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Comment by sargun | Hacker News Reader

I find Postmates competing primarily on food delivery quite odd. When I originally started using Postmates, it was for pretty much for everything but food. When I ordered food from it, it was for the likes of food trucks, where I just needed to dispatch a courier and make a free form order. Unfortunately, Postmates discontinued support for these features.

The kinds of things I ordered before the modernization of Postmates were USB-to-Ethernet adapters, Macs, soldering irons, and more. These were typically high priced goods that I needed in a short period of time to keep up some service.

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My team of ~5 people orders from Postmates every weekday for lunch and our order is missing items about a third of the time. It's not uncommon for one of us to reorder via Caviar's Fastbite service, where the food is on-hand and delivered within 5 mins in SoMa. When we tried Caviar's non-Fastbite service, we noticed the same problem with missing items. Does this happen to anyone else? We've been having this problem for months and I'd think that one of these companies have got it figured out by now.

Never had missing items via Caviar. I order dinner about once a week from them, the only mistake I've had was a restaurant confusing pepperoncinis for pepperonis (I'm vegetarian so that's kind of a big deal to me), which I can totally see happening in a busy kitchen by mistake.

I find it bizarre that you're consistently using a service which is bad 33% of the time. I feel like I'd have given up after a couple of weeks - because honestly convenience is what you're paying for and only getting some of what you order is the opposite of convenient.

It only happens to 1/5 of us 1/3 of the time. :) Plus Postmates at least reimburses us for the missing items.

If it's me I'm annoyed and hungry, if it's someone else I'm annoyed and guilty.

1/3 of the time lunch is wrong and there is absolutely no excuse for it. If you went to a restaurant and they could only get your food served correctly a third of the time you'd stop going back pretty fast I reckon

I order almost daily from Postmates & DoorDash. I have about the same hit rate as you with either orders cancelled an hour in or missing items.

Edit: I think a big part of the problem is they don't read the order notes

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