For what it's worth, the general vibe I've gotten from couriers has been that Caviar is one of the best food delivery apps for them, and that DoorDash is among the worst.
For example as a user I have literally never had a good experience with Caviar. It almost always wrong in different ways.
As a courier one time the guy called and said that the restaurant was taking so long that Caviar would no longer pay him to wait so we ended up paying him out of pocket to cover it (he said we could cancel and get our money back but that he'd also get nothing after waiting for a very long time).
Uber Eats, as a user, has usually worked pretty well. As a courier one of them told us they constantly have out of date restaurant menus, people order from them, the restaurant substitutes or ignores it completely and now they have to deal with an angry person.
It really feels like restaurants are not equipped to handle these types of services and all of the services don't train their people if at all, as well as treating them kinda like crap many times.
I also once opened the door after waiting about five minutes after getting the “driver is approaching” notification to hear two people bitching about “how ridiculous” it was finding my place. They were in my driveway but could not find the front door. My house is on a hill so the door is down a flight of stairs from the garage but it’s only about 20 feet away and plainly visible from the street.
The building itself looks like a garage from the road, so many pass by the unmarked door they need to enter the code on. Also, there's three consecutive lanes you can turn right onto, so when Waze tells them to turn right, only 33% of drivers get it correct else they get lost in a maze of parking lots and dead ends. This is also after the driver successfully navigates a roundabout (hard for some US drivers) and does not accidentally getting back onto the interstate because the lanes are not clearly marked.
That courier was full of shit. You get paid regardless of customer status, and you also get paid per minute over a certain delay threshold. Sounds like you just got a bad actor.
I mean, that's basically what he said but that it had been an hour and a half (IIRC) and he said Courier would stop paying him to wait.
I've never been a courier so I wouldn't know.
A lot has changed since then, and we’ve had several pretty negative encounters with them including one where the CS rep basically accused us of lying about not receiving our food. (I suspect it was misdelivered because the map software they used put our address as our neighbors house two doors down.)
My last experience with them: The app told us to contact them for an ETA on our food. The actual status of our order wasn’t clear. We had a dasher and then we didn’t have a dasher. There was no way to contact them. We tried “Contact the dasher” and the number didn’t go through. We tried to use the chat functionality (which is ridiculously buried under four or five levels of clicks and even then not immediately obvious” when it used to be basically automatic if you clicked “help”) and it wouldn’t connect us. We tried another number which also didn’t go through. The website had a message about difficulty placing orders at that time but ours was already placed.
So there we sat in limbo not knowing if the food would ever arrive and no way to contact anybody. Should we just go out to eat? We didn’t know. We did use their web form contact them, but the response came way too late to not have ruined our meal time. Eventually our order was cancelled and to their credit they gave us $50 credits but meh.