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Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

(about.grubhub.com)
146 points endtwist | 3 comments | 13 Nov 24 19:12 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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bsimpson ◴[13 Nov 24 19:20 UTC] No.42129006[source]▶
Those weird ghost kitchen things have more than half a billion dollars to spend on acquisitions?!

I wonder how this came to be - did they already have that big of a war chest, or did they hear they could buy a name brand and go back to their investors to finance it?

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JumpCrisscross ◴[13 Nov 24 19:45 UTC] No.42129215[source]▶
I’ll look up the addresses of restaurants on Uber Eats, using street view, before ordering. Most of them are at bodegas or otherwise non-restaurant spaces.
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Gormo ◴[13 Nov 24 21:35 UTC] No.42130252[source]▶
I recently saw a new burger joint pop up on Uber Eats with an address not far from my home. It turned out to be the address of the last remaining Ruby Tuesday restaurant in my area, but the burger place did not advertise any connection to Ruby Tuesday. Seemed very sketchy to me.
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1. heroprotagonist ◴[14 Nov 24 02:35 UTC] No.42132579{3}[source]▶
A ton of places are doing that. Restaurants that want to price things differently from their main. Or primarily in-store restaurant chains that don't want branding impacted by crappy delivery reviews. Keyword competition to improve sales. Menu, naming, picture, process experimentation. Additional placement in search results with different ranking. Bad review evasion. Limiting blast radius of bad reviews (eg, they still have a second high-rated listing for those X months they get less orders until a spat of negative reviews expire).

Basically, 'cheating' because it's not very honest, or can also be putting in extra effort to sell more and/or limit risk.

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2. Gormo ◴[14 Nov 24 21:41 UTC] No.42141533[source]▶
The way you put it doesn't sound like almost the mirror-image of the whole "ghost kitchens" thing. If established, reputable restaurants with known food quality are operating unde alternative branding in order to experiment with new marketing strategies, it doesn't really seem like 'cheating' to me.

Definitely not in the same category as a fly-by-night operation in a warehouse pretending to be an established restaurant.

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3. heroprotagonist ◴[15 Nov 24 07:02 UTC] No.42144538[source]▶
Agree, it's all in how it's actually used. There are ghosts kitchens renaming themselves to avoid bad reviews, or to inflate their presence. But there are legit reasons to do it too.