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Comment by rockarage | Hacker News Reader

This is a failure in leadership at UberEats. Uber has more than one revenue source and delivery is in high demand, UberEats is severely losing to DoorDash in food delivery, despite Uber having significantly more resources than DoorDash. Uber has billions in the bank, Doordash only has hundreds of millions. At the time of this posting, Doordash is currently number #13 in the App store, UberEats is sitting at #62. Uber has access to capital and reserve in the bank. Reserves are often used for a rainy day, well it is pouring now. They should be using their position to gain market share during this time of peak demand for deliveries, should not be losing to DoorDash.

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I ordered some things from UberEats early on in the quarantine. The restaurants made several errors and eventually UberEats said they wouldn't refund because I was having too many issues with my food, and it was 'unlikely' that a person would have that many issues. So I don't use them any more.

Similar - I use DoorDash all the time and refuse to use UberEats ever again, absent they change their refund policy. UberEats treats customers like garbage.

Just read the App Store reviews for UberEats. If a driver isn’t able to deliver successfully they just cancel the order and blame the customer by default. Contacting customer support is met with robotic replies and they refuse refund.

Last time I just did a chargeback and won’t use them again.

If you get banned from UberEats do they blacklist you from Uber as well?

I’m not banned, just refuse to be treated like garbage.

My guess is not.

the inverse is true. I am banned from Uber and cannot sign up for UberEats

Appreciate the candor. Can I ask — what does it take to get banned by Uber?

Chargebacks usually result in Uber banning you till you pay them back.

This. I've found UberEats customer service to be severely lacking compared to other food delivery services. I stopped using them after getting yet another completely wrong order (I'm vegetarian and was sent a dish containing meat) and having customer service rudely close my ticket without even an explanation or refund.

Maybe you are too picky? Mistakes happen in restaurants and we shouldn't expect everything to be as we want. I never asked for refunds even when my food was completely different than what I ordered.

Why not? In a physical restaurant you would casually mention it to the waiter and they'd apologise and offer to replace it for free. Similarly, if you order something online and get the wrong items delivered you'd send it back.

That depends. When I didn't eat meat, I would definitely mention it if the special preps were skipped. But if it's not an issue of dietary restriction and the waiter brings me soup instead of salad as a side, I'll take the soup. I'm not slowing down the whole production line and getting a line cook chewed out so that I can have salad instead of soup.

I honestly consider it a virtue to complain in such a situation. It might seem like it has negative consequences, but the reason I went to the restaurant and not another is because of an expectation they'll do their job as advertised. Bringing the wrong food is doing their job wrong, and letting it slide is indicating that that's ok. It isn't a big deal that has any major meaningful consequence usually, but just because its a small thing doesn't mean its ok. However I agree in not being too frustrated. If I got a wrong order and the restaurant refused to correct it, I'd try to enjoy whatever I got and then plan on that being the last time I visit that place.

This is really amazing, I never thought that there are people who would accept wrong food in a resturant. Also finding it kind of unbelievable that there are so many people who accept cold food. Is it because right now a lot of us are feeling bad for resturants or is it normal behavior for some people?

If you are in a resturant with friends and get a wrong food, would you tell your friends? I am wondering because I have never seen anyone stay quite if their food order was wrong. Just wondering if it may have happened among my group of friends, and they quitely ate their food.

If Amazon ships you a wrong product, would you keep that instead of what you had ordered?

Personally, I've made mistakes in daily normal tasks and know how it feels to have people make an issue out of little things. If the end result is the same (it goes in my gut and doesn't taste horrible), I'm not going to complain unless it's completely wrong. Paying for a $25 steak and getting chicken nuggets would be too far, but messing up a side won't ruin my day. It’s stressful working in a kitchen and I’d rather the workers not have too much trouble so long as the things I got taste fine.

I'm also unable to eat a certain common ingredient in cooking, and it's one that virtually every person on earth loves. I've found that complaining just results in them doubling that ingredient and I have no clue why. I've even gotten visible spit in my food before. Picking that ingredient out myself instead of mentioning it is usually better. I've grown a bit of tolerance for not getting what I want.

If I get a different package, it's probably not serving the same role, so I'll complain.

In most situations I would probably note the mistake to my friends after I was sure that the waiter was out of ear shot, but not make a big deal out of it. I can think of one person who I wouldn't say anything to until we'd left the restaurant; I know from previous experience that he would bring it up to the waiter.

I think my treatment of the service industry changed significantly in high school, when I actually knew people who were working at restaurants and heard their stories of horrible customers. Having since worked at a restaurant and eaten out with lots of food service people, I believe that food service people tend to treat food service people better than others do (though I've seen exceptions both ways). I'm not trying to say this in a claiming-moral-superiority-via-kindness way, it's just a pattern I think I've seen in the world, and I think it kinda makes sense given the nature of granfalloons.

Isn't it better to point out a mistake so it can be fixed? In my work if I make a mistake I definitely don't want people to ignore it, otherwise how do I get better? You don't have to make a bit fuss or be rude about it, but I don't see anything wrong with pointing out something is wrong. At least it's better than just having a bad experience and not go back next time.

