"Why not"?!

There is couple of fundamental difference to Unilever example:

1. Similar sounding names to existing brand is trademark infringement. Here this particular entity is deliberately copying the restaurant names to mislead people into selecting them (when original restaurants are closed).

2. Assumption is Unilever creates different brands with same exacting manufacturing standards, and it stands behind them (packages will follow federal labeling guidelines). It is for A/B testing of brand collaterals (name, packaging graphics, colors, copy etc.). Here obviously that is not the case.

It is very obvious that deception is the end goal, so really don't understand "why not" remark.

At the core is a more fundamental principle at play: reputation. The law just tries to honor this one way or another.

Reputation is a core concept in building trust in human relations, that we have subconsciously transferred to brands.

Since the dawn of time, both humans and brands are trying to fake their reputation. For instance in the old days, when communication wasn't as fast, con artists used to travel a lot, allowing them to start over after ruining their reputation.

I think for many of us it gives an innate sense of disgust because it goes agains the core of human relationships.

Exactly this. This is the same as the reason to be concerned about counterfeit products — the seller has nothing to lose if the product is dangerous or substandard, since the reputation damage happens to someone else.

Brands used to put “Established 1850” or whatever on their packaging. Now old brands aren’t respected by most consumers who are looking for that new thing they saw on an Instagram ad or learned from a YouTuber

Most brands trashed their own reputations on purpose. For any given brand, I don't know whether I'm getting their solid 2000s quality products, or their now shitty 2020s quality products.

That has happened a lot, but the gp is also correct, there are quality products that are inexpensive simply because they have been around forever, so people think they are boring or outdated. There are some really good deals on spirits for instance, that simply aren't popular, but have always been high quality. Eventually someone writes an article about it and they either raise the price, or it is unobtainable.

Perhaps legally, these nitpicks are valid. Lawyers are nitpicky types. "Deception" defined in a legally functional way, tends to see things differently to average people using common sense.

I agree with the parent, there is a lot of similarity here. You may be right that cloud kitchens are more haphazard and veer into challengeable trademark infringement. Old giants like Unilever tend to be better at legal precision.

Besides that, they're both doing the same thing. They're using brands to obfuscate, artificially manage reputation, or achieve basic marketing goals... not tell consumers who they are buying from. It's all deceptive. Fake choice, fake competition, fake diversity. It's all abusive of trademarks. Trademarks are intended to help consumers know what they're buying, create some reputational accountability. Typical FMCG strategies, like unilever and these cloud kitchens, are all about neutralising this... allow them to enjoy positive reputation while neutralising the negative reputation.

All of this is standard strategy, used often. For example. You are going for a "normal" supermarket experience: Many options for cereal, cheese, detergent, etc. Choice. But, you still want 70% cereal market share to go to vendor A. Maybe it's an internal vendor. So, fake branding. Fake diversity. Create the experience without creating the experience.

As Cloud restaurants become a mature, they'll probably learn to avoid legal trouble. But, the game will still be the game. It's not cheating if you're drunk.

The post, for example, wants to know which brands represent which kitchens. He doesn't want food from the bad kitchens. Tightening up trademark infringement will not help him.

Exactly! Some companies use their brand to differentiate their good qualities from their competition, but other companies use thousands of brands to hide themselves, obfuscate, and confuse customers. If someone publicized that they found rat poison in one of Nestle's products, Nestle would rather people just stop buying that brand and not boycott its entire portfolio of brands. That's obfuscation and deception.

You can find thousands of comments of the form “This is no different from…” which exhibit temporary amnesia about the devil in the details. It’s hard to know if something is a harmless analogue of something else. And too often the precedent isn’t even a good precedent.

>1. Similar sounding names to existing brand is trademark infringement. Here this particular entity is deliberately copying the restaurant names to mislead people into selecting them (when original restaurants are closed).

Can you define that difference? Wingstop and Thighstop for instance are incredibly close and not enough to trigger regulatory enforcement. There is the side note that they are owned by the same entity, but do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?

>2. Assumption is Unilever creates different brands with same exacting manufacturing standards, and it stands behind them (packages will follow federal labeling guidelines). It is for A/B testing of brand collaterals (name, packaging graphics, colors, copy etc.). Here obviously that is not the case.

