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Comment by spuz | Hacker News Reader

There is currently a thread on Reddit where hundreds are reporting having their orders cancelled but still being charged.

https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rj0a19/made_...

A similar thing happened to me. I still have an email that says "your order was cancelled but we'll refund you in 3 weeks". Three weeks later I still had no refund but since so much time had passed, their support refused to consider my complaint. After trying everything I could think of I eventually reversed the charge with my bank which took another 4 weeks or so. Then shortly after that I tried to book a taxi through Uber (not UberEats) and was unexpectedly charged the original amount for my cancelled food order. Again I had to get that amount refunded through my bank which again took weeks.

Most people will not bother to get their money back. Uber's business model is literal theft.

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I'll share my less dramatic experience, on the off chance others have seen the same:

Every few weeks I get an email from Uber Eats with a generous-looking promotional code, to the tune of 25% off. If I line up an order on the website and enter the promotional code, no discount appears on the order. If I refresh the page and re-enter the code, it tells me That code has already been used.

This has happened to me 3 times now, if I recall correctly.

It's not as if this can be blamed on my using a peculiar browser. Last time this happened I was using Edge, with no plugins or funky configuration changes.

I had the same experience with a couple food delivery services.

At first I figured it was a bug, after a couple more rounds I wondered if they counted on me deciding “whatever I’m hungry”.

Had similar issues with coupon codes from other non food services too…

Yeah, I never use Uber eats it sometimes do when I get one of those big discounts… but every time I do, I have issues like this. I usually get it to eventually work by following the email link and retrying a bunch, but the fact that it fails so often is always suspicious to me… are they hoping I don’t notice, or that I will say fuck it and order anyway?

I have a coupon code that keeps showing up in my email for something like $20 off from Uber Eats. I usually use Doordash, so I don't end up using it. Eventually they send an email warning that the coupon is going to expire soon, don't let it go to waste, etc. I don't care, so it expires. Then two days later, I get another coupon code for the same offer, and the same set of emails repeat.

This has repeated at least six times. I'm just morbidly curious how long this cycle will go.

Sort of unrelated, but I had a similar email issue after I moved between states earlier this year.

Submitted a request for a quote from a moving company, and included the specific date of move in the request. They called me, gave me a quote, but I opted to go with someone else. Moving date came and went, we got settled in, and about a week later the emails came in.

I would get one email per day informing me that they hadn't heard from me yet and needed to hear from me ASAP if I was still interested. They proceeded to include a comment that said they would not stop emailing me until they heard from me. Each email also appeared to be hand-typed by this person every day.

I wrote an email asking them if they even bothered to notice that my move date had come and gone, but stopped myself because, like you, I was morbidly curious. It took them three months of ignoring their, "We won't stop until you call us," emails for them to finally stop.

I looked at a used car (at a new car dealer) a few years ago, and got phone calls, one or more per day for weeks, until I called them back.

I realize that maybe the person was forced to do it by their boss, and people hate being ghosted, but it was so far out of my idea of social norms that I didn't want to talk to them even more.

If they're not taking the hint after 10 calls with no response, what are they thinking? How far will it escalate?

If I was just busy for a few days and wasn't ghosting them, what do they think they've accomplished?

wonder if this is just because these places are operated/owned by older people who are used to an era where people called all the time? Norms might have been different then… but even if that’s the case, they should be aware of the current norms.

I don't think older people expect to be treated like that.

The salesman was ~half my age, and I knew someone ~twice my age who had bought and serviced a car there and simply said they had no such experience, like I had.

I guess that older people do feel it's more of a faux pas to not return a call. But it's never been normal to go nuclear even so.

I have wondered if the reason for weird stuff at car dealers is simply that, with a commission-based position, you can basically let anybody who thinks they can do it try, and some of them are going to be weird overconfident people.

But I also figure that as a rule, really weird "customer service" is probably management coercion for some stupid reason.

I’ve had similar experiences occasionally with a few tech recruiters (this is an outlier experience not the general one). Incessant emails until finally one with something cute and a gentle note that they won’t bother me anymore. It’s really annoying because I feel cruel for ignoring their emails but it’s not like it’s going to change my mind. If your email got ignored just move on, but I do understand that the business incentivizes that behavior.

Literally every time I order from Amazon they offer me a free trial of Amazon Prime. I take them up on the offer around 80% of the time, use the free trial, and immediately cancel. I've had probably 8 free trials of Amazon Prime over the last five or so years and they are still offering it.