>You don't have to make a bit fuss or be rude about it, but I don't see anything wrong with pointing out something is wrong.

In industries where people tend to treat each other sanely, I would agree. I believe that most kitchens are managed by assholes who chew out their cooks over minor mistakes, so this is a particular case where I don't think I have a choice about how feedback is given. I can be nice to the server, but the only way I can be nice to the cooks is to not make my issue known. If the restaurant industry wants my feedback, the restaurant industry needs to fix this horrible work culture problem. If they could stop sexually assaulting their staff on a regular basis that would be cool, too.

That's a weird stance to me to be honest. If I order something I expect to get that thing. Otherwise why even order? Just sit down and get served something random. Especially if it's a correctable mistake. I mean if the style of cooking is just not to my taste, fine. But if the actual order is wrong, it can be fixed and I expect it to be fixed.

Same experience here, both with wrong food as well as a bug in the app which caused a cached, previous cart to be ordered instead of the new cart from a different restaurant. I actually provided detailed steps to reproduce this and screenshots and they couldn't care less.

Both cases ended up with a chargeback.

Deliveroo is similar, they banned a 2 year old account used multiple times every day (for both me and my flatmates) with over 2k spent on it for supposed fraud when I dared to ask for "too many" refunds because of cold/incorrect food (if you place many orders you have more probability that something goes wrong, but their "fraud" scoring algorithm - that also influences whether you can get one-click refunds directly in the app - doesn't seem to take that into account).

Both Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats also often lie and blame the restaurant for being slow when they can't assign a driver. I've had multiple occurrences where an order is stuck on "Driver waiting at the restaurant" for 20+ minutes but calling the restaurant reveals that the food was ready long ago and nobody is coming to pick it up.

Though I'm kinda glad people who refund delivery food for being cold get kicked off the platform so that more reasonable people who know how to heat food up don't have to subsidize you and your expectations.

Btw how many times did you heat up and eat the food anyways after getting your refund?

> more reasonable people who know how to heat food up

If the food was advertised as potentially cold or wrong upfront with no guarantees it would be one thing and the market will adjust (only people who want to take the gamble would order).

It is not advertised as such, and the prices don't reflect it either. You are offered a deal where you pay money for warm, or at least correct food to be delivered. The problem is that one side doesn't want to uphold their part of the deal but still expects the other side to uphold its part (aka paying the money). That sounds like false advertising to me and we have laws against it for a reason.

> how many times did you heat up and eat the food anyways after getting your refund?

Cold food actually results in a partial refund which is fine by me (though the option for the full refund should still be offered IMO, as some foods might not taste the same after reheating though I haven't experienced this personally). For me cold food was never a big deal, it was the incorrect food that made up the majority of the problems, often they wouldn't respect the extra options like "no cheese", the food would be completely different from the description (I guess the restaurant changed the dish but didn't update the menu on the app) or outright receiving the wrong order with someone else's order receipt attached to it.

It's likely not the restaurant's fault it's cold. And the guy making $6/hr to deliver it to you tried their best, or got there later than they wanted to.

Once again, if you can't suck up the gamble that is delivery food, I'm glad you get kicked off the platform. I just wanted to give a response from another pov since you felt like you were wronged: I read your account of events and think "nice, the system is working."

> It's likely not the restaurant's fault it's cold. And the guy making $6/hr to deliver it to you tried their best.

I never said it was either those people's fault (although I have seen drivers do other stupid things, like keeping pizzas vertically in their delivery backpack).

However it is the fault of the platform for advertising something and not delivering on its promise. The platform should be aware of how long it takes to deliver (taking traffic into account, especially for Uber which has access to that data already) and shouldn't risk offering deliveries if they can't reasonably guarantee the food won't be cold (or at least make it clear upfront - "this restaurant is far away and this might be cold - continue anyway?").

Again the problem here is we're talking about "move fast and break things" scum so being upfront and doing business fairly isn't part of their textbooks. Instead they hope most people don't kick up too much of a fuss and kick the ones that do. For what it's worth, I've never lost a chargeback case on these problems so seems like at least MasterCard agrees with me?

Not to mention if these were one-offs and everything else was great it would be somewhat excusable, but the other scummy things I've noticed (like lying about the restaurant being slow for their failure to have enough capacity) seems like this is not a one-off and the entire business plan is to be as scummy as they can get away with, preying upon unsuspecting customers who might not know they can do chargebacks.

> if you can't suck up the gamble that is delivery food

The problem is that it is not advertised as a gamble, quite the opposite actually. When a supplier sells me a product/service I expect them to deliver on their promise or compensate me if they get it wrong (I have been on the other side of this and made sure to compensate my client to make up for my failure). This is how business works in most industries, there's no reason why it should be different here IMO.

Here is a tip - If you don't own a microwave, you should not use any delivery app.

If you're fine paying for the company's mistakes yourself that's your problem, but don't expect others to do the same and accept a lower value than was promised and advertised.