> Assumption is Unilever creates different brands with same exacting manufacturing standards...

Where did this assumption come from? That's a claim without any backing as far as I am aware. Do you honestly believe they only make different brands because they are testing how the sound of the brands name affects sales? Nothing around compartmentalizing the risk of them causing some backlash by cutting corners or getting people ill, and the ability to just cut off that one brand rather than their entire product line?

>It is very obvious that deception is the end goal, so really don't understand "why not" remark.

It is literally the opposite to me. It feels like deception is the main goal unless they make the "Product of X Conglomerate" a larger part of the packaging than the brands label, and not the minimum size required by law, or if its legally allowed, omitted entirely from the label

I don’t understand your point about Wingstop and Thighstop at all. Of course a company is allowed to “infringe” on its own trademark — in quotes because that’s not actually infringement at all. How do you know for sure it wouldn’t be enforceable if a separate restaurant had been called Thighstop?

If they decide not to pursue action due to infringement then I'd argue they're not really separate entities at all so why have them in the first place. In which case, they're performing some sort of fraud. These things are usually illegal in the context of tax-evasion ("oh he's my nephew and I give him a company car, and full-salary for 'consulting' once a month.")

There isn’t any fraud here. It’s all very normal corporate structure.

Yum! Brands owns both, and Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, etc. The restaurants themselves are owned by franchisees who license the trademarks (and all kind of complicated buy-in and standards).

Yum! Brands made ThighStop to address the wing shortage and keep the association/credibility. It’s actually weirdly transparent: just like WingStop, but thighs. I don’t know if WingStop franchisees got automatic rights to that brand or not. My guess is that it was just a way to keep them afloat.

Now, the fact that WingStop has any cred is gross. I can get better wings from a mom & pop or local chain at any strip mall, or heck, a gas station than wing chains like them, BWW, etc.

I guess America outside the South and Buffalo, NY doesn’t have access to wings that don’t taste like a salt lick. It’s a tragedy.

As a couple nitpicky points:

As far as I know -- and I've double-checked this just now -- Yum Brands does not own Wingstop (which doesn't capitalize the "s", even though we all do it automatically). They own "Wing Street", which is a sub-brand of Pizza Hut. Wingstop is an independent publicly-traded company.

Wingstop created Thighstop as a "digital brand" -- essentially, a ghost kitchen run out of existing Wingstop locations. This is a trick that a lot of chain restaurants started doing since the pandemic. Denny's runs "The Meltdown" as a sandwich shop; Chili's runs "Wings & Things"; you can find others. You can only order from "Thighstop" online, but you can add a thigh to combos when you order from Wingstop if you're so inclined.

(And I have not lived in Buffalo, New York, but I have lived in the South -- and California -- and can assure you there are many "mom and pop" wing shops and local chains that…aren't great.)

Bah! You're totally right and I'm wrong. I flipped them in my head. Thank you for the correction.

Definitely some are not great, I can name 3 within a mile of me I won't go to. And some are "sketchy" but delicious. But that also applies to barbecue, mexican, catfish, etc. around me. Just look where the locals go. If there's a line at an unexpected place, it's probably good. But if it's around a college campus, it may just be cheap :).

>I guess America outside the South and Buffalo, NY doesn’t have access to wings that don’t taste like a salt lick. It’s a tragedy.

Or you make them at home. Which is very straightforward.

There were literally ads on TV by Wingstop talking about rebranding to Thighstop: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nTx4YuMa3cQ

This is no more fraudulent or shady than Apple having a brand called “MacBook Pro” and another one called “MacBook Air”.

It's not fraud, it's pretty clear marketing. When there was a shortage of wings, they stopped selling those and started selling thighs. Thus, Thighstop. This has literally nothing to do with tax evasion - you really are not understanding what they're doing at all.

> If they decide not to pursue action due to infringement

This is kind of a bizarre thing to say... they are the same company, so there is just not universe in which Wingstop would sue itself.

Thighstop seems to exist because Wingstop is/was having a chicken wing shortage.

There is nothing wrong with one business running two brands to sell two different products.

>do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?

