📚 Grubhub Hit With Lawsuit for Listing Restaurants Without Permission

Two restaurants have initiated a potential class-action lawsuit against GrubHub for allegedly listing 150,000 restaurants to its site without the businesses' permission. From a report: The Farmer's Wife in Sebastopol, California and Antonia's Restaurant in Hillsborough, NC filed the suit with Gibbs Law Group, accusing Grubhub of adding their restaurants to its site despite not entering into a partnership, which causes "significant damage to their hard-earned reputations, loss of control over their customers' dining experiences, loss of control over their online presence, and reduced consumer demand for their services." Grubhub has explicitly made this false partnership part of their business strategy. Last October, CEO Matt Maloney said the company would be piloting a new initiative of adding more restaurants to its searchable database without entering into an official partnership with them, so customers would believe they had more delivery options with Grubhub, and wouldn't switch to competitors. It works like this: if you happened to order from a non-partnered restaurant, "the order doesn't go directly to the restaurant," says the lawsuit. "It goes instead to a Grubhub driver, who must first figure out how to contact the restaurant and place the order. Sometimes it's possible to place orders with the restaurant by phone, but other times the restaurant will only accept orders in person. The extra steps often lead to mistakes in customers' orders and often the restaurant won't receive the order at all." Grubhub also wouldn't warn restaurants before they were listed, which led to restaurants suddenly being inundated with Grubhub orders they never expected. Often, Grubhub would list outdated menus with the wrong prices, or include restaurants that don't even offer take-out, leading to canceled orders. The lawsuit includes screenshots from the pages Grubhub created for The Farmer's Wife and Antonia's, using their respective names and logos. The Farmer's Wife alleges the pages are "inaccurate and suggests that The Farmer's Wife is offering to make food that it does not actually make and has never made," which the lawsuit claims hurts the restaurant's reputation, and leads customers to become frustrated with service the restaurant never agreed to provide in the first place. And both restaurants say the language Grubhub uses suggests a partnership that doesn't exist, and in Antonia's case, was actively declined when Grubhub approached them. Further reading: Even If You're Trying To Avoid Grubhub By Calling Your Favorite Restaurant Directly, Grubhub Could Still Be Charging It A Fee; Meal-Delivery Company GrubHub is Buying Thousands of Restaurant Web Addresses, Preventing Mom and Pop From Owning Their Slice of Internet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.