No wonder these delivery apps can't turn a profit even with such a high markup. These customers are jerks ruining the ecosystem for everyone else.they just keep hopping from app to app as they get banned issuing chargebacks on food they ordered and ate, because it was cold!

We might need a food credit score to get on these apps soon

If they can't turn a profit by reliably delivering the product that was ordered & paid then either they're doing something wrong or it's not a viable business model.

The expectation of regularly getting hot food has been set over the years by the usual pizza delivery services and others. If new competition cannot match that then banning unsatisfied customers will only be a long-term solution if the majority of customers accepts the lower standard, but they are not obliged to do that.

I'm not saying one should always refund the delivery based on any imperfection, but most customers don't do that, otherwise delivery services would never turn a profit. But apparently some people got really bad series of wrong or late deliveries, and that doesn't have to be accepted silently.

Pizzas maybe keep the heat longer than eg. a hamburger with Fries or a stake. I mean they are quite moist. I mean if you want hot food pizzas, soup etc. is probably what you can get unless the driver has a heater.

Serving a certain class of customers is definitely not a viable business model unless these customers are charged 100% markup.

I think these customers should just go pick up the food themselves, the rest of us can use the app. Department stores also ban problematic customers who return too many items, so this is not a new concept.

I feel that both you and the commenter you've been arguing with are making mostly reasonable statements. I also think that for this particular industry you're probably part of the 20% of customers who cause 80% of the problems, and that this is why you're being booted from these platforms. Note that I have not made any statements about the ethics of the platforms' advertising.

> The platform should be aware of how long it takes to deliver (taking traffic into account, especially for Uber which has access to that data already) and shouldn't risk offering deliveries if they can't reasonably guarantee the food won't be cold

In my experience, the platforms are doing the exact opposite. A lot of times the driver is there, the food is there, and the driver is being told to wait for more orders. I've called and asked before on some of the platforms where you have the phone number.

That said, I've never seen someone bothered by having to put some delivery food in the microwave, though. It's sort of expected. About the only case where I've seen that is for pizza, and pizza places have their own drivers anyway.

So it's probably a good bet for the platform doing what they do. If you can serve twice as many customers this way, and have to ban 1/5 customers who have no microwave, you'd still come out ahead as a business.

> keeping pizzas vertically in their delivery backpack

This is a failstate in the recent video game Death Stranding, which yes, sometimes involves pizza delivery.

This is worst kind of argument one makes. You are constructing it in a manner that only serves to make the other person look like a jerk while the reality is much more nuanced.

Without any prior knowledge of the actors involved you assign all good traits to one side; the restaurant created a hot meal and the delivery person really tried their best to deliver on time, and then assign bad traits to the customer, they were unreasonable and should be more understanding.

There are people who don't do the right thing and if I am paying for something then I expect to receive what I paid for. You don't know me. Maybe I am struggling financially and the meal I ordered was a once in month treat for my wife and children and we can't afford the luxury of eating out. Maybe we were all looking forward to a family dinner. Maybe the restaurant fucked up. Maybe the driver is running multiple delivery apps and making a killing in these while the orders go cold.

So you can just fuck off.

His argument is faulty, but the fact of the matter is that Deliveroo owns the relationship with the customer. It's ultimately Deliveroo's job to make sure good food shows up in the right place at the right time. Failing that in a competitive market they will likely lose customers.

There's lots of examples in this thread and elsewhere that frankly most of these delivery companies aren't great at what they do.

Additionally a lot of them are shitty to their vendors (restaurants) - the post that spawned this whole debate being a perfect example. It's not necessarily Deliveroo's job to treat their vendors like royalty, but we give Walmart plenty of well deserved shit for abusing its vendors, no reason Deliveroo should be immune to criticism.

This viewpoint is bizarre to me.

I get that it's difficult to reliably deliver food from restaurant to apartment in a time which is short enough that the food is still hot (or still frozen, or whatever). But I notice that some restaurants from which I order on Seamless are always correct, always hot, and typically delivered within 20-25 minutes. Others are hit or miss with some or all of those considerations. If some restaurants always get this right, it's hard to imagine that the fault lies with Seamless or gambling.

A restaurant business owner friend of mine is struggling to stay open and he lowered his fees to accept more orders on Seamless/Grubhub. Quite a bunch of people order food, receive it on time only to then, in a couple of hours, cancel the order. He filmed himself handing the delivery in to the person who ordered and showed it to the customer reps at Seamless/Grubhub and they don't do anything about it, he basically has to take the loss, multiple orders a day already. He isn't delivering to that address again if they re-order. But, at least here in NYC, there's no shortage of people who cancel they orders hours after they eat it.

How is it even possible to cancel an order hours after it's been delivered?

Seems like a technical problem or a shortcoming of the platform, but regardless, someone refusing video evidence like that (especially from who is essentially their business partner and has little incentive to commit fraud) is unacceptable. The problem is that support is outsourced to monkeys with no real power to investigate or change things and it's cheaper to fob you off than to assign the issue to someone with at least half a brain to see what's going on and make it right.