The regulator doesn't pursue trademark infringement cases. It is upon the trademark holder to defend their mark via proceedings. So WingstopCo would bring an action against ThighstopCo. In this case, since both marks are held by the same entity, there's no enforcement possible unless the holding entity an exclusive license to one of the marks to another party.

> do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?

I've been told that trademark proceedings have to be initiated by the holder, and that the holder failing to do so is how certain phrases can become common names for a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

But IANAL.

Too argumentative.. but would try to answer some.

> Can you define that difference? Wingstop and Thighstop for instance are incredibly close..

The author of the blog clearly identified the modus operandi. He makes a very compelling case (he obviously understand the local context, can intuit things based upon the fuzzy dataset which is result of his experiencing the system over time.. etc.).

> Where did this assumption come from? (Unilever has exacting manufacturing standards) That's a claim without any backing as far as I am aware..

The knowledge of how world works and is typically built if one is curious enough. https://www.unilever.com/news/news-search/2022/shining-a-lig...

> There is the side note that they are owned by the same entity, but do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?

Yes. Yes they do. Absolutely, 100%, regulators know that Wingstop and Thighstop are owned by the same entity. They know this from regulatory and administrative filings, and they know this from the advertising that could not possibly be more clear that these are the same company.

Here, Rick Ross can explain it to you in no uncertain terms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTx4YuMa3cQ

>Wingstop and Thighstop for instance are incredibly close and not enough to trigger regulatory enforcement. There is the side note that they are owned by the same entity, but do regulators know that for a fact before they decide no to enforce penalties for what you are claiming is trademark infringement?

Well, yes? Regulators would determine both are owned by the same entity, at which point there would be no enforcement penalty to apply.

Regulators don't even proactively enforce trademarks in the first place. The holder is responsible for bringing an action.

Well there you go.

> Can you define that difference? Wingstop and Thighstop for instance are incredibly close and not enough to trigger regulatory enforcement

I can define the difference clearly: "whatever a court decides"

The law is intentionally fuzzy, and in the case of trademark, it's whether the names are "likely to cause consumer confusion", which is an obviously fuzzy thing that cannot be encoded in a computer or with a set of string matching rules. Which is fine, our legal system has humans in it.

If the companies are doing so with the specific intent of causing consumer confusion, then it seems like the court would have a relatively easy time at showing that such an occurrence was likely.

What the court decides is different than “similar sounding names”.

My point was that similar sounding names are not automatically infringement because they need a court to decide that the similarity doesn’t matter. I explicitly pointed out two similar sounding restaurant names owned by the same entity because either they were assumed to be IP infringement until a court decided they were not, or courts didn’t get involved by default for similar sounding names.

The whole point was to make a reductio ab absurdum argument that similarity of names did not matter in terms of IP until courts were involved, so bringing it up as a reason that ghost kitchens couldn’t make similar names a silly argument to make sans lawsuits

In this case a court wouldn't even get involved. One of the brands needs to sue the other one.

Results are the same. Spamming mental space of a consumer so that no matter what he buys he buys from them, but has illusion of choice.

>Unilever creates different brands with same exacting manufacturing standards

They absolutely don’t. Given brand of laundry detergents can be quite different between neighboring Poland and Germany, with the only visible difference being the set of languages on the label.

what unilever is doing is segmenting the market, and filling each segment with a product offering. cloud kitchens are trying to do the same, but the issue is they're not segmenting on quality at all because they're fundamentally pursuing a (lower) cost strategy. you can't differentiate on quality if you have thin margins, as implied by the cost strategy. they're primarily segmenting on (a select subset) of cuisines, which doesn't get you as far as you might think in such a competitive market as prepared food delivery.

That's not how CPG business models work. Unilever doesn't "churn out thousands of brands" to cannibalize their own portfolio. What they are doing is building brand equity and competing for sales and shelf space vs other CPG brands-- that costs a lot of money and takes years.

The cloud kitchen model is more akin to putting lipstick on pigs...

What restaurants are doing is competing for sales and shelf space on online ordering sites

In theory, this is actually a functional service that can be useful.

I hardly ever eat out because the cost and hassle compared to the food is far, far from being a reasonable trade to me. On a daily basis, I don't want "fancy" plates of food creations, just simple but fresh and relatively healthy food like I would (or, rather, do) make for myself.

