Chef Pim Techamuanvivit Speaks Out about How Seamless, Grubhub, and Yelp are Defrauding Restaurants (and Customers?)

[Pat]

This looks like it could be something very big about to explode. SF restaurateur Pim Techamuanvivit (aka chezpim) has discovered that seamless, its parent grubhub, yelp, and doordash have fraudulent listings for her restaurant(s). She doesn't do takeout or delivery. People are being defrauded, potentially big time, depending on how far this extends. I'd imagine it's the biggest problem with popular restaurants who don't offer takeout or delivery. She found out when someone called her restaurant about an order that hadn't arrived.

ETA: I think I screwed up embedding the tweets because clicking takes you to her feed, but it's easy enough to find them there. The first tweet and its thread are pinned.

[DonRocks]

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As one example, I screen-scraped Grubhub's "Kin Khao" menu, and then the actual Kin Khao menu. Somebody's got some 'splainin to do...

Grubhub's:

The actual Kin Khao:

[DonRocks]

Kin Khao apparently offered lunch delivery in Jun, 2014 on Caviar:

Caviar was purchased by Square later in 2014.
Square-Caviar was purchased by Doordash in 2019.

Look what I found on Doordash: delivery, a menu not listed from "Kin Khao," but from (get this) "Happy Khao" ... and the menu is essentially the same one for Kin Khao on Grubhub.

Now, look closely at the bottom of the final page:

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"Delivered from Happy Khao Thai at Kin Khao, 55 Cyril Magnin St, San Francisco, CA 94102, USA"

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As the Giant Monster once said on "Flesh Gordon" (1974) ... "Oh, fuck."

[deangold]

Door dash put us on their service after we tol them we were not interested. Higher prices and of course, the menu was out of date. I was approached by Door Dash and just the sales effort on their part was enough for me to reject them. But I would up on Door Dash. I went thru the roof and after a lot of yelling and swearing, they took us off their site. The menu they had posted was old and out of date. WHen we signed up with grub hub for pick up orders, they put us on seamless so I shut off their service too. The links stayed on google's box, but they led to generic landing pages.

Basically tech bros are scum of the earth. Amazon and Uber were horrible as people.

Postmates was the best for me but I have heard other prople with horror stories. They have a service where they will just purchase product at any business and deliver it for a large fee. Then they have partner businesses. We partnered with them so we got a fixed delivery fee and they used our menu at our pricing. If there were problems, we could be part of the solution. But even when we ewe a partner business, we would get orders called in by Postmates and the courrier would show up with a credit card and pay for the order. Sometimes they had to use a Postmates credit card so that is how we knew. And like I said, we were partners.

Caviar was not bad, but they faded as a presence in the arket. We used to have postmates and caviar neck and neck but over time Postmates grew and Caviar shrunk. 

This is a shitty part of the business and the models suck.

[Ericandblueboy]

1 hour ago, deangold said:

Door dash put us on their service after we tol them we were not interested. Higher prices and of course, the menu was out of date.

So whose food did they deliver?

[deangold]

21 hours ago, Ericandblueboy said:

So whose food did they deliver?

I am pretty sure they tied to place order with us for pick up and when we told them we didn't serve a particular dish, they either dropped it from the order or they called back and ordered something else. I didn't know it at the time it happened, but it made sense after.

[Pat]

Here's an article from the SF Chronicle on the topic.

[DonRocks]

On 1/26/2020 at 1:47 PM, Pat said:

This looks like it could be something very big about to explode. SF restaurateur Pim Techamuanvivit (aka chezpim) has discovered that seamless, its parent grubhub, yelp, and doordash have fraudulent listings for her restaurant(s). She doesn't do takeout or delivery. People are being defrauded, potentially big time, depending on how far this extends. I'd imagine it's the biggest problem with popular restaurants who don't offer takeout or delivery. She found out when someone called her restaurant about an order that hadn't arrived.

I've done some research for Chef Pim, and uncovered some very suspicious activity - I'm also going to be adding something here in DC that I've discovered; I'm just waiting on permission from the owner.

On 1/26/2020 at 1:47 PM, Pat said:

ETA: I think I screwed up embedding the tweets because clicking takes you to her feed, but it's easy enough to find them there. The first tweet and its thread are pinned.

Pat, you didn't mess anything up - to go to (for example) the second tweet you included, click on this text at the bottom of the tweet (clicking randomly in the body of a tweet will take you to the top of the person's twitter feed).

4:22 AM - Jan 26, 2020