Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever
This week, a class-action lawsuit was filed against DoorDash, alleging that DoorDash manipulates a fee called the “expanded-range fee” in order to charge premium customers and iPhone users more money. DoorDash has of course denied the allegations, saying that its pricing is “fair and transparent.”
This is a particularly amusing defense, considering that at the time of the complaint, the “expanded-range fee” was not defined on the company’s website. It’s there now, though, with a description that is suspiciously in a different color than the rest of the fees (of which there are many), and I was unable to confirm when the changes took place via archive.org because the fees page is an uncrawlable javascript nightmare. Luckily the complainant in this pending case took screenshots.
This wouldn’t be the first time companies have utilized data that they shouldn’t even have in order to charge certain customers more. Back in 2021 the British government called out airlines for charging Mac users more.
What a world it would be if, say, I don’t know, retailers had no idea what device or browser you were using? Then this sort of thing would be… what’s the word? Impossible.