However, having a kitchen churning out fresh food, a bit like a canteen but with a delivery step (doesn't have to be direct, a "round" would work too as long as the food stays approximately fresh and arrives within a reasonable slot).

There's no need for this to happen in a restaurant with tables and tills. The most efficient system is probably a big central kitchen and a bunch of electric delivery vehicles. The economies of scale that such an operation could bring over me buying a few portions at a time, slicing single cucumbers and heating my little oven or pans to cook a few items day in day out seem like they could plausibly be favourable to outweigh the downsides (cost of delivery, lack of control over the food ingredients, quality, portion size etc).

Of course such a system, if it became dominant over others would probably very quickly fall victim to MBA syndrome as corners are cut and it ends up being school/prison slop (with a much much more expensive premium option that is basically what we already have).

And I imagine people don't like the idea of a "remote canteen" vs the romantic idea of a chef lovingly assembling a dish and carefully handing it to a courier.

So my options are to do it myself or pay multiples.

That's all nice and well, and I'd go one step further: instead of door delivery, have the vehicle put down anchor (or some temporary vending-machine like container) at some pick-up spot in walkable distance. Great opportunity for WFH isolatees to connect.

But that's all not an excuse to hide behind a fleet of faux-boutique identities. When you do that it's borderline scam. Or not borderline at all, once you accept that most of the money we spend on getting food cooked for is not about the calories and not even about the taste.

Yes, that would work for me too.

> But that's all not an excuse to hide behind a fleet of faux-boutique identities.

Absolutely agreed. And of all places I won't use once they've demonstrated untrustworthyness, food providers are top of the list.

Not only is what you do (and don't) eat rather important, but also it's something that I can actually do myself.

If I don't trust CPU manufacturers not to backdoor my computer, I have limited options. If I don't trust a restaurant, I can pan fry my own tofu.

Are you describing a diner?

A large diner, with no tables or wait staff?

Also classic diner food is generally pretty inappropriate for using more than a few times a month because it's not very good for you.

It's more like the backend of a large, decent company canteen[1] stuck to a milk-round front end.

[1] And I don't really mean the ones that are just buying catering trays of food from a wholesaler and heating it. I worked in a factory in China for some time and their food was great. Simple, home style food, cooked right there, from scratch, every day. Lunch for everyone and an option of breakfast and dinner (mostly for residential workers). It's the only food that's not homemade that I could imagine eating daily.

We actually do have something like a canteen with delivery in east London https://www.getdad.co.uk/

The simpler option is to have a diner/canteen serving daily homestyle food nearby. Japan has neighborhood family-run places like that. Singapore has homestyle food stalls in most neighbourhoods (known as coffeeshops), though traditionally the food is pretty oily and salty.

Its rampant across industries. Hotel chains have sub-brands, sometimes with suspiciously similar names.

As far as industries go, the restaurant industry is probably one of the least consolidated in the world. For every chain restaurant, there are a dozen standalone restaurants.

Hotel sub-brands are often (usually?) to differentiate significantly in quality / service / price. I think it would be much more reasonable for a restaurant to decide they want to cater to both fast food and fine dining (or less extreme ends of the spectrum) and to offer two experiences under different brands, than to just chuck up different brands on top of basically the same thing.

>Hotel sub-brands are often (usually?) to differentiate significantly in quality / service / price.

That's the idea anyway. There are also specific traveler personas that they target. For example, Courtyard was originally specifically designed for business travelers. Of course, a huge chain like Marriott has acquired other chains and many of its own brands have morphed over time for various reasons so a lot of the sub-brands end up looking pretty similar to each other. This isn't really hidden from consumers though. Certainly frequent travelers are well aware of the overarching company because of loyalty programs.

This is because, where regulations allow, people will literally set up a small restaurant with two plastic yard tables and a open top grill.

In the US that type of setup is pretty much illegal everywhere. Chains were becoming more prevalent, but recently we’ve basically gone back to the same model with a food truck, which is tiny and takes up a parking spot. Usually taking off the wheels is illegal though.

Cool, this is interesting... What makes the "two plastic yard tables and a open top grill" restaurant illegal? Sanitary requirements or some minimal size mandate?

Otherwise I like the concept of food trucks, to me they are a perfect way for enthusiastic chefs to start their business with low(ish) money investment.

