Phone is still the best way to order pizza
dan.bulwinkle.net
dan.bulwinkle.net
Worse, the app pretends to be an unrelated party when something goes wrong. "Sorry, you need to call the store. Look up their number, it's on the website." For me it doesn't add anything to the transaction, it only takes away.
The literal only reason I use the pizza app at all is for chains where I have no idea which store delivers to me. Rest of the time I've gone back to calling. Much faster that way.
I just stay logged in and several apps I have let me just browse and click on coupons.
Most of the apps in my area (Toronto, Canada) absolutely do not require account creation and allow you to just use a ‘guest’ account; usually just requiring (reasonably) your phone number.
As to why I’d want an account to order?
Let’s say I have a local favourite pizza joint and a favourite pizza I like to order. Having my personal info and payment info already filled out and hitting ‘reorder’ makes ordering and paying a literal 5 second experience.
Since it’s optional almost everywhere online and in app here; I don’t see the big fuss.
I ordered from Jolibee last night and was happy to find out I didn’t need to make an account, since I don’t eat there often; unlike my local pizza joint. I used the guest system and my girlfriend just gave them my name and picked it up.
I do agree that the site which is closest to the customer should be providing the support.
The only way that'll be fixed will be with legislation. It's not only Uber, it's Google et al - they all into it.
Simply, they need to be halled kicking and screaming to plow some of their enormous profits back into customer servive.
Trouble is consumer protection law is decades behind where it ought to be.
Potentially, but on the other hand, card disputes are a thing and I'm baffled as to how little people know about them or have misunderstandings such as them only being available for credit cards (the law may give you extra protections there, but the standard Visa/Mastercard dispute rules apply equally regardless of whether it's debit or credit).
Just like Uber and similar Silicon Valley scum gets away with this because they have a monopoly and can do as they please, so do the card networks - and the card networks are on your side in this case, so use that to your advantage.
Right, and reckon I'm no exception.
One of the principal reasons why we have democratic governments is that they are there for the protection of the citizenry.
The trouble is that by the time governments venture into these murky areas much damage has been done. Here, the problem is that no one has spelt out the details in advance —i.e.: what the ground rules are and the consequences if they are broken. Alas, governments are never proactive in many areas where they need to be.
There's just so much going on in modern life that we can't expect citizens to keep up with everything that's going on. We need short, actuate and informative one-liners that people can check before and or during any operation that they're involved in. This ought to be the role of government.
In singapore there’s no Uber eats. But most popular is probably grab which is what I used. If I raised an issue with grab. I get a phone call. Explain to person over the phone and depending on the shop I get a new order or a refund.
The only time it’s difficult in singapore is some of the Indian food restaurants use their own delivery drivers, not the grab drivers. So there’s no status updates and any disputes must go with the restaurant directly. But when ordering it states the restaurant uses its own drivers so you can avoid ordering from them.
I had a huge delivery of Chinese food left on my doorstep (it was still quite hot). Obviously, delivered to the wrong address. The bill was fully itemized and stapled to one of the Uber bags and it came to just short of $200 but there was no correct address and no telephone number to be found on it anywhere.
Anyway, I did my best to contact Uber Eats to get the delivery person to collect it but to no awail. Checked everywhere for a telephone number including searching the internet and found nothing except the number that explained how to place an order. When I rang it, it had a recording - no hunan to be found anywhere.
I couldn't log in on online as I didn't have an account.
And no one reappeared from Uber to reclaim it.
Anyway, I gave up. There was so much food I couldn't get it all into the freezer. It lasted several weeks. Saved a lot on food bills over that time.
Damn fuckwits!
In that sense they're not fuckwits but their ethics are in the gutter.
It is sad to see that prediction coming true in various fields. This strong bias against having customer service people, against customers having any way to talk to a person, is noxious to society at large.
I guess in the same line of thought, I find the abandonment of the public phone system to be sad. Instead of replacing old phones with newer terminals with internet capabilities, we abandoned the entire system. Therefore making the world a bit more unequal and a bit more dependent on personal devices.
FWIW uber has had a web app for years now, and before that there were a plenty of unofficial clients. I remember calling Ubers from my laptop in 2016.