Because like all customer-focused apps, they are focused on customer retention and satisfaction. It’s much better to let customers cancel orders or complain after the fact and just refund their money, than it is to fight with them and have them leave a bad review - or worse, have them request a chargeback, too many of which will get you canceled from your card processor.

Meanwhile, the delivery platforms just push the cost back to the restaurants.

If restaurants had the guts to cancel their service with the delivery platforms, they could squeeze them into doing a better job, but at this time no restaurant can afford not to participate in the delivery economy, at any cost.

Reminds me about an article I read years and years ago about a company that was put out of business by Wal-Mart because Walmart would take almost anything back as a return and just forward it back to the company for a refund. They described getting tractor trailer loads back with empty boxes, boxes with most of the pieces missing, etc - all debited from their sales.

Hot food that arrives cold is the same thing as cold food that warmed up. I wouldn’t expect to pay for late food that arrives cold any more than I’d be expected to pay for a melted ice cream cone.

I don't think you can make excuses for UberEats or whatever. Food delivery is not a new problem. I have been ordering pizza and Chinese food for more than 2 decades. It is very rare when we received cold pizza. And most of the time when it happened resturants proactively refunded us or gave coupons for another time.

It is kind of amazing how many times UberEats, GrubHub, etc deliver cold food. Not just for me but vast majority of my friends report same thing.

As a consumer, I rather get refund so bad companies can go bankrupt before becoming too big to fail.

I've had a very high number of failures to deliver in a timely manner, and several times when I wasn't delivered anything at all.

Twice, I have been left food that I did not order. Mind you, my house number is plainly visible in three locations from the street. They didn't even ring the doorbell. Just dropped it off on the porch and left.

These problems span across all delivery services.

I don't know who does the delivery for groceries, but I am at an almost 100% failure rate for drivers to follow simple directions. "Leave the order by the large garage door" is all it says. I've only had ONE driver do that.

I've given up on food delivery except for the pizza place that has its own drivers.

As far as I am concerned, all these services can go out of business.

I too enjoy a soggy burrito and think anyone who complains about being glopp is unreasonable.

I've never had cold food arrive when ordering directly from a restaurant.

If the food arrives cold, it's the platform's fault. If the platform can't figure out how to get food to arrive warm, its providing, in one dimension, a worse service than you would get without the platform.

Honestly I find all delivery services to be pretty poor. Maybe it's because I don't tip but my food always get there pretty late and it is cold. I've tried tipping and it doesn't change much, it's just better to go to the restaurant and eat it while it's fresh.

> Maybe it's because I don't tip

I think that without tipping, you can expect your food to be delivered cold and late every order.

The drivers don't know in advance what tip they're getting, do they? Doesn't seem to be the case on UberEats, anyway. Failure to tip will eventually result in fewer available drivers and later/colder deliveries, but it's a statistical thing rather than an individual consequence.

I live out in the middle of nowhere and consider myself lucky that they deliver at all, so if the food is a bit on the cold side I don't normally take it out on the driver. I've had other complaints with UberEats, but overall the service works about as well as can be expected.

I have tried tipping, then removing the tip after the delivery, same stuff.

All of these comments make me thankful to have Favor as an option in Texas: https://favordelivery.com/cities. It's owned by HEB and does grocery delivery from HEB as well.

Favor is awesome, I used them a lot when they were a startup. HEB made a really good decision in acquiring them.

Totally had the same experience. Ordered Starbucks and they forgot the coffee. Was 3rd order in a row that was messed up. It's a cluster of mismanagement over there.

I've always wondered what happens if you take a bigco like Ubereats to small claims court over issues like this.

You waste your time, and small claims throws out your case because you agreed to arbitration with UberEats.

They usually don't show up and you get a default judgement

UberEats's customer service, even prior to this has been awful.

While I'd prefer not to use UberEats, they've basically become the only option for a large number of restaurants around.

I've ordered food from a variety of places, including large internationally recognised chains.

About 20% of orders have something wrong. Sometimes it's minor things. Othertimes it's significant - like drinks and dishes missing.

So, I report them to Uber, and get a refund.

However now I get these snarky customer service form emails a few days later that gives these snide tips like "To better improve your delivery experience - make sure to be ready to collect your order promptly" followed by a semi-veiled threats of "We take fraud seriously and will terminate any suspicious accounts"

I'd be more than happy to submit photos or videos showing that the delivery driver gave me one bag when it's marked "1 of 2", or what items were actually in the bag - but no, just shit customer service.

e: I forgot to add - there's also zero way to contact them other than for a specific order.

I wanted to report to them a number of fake restaurants that someone is running out of their apartment. (The restaurant address is an actual residential apartment building, there's no commercial kitchen) There's no way to do that.

I hear you. I hosted an event for one of Uber’s earliest investors and UberEats f@cked up the order and showed up 90 mins late. I even called the restaurant a day in advance. Lots of finer pointing. Never trust them again.

This whole food delivery app business is a rip off for small restaurant owners.

The owners of a few restaurants I frequent all seem to hate these apps for how much they charge them. I heard approximately 30-40%. Sure they do bring in customers specially now but 30-40% seems too high if you consider what it costs the apps.

