In Germany, if you can't afford a lawyer you are entitled to the government paying legal aid in civil cases [1]. As you are - I just realize - in many countries.
Problem is, that a restaurant owner isn't entitled to that so that even if you are a small company (self employed restaurant owner) you are toast. You could hope to have a legal insurance covering stuff like that, but not sure, if that would be the case for most insurances.
"That ladder just happened to be placed there". "The forklift happened to be parked that way". "The room happened to have too many people in it". "The fire extinguisher happened to be expired and failed to fire" -- all illegal circumstances (in various parts of the US, based on Federal/State/Local regulations)
"They needed to sue, but couldn't get a lawyer" is absolutely a circumstance we could make illegal. Making a circumstance illegal doesn't mean it will never happen, of course, but it does mean there can be immediate repercussions and fixes for it if/when it does.
> "They needed to sue, but couldn't get a lawyer" is absolutely a circumstance we could make illegal.
I mean -- I guess, technically you can, but it's one of the most insulting things I have ever heard. What are you gonna do, sue them for not having the money to have a lawyer to defend themselves? Maybe take them to court for damages, caused by them not having money? Kafka would have a field day with this.
You wouldn't take action against the person without money. You'd do something to fix the situation, like provide them with a lawyer for free.
Note I don't necessarily think that's a good idea (really haven't thought it through), but that's how I interpreted th comment.
If I make houses without a sewer line illegal, that doesn't mean the state has to lay a sewer line, it means you the owner have to take care that you get a sewer line or you open yourself up to liability.
Maybe you mean that making a circumstance illegal doesn't necessarily prevent a circumstance from occurring?
For instance, if you make it illegal for the accused to lack representation in court, you can then sue them for not having representation, a suit from which they cannot defend themselves, lacking representation, which then opens them up to another suit, ad infinitum!
I think there's some conflation of "regulating" and "making illegal" going on here. Mandating that the state must provide everyone with a public defender is not equivalent to "making lacking representation illegal".
For the sister comment: I wonder why companies are not entitled to a public defender, interesting.
It's just like tax avoidance. It's expensive to set up but ultimately it results in rich people paying LESS taxes/wealth than poor people for those who can afford it.
Or rather "collective actions" and "group litigation orders" are a recent thing and haven't become a standard part of the legal system. Not many people on any side who understand how they're supposed to work in practice.
The UK also has a different set of priorities in its litigation culture. You can win a huge payout if you prove unfair dismissal or discrimination, but it's much harder to prove that your work contract is unfair/exploitative or that Service Provider X is operating in a shady way.
Look (listen?) for the cagey answers:
"Is this Restaurant X?"
"I can help you place an order!"
"But is this Restaurant X?"
"I can take your X order when ready!"
They advertise that you'll get food from Restaurant X and that's indeed what you get. It's not fraud to resell product, you don't need permission from the original seller to do it (in fact I think that's a specifically protected right), and it's not fraud or any kind of trademark violation to describe a product as being from Restaurant X if that is a fact.
edit: This got way more discussion than I anticipated. I think that even if there was a massive banner on the top of the site that told you GenericDeliveryCo was operating this website as a front for the restaurant, we are not them, etc, this behavior by GenericDeliveryCo is still damaging to the businesses they are creating websites of because they tend to absolutely bury the real website via better SEO. There’s an argument to be made that some restaurants would enjoy having a website made for them - for business or whatever other reason - but there’s no reason GenericDeliveryCo couldn’t... ask first.
The Resturant gets paid and the customers get food. The delivery service adds value and gets paid for it. If someone doesn’t realize doordash is not the Resturant by now... who cares? As long as the restaurants reputation is not hurt... (here’s were the issues start)
To that end, if I am the Resturant, I see that I can add my own delivery service, undercut doordash by a bit, and make more money, and control my reputation by employing people who have incintives aligned with me, then great! Thanks doordash, for showing me the way.
Ah, but can I? Maybe not without forming a power group with other restaurants (or some other economic structure..?), as the cost of adding a “real employee” may be greater than the margin added by the delivery service. I need a structure that both aligns incentives between delivery service and Resturant, and is cost effective. Since restaurants weren’t already doing this, probably it has to happen at the meta-Resturant level of it can be done while preserving reputation at all. (Of course, the difficulty of it depends on the food being served, so that’s why, e.g. pizza was already being delivered.)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1125#a
1125(a)(1) is pretty unambiguous in this context. If Grubhub is using a restaurant's name to "deceive as to ... the origin, sponsorship, or approval of his or her goods", that's cause for civil action.
