Yeah sorry. Text doesn’t carry tone well. I’ve added a trailing /s now.

I feel for every business that’s hurting right now, especially the small business restaurants that have been a staple in their local community. That has limits though, which fall short of barring “if someone else can package up directory services and make a buck off it, they should be able to, because that makes life better for consumers and I care about consumers more than businesses.”

Yellow pages used to charge what I considered obscene rates for ads before the internet. What did they do to deserve thousands of dollars per year from my local plumber? He’s the one who actually got in his truck, got dirty, and fixed my problem! Well, they’re the one who helped me find him...

I simply reject the label of "predatory" here. Restaurant owners are sophisticated businesspeople who negotiate supply contracts and such as a matter of course; it's not predatory for delivery apps to offer them a deal, even if they'd prefer a better one.

The fake phone numbers and websites, yeah, I'll grant you those are dishonest. Anyone calling a restaurant's listed phone number is expecting to reach that restaurant.

For every sophisticated business person there are four that need basic math and accounting explained to them.

It's all too common to see them base their entire business around a single percentage above total raw ingredient cost.

While I agree predatory is a strong word, you are missing the point. There is an ecosystem of small businesses that are being cannibalized by delivery app companies. These are the places I enjoy eating, places that are unique and amazing but not necessarily the top rungs of the business ladder.

This is happening because these delivery apps that are run by sophisticated business people haven't even worked out their business model yet.

Asking for transparency isn't asking for too much.

Most of the time I order delivery, I'm not trying to support my favorite places or really any places at all. I just want some noodles, and I'm entirely insensitive to where they come from. The restaurant industry has no intrinsic moral right to make money from my order; it's strange to propose that I should go out of my way to spend more money and waste more time just for the sake of some random owner's bottom line.

When I'm trying to support my favorite restaurants, the ones I do care about for their own sake, I of course go pick the food up myself. I think most people do the same.

If you feel the restaurant industry has no intrinsic moral right to make money on your order then you are 100% mistaken. If they don't make money on your order you don't get food, so it is in your own interest that they do make money on your order. A race to the bottom will get you either crappy food or no food at all.

What surprises me is that on a website with lots of top earners people would still begrudge others to make an honest living. And running a restaurant is a lot more work than writing software.

I'm not sure how to resolve this disagreement. It just doesn't seem plausible to me that restaurants competing against each other in a free market would cause them to all go extinct.

I think resolution would benefit from people being honest about their motives and less logical fallacies.

It seems that your motive is much larger than this specific issue at hand and is being guided by a desire to promote an overarching ideology.

Additionally, you chose to focus in on 5 words of the above poster and ignored everything else. This is very much a strawman.

The person you responded to was very much making a slippery slope argument and I agree with you that it will not mean all restaurants will close or go to shit.

I would however like to know how I can get the information I need to make an informed personal choice.

I would also like to state my desire to allow other people the information they need to make an informed choice. What they do with that information, I really don't care. They can make a financial decision, a moral decision, an ethical decision, base it on a whim, base it on a value assessment, feed the numbers into the seed of a random number generator, I really don't think that is my business or yours.

I'm not sure how you are mistaking my want for transparency on where my money is going with a moral decision.

Is every purchase a moral decision to you perhaps?

It seems you are very much pitching libertarianism here. Perhaps I am not familiar with this part of the dogma.