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.
Btw how many times did you heat up and eat the food anyways after getting your refund?
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.
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."
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.
We might need a food credit score to get on these apps soon
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.
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.
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.
This is a failstate in the recent video game Death Stranding, which yes, sometimes involves pizza delivery.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 think that without tipping, you can expect your food to be delivered cold and late every order.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My guess is not.
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?
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.
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.
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.