stopped the deliveries and take out, and mediocre food delivery services took over again.

This reminds me of Carlo Cipolla’s infamous essay on the laws of stupidity: http://gandalf.fee.urv.cat/professors/AntonioQuesada/Curs192...

In particular, his third law: “A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.”

Possibly taking a page from this:

> I sold microwave meals on Deliveroo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k47u9tduwb8

Third party sites almost always offer inferior booking options to the actual company and they're much worse about hiding gotchas.

"we can't delete bad reviews, but you could always make a virtual kitchen" is how I take that 'feature'.

My family orders take-out once a week. I used to go pick it up almost every time. DoorDash reduced my personal stress level by so much that the 20% service fee is an absolute bargain.

DoorDash itself is predatory and harmful to local restaurants and worldwide labor practices.

If you are a developer and a product manager asks you to implement a dark pattern, you should raise objections at every step of the process, implement it slowly and with defects, and talk about it publicly to shame the company. We're holding the shovel. Make dark patterns expensive.

Thank you for saying this, I work in the web space and there is just zero excuse for how poorly it works, none. I don't believe any amount of tracking or anything else would cause things to be as slow as they are. I have often thought that it would actually be a little difficult to make something so slow without intentionally throwing in a few second delay.

Sounds like it’s trying to track all your mouse movements and clicks and either it’s broken or you’ve halfway blocked it.

Or switching out of the app and back causes it to throw up a spinner for longer than feels reasonable. As someone who has interfaced with their API I can tell you it's a trainwreck and I have no expectations that their actual backend is any better.

Usually the ones in the States are quite more expensive than ordering from the restaurant as well. GrubHub adds markup to individual food items, DoorDash does it via hidden fees. Usually about 10-20% above the normal restaurant price, not including delivery fee and tip. Most often there is no other way to get food delivery from said restaurants though.

"whole industry": I am currently in Germany and the major apps here (Lieferando and Wolt) are a lot less dark patterny, the prices seem to be usually same as in-restaurant and there aren't hidden fees.

(My crunchy friends still criticise them for being an oligopoly that squeezes restaurants though, which may well be true.)

Transparent: Moreso than Restaurant + Delivery!

Functions well: How dutifully can one shop, and hand/machine-wash plates after eating?

End product tastes good: taste food while you're preparing it (and the food is safe to eat)

Home-cooking is a good start to OP's requirements

> how expensive it is actually to have individuals deliver you stuff

That's not actually the expensive part. The expensive part is the greedy investors behind it and their attempt at monopolizing the industry (which thankfully is failing).

I actually hate the photos or lack of there of on these sites. If I see a photo of product in banner of restaurant I expect it to representative of the food they make. But often it looks more like styled stock footage...

I think Ghost Kitchens are perfect pairings for delivery service. For all parties. Now I admit, each should be individually presented location and actually the place making the food.

> but that money is going straight to the guys that deliver my food.

Ha ha, sorry that isn’t the case. Door dash etc are actually killing some restaurants by impersonating them, forcing huge discounts on what they will pay, and of course notoriously stealing from their delivery people.

> who wants to go back to the days before it?

Me. Specifically, before they bought Caviar [1].

No fake restaurants. Dedicated delivery staff who were on time and friendly. Differentiated offerings from Seamless.

[1] https://help.doordash.com/dashers/s/article/Caviar-x-DoorDas...

I've actually stopped using third party delivery services all together - the food is routinely cold, there are hidden fees everywhere, drivers are severely underpaid, many times you can't even order from the full menu.

Pizza and Chinese food delivery has been a thing long before doordash, and the quality of directly employed delivery seems to be much higher.

If a restaurant doesn't have delivery I'll just making a to-go order and go pick it up.

I love to cook, but this view is incredibly condescending. People have busy lives, you don't know what some internet person's life is like. I know a lot of people that simply don't enjoy cooking.

Fun fact, most people know can cook. They just don't want to cook every single meal. And for a variety of reasons, that no one should have to defend.

Especially from snobby "hackers" with who lack a sense of perspective and empathy to other people's situations.

I love to cook. It is a skill I have developed deeply. I can look at what I have in the fridge and throw together a coherent meal even with dregs. I can cook a better meal than all but one restaurant in my entire city, and even that is a close race (it is a small city). I am skilled and cooking meals from a wide range of different cuisines.

There is one day a week that my wife and I both have a ton of meetings. At the end of the day we are both exhausted and neither of us want to cook. We frequently order food on this day. That's not a moral failing.

It's possible to both be able to cook and to want takeout now and again. Sometimes you just want someone else to do the cooking for you, but you don't want to go out to a restaurant.

I refuse! I mean I know how to cook, I just refuse to cook now days. The actual cooking isn't _that_ bad, but all the stuff around it absolutely sucks and isn't worth it for me.

You need to go shopping for food, you need to pick ingredients, manage "freshness" so that food doesn't go off and plan what meals you'll cook with the ingredients you bought. It would create situations where I had to choose between going out after work to a restaurant or letting food spoil.

You also need to clean up after cooking, either washing dishes by hand or loading/unloading the dish washer. If you use the dish washer, it creates a "task" in the future where you need to unload it. If you wash them by hand, it takes a long time.

I never really thought about all those things before, but when I stopped cooking/shopping it was like a huge mental load was lifted and I was free. I am much happier with this lifestyle and so is my SO.

But I don't really like delivery services because they deliver things in plastic containers and are bad for the environment. I prefer meal replacement powders and eating at restaurants. That being said, some delivery places are better than others when it comes to packaging waste.

Unfortunately, the hotels I spend around 40 days a year at don’t have full kitchens.

There are dozens of things I would rather do in my limited time than spend time cooking.

Oh i can cook. It just takes so much (free) time. Last week i made my own hamburgers. :)

Do you have kids?