How does it compare to cost of hiring a web guy to build out an order system (admittedly, a one time expense) and a full time delivery guy? Pizza places have been doing it for ages, so can’t be that prohibitive.

That you have your own website , app or accept request by phone doesn’t matter, the customers already have Uber or deliveroo app installed with their payment details saved and will use that because is more convenient than signup in another site.

What those apps charge to the restaurant is the money they expend on advertising to have those customers on first place. And the more money you expend on them, more money they will have to outbid you on marketing.

If you are searching on google for any place , you will see almost always advertising from those platforms before the owners site, just like booking does with the hotels, and like that the solution is to give some perks to people that reserve on your own site with reward cards or similar things, and also expend your own money on advertising instead of letting those platforms profit from you.

> That you have your own website , app or accept request by phone doesn’t matter, the customers already have Uber or deliveroo app installed

I dunno, one rarely wants just some generic burger/sandwich/pizza/sushi, brand loyalty in restaurant business tends to be strong.

I might be in the minority, but I usually start off with the restaurant Web site, and then just end up using whatever takeout/delivery app they link to.

I’m not sure what it’s like in the US, but at least in the UK I understand that food delivery demand has plummeted.

I initially thought it would be higher due to people isolating and now shopping, but a lot of people now have less disposable income to spend on expensive food delivery. Also less availability (restaurants closing down)

Here in NL it's exploded. During lunch and dinner times Uber / TakeAway / Deliveroo is all you see on the streets.

For many restaurants this is the only income they have and it's highly encouraged to order some.

Not many people have gone down in disposable income, though. That might be a factor.

Netherlands hasn't had increased unemployment due to COVID?

Not yet. A combination of work-from-home, a fairly limited lockdown and a variety of state and city schemes for income support for entrepreneurs, small business and a furlough program seem to have limited the impact for now. We’ll see in 5-6 months I guess.

No we don't have a full lockdown. Many work from home, some in A/B teams and if your business had to close (cafés, restaurants without delivery, pilot) you still get paid except your company can get it reimbursed via the government.

So basically our economy kinda just runs on, even though a lot less is happening.

Restaurants have switched to delivery if they can. Most people I know actually have more money now, since you can't really go out and spend it. And May is usually the month where Dutch people get their 13th month (bonus).

Our economy is in the toilet. Large parts of it at least (that aren't very visible).

We'll see the wave of defaults and bankruptcies in a couple of months.

Define "our".

The economy of the country The Netherlands

Thanks it was a bit ambiguous. I hope your economy improves soon :)

The statistics seem to say otherwise - https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2020/16/fewer-employed-in-marc...

That report says there was a drop of 0.2% in labor participation in March. That's not a lot.

There's significant demand, DoorDash, Instacart, and others are hiring drivers to meet demand.

And less reason to order delivery. At least if you own a car, driving to pick your own food up is easier now (less traffic, no parking issues, you are less likely to be in a social event that prevents you from leaving). And one less potentialy infected person handling your food.

And a good excuse to get out of the house for a few minutes.

And an excuse to turn on your car, and prevent the battery from dying.

friendly reminder that just starting a car isn't going to prevent the battery from dying. You need to get in a decent drive and a 2 mile jaunt to McDonald's probably isn't enough.

It's better than nothing, no?

yes, but you don't do it for the battery. You're supposed to do it because it circulates fluids

Starting the car takes a lot of power from the battery (the battery has to run the starter motor to crank the engine), so if you don't drive the car long enough to recharge the battery to at least where it was before the trip, you'll have less charge than you had before. If you repeat that cycle enough times, the battery will eventually die.

> so if you don't drive the car long enough to recharge the battery to at least where it was before the trip, you'll have less charge than you had before. If you repeat that cycle enough times, the battery will eventually die.

I've not tested the low threshold, but a 20 minute drive seems to be more than sufficient.

I'm surprised why cars still don't include a charge controller that counts the amount of energy in/out of the battery and gives you a battery gauge, or even a simple voltage gauge.

We can do it just fine in cheap laptops (with lithium batteries which require more complex charge management), why can't we do it for cars that cost tens of thousands?

Cars have had voltage gauges for decades. The really aren’t very useful because essentially by the time the battery reads less than its nominal 12v it’s basically dead.

True but it will at least confirm that the battery is dead, as opposed to something else. I remember back when I was a kid my parents' car would not crank (you hear the solenoid engage but the engine doesn't turn) and nobody had any idea what it was (if you're not a car person and this never happens to you it might not be obvious especially considering all the other electricals still work fine on the slightly lower voltage). A voltmeter showing below 12V or a "low battery - <12.2V" light would've quickly cleared that up.

Basically all cars monitor battery voltage. Many models even have a dashboard gauge for it. But what is that information useful for, other than diagnostics? Why give it dashboard real estate? Besides, you can always pop open the hood and check the battery with a $12 multimeter.

My fire department bought a new ambulance.

Emergency lights use a lot of power, as you can imagine. Even the LED ones. But we also don't want to idle on scene for a while.

