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Pizza Hut's AI system caused 'cascading' problems and $100M in damages, franchisee alleges in new suit
(www.businessinsider.com)
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
Why on earth is a company like Pizza Hut using Door Dash for it's deliveries? They're easily capable of running their own delivery service.
They fired them all when state of California was raising the minimum wage. And Doordash as always operated like this. The drivers always deliver multiple orders at once so Pizza Hut is out of luck. Because the driver also the right to refuse to pick up orders.
No way will pick up one order of pizza then drive back for the next. Not happening.
It pushes the responsibility for those drivers onto someone else. Back in the day, if your delivery car was busted you had to get a backup. Now, the franchise is unaffected. Some other DoorDash driver will take their place and the pizza place doesn't need to lift a finger.
Did the driver get in an accident while delivering the pizza? That's their problem. Take up the missing order with DoorDash support. Pizza place keeps chugging.
There's a trend with delivery apps where they add restaurants to their service listing even if the restaurant hasn't consented. The apps will configure the menus using copies that have been posted online (sometimes out of date with products the restaurant no longer offers) and use their delivery drivers as middle men to place the orders manually. If you are a large restaurant and the apps are going to list you regardless, there is incentive to reach an agreement and control offerings rather than deal with the customer service impact of misattributed third party issues. Some restaurants maintain their own independent delivery services even when apps force their way into being a competing delivery option.
Why would they? Outsourcing is cheaper than maintaining their own fleet of delivery vehicles.
Door Dash is essentially a wage theft app designed to outsource the costs of doing business onto the worker.
To my knowledge they didn't maintain fleets of vehicles. Least on my side of the country pizza delivery jobs used to be, bring your own vehicle, company might provide you a stupid little hat to put on your car. But they still had to pay you for your time when there weren't deliveries.
I wonder this about a lot of my local restaurants. Maybe some of the platforms require it. I know that in my area, everything serviced by Door Dash arrives more than 40m after leaving the store, cold, unappetizing. That makes sense if they're doing what the article says and waiting for more orders before delivering.
Money. They started by having their own delivery, but 3rd party delivery service became so big it cannibalise their market so they have to use said 3rd party delivery service because that's where the people are, then they gut their own delivery service. It's not all their fault, seeing how difficult to run an FNB these day, more so with franchise, they just simply adapt to the situation.
Sadly it’s where people are. Network effects have made DoorDash dominant.