Ask HN: What's your worst Uber Eats/Door dash experience?
I've just had an UberEats food order canceled after waiting for 1 1/2 hours. The food is actually at the restaurant and has been for 1h. Has anyone else seen this? Is that common?
A few things that UberEats does well: the live-updating map of your driver, which makes it seamless to anticipate the delivery time and meet your driver at the curb in the event that their GPS doesn't accurately locate the address. Speed of delivery, which may be due to having a larger network of cars and drivers to pull from. And price / checkout flow - it's very easy to place an order with pre-saved checkout information and the prices are usually lowest (edit: even including raised menu prices - the total price is less).
I personally have no love for Uber as a company and have actively avoided it for transportation, so I feel that UberEats UX has done a lot to retain my business despite it being Uber. If there's ever a Lyft of restaurant delivery (maybe an official Lyft offering?) I'll switch.
FWIW, my UberEats experiences have been in the Dallas area.
Call my driver and am unable to communicate clearly with them. Get handed over to the guy who's door he was at and have a quick chat because both of us are annoyed (him for having someone knocking on his door at 11pm, and me for no ice cream).
Call Uber support and they call the driver, then say he should be at my place in 5 minutes or so.
A couple of calls back to Uber and about 2 hours after I ordered it, I finally get my ice cream. At this point in time it is all liquid.
For Reference: Ordered around 10PM (Friday night from memory), located in Perth Western Australia
Call Uber again and they say they will refund me. Still haven't seen the refund...
Half the time my order was wrong anyway. Half the time they would delete the food allergy notes I added. 80% of the page loads resulted in a 500 error -- I basically just had to keep refreshing until something worked. Their UI jumps all over the place and deletes everything from your cart once you sign in.
I know you only asked about two of the competitors, but I just had to rant.
UberEats drivers who accept delivery of multiple orders, so you wait for everyone else's orders to be cooked and delivered before your cold burger and fries arrive. This problem is exaggerated by either these orders being on opposite sides of the city or the delivery driver being on a bike (why either of these are permitted I have no idea). Have even had my order delivered to someone else and vice versa this way before.
In general, slow deliveries and the usual process of having to walk up the street to find lost/lazy drivers. The ETA always being wildly wrong (I get cooking delays, but delivery ETA from pickup should be spot on, and is usually off by 100%). Then add in general restaurant problems with mixing up orders, missing items, or selling food that doesn't transport.
Would happily pay $10 (maybe even $15) per delivery rather than the $5 they charge now if all of these problems went away (e.g. guaranteed prompt and direct delivery).
Unfortunately the Eats drivers (of which I am one) don't have a choice. If the Uber dispatch algorithm determines that we should pick up two orders at the same time, then it gives us instructions to that effect. It also decides which of the two orders to deliver first. We don't even get to see where the second order is going until the first has been dropped off.
And yes, the algorithm is terrible. Sometimes we drop off the first order all the way across town, and the second order turns out to be for a customer a few blocks away from the original pickup location! It's also quite common for a new order coming in result in the driver (who has just arrived at the restaurant to pick up your food) needing to wait an extra 10 minutes while the new order is prepared and cooked.
The end result is customers getting cold food. I'm amazed that Uber Eats has repeat customers.
(And here in New Zealand, the restauarnt pays Uber 35% of the menu price - plus the customer is still paying a delivery fee on top! It's again amazing that any restaurant would even bother with Uber Eats.)
As a driver, doubles are overwhelmingly not worth it in my city. For example, if I get paged for an order it may be for delivery from restaurant A to dropoff C. At any time before I arrive do the pickup, I may get paged to pick up an additional order. There only a narrow set of circumstances where it is worth it to me, the driver, to accept a double. Here's a list of things that would make a double unfavorable for a driver:
- The dropoff for the additional order may be at some point B that more or less lies somewhere along your route from A to C. Uber will route you to B first and then C. You're essentially delivering to B for free; you could have rejected the second order, forgone the double workload, and delivered directly from A to C and get paid the ~same amount.