California also has a new law explicitly addressing this issue:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
... and yes, there's an aptly-named website called https://www.grubhublawsuit.com/ describing a class-action lawsuit on this specific topic.
And no, that website isn't an infringement of Grubhub's mark if it's not likely to be confused with Grubhub's business. (It'd be a different story if Grubhub were a law firm in the business of filing class action lawsuits.)
Your linked law suit is about something entirely different to what's being discussed in this thread - that's about describing restaurants as shut when they aren't.
https://www.classlawgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/Grubhub-Cla...
You're not allowed to use trademarks to masquerade as the other party, especially if you're then trying to conduct business as if you were that other party.
Taking a step back: is there any trademark usage that you view as infringing?
Using an example from another side discussion: I hope we can agree that if you made a laptop and called it a Macbook Pro, Apple would sue the heck out of you, and they'd be in the right. Where we seem to disagree is whether it's infringement if you set up a storefront, name it "Apple Store", and exclusively sell products that you've purchased from an Apple-run Apple Store.
There's also a very large body of trademark specific law which may specifically address this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_off
But the food isn't being misrepresented! It is the food of the restaurant. Passing off means pretending the product is something it isn't. That isn't what is happening here at all.
You and a few others seem to be under some kind of mistaken understanding that the food is 'fake' or from a fraudulent dark kitchen not actually associated with the restaurant? That's not the case. It's the actual real food from the actual restaurant, resold.
I'm not under a mistaken understanding. I'm explicitly saying that you might not have to misrepresent the food itself: if you insert yourself as an intermediary but claim to be the underlying provider, there's potential for confusion and damage to the goodwill of the underlying provider, and that is what passing off fundamentally protects against.
I don't know if it would fly, but you asked and that's a place a case might be found.
The broader point here: it's one thing to advertise selling someone else's product. It's another to _pretend to be them_.
The service of delivery is what is being passed off.
I'm afraid I think you're mistaken.
You're allowed to use someone's trademark to factually describe the product you're selling. You don't need the owner's permission to do that.
If you're selling an actual Apple laptop, you can use the trademarks 'Apple' and the Apple logo to describe it.
If you're selling an actual Bob's Burger, you can use that trademark and logo to describe it.
Somewhere in the product description, advertising, is the word "FOR".
Lightning cable FOR Apple iPhone.
Belking trying to sell the same cable as "Apple iPhone Lightning cable" would be problematic. Leaving aside licensing issues.
The proof is in the pudding. Go to one of the websites they register for a restaurant, and see just how many references to "We are not the restaurant, but we are reselling and delivering their food". Hint: rather few.
Call the number on the website. "Hello, I can take your order for [restaurant name]!"
"Is this [restaurant]?"
"I can take your order!"
Because all of the above isn't defensible. They're not just (re) selling the restaurant's food, they are implying that they -are- the restaurant.
Behavior here becomes important. Deception and context. Why in these cases if Deliveroo/Uber/etc were comfortable with their process would they not say "This is Uber Eats, and we can take orders for [restaurant]"? This again comes back to one of those definitions of fraud, "dishonestly obtaining financial advantage (your cut of the order, inflated pricing, etc) by deception (explicitly stating or repeatedly implying that you are the restaurant)".
and other vague hand-waving answer designed to imply that you are talking to the restaurant and avoiding the answer, "No this is a call center for a delivery service".
apple-sf.com (and the various food delivery sites being discussed) pass themselves off as the restaurant. It's not clear to a casual user that the order is being processed by a 3rd party.
Uber successfully had an app taken down that helped drivers determine whether Uber had cheated them out of wages they were owed. The important thing is that unless the people of UberCheats have a lot of money and time to burn they can't really challenge Uber's actions here.
Hell, a few weeks ago Apple forced a company to change their logo of a green pear because they claimed it was infringing on the Apple logo[2].
I don't like the colour of your shirt, so I'm going to say it's objectionable. It doesn't break any laws or infringe any regulations, but I want a judge's opinion on it anyway.
See?
In the case of passing off a service you offer as begin the service of another company, there is a clear legal case to answer. And as I recall this is settled caselaw in the UK and the people pretending to be other companies are in the wrong.
It wastes the time of the defendant and the legal service, which harms society.
It imagine it's also super stressful and expensive for the defendant to go through, even when it's thrown out.
Consider: - Cutting your grass at 8am when your neighbour works nights.
- A well off person putting their child up for adoption because they don't want the hassle.
- Payday loans given to people you know won't be able to pay them off, ensuring they pay you far more than the value of the loan.
- Banks processing payments out of order to trigger overdraft fees that would otherwise not have been collected.