Glad to hear they have a web UI now. Even if I use the phone app, the web app is an important backup to have.
Ironically, that's exactly what the intended recipients were complaining about too!
What I'm still unclear about is that someone nearby ordered the food, as I didn't answer immediately why didn't he ring hone to base or to the planned recipient for an address correction?
> Moreover, you can't even phone Uber Eats!
Uber Eats does have human phone support.
https://gethuman.com/chat/UberEATS
UberEATS Phone Number: 800-253-9377
They said no such vulnerability existed. I sent them video. They said I must have been doctoring the video because they couldn't reproduce it. They then banned me.
This was in 2015.
They were then sued because the vulnerability apparently identified someone's affair[0].
I sent my email exchange with Uber to the attorney who sued Uber, letting them know that they were aware of the bug two years prior. You know, because no good deed goes unpunished.
I get by just fine with DoorDash and Grubhub these days, but both of those platforms have the same issues that UberEats does.
---
> I get by just fine with DoorDash and Grubhub these days, but both of those platforms have the same issues that UberEats does.
To get back to the original point, don't you think you would be better off saving as phone contacts the few restaurants you buy from, or maybe writing down the numbers on the fridge if you live with other people?
After a particularly frustrating instance where Uber told me to cancel but didn’t refund me for me, I did manage to find a support inbox that’s read by an escalation team and I had a real life human calling from SF let me know that they would refund me.
The effort it took to get the refund was ridiculous though as every contact option Uber presented me resulted in robo responses telling me since I initiated the cancel that I’d be responsible for food costs, even when I included chat screenshots of their agents telling me to cancel.
If you're in a metro area ordering during ordinary hours and having this happen, it's almost certainly because the restaurant has developed a bad reputation and people refuse to work with them. The thing about Uber's intermediation is that if you had this sort of experience by ordering directly through the restaurant, you'd rightly associate the experience with the restaurant's failures, but with Uber, it feels like Uber failing.
> a particularly frustrating instance where Uber told me to cancel but didn’t refund me for me
UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food. They have no special powers here. Expecting one to refund "for" you is like having a mail person show up at your door and then berating them for the screwup of whatever business sent you the wrong thing, etc.
This is to be expected, but it's not clear how this is relevant to your parent given it appears to have been Uber customer-service agents directing them to cancel, not a driver.
Do you mean delivery drivers refuse to pick up from there? How is that a customer's problem? That's a potential breach of contract between Uber and the delivery drivers.
Uber Eats positions itself as an end-to-end managed service where you pay money to receive delivered food, and charges hefty fees (on both sides of the transaction) for doing so. It's up to them to make sure this works by implementing appropriate penalties for drivers or restaurants who default.
However in typical Silicon Valley fashion their business model is to screw everyone so I'm sure the restaurants and delivery drivers have equally little recourse when things go wrong or to provide feedback so bad/misbehaving actors are allowed to remain as long as it's not causing a problem for Uber.
> UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food
Not really. FedEx/USPS doesn't manage the customer relationship, doesn't broker the transaction nor takes a fee off the transaction amount itself.
It's not (necessarily), but it's not the drivers' problem, either. It's the restaurant's problem—just like it's their problem if no customers want to do business with them because their food tastes bad, or if their suppliers refuse to do business with them because they're always late paying invoices, etc.
> That's a potential breach of contract between Uber and the delivery drivers.
You can't have a breach of contract for contracts you don't pick up... Or are you implying that you believe the relationship between Uber and their contractors is/should be one where the driver has to take every offer that Uber sends them? If so, are you a freelancer? How would you feel about an arrangement where, because you agreed to work with Marcy in Q2, then when Albert comes to you in Q3 and wants some work done, you have to take it no matter how bad Albert's offer is—e.g. one which very well might turn out to have you working for less than minimum wage—or without regard for whether you find Albert to be a loathsome, demanding prick?
> FedEx/USPS doesn't manage the customer relationship, doesn't broker the transaction
Neither do UberEATS drivers. That's the entire point of the metaphor. (Having said that, I misread your original comment, which other comments have pointed out.)