- The first order, i.e., the one you originally accepted, is ready, but the second is not. The kitchen may or may not lie to you about how much longer it will take. As a driver, you have no insight into the final destination of the orders until you confirm receipt, so you cannot tell whether you're dealing with a a pathological case for B as above, or whether the order will actually be worth your while. Both customers pay the full delivery price AFAIK, so the only party benefiting here is Uber.
- The first order is ready, but the second one is not, the kitchen knows this, and they know that it will be 5-10+ minutes longer for the second order to be ready, but they never communicate this to you to give you the option of opting out of the second order. So the first order sits cold while the second is prepared, with you the driver believing that your choice is actually between waiting for the first thing available from the kitchen or canceling the whole thing altogether, which would mean being unable to recoup anything of your sunk costs for the trip to the restaurant (and possibly back to a "hot zone" if the restaurant is outside the city).
- You cancel one of the orders, and the staff gives you a bad review (unprofessional) as if you've robbed them of something. You haven't. If a driver sits idle for 10 minutes waiting for the order to be completed, the driver pays that cost while the restaurant gains nothing. This is infuriating, and I was strongly reminded of it by front page link to "Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" a couple weeks ago.
There are exactly two scenarios where a double is "worth" it:
- Geographically speaking, the second order is well past the first one that you would have delivered. This means you don't have to bear the costs of waiting for the next request to come in nor the cost of travel for pickup, because you already have work queued up.
- Geographically speaking, the route between A, B, and C are disjoint (i.e., B and C are in opposite directions from the restaurant). Congratulations, you actually end up making more than if you had made the same two deliveries as individual trips. This is fairly rare, not good for the (second) customer, and it still doesn't eliminate the risks above about arriving at the restaurant to find the orders aren't ready.
1. Ordered some burgers and milkshakes, guy rocks up quite late, quickly hands me my bag and shouts (very loudly) "BEWARE". Turns out "BEWARE" meant, "I've spilled both your milkshakes all over the rest of your food". To their credit, Uber refunded me the whole order.
2. Looked at the app and noticed the driver was sitting at the end of my street and had been for about 10 minutes. I called and got no answer, so I wandered down to see what was up. He was angrily pounding on some random door, apparently thinking it was my house. Then he got mad at me for not coming down to find him sooner?
These days I prefer to use apps like EatNow that let the restaurants use their own delivery drivers - much more reliable in my experience as the drivers are actually accountable for what they do and have a direct relationship with the restaurant.
Experiences might differ accordingly.
On a personal note, we have Swiggy in Bangalore and there were tons of issues when it was starting out. Now while the wait times are longer at least the food is delivered promptly.
I contacted Postmates about it and they refunded me $17. Huge inconvenience since the food took forever to get to me and I was missing over half of the order and had 4 other hungry people. Never ordering from Postmates again.
I only use Door Dash now since the rest of the times I tried Uber Eats the drivers refuse to get out of the car and come to the door even if you have that selected - they just sit in the car and call. Door Dash seems to have a lot better and nicer employees and I've had fewer issues with them in general.
The restaurant actually cooked the food twice - and the second time, I asked if I just could go down there and get the food - but apparently this isn't possible. Uber just use the excuse that their drivers are contractors - and they can't do anything.
I'd understand if this were the middle of nowhere, and on a Friday or some other busy time. But at 8PM on a Tuesday in San Francisco... Yeah. Probably they should sort this out.
45 minutes later and had a flat replacement delivered with a refund and credit from Amazon. Other attempts from other services have typically arrived cold and late. Allowing me to see notifications as to when the food is ready, then wait in agony as nothing happens for 30 minutes, gives me a pretty good idea what I’ll be getting. So far, I’m not a fan.
Some technologies I will miss if they don't pan out. DoorDash isn't one of them.
I will admit that DD made it right but I wonder if I would've gotten anything if I didn't straight up ask the support chat person for a credit.
Never used other services.
Unless it's cancelled, in which case you just get an email and no text.
It's really annoying when you expect one channel and they use another.