Genius. I keep declining it out of some misplaced sense of morality.

This has repeated at least six times. I'm just morbidly curious how long this cycle will go.

Possibly forever. This is the Bed, Bath, and Beyond advertising model.

Flooding your in/mail-box with coupons is a way of keeping the brand fresh in your mind. Considering the worthlessness of the coupons, and the small number of people who use them, it's more than worth the expense.

> Considering the worthlessness of the coupons

Are there a bunch of restrictions? $20 off sure sounds pretty good.

$20 is good to you. To Uber, it's an insignificant spec.

I haven't been in London in four years but still get regular offers of discounts quoted in Pounds Sterling.

I get similar codes and emails from a variety of delivery and meal kit services that don't work. I figure it's just another "innovative" growth/revenue hack.

I have also had this issue, but only in the last few weeks. The promotions used to work before.

The same happened to me. I didn't notice that the discount wasn't on the bill until 2 days later. I contacted UberEats and they said it was over 48 hours so they wouldn't do anything about. It was about 52 hours after.

I have used Uber Eats before and they are constantly sending me emails with $30 off coupons for first time orders only. Are they hoping I give them to someone else or something?

Typical modern tech approach to user problems. Sorry we tried, most customers are happy though so we're winning, move fast and break things etc

Haha, what is that screen?! "We didn't keep our part of the contract, but we are charging you anyway"?

How on earth did that make it all the way into the app.

Here you wonder what the programmers implementing this were thinking

They were implementing what they had been asked to.

at a certain point you have to take responsibility for your actions and the impact it has on the world. Sure, if you don't do it somebody else will. But what matters is that you weren't the one who did it and dirtied your hands. Yes, the CEO/management are responsible for the overall direction and tactics used by the business but the engineers are also complicit since without them the plan isn't executed.

1. I can't imagine a scenario where someone asks me to implement the message in question and I reply "I won't do it and if you insist I quit." 2. I believe the components on the screen ("You will still be charged" and the actual message) have been designed independently. Of course in the end there was someone somewhere who decided to combine them in the logic of the app.

Normally I'd tend to believe it was a mistake, but after several reports and their lax attitude to them it's clear it works as intended, at least for now.

> 1. I can't imagine a scenario where someone asks me to implement the message in question and I reply "I won't do it and if you insist I quit."

I guess this is your choice but I find it unethical. If you're a good engineer at Uber chances are 100% you can get a job at any other high-paying organization, so why choose to participate in this scheme?

My point is, neither of the 3 separate messages on the screen is morally wrong on its own. It is only when you combine them it becomes obvious is totally wrong.

As for the core of your point, frankly, half of the Silicon Valley would be jobless. Not just Uber programmers who already proved who they are by developing Greyball. The whole business of Facebook and Google is centered around tracking people. Amazon will happily accept fake reviews and products as long as customers pay they're happy. Netflix officially says they're competing with the time their customers use for sleeping. Apple will do everything to make their products environment unfriendly, unupgradeable, with ton of additional accessories produced only to increase their profit. So really, I understand your idealism, but the ship has already sailed and you can call yourself lucky if you can work on a product and for a company that are 100% ethical.

All the examples that you gave are strictly in the morally grey area. Where they end up on the spectrum is up to you as a person and what values you consider more important than others.

However, in this case, things are quite black and white. Someone pays money for food, they don't get any and then you keep the money anyway. Calling it anything other than theft is being delusional. If they did partial refunds or they only gave uber eats credit instead of money then this case would be in the same bucket as the ones you mentioned in your comment.

I work on an app for my company where requirements start as “we wish to show a message to the customer if their order is abandoned”. So I build out the feature and the requirements change to “we want that message to be customizable from the dashboard”. Now I have built a feature that could theoretically be built to function as in the screenshot, since I’m not longer in control of the text that is showed.

Thankfully my company isn’t scum of the earth, but it’s easy to see how multiple people assumed the features were being used for good intention, and a non-engineer used it to make a few extra bucks.

Why blame the greedy managers and owners at the top your overpriced pizza when you can blame the guy with a mortgage who did as he was told?

Besides they're as likely to tell the developers to code it up so they could do this in theory and then turn it on themselves.

> Why blame the greedy managers and owners at the top your overpriced pizza when you can blame the guy with a mortgage who did as he was told?

Nobody's absolving the managers or owners from their part in this issue. The point is that the guy with the mortgage decided that an extra room in his house or a bigger backyard is worth stealing from others. This isn't some ethically grey area, its outright theft that the engineer enabled.

