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by alkonaut 1420 days ago
There are a few of these delivery firms now, has at least one realized the best niche to use should be “trustworthy”?

E.g require any restaurant to have a brick and mortar restaurant with actual customers in it, or it’s banned. And requiring each such restaurant to have only one listed name in the app - which must be the same as the name on the sign of the physical restaurant. And clearly highlighting the age of the physical restaurant (under the current name) in the listings.

Basically: I want to use services that aren’t trying to grow quickly by inflating anything. I don’t want VC funded startups operating at a loss for growth for anything. I want to pay the true price of the service and only use services that aren’t “disrupting” by using legal loopholes or pricing to a loss to drive established actors out of markets.

2 comments

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.

Because ghost kitchens have less skin in the game. They can ship a subpar product and then whenever their reviews get bad enough, they just pick a new name and start over "fresh" as an exciting "new" restaurant. Brick and mortar restaurants have a reputation to uphold. Every time I've ordered from a ghost kitchen the food has been considerably worse.