A Pizza Restaurant in Kansas is Making a Profit Buying Their Own Pizzas From DoorDash

Yesterday on the blog / newsletter “The Margins” Ranjan Roy shared a story about a friend of his who owns two pizza restaurants in Kansas and how he made a profit off of buying his own pizzas from DoorDash. The story starts out in oh too familiar territory with the pizza restaurant owner getting complaints about deliveries even though his restaurant didn’t offer delivery service or partner with delivery services. After investigating the owner discovered that DoorDash had claimed an “order delivery” button on the restaurant’s Google Maps listing (Google My Business) which appears in Google search when searchers look up the restaurant.

aj's new york pizzeria in kansas website screenshot

The DoorDash orders were causing a nightmare as the food often arrived to customers cold due to improper delivery bags, along with a flood of new complaints and bad Yelp reviews. The owner also noticed the pricing for his pizzas were incorrect. A pizza he sold for $24 was being sold by DoorDash for only $16.

To get his revenge the owner of AJ’s NY Pizzeria (in Manhattan and Topeka Kansas) ordered $160 worth of pizzas to be delivered to a friends house. DoorDash then called him and placed an order for $240 worth of pizzas and delivered them. This made him a cool $10 in pure profit.

However, he tried another experiment. The second time ordering essentially just the dough or crust without any toppings via DoorDash. This time he was able to make $75 in pure arbitrage profit without DoorDash even suspecting a thing.

If a food delivery service starts showing up on your Google Maps (Google My Business) listing it is likely because they have informed Google you wanted the link to be listed. While you can not currently stop this from happening, you can request that Google My Business Support remove this link using this online form: https://support.google.com/business/contact/business_food?hl=en