> Besides they're as likely to tell the developers to code it up so they could do this in theory and then turn it on themselves.

I've never worked at Uber or any other big corp so I can't speak to how they do things there. This seems quite probable, but still doesn't completely absolve the engineer from responsibility. All it does is reduce their share of blame.

>Nobody's absolving the managers

Whether consciously or not, scapegoating their minions does exactly that.

This is a pervasive feature of American culture where the most guilty parties with the most power who have the least defensible motives use FUD to spread the blame around and it actually works. People buy this shit and even internalize it - something this thread is a living testament to.

This is the same shit that happened when the CEO of Boeing tried to blame the dead pilots and subsequently tried to throw his engineers under the bus and each time where there was even a shade of doubt a ready cohort of people stood ready to defend the self serving FUD he pumped out.

>I've never worked at Uber or any other big corp so I can't speak to how they do things there.

Only at small companies have I ever been asked to build $evilfeature. At big companies I get asked to build $featurethatcouldbeabused. The bigger the impact and the more morally wrong it is the more feature indirection there will be.

Either way it's good to know that when somebody with the power to deprive me of my sole income asks me to build a kitchen knife they intend to stab someone with there's a willing crowd on hacker news ready to claim that they dont get to hog all of the blame because I technically could have refused to make that kitchen knife and joined the unemployment queue.

https://libredd.it/img/g1o5jeeok8681.jpg

You weren't kidding. Fraud doesn't get more blatant than this

I'll admit that I haven't read their T&Cs, but how is this allowed? It blows my mind.

I’m gonna guess the screenshot is fake. Their support page still says he should get a refund: https://help.uber.com/ubereats/article/i-was-charged-for-can...

I have never had to do this, but I always figure that I can just cancel the transaction as fraud via my credit card. Possession is 9/10 of the law and all that.

Is there some limitation to this approach that I'm not aware of?

It depends - can you do without whatever account you are disputing a charge for? Amazon, Uber, Apple, Google and so on will basically just immediately close your account when you dispute any transaction. No more access to apps or books or movies associated with that account.

Yup I made the mistake of doing this with oculus sending me 4(!) quest 2 unit's when I only ordered 1.

They essentially ghosted me support wise so I did a chargeback. They then banned me from buying games. It took > 100 days to resolve it. Never buy hardware from oculus/facebook directly.

A chargeback is a nuclear option, and pretty much every company you will ever deal with will burn you as a customer if you exercise it.

If you have to do a chargeback you should never give that company access to your credit card again.

Yes indeed, so, companies that you can't trust, but can't afford to piss off, should be the definition of anti-trust targets.

In an ideal world.

Apparently Steam used to have a policy of shutting down the accounts of people who did too many chargebacks, locking them out of whatever else they'd bought before. [0] I'm not sure whether they still do, although their refund policy has changed since [0]. I'm also unsure if it's even legal to do this, especially in countries with consumer protection laws.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14545053

That's probably a good thing. Leaving an open credit card in the trust of companies without support is a recipe for trouble. If you purchased something download it immediately if you can't don't purchase vapor.

Your movies/books should be local. Your apps still exist on your local android phone.

Amazon seems to have customer service same as Apple but Google and Uber? Those places laugh at you when you need support..

FWIW, I've generally gotten quite good support from Uber in the past. I can't think of an interaction that didn't go very smoothly, on either Uber or UberEats.

This makes sense, as the feedback loop from how you feel about their product to how much revenue they make is immediate, unlike Google. If Uber were to piss me off enough, I wouldn't think twice about just opening Lyft every time I needed a car instead of Uber. I'm not very price-sensitive, but even my price-sensitive friends find it too much of a burden to check both options every time they call a car. This means we're all locked into an equilibrium where we spend large amounts of money with a single company, but can shift into a different equilibrium for very minor reasons. Hell, I think the last time I switched was because I got tired of all the little usability papercuts the Lyft app is filled with.

> Amazon, Uber, Apple, Google and so on will basically just immediately close your account when you dispute any transaction. No more access to apps or books or movies associated with that account.

Interesting, this makes total sense

I had them not deliver an order once. They kept telling me it looked like it was delivered on their end, and they refused to do anything about it. I regret not doing a chargeback.

I saw that reddit thread this morning and it was infuriating to see. What is the rationale here? Like at what meeting at Uber did they come to the conclusion a business can accept an order, cancel it, then keep the money. If a business is about to close, don't accept the order.

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