So new ambulances (and engines, too) have a nice feature. Leave the lights running. Turn the engine off.

When the battery voltage gets low enough, the vehicle will start the engine, let it run til the voltage is better, then shut itself back off.

Nice, but a bit deadly in an enclosed space due to fumes.

At least here a drive to McDonalds results in a 15 minute wait in the drive through, so there's more charging going on than just the trip. In n Out is even worse, their line fills up the Costco parking lot...

And a good excuse to just drive for a bit, if you find it highly enjoyable, like I do.

I have done the opposite. Before this, I would do take out once or twice a week and just pick it up on my way home from work. Never used delivery apps. Since lock down, I use Doordash 2-3 times a week.

+1 for driving being easier. We park a car on the street in Brooklyn. Normally this is a huge hassle where we have basically memorized when are good times to use the car so we can find a spot again. But twice now we have used the car and found our original parking spot still available.

Nope, it's seen nearly triple the usual demand in the US.

Here in Los Angeles, food delivery demand is way up. Almost all restaurants have switched to delivery/takeout only, and lots of people are doing delivery for food.

Dine-in service being illegal has certainly made takeout a popular option around L.A. I do wish more people wore masks to pick up the food inside the restaurant, however.

Availability seems to be an issue all around. After an early lockdown surge of restaurant additions in DoorDash, now listings which appear to be available and open have a decent chance of getting your order rejected, or just dropping off altogether. Restaurants are having a tough time right now, and it remains to be seen if poorly-advised re-openings will have any short-term positive effect on business.

In addition to less money, as you pointed out:

1. People have more free time from being stuck at home, unable to work, so less need to rely on delivery apps.

2. People get tired of being stuck at home and one of the few permitted reasons to leave is acquiring food.

The thing that I noticed is that because we're more worried about food supplies, people are making sure they're stocking their fridges and being much more careful about ensuring they've got food for every meal - because they aren't just going to pop out to grab something. As a result it's much more difficult to justify ordering takeaway, because you've got to eat the food in the fridge before it goes off.

This is mostly accurate in the Bay Area.

People who already had the means to rely on Uber Eats, continue to do so. But the rest quickly realize that paying $22 for a meal instead of $8 isn't worth it

Not sure how DoorDash compares but what often made me pause on ordering UberEats pre-pandemic was the way they do the service charge. It is a percentage (I believe 15%?) of the cost of what you are ordering, and it does not appear to go to driver at all (tip is a separate prompt + there is a delivery fee)/clearly doesn't go to the restaurant. I don't understand why I should pay Uber a percentage based on the cost of the meal, when GrubHub and some others operate on a flat rate service fee. I would sort of understand if it had to do with order size, but when you start adding higher end restaurants it really feels like a rip off. And it also makes their "deals" feel really hollow because who cares if delivery fee went from $3.99 to $0 when you will often still have a >$10 service fee?

>GrubHub and some others operate on a flat rate service fee

GrubHub charges the restaurant a percentage, it just hides that in the cost of the food on it's platform rather than making it explicit.

A lot of these companies do this scummy thing. They charge delivery fees, "service charges" and silently inflate the prices or charge the restaurant a commission which means the price of the food itself is still higher than what they actually pay out to the restaurant.

I don't use UberEats because I've found it to be dramatically more expensive. The same order from DoorDash, GrubHub, etc are often $5-10 more expensive on UE due to both higher prices from merchants and Uber charging higher fees. The only people I know who use UE for delivery are already "locked in" to Uber with their credit card, having lots of points in their rewards program, etc.

That's probably because UberEats isn't subsidizing those purchases and reflecting real underlying costs. DoorDash is still a private company and has the leeway to subsidize a lot more.

UberEats losing market share to DoorDash is indicative of UberEats leadership failure. DoorDash engineering is bad, DoorDash policies are bad, DoorDash feeds their PR machine often.

Additionally, UE software is bloated and user-hostile compared to DD and GH.

Unfortunately, none of these facts necessarily line up to support your claim.

Uber Eats does not have 'billions' - Uber does. The 'cost' of that market share is unknown - who is subsidising and by how much more?

Maybe 'Uber Eats' is a 'marginal strategy' in that they can leverage the slack time of their drivers into doing something else.

Market Share varies from country to country.

They may actually be using their $ to gain market share right now, why would you imply otherwise.

Their layoff could be for any number of reasons: convenient opportunity to trim the fat, close down some projects and do a 'one time writeoff', it maybe mostly just a covid reality. It's possible they are laying off more heavily in areas that don't have Uber Eats.

Billions in the Bank is not for a 'rainy day' it's for any and all sorts of things.

It would take some specific information with respect to Uber Eats to see how well they were doing with it.

I've switched to running my own delivery and just grabbing takeout. Cheaper, faster, warmer food, restaurant gets more money, such a win win.

The primary reason I don't use them is they have 0 customer service, it's impossible to talk to a real person for help when your order gets screwed up or your driver is a no show (happens a lot).

UberEats app is somewhat buggy too. I also feel they lose out when it comes to overall restaurant selection.