This sounds fun. Let's pick a state that is not known for onerous regulations...how about South Dakota?

>Food employees must clean their hands in a handwashing lavatory and may not clean their hands in a sink used for food preparation or in a service sink or a curbed cleaning facility used for the disposal of mop water and similar liquid waste.

>Food must be stored in a clean, dry location where it is not exposed to splash, dust, or other contamination and is at least 15 centimeters (6 inches) above the floor

>Sufficient refrigeration facilities or other effectively insulated facilities that are conveniently located must be provided to assure the maintenance of potentially hazardous food at required temperatures during storage. Each mechanically refrigerated facility storing potentially hazardous food must be provided with a numerically scaled indicating thermometer, accurate to ±1°C (2°F), located to measure air temperature in the warmest part of the facility.

>Fruits and vegetables may be washed by using chemicals as specified in 21 C.F.R. 173.315, April 1, 1996. Any sink used to wash, prepare, store, or soak food must be indirectly connected to the sewer through an airbreak.

>A ventilation hood system must be provided over all cooking equipment which produces steam, excessive smoke, grease vapors, or odors.

>Perimeter walls and roof of a food establishment must effectively protect the establishment from the weather and the entry of insects, rodents, and other animals.

It would be hard to meet those requirements with a grill and two tables, but the list goes on:

https://sdlegislature.gov/Rules/Administrative/17361

>Food employees must clean their hands in a handwashing lavatory and may not clean their hands in a sink used for food preparation or in a service sink or a curbed cleaning facility used for the disposal of mop water and similar liquid waste.

So a restroom.

>Food must be stored in a clean, dry location where it is not exposed to splash, dust, or other contamination and is at least 15 centimeters (6 inches) above the floor.

A shelf.

>Sufficient refrigeration facilities or other effectively insulated facilities that are conveniently located must be provided to assure the maintenance of potentially hazardous food at required temperatures during storage. Each mechanically refrigerated facility storing potentially hazardous food must be provided with a numerically scaled indicating thermometer, accurate to ±1°C (2°F), located to measure air temperature in the warmest part of the facility.

A fridge and a thermometer

>Fruits and vegetables may be washed by using chemicals as specified in 21 C.F.R. 173.315, April 1, 1996. Any sink used to wash, prepare, store, or soak food must be indirectly connected to the sewer through an airbreak.

This a U shaped a filter on the drain hose, you can self install and cost a few bucks.

>A ventilation hood system must be provided over all cooking equipment which produces steam, excessive smoke, grease vapors, or odors.

A hood a standard in every kitchen.

>Perimeter walls and roof of a food establishment must effectively protect the establishment from the weather and the entry of insects, rodents, and other animals.

Walls and a roof?.

These are sanitary requirements but none of them are extra imo

How many food trucks come with a restroom? Or 4 walls and a roof, assuming that’s required to cover a shelter? Or a connection to the sewer system (which sounds pretty tenuous for a food truck, you need to find a parking space with a open sewer connection?)

They tend to have 4 walls and a roof and facilities to wash your hands: Water tanks exist - I mean, folks use toilets in an RV without them being currently hooked up to sewage, so I don't see how this is an issue. We have the tech. Hand sanitizer is likely available as well. Additionally, in many places, they have to be within a certain distance from toilets.

The sewer note is more about this particular line:

> Any sink used to wash, prepare, store, or soak food must be indirectly connected to the sewer through an airbreak, and a water tank not being suitable.

Which I interpreted as a direct sewer connection for the sink being required.

They didn't say it was impossible, just hard. Do you have a thermometer in your fridge? Did you specially modify your sink to add an airbreak? I agree, they are quite reasonable requirements, and also requirements which one does not meet if they just have a grill and two picnic tables. They would also want to have a small trailer for proper food storage.

A restroom that's practical for the cook to wash hands every single time is a lot harder then a nearby walk-to restroom.

These add up fast.

The most interesting part is that they used centimeters

> onerous regulations

More like common sense. I'd really wish any place that prepares my food from scratch would obey at least the ones you listed and more even if it's just a grill.

So basically "don't shit where you cook for customers".

A land of the free would truly have to be a home of the brave.

What’s up with the air gap requirement?

