22 February

Many of these new food delivery business models are rank piracy. Often they set up webpages for local restaurants without even telling the owners, and then customers order through these websites, with the food delivery company taking a cut. Once customer traffic is entrenched in this way, it’s literally a ransom situation, the company charges local restaurants fees to use its service. It sends restaurants broke, and the delivery drivers are paid slave wages. One US pizza shop got smart and started organising lots of fake orders through the food delivery site, to its own business, and then delivered nothing but the pizza boxes with a bit of raw dough in them, pocketing the usual rate for the pizzas. They were getting the pizzas delivered to themselves, and taking the delivery service’s money for a full pizza sale.