Their support is outsourced to monkeys which is most likely by design to make you give up. If you persevere enough they will "magically" (for no good reason, given the circumstances haven't changed) give you a refund to shut you up, and if not, you have enough evidence for a chargeback anyway.

Charging back those orders would be the right thing to do to discourage such behaviour.

UberEats is suffering from some brand confusion. "It's Uber but for food." "It Ubers your food." Lots of ordinary people didn't bother to understand what this service does, even though they use both Uber (for rides) and other food delivery services. When I saw the first UberEats ads, admittedly just out of the corner of my eye without bothering to dig in, it sounded like a service that will give me a ride to dinner.

My UberEats experience in west Los Angeles during quarantine has been perfect. When traffic is bad there are more delivery problems (and customer service is truly the worst ever) but recently it's been amazing.

Fees are about to be a big issue though -- to the end user UberEats is a full $2.99 more expensive than Postmates for < $15 subtotal orders. I don't know if that means Postmates is taking an extra $2.99 from the restaurant for those orders.

Either way though, the % of restaurants' orders going through delivery services surely just went up dramatically so those fees are now going to make a bigger impact, I'm sure we'll see the ecosystem change soon.

haven't tried in a while, but the last time I tried UberEats, it was much more expensive than DoorDash. IIRC, DoorDash is basically a flat delivery rate for each restaurant, while UberEats delivery pricing is more like hiring a point-to-point uber driver. if that's still the case, it's not hard to see why people would prefer DoorDash.

It's definitely more expensive than most delivery apps, but idt it is even because of the delivery fee, which usually appears reasonable. They kill you on the percentage based service charge. Which is maybe trying to makeup for different delivery logistics, but it definitely doesn't explicitly price based on delivery difficulty- which makes it much more annoying to me.

The only other app I noticed doing this is Caviar. Perhaps they assume that people ordering from steakhouses will largely not care about the extra service fee, so it makes more business sense to jack up the price as much as possible. But personally it has stopped me from ordering on multiple occasions.

> The only other app I noticed doing this is Caviar.

DoorDash does have a percentage fee. For me it shows "free" delivery and taxes and fees. Tap on taxes and fees and there's a service fee.

I have a Dashpass, so my service fee is cheaper, but I think it's 11% without the pass based on looking at some of my past orders.

I just tested a couple restaurants that are on both Uber Eats and DoorDash and it's pretty mixed in terms of cost. For some reason the delivery fees are really high on DoorDash for some restaurants, but for others they are "free" and the lower service fee tilts things in their favor.

Sometimes the price of the items themselves is different.

Shop around

A lot of my friends moved to Doordash since they teamed with Chase Sapphire Reserve for free delivery.

The timing of the CSR deal was amazing (for customers at least). All of my friends have switched to DD too because of it.

Haven’t heard of the deal? How does it work? Using CSR as a payment method?

https://www.doordash.com/dashpass-v2/chase/sapphire-reserve/...

https://www.doordash.com/dashpass-v2/chase/sapphire-preferre...

...shows some for Sapphire Preferred. Looks like a year of DashPass for free.

https://help.doordash.com/consumers/s/article/Chase-Partners...

I still have a huge problem with DD from their tip-handling, though. I know they revised it somewhat but they held out longest and have been the shadiest. I'm disappointed they're winning.

Yes you get DashPass for a year or two. Forgot. And then just filter stores by "DashPass". Same with Lyft and Lyft pass.

Thanks for the tip. I don't know if I'll ever use it because the options around where I live are pretty terrible. But maybe I'll be desperate some evening.

I did :-) I'll never use it enough to remotely justify the normal service, but if I end up using it a few times, why not?

In general I would agree with you. My sense is that UberEats can't possibly absorb the huge loss of business of Uber's "main" product line. I also feel that Uber's problems will persist for at least 15-18 months, if not for longer.

In this case, you still need to considerably cut your workforce, to be able to use that cash for a "very long" rainy day.

Just IMHO. I can be completely wrong on all accounts.

I tried to order food with DoorDash. I couldn't figure out how to use the app. I entered my address and selected a nearby restaurant. I picked a couple things on the menu and added them to my order. Never was able to figure out what to do from there. There didn't seem to be a cart or order or anything and there was no call to action. I gave up after a few minutes and deleted the app.

A “view cart” button appears at the bottom of the screen when I add an item to my order (iOS).

Yes I saw that icon, nothing ever showed up there. No badge and when I touched it I never saw what I had already added. I started by tapping the first restaurant they suggested. I viewed the menu, picked an item and set the quantity and added it to cart. Then I picked another item and did the same. I figured that would feed me so I tried to order it. No evidence of any previous interaction was discernible. The cart was empty. Any time I touched the cart icon I just ended up back on the main page of the app and had to pick my restaurant again.

I thought maybe I was picking a restaurant "outside of my delivery range" so I made sure location services were on. No change. The first thing it does is ask for an address, I shouldn't even have to give it my GPS coordinates but hey, who would test that right? When I enter the address I shouldn't even be able to see restaurants that don't deliver to me so I doubt that was the problem.