So that in the event of a clog, sewage will not be able to back up into the food. It'll spill out onto the floor instead, which is bad, but not as bad as contaminating the food directly.

In the US any sort of restaurant establishment is most likely by zoning required to have some amount of parking.

The cost of the land and asphalt for a parking space is $5-10k for a surface spot, $30k for an underground one. Two tables wouldn’t pay the interest rate on that, especially if multiple are required.

Here in Kansas & I think MO people can sell things they cook at home. I know a caterer, baker & jelly canner who operate out of their home kitchens.

The food-trucks seem to be doing pretty well. Within a mile of where I live, there are at least two taco trucks and one barbeque truck, all permanently parked there.

There are a couple of inherent downsides to the model, namely the cost of maintaining a working motor vehicle, and the impossibility of connecting it to electric or sewer (so they all run off pretty dirty diesel generators.)

Maybe we should mandate that in labelling guidelines on consumer products, the name and logo of the ultimate parent owner of the company selling the product should be prominently featured alongside whatever the regular brand is.

Many products already do it eg “TheThing: By TheParentCompany”. But yes maybe consumers should be aware who ultimately benefits from their purchase of a product, and easily be able to decide to buy more independent brands.

>the name and logo of the ultimate parent owner of the company selling the product should be prominently featured alongside whatever the regular brand is.

How do you define "ultimate parent owner of the company"? In the case of Unilever, they own the brands directly, so it's straightforward to determine the "ultimate parent owner". But it's not hard to register a separate LLC for each brand, which makes the "ultimate parent owner" much murkier, especially if the LLC has weird ownership structures.

I just want BlackRock to suddenly become a brand so people are aware of the conflict of interest they generate

Is blackrock the ultimate owner? Or the taxpayers of the taxpayer funded pension plans and 401k owners who Blackrock invests on behalf of the ultimate owner?

Can we so this with politicians, too? Make them wear patches of all their corporate sponsors like race car drivers?

That is more about sponsorship disclosures. A better parallel would be with disclosure of paid or sponsored material on broadcasts.

But yes, I’d be all for that. If a bill is drafted, all the entities that had input into that draft should be listed. If a politician gives a speech at the request of a compensating entity, that should be disclosed at the beginning: “This speech was paid for in part by Audible. More on them at the end of the speech”

It’s more like publishing who actually wrote legislation. Often it’s lobbyists who write laws and politicians put their names on them.

I strongly disagree with the notion that anything profitable and technically legal is fine. The whole premise of this site is that words matter. That communities matter. That applies here too.

mosquitos evolved naturally, within the rules of the universe. doesn't mean they shouldn't be eradicated

That is the naturalistic fallacy. What is natural doesn't tell us what's good, and vice versa. Blind, amoral evolution delivered us to the point where we can make moral judgments about evolution's results, especially as it pertains to human behavior. And on the basis of those judgements, we can make choices about how we treat one another.

This is jarringly orthogonal to the point you are replying to, did you mean to reply to another comment?

it was a poorly explained parallel to "anything profitable and technically legal is fine."

I guess we just hope and wish that a restaurant would have a "terroir" for a certain type of food or flavor they are good at or something authentic in any way. My soaps from Unilever will at least be different because the recipes are different, but something tells me those soups from that kitchen all taste the same.

>those soups from that kitchen all taste the same

this got me thinking - the photos of the store fronts are basically garages, with few or no tables and chairs, and few or no delivery vehicles. you'd expect in a massive city with 24/7 food services, and a large surface area to nab unsuspecting customers, there to be a fleet of mopeds awaiting outside. but instead the address given is probably just where the businesses are registered. box ticked, nothing checked. the actual "kitchen" and delivery mechanism could be based anywhere. e.g. the nearest/dirtiest friend/family/gang member to the delivery address. are we to trust that the one running this scam adheres to food safety standards? or any standards for that matter

> If the practice is distasteful, then change the law, but beware the lobbyists.

Lobby to change the law but beware lobbying?

Not lobbying, lobbyists.

lobbyist: A person who is paid to lobby politicians and encourage them to vote a certain way or otherwise use their office to effect a desired result.

Emphasis on paid.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/lobbyist

Yes you normally need to pay a lobbyist to lobby - because you need permission to access the lobbies.