I'm not sure what this means exactly or how it's relevant. In these instances, it's not the driver's fault, it's Uber's fault. They are taking orders they can't fulfill and then denying refunds when you cancel until you figure out how to escalate it to a human who can do things other than press canned-response buttons.
The order status will stay on "preparing your order" for an hour while I know full well (by calling the restaurant directly) that the food was ready for over an hour. Sometimes it'll switch to "driver on the way to pick up" and then back to "preparing your order" which makes no sense.
Deliveroo is was similar in that aspect back in 2018, not sure if that's changed now.
Regarding your refund, a chargeback is the typical way to deal with such scum, and the evidence (chat screenshots) will make it an open & shut case.
Oddly enough, I've NEVER had this issue with DoorDash. I think DoorDash simply makes restaurants unavailable if they don't have drivers, whereas UberEats ALWAYS takes the order and then simply doesn't fulfill it if they can't. What you say about "preparing your order" is 100% correct. There isn't a "waiting for driver" status, so if there is no driver on the way, it stays at "preparing..."
This is a particularly terrible customer experience since you almost always time your deliveries so you eat them right when they get there and you are hungry when they arrive. By the time you realize Uber is not going to bother fulfilling your order, you've already probably been waiting 30 minutes, cannot cancel then without being charged, and have to start making other plans for food as you get hangrier and hangrier. It's even worse when you're getting food for the whole family delivered and have to deal with hangry kids!
If that happens, that is the last time I order from that restaurant.
Uber Eats wasn't much better and tried to still make me pay for delivery fees even when the only item in the order was wrong/damaged, but a chargeback quickly took care of that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rj0a19/made_...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-eats-delivery-drivers-e...
It would never have occurred to me to take bites out of customers food but if you see just how little these app drivers earn and consider how little loyalty they feel to any one restaurant or platform, it's kind of understandable.
It was so weird as this was about a $150 sushi order and the restaurant was fairly nice.
Uber refunded the meal immediately after seeing a picture.
When my kid doesn't get the meal we ordered for them, they don't really care that Uber Eats was quick to refund the order.
They're still hungry.
I don't particularly care about the cost being refunded, I've wasted 2 hours waiting for food that didn't arrive.
I've been using UberEats for years.
It meant a much larger range of restaurants became available to me - I don't drive, and these restaurants would otherwise not get my business.
Uber Eats has often been very good about giving me refunds for restaurant screwups.
However they sent me an email after a string of restaurants fucking up orders - missing whole meals, or significant parts thereof. At the time, they didn't ask for any kind of supporting evidence, just click through the app and it would instantly refund you.
Then they sent me an email saying that they've detected an "unusual" number of problems, and that they'd like to remind me that fraud is illegal and they may take further action if they detect it. No way to appeal, no way to say "Hey, if you're going to subtly accuse me of being a fraud, at least let me have an opportunity to provide some information".
Uber Eats now (sometimes) asks for some evidence, and it apparently goes off to some human for review (or they just stick a ~30-90 minute delay timer on the processing queue to make it look like a human reviewed it).
Now, most restaurants around me no longer have their own delivery options, and direct you to Uber Eats or a whitelabelled service that just submits the order through Uber Eats or Menulog anyway.
There's a number of fake restaurants now listed on Uber Eats around me, even some chains of fake restaurants. One of these fake-chains is operating out of low-quality hotel kitchens and is clearly heating up commercial cook-chill/frozen meals. Another is operating out of a residential apartment building from someone's home (not a commercial kitchen).
Good luck trying to report these to Uber. They don't give a shit.
While I'm dumping these on Uber, they're unfortunately not the worst.
Menulog are IMO worse - they have all the same problems as Uber in terms of fake listings, but also work with restaurants that keep getting bad reviews to wipe out the bad reviews and re-list them as New. All the business has to do is say they've been sold to new owners, delete the old listing and re-add and hey presto, those 500 1-star reviews saying you've got a shit product are turned into 30 5-star reviews about this amazing "new" restaurant, rinse and repeat every few months when business drops off.
When I talk to somebody on the phone I feel a lot more sure.