Your example is flawed. It's not a crime or fraud to resell a product.
It is still fraud, not merely objectionable, to resell a product while in every way possible acting as if you are not a reseller but the original producer.
Isn't that what we (should) have judges for?
I mean, if a judge blindly follows the letter of the law, we can replace him/her by a computer.
'They're being objectionable' is not a reasonable starting point. 'They're being fraudulent' would be... but they clearly aren't being fraudulent.
A pro-restaurant argument might be that these alternative websites are interfering with new and extant restaurant-customer relationships, falsely implying a restaurant-delivery co. affiliation, and that the use by the delivery co. of the restaurant trademarks exceeds nominative use. The restaurants might also argue that the distribution of food, how and under what conditions, is part of their product: a delivery company taking too long to deliver an order could harm the quality of their product.
If I created a chase-bank.com website, and allowed users to interact with their actual Chase account through it, but I took a percentage of all transactions, it would be fine?
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24931128
What you should feel bad about are the excessive commission fees charged by those delivery apps.
The restaurant owner even discovered that, because of some inconsistency between his prices and the third-party ones, he could cause the delivering company to pay him by simply placing orders to himself.
This isn't what is happening.
The food still comes from the actual restaurants.
Personally I'm surprised you don't hear of hacker groups that protect websites and social media properties of the downtrodden. GoodFellas meets Social Network.
How does it cost the restaurant any money when they do this? The delivery companies can't unilaterally take a cut of the price, can they. I think you'll find the delivery companies mark up, and get their money that way, in this case where they don't have an agreement with the restaurant. The restaurant gets the price they ask for it.
If they've agreed to it, what's the problem?
The parent comment was complaining about Deliveroo setting up without an agreement. When they do that they have to mark up - they can't take a 30% cut of the restaurant's price as the restaurant charges Deliveroo full price.
They’re in a position where the options are pretty much “agree to this” or “go out of business”
(To which I guess the free-market response is “That’s not a problem - an independent restaurant SHOULD go out of business if they can’t compete with a website company when it comes to websites”?)
Or that they’d do just fine if no one had a website offering their food, but the Deliveroo website is an arms-race bleed-them-dry move?
For example, I like grocery stores because they deal with farmers and food distribution and save me from driving out to source my own produce from growers.
Sometimes they... might not. It's all relative the cut they demand.
So here, are food delivery companies worth ~30% of cost?
Yes, all sort of anecdotes are possible to drum up in this situation. Long term, across the entire food industry, can a ~30% cost be absorbed? Somebody is paying that, you or the restaurant, because it sure as heck isn't the delivery company.
Will the service provided by delivery (and advertising/marketing) increase volume to offset ~30%?
I don't think so, which means that because of their oh-so-useful help, means prices go up. This is needed because either customers pay more, restaurants make less, or somehow the delivery/advertising/marketing company drives more volume so they can turn around and immediately take that as their cut.
If the customers don't like higher prices, they'll stop spending. If the restaurants don't make profit after this new expense, they'll shut down.
The customer is. They are the only one bringing money into the system over the long-run. The customer is paying for the ingredients, the property tax, the delivery, the lights, everything. The restaurant just handles the money.
However I am under the impression that restaurants are NOT operating at a 30% profit margin, and cannot absorb this middleman cut entirely on their own.
It remains to be seen if sales volume goes up enough to offset this. Otherwise the middleman cut will be paid by the customer and thus prices go up.
FWIW, I don't think the middleman adds enough value to demand a 30% cut. So I personally opt out of that and order directly from a restaurant and also pick up in person.
>The restaurant just handles the money.
I thought they were providing the labor for the actual service/product the customer wants. Without that, there is no product for the middleman to attach to and deliver.
Basically what I think we're dancing around, is that perhaps the current business of model of restaurants is busted and has to change, post covid. The old model is rent a large space for indoor dining, cook/serve the food, sell high margin alcoholic drinks ;), plan for a steady stream of events/holidays (valentine's day, mother's/father's day, etc), try to locate near other office workers for a steady lunch customer base, and so on.
Maybe that doesn't work as well post-covid due to work-from-home a large shift to ordering out. I mean rent alone has got to be eating restaurants alive, when they don't need as much space now.
As far as middlemen and delivery, restaurants themselves are middlemen if you look at meat/produce being the actual materials and me, the hungry customer, wanting the spend cash for a product - but now eating at home.
Perhaps the new restaurant future is the rent smaller work spaces, or team up with other restaurants and have a booth with shared/common space, and serve mostly with delivery in mind. There's a place like this in my local large city, with a dozen or so vendors that rotate a little bit, sharing a large common area. It was packed every time I went, in the before times... not sure how it is doing now (website says they are mostly doing delivery so I suppose it is still up and running).