Lobbying isn’t a bad thing. Charities, unions, NGOs all lobby, and they use lobbyists to do it.

You will be glad to know that Unilever is also in the ghost kitchen business.

https://www.icecreamshopus.com/

> If the practice is distasteful, then change the law

Or, you know, use morals and conscience.

But some people don't have those so this is just unfairly disadvantaging the people who do.

This is the same reason why murder us illegal even though most people wouldn't do it anyways.

I propose a new and simple law:

The branding of the parent entity must be more prominent than any subbrand on any packaging or promotional material.

There'd be no trouble opening a company per brand; the company would buy white-label products from Unilever and put its own brand, and market it.

Another example is Luxottica for optometry.

Although they are even worse because they are an example of "vertical integration" -- they own both the manufacturing of many of the major eyeglass frame brands as well as many of the chain eyeglass stores such as Lenscrafters and Pearle Vision as well as being the real owners of the optometry departments found in stores like Target and John Lewis.

Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi

This applies to pretty much all areas of life:

Food delivery, Web scraping, personal relationships, insider trading, nation building, you name it.

Also intent/appearance of sincerity matters: "When Two Do The Same Thing, It Is Not The Same Thing After All."

witeless brands inCanada is another example. Very often when you are comparison shopping for a cellphone plan you are just checking between the sub brands of 3 companies. No wonder the data plans in Canada are super expensive compared to everywhere else.

It is the same in the US, and probably around the world. I do not see how it could be possible for more than 3 or 4 wireless networks to go around putting redundant towers up all around the country, especially big countries.

It's possible. Indonesia has 7 cellphone carriers with their own infrastructure, and I think 5 of them have national coverage. Used to be more but the number got reduced over time due to mergers and acquisition. I won't be surprised if there would be only 4 major carriers left soon if the largest ones continue acquiring smaller players, which is a bad news because cellular plans used to be very expensive when there were only 3 major carriers and these smaller players brought competition which drastically reduce prices of cellular plans.

It's possible... But then you go on to describe how it's ending due to consolidation ;)

You mandate that anyone who puts up a tower has to sell physical space and connectivity for base stations of competitors on those same towers at a fair price.

Charging to recoup the cost of the infrastructure = ok.

Charging more to force competitors out or to build their own, wholly redundant, towers = illegal.

How many base stations can you reasonably fit on a tower, how many redundant networks (even without redundant towers) can the market support? Let's say... 3 or 4?

What’s a “fair price”?

Like I wrote: covering the cost of establishing and maintaining the tower.

It's essentially a matter of declaring that the towers themselves, and the infrastructure that connect and power them, are not to be a profit maker for anyone. Can be made a condition during spectrum allocation, for example.

There's still plenty of other areas for providers to distinguish themselves.

And there's still an incentive to increase coverage. The only coverage increase incentive lost is the incentive of becoming a local monopoly. Good riddance, I say.

No private business is going to invest just to have its upside limited.

It's not its only upside.

They're already required to make sure the tower doesn't fall in someone's head. That cuts into profit. But they still do it.

Yes, the wonderful choice between RoBellUs or econo-RoBellUs sub-brand. Such overwhelming choice, I couldn't fathom having more options.

Don't forget the Chatr/Lucky/Public sub-econo-brands.

"New bad thing is similar to existing bad thing so we should consider it good" is a distressingly common argument.

Ultimately the why not will be because the platforms won't tolerate it. Having a kitchen so bad that it doesn't want a reputation listed lots of times isn't helping their customers any.

This is what baffles me the most.

A few years ago I was ordering a fair amount off Postmates. One night I ordered something that was decently expensive. When it came the food looked nothing like the picture and was so bad it was borderline inedible. I threw it away in disbelief that a restaurant could possibly be this bad and after a bit of research I discovered that this wasn’t a ‘real’ restaurant - it’s one of these converted buildings that operate on a delivery only basis through the apps.

I tried to complain to Postmates but they ignored me, gave me copy/paste e-mail responses and didn’t do anything.

So I never used Postmates again, and likely never will. A lot of these businesses are run to try to make quick profits at the expense of establishing long-term trust and they will ultimately fail.

I realized this with contact lens cleaners. Huge selection, very small number of vendors.