I worked at a place near Union Square, NYC and was in the habit of ordering food for pickup from sweetgreen because I knew it all worked. I have thought about ordering from restaurants in Collegetown, Ithaca from the web but just haven't gotten in the habit because I don't feel the certainty.
A restaurant with absolutely excellent process for handling walk-in traffic can fail entirely faced with an occasional online order. In their case they made the sub half an hour before I requested it be ready and stuffed it in some corner where they couldn't find it.
In the last two years I've seen the small facilities run by Cornell Dining go from handling almost all in-person order to handling a large fraction (between 1/3 and 2/3) of online orders. In-person orders are handled by Kanban-style process where the people making the food take orders at they clear work-in-progress. I'm not really sure how they handle online orders that aren't gated by this. I suspect there are many indirect effects, for instance, I think because the traffic patterns are more complicated it would be easier to walk out without paying for your food. (On the other hand, I'm a member of a cohort of middle-aged people who complicate traffic flows by going into line to pay for food before it is ready because that's efficient.)
Anyhow, once I know a place is good for handling online orders I'm inclined to do so. But if I'm not sure I'm much more inclined to go in and do things the old fashioned way.
I think this might differ if you're in the U.S or out, here in Europe often it is like this:
In the app/website you have an "account" that you get by entering data into form fields which takes a while, and which then gets stored into a database and is saved forever unless you go through some extra steps to make sure it doesn't which will be complicated by how well the app / website has been programmed to handle these potential extra steps (if at all)
On the phone you have an address that the guy writes down on the piece of paper for the delivery guy and is thrown out afterwards.
They’re on apps, but they write your order on a paper ticket if you are a phone, pickup order and only take your name.
Use an app for discovering new places and seeing what they offer and order direct by phone.
When I call the restaurant I ask them if they have their own delivery person, or if it's Uber. If it's Uber, I politely decline to order from them.
And you don't have to have an account, the address and payment details are filled in by the browser autocomplete.
So the friction is - click on the menu, click "order", type in the wireless transfer code.
Also - almost nobody orders "pick up" pizza here, so phone requires you to specify the address every time which is significantly more friction.
The competition is fierce and the delivery apps are very affordable.
For some restaurants this is not true, they save your (phone number -> address) mapping the first time you call, and in the future ask for confirmation whether the address is correct.
What is this wireless transfer code? Like some sort of payment system?
This is the sub-goal, but not ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to maximize the profit, with accounts created, all the analytics will work out, and they could do all kinds of promotions or targeted ads.
I guess that's the same reason why you are asked to install a mobile app whenever you visit Reddit mobile WEBSITE. It does not attempt to make your life better. At least it's not the ultimate goal of ecosystem.
Woe to the pizza company who thinks "we don't need to care about customer retention, our pizza is just too good."
I have dozens of pizza places to order from, all within delivery distance. Make ordering difficult, and as long as the competition is pretty much as tasty, I'll move on.
Yeah, Reddit's approach to making so difficult to access the mobile on a whim, especially in an ephemeral browser, is a straight up UX dark pattern. I use Reddit less on mobile because of it...
I want to stay in the browser where I have things like ad blockers and can open a bunch of tabs at once and bounce around easily, etc.
I do not install apps or create accounts.
As far as when there’s a problem, with the major food delivery app I use, I am refunded merely for asking. I’ve used it heavily during the pandemic and literally every problem was solved through the app.
With the situation in the US at least, trying to get anyone on the phone is an exercise in frustration. The app (for me, so far) has always been up. The employees don't have to stop making the product to take an order. They don't know the specials, or don't care to look them up which might be changing on an HOURLY basis. The app knows. On the phone I have to go through my order painstakingly each time; the app knows what I've ordered and I can single-click repeat it.
And honestly, all they're doing is taking my order and putting it into probably an admin version OF THE SAME APP. It's LITERALLY the old game of "telephone", but for something I want to buy.
And that is always the case. Just call instead.
Unfortunately you can't do that for everything. Just today I was practically forced to install and give away "my" phone number to the worst app you can ever imagine, just to be able to park.
So the hostility is perhaps less there.
And the user hostility only starts at the surface.