In which case a restaurant factors in the delivery fee/cut as an expense. Basically juggle it so part of the fee comes from not having to pay as much rent, and perhaps this delivery need is part of the new business model. Folks can still come by in person to get out of the house and save a bit, but factor in the majority of customers will order delivery.
I don't actually work in this industry so I don't know what actual numbers look like, but I do listen to the Planet Money podcast and a recent episode was about a restaurant that had to close due to high rents! It ended with the former owners wanting to open a new restaurant, but only if they owned the building.
Our food arrived TWO HOURS after ordering and cold.
I'd really rather NOT go back to the old way.
I’d rather just go pick it up myself than use restaurant delivery.
I’m sure there may be exceptions somewhere, but even in Manhattan the deliveries that work for the restaurant sucked.
I think it’s that there’s no simple feedback loop.
An example is my local mom and pop pizza place. They used to have a few teenagers who would wait tables and drive deliveries. They meant well and tried hard, but it would take a long time for delivery. I’m a 15 minute walk and it would take two hours for two pizzas. If something was off I could talk to the owner and that took a long time but it was never anything bad enough to fire the poor driver, nor should they be. So the poor delivery lingered on.
They switched to Uber and deliveries went to 15-45 minutes. Not perfect but much better. Also easier to enter the order on my phone than calling it in.
Any time the food is cold or off, it’s easy to rate and get fixed.
It’s like taxis vs Uber rides. Taxis did have some advantages, but it way better now. Generally Uber drivers make more than taxi drivers, but there were some owner operator taxis (super rare at least in NY where almost all cabs are owned by big firms) who are losing out.
I've never, not even once, seen the same driver from one of these services.
This is a huge problem, because every mapping service directs them to an automated exit-only gate that nobody anywhere has the power to open for them -- certainly not if they just sit there for 5 minutes helplessly then chuck it out the window and drive off.
On several occasions I did not even receive a call, text, or any other indication to expect to find my food a thousand yards away sitting in the rain in a parking lot.
They are delivery dilettantes, with no knowledge of their delivery area, no oversight, no guidance.
Most of them have no fixed delivery area, they just follow the next call until they end up two hours away in another county they didn't even realize existed within the borders of their fine state until that evening.
I have received orders so delayed there were legitimate food safety concerns -- upwards of 3 hours from the time of preparation.
3 of the 4 delivery services I have tried did not take responsibility for so much as a single one of these failures to deliver.
2 of them charge more than double menu price for most items on most menus because they added the full base price of an item to (the full base price of an item plus the full upgrade price of an item) in an intentional and deceptive manner.
I informed them of this repeatedly and went up a completely scripted escalation chain that very obviously started in another jurisdiction and very obviously said exactly what I was later informed after requesting a point of contact for service of process was absolutely not their policy (specifically: they have my money now so I can go and find something convenient with which to fuck myself)
I have to conclude that either you've been trying to order take out from the hardware store and been sorely disappointed that your pizza never arrived or must live in alternate reality filled with sunshine, rainbows and GrubHubs that aren't openly defrauding their delivery partners, customers, and shareholders
Yes, of course. Aside from the example I gave where I used their self-delivery for 10 years before switching to this new gen.
And I suppose I’ve ordered from about 500 self-delivery restaurants, although I don’t keep a log.
It sounds like you’ve had some bad experiences and they aren’t like mine. I have had really bad experiences with doordash and grubhub where they wouldn’t fix problems, but Uber is about 75% responsive that is so much better than self-delivery.
From first principles it seems like self-delivery can’t compete unless they are really into delivery. Because they can’t scale well beyond their drivers on hand and it’s not possible for them to send out 10 orders at once, etc
You know that you can easily fix this, right?
I will never ever willingly tolerate that two hour delivery again. At any price or discount. It was a week night and we were starving by the time the food arrived and it screwed up our routine for the day.
I would pay a reasonable premium to have that meal delivered to me on time and hot.
So really, deliveroo/uber eats created entirely new business. A friend who runs a restaurant said he thought they were the devil and was never going to join them until the pandemic but he said he is now a believer. Adapt or die.
As for drivers earning a liveable wage, I am for that and maybe regulation is required, who knows but you bet your ass the more efficient business with huge economies of scale will have more power to pay their drivers properly than indie mum n dad restaurants.
The only thing we've seen these "economies of scale" doing the last decade is the exact opposite, namely using all their muscles to pay workers as little as possible.
That anecdote was immediately relatable to many of us who have gotten late, soggy, cold food delivery.