It just simply did not work at all. I'm not dumb, I tried to give them my money and couldn't figure it out, maybe I finally got old. Maybe I got hit by a cosmic ray.

I can call the local pizza place and submit a delivery order in under 11 seconds:

"Hello mulmen, would you like to hear our specials?" ~2s

"No, thanks" ~1s

"Ok, would you like to repeat your last order?" ~2s

"Yes" <1s

"Is the card ending in 1234 still valid?" ~2s

"Yes" <1s

"Thanks, we will be at 1234 Main St #1 in 45 minutes." ~3s

<click>

Seriously, I timed it. 11 seconds is my best. They have a local call center for their many locations so they pick up almost immediately. Order takers only take orders. I can place an order on their webpage (they don't have an app, why would they?) in under a minute.

Pickup orders from other nearby spots is similar.

I don't understand the value these delivery services supposedly offer.

Pizza and Chinese restaurants are famous for efficient phone ordering.

Growing up I could get a pizza ordered in 3 seconds flat.

Finish dialing... doesn’t even ring once. “George’s Pizza”. “Large cheese pickup!” “Ok 10 minutes.” <click>

Now try ordering from Cheesecake Factory. They pickup, and then read a script just to then put you on hold, where you might wait for several minutes before they pickup and make you recite name, phone number (Interrupting you to repeat each segment back as you are saying it), ask you a half dozen questions, finally let you order, insist on repeating it all back to you, etc.

I think it’s funny you’d think a digital menu and checkout cart would increase accuracy. I guess you just can’t win either way.

The family owned Mexican restaurant across the street is really good too. Something something small business something.

There's another active thread at the moment: "Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life" [1].

I didn't think I had an answer but now I do:

"This isn't a technology problem."

All our shiny bleeding edge hyper-connected disruptive technology can't hold a candle to the level of service pizza shops and Chinese restaurants have been delivering for basically always. Using a pen and paper. Or maybe just shouting! Best we can offer is "Alexa repeat my pizza order" but is that really even better? It's almost exactly the same experience for the consumer but there's some surprising long term consequence like the pizza shop can no longer make ends meet.

I continue to be happy placing takeout orders over the phone like a caveman. A tech company that provides that level of service to their customers will go very far indeed.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092657

I reinstalled Uber Eats after receiving several generous coupons.

That app is awful. It took me six tries to login, because I genuinely couldn’t figure out that the “ok” button was a tiny black bar all the way at the bottom of the screen (I was using an iPad). I also struggled to change my default address from Chicago to LA, and almost ordered food in Chicago after changing my home address in the app. At multiple steps during the ordering process the UI randomly changed, making it really hard for me to find what I was looking for.

I’m not surprised that Uber Eats isn’t winning. Once my coupons are done I’m uninstalling that app and going back to Door Dash.

The Uber Eats app is leagues better than the half-assed, buggy Doordash app.

I can’t recall having seen bugs in Doordash, and my wife hasn’t complained about it. So YMMV I guess.

Well, DoorDash focused on food delivery since day 1. It wasn't Uber's focus until recently. Even if they are doing a great job now, it will take time to close the gap.

UberEats was founded in August 2014, easy to Google.

Would you say though that Uber's focus was on food delivery in the five and a half years leading up to March of 2020?

Yes, food was and is a major focus for Uber, it's part of their pitch for growth: they just don't do taxi/rideshare, they do deliveries one of the reasons they're valuation dwarfs Lyft.

Between high fees and more errors with UberEats, I've stopped using them. DoorDash has been decent, but not great. I reallllly wish DoorDash would add car make and color, then I'd have 0 reason to consider UberEats. I usually walk out of my complex around dinner time and there's between 2 and 5 cars waiting either to pick up riders or deliver food, so I get to go to each and ask if they're for me.

Doordash seems to have restaurant delivery reasonably well worked out. I've had minor problems with Doordash, and customer service fixes them. You get to see where the delivery person is on a map.

Uber isn't that good when they can't afford to operate at a loss. Their real edge was too much money from Softbank.

DoorDash just gives away coupons and if you order frequently, DashPass is a great deal. I don't know how DoorDash is functioning in a way that is so much cheaper to me the consumer.

I'm surprised to learn that DoorDash doesn't have the resources as they are giving away a lot of coupons.

The problem? Pricey. The business model doesnt work.

After a bad experience with Uber Eats, I swore to never use them again, and now I’m glad they are failing. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Good grief, using that quote for that purpose. Madness

I fail to see the issue.

Using that quote in this context essentially represents the epitome of first-world problems and privilege.

As much as you can hate a service, please consider the the primary "victims" of a layoff are the workers, not the company itself.

I don't think that any specific individual "deserves" to be punished for having worked at a company like Uber. There might be exceptions, and there might be a few specific individuals that crossed the line, but most people do their work and behave with honesty, and they don't deserve your negativity.

They will find new work and recover.

Uber will not.

Not necessarily. Unemployment at 20% in the US at the moment; not all of them will find another job.

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