My solution to their failure is to go pick it up myself, including purchasing some of those red insulated delivery boxes for our family use. It makes takeout much more enjoyable when the timing is predictable and the food almost as high-quality as if served on-site.
As a customer, my concern is with a goods and services I’m buying. The restaurant’s relationship with its employees, food suppliers, and power company is their concern, not mine. If a restaurant wants to pay $100/hr or any other legal wage, that’s their business, not mine.
Well. This is self-centered to me. I don't want to buy anything from anyone who doesn't treat people with dignity.
So then you add the cost of user aquisition - which is usually giving out £5 - £10 vouchers and for most of those customers to only use the service once. Clearly the first delivery is a massive loss. Then following that lots of orders are done on a free-or-low delivery cost basis (incl. Deliveroo Plus).
These companies are in a land grab still so it's low margin and high competition between them and Uber Eats. Uber Eats is technically a better cost model (i.e. more efficient) than Deliveroo assuming car delivery, as you can interleave deliveries and cab rides.
Still just don't see what's wrong here.
I don't want to mention that I'm blind in every frickin HN post but I'm blind, and Uber Eats and etc. are great. and there are restaurants that I specifically know that are in my neighborhood and they are not available on Uber Eats. And I don't order from them because I can't accessibly, so they lose my business presumably because they have opted out. Then there are other restaurants that are local and on Uber eats, and I order from them and feel absolutely fine that I have given the restaurant a sale it wouldn't have otherwise had and employed someone sitting in a car that otherwise had nothing to do. For a minor marginal cost, the restaurant made an extra sale and I got my food. If the restaurant did not want to make this transaction at all, it would not. So everybody came out ahead? I got food, Uber got money, the restaurant got money. What's wrong here? It's like the old argument so many have made about piracy. Uber eats turned a person who otherwise wouldn't be buying food into a sale. Who lost here?
Also, let's say that registering bobs-pizza-chicago.com is wrong. If so, this applies just as much to JebBush.com redirecting to Trump's website, and all the permutations you can think of there. We either solve domain squatting in the general case, or admit that it's shitty but just as okay when done to a restaurant as when done to your least favorite website or political figure.
There are of course some site builders restaurant owners can use to improve this, but since, as others have said, they are not always tech savvy they probably don't know, best thing to improve accessibility I can think of is that local commerce boards create some sort of recommendation or guidelines on how to setup a business website following best practices with a list of easy to use builders for such.
What sucks about the domain squatting is that those large corps will have much better SEO capabilities, so even if someone owns register bobs-pizza-chicago.com and make sure it works they could just make chicago-bobs-pizza.com or some variant and beat them in SEO and steal their traffic, even if they were required to provide some banner saying "this is a doordash website" most people wouldn't care and order anyway.
I have friends who own medium-sized restaurants in a couple different major EU cities.
They all have domain names, and web sites sort-of, but none of them thinks anything matters besides Facebook and to a lesser extent Instagram. The web sites are rarely, if ever, updated. Of course right now they are all forced to close anyway; but pre-Covid at least one of them tried to take the web site seriously and gave up after a while, everybody used Facebook anyway.
One of these owners is my age, the others are younger. I even know a guy who owns a catering company and doesn't bother with a web site.
I understand your friends think a social media website is enough. This doesn't mean they need to accept having a website created for them. It sucks that they have to opt out of local delivery services, but it also sucks I have to opt out of junk mail. I still don't understand where the evil is here? It's legal for people to create websites that look and feel similar to existing websites. If this is a problem let's fix it! if it's not, let's not focus on restaurants?
EDIT: Note, the comment I’m replying to grew by about 300% after I posted this.
Let's assume that restaurants don't want people to order their food through delivery. Why don't they just opt out? If they aren't opting out, then clearly the people buying the delivery are paying the same as any other takeout customer? Where is the problem here? What is the thing that gets people so very offended on behalf of restaurant owners? I actively want to understand this!
If people have to pay a large markup, they may end up ordering less food. Or maybe ordering from another place because this one seems too expensive.
The offense comes from delivery companies forcefully inserting themselves between customers and the restaurant. Why not just let customers go to the delivery company's website to order, if that's what they wanted? Why is it necessary to deceive customers?
If a delivery company gets the domain freds-diner-restaurant.com, then they're competing for your traffic.
And their domain might end up higher in Google search results, leading customers to order there. So I don't think it's necessarily the case that they're getting customers they otherwise wouldn't have.
Customers that are only willing to order from Uber Eats etc. aren't going to look for the restaurant's website anyway, they'll just go through the delivery company's website.