I do use guest checkout on sites I don't think I'll order from again or at least infrequently.
What's one more auto-generated row in my password manager's database anyway?
---
While typing the above (a bit of ▧am improv) I had this a bit of a "oh" moment as I envisioned the idea of the "good model citizen" a la China or the USSR, except instead of the... ideal being like *that* it's about being Your Best Most Optimally Saleable You.
Uhhhhh.
I should really have a password manager set up properly as well, but that's just another job, and scary in some way. I have a password manager but it's all manual, no autogenerating accounts or fancy stuff.
Having said that I think Domino's Pizza has a great process for ordering pizza on their web site where you build you own pizza and can then track the progress all the way to your doorstep.
damn, you're lucky. I remember a few phone calls a decade ago where some brand had a sale on burgers, but they had a policy of waiting for me to dictate the coupon code over the phone... ugh
1. The line is busy. The app is next to never busy.
2. The line has static and you are not heard correctly. Especially problematic for delivery or complicated orders. Or they may get your name wrong. My first name is common and my last isn't great over the telephone.
3. You have to remember what you ordered each time. Apps let me quickly re-order.
4. You cannot easily pre-pay (irrelevant if you have cash, but if you are like me and wish to never use cash again, having to pull out the card is annoying rather than just grabbing the pizza).
5. Most places now seem to be on DoorDash, so you can just order from there and avoid the additional friction. You also know you can get excellent customer service from DoorDash while a new restaurant is an unknown.
I don’t do delivery except pizza because I don’t want to pay a premium for cold food. Websites always have built in timers that take longer. Usually 45m.
Meanwhile I can call a pizza place, have pizza and wings ready in 15m, pay cash or whatever and have hot food. Order online, chances are it’s sitting there for 10m to avoid getting penalized on the SLA for online order pickup.
Plus, shitty middlemen like DoorDash are gross. Why would I want to have someone take a vig off my business and have a worse experience by any measurement?
The "its done" in the app or web page and it is within a minute or so of being able to walk out the door with it or have it show up. And ordering with Dominos you get a dominos driver - not a middleman.
The app and the screen on the wall said that my order was ready for 10 minutes while I stood there waiting for them to finish my order.
The food was terrible. Their chicken actually used to be good! Tonight the whole thing was just gross.
Their ability to have every franchise and user connected to one site is impressive, and the recent addition of a driver tracker app is neat/creepy, but really it's a fancy timer.
Hmm... do you feel the same way about the middlemen who make it possible for you to buy bread without ordering the wheat direct from a farmer in 5,000 bushel lots, storing it, grinding it into flour, and then making it into bread?
Everyone hates "middlemen", but if they're really not adding value they tend to get disintermediated fairly quickly.
I remember the bad old days before Amazon where if I wanted some weird bit of kit I'd have to go to the library, blow a few hours doing research to figure out what companies might make the thing (not always successfully!), then blow more hours making long-distance phone calls (very expensive back then) to try to find a company that a) had what I needed and b) would sell it in quantity one. It sucked. Massively.
> Why would I want to have someone take a vig off my business and have a worse experience by any measurement?
Because then you don't have to hire your own drivers and maintain your own online ordering system. Not all restaurants participate in DoorDash, by any means. Presumably the ones that do find that it adds value.
Also, I disagree that the DoorDash experience is worse. Strongly. To name just one advantage over the old ways, there was no GPS app that showed me when the driver was nearby so I could be prepared.
Wheat in metric tonne lots direct from the farmer costs about $350-400/tonne, or about $0.35-$0.40/kg. Kroger enriched white bread costs about $3.00/kg, more than seven times as much.
There are a lot of middlemen in there, each of which raises the price. On the other hand, I don't have to store a metric tonne of wheat, and maintain my own milling and baking facilities (I do make my own bread, but that's actually more expensive than buying cheap white bread... worth it, though).
Similarly, with DoorDash I don't have to interrupt what I'm doing, go to the restaurant, stand in line/wait for a table, then travel back home. Those are costs I avoid by using Dd.
Is it worth it? It depends on the individual. But no one is being forced into the transaction, and they are clearly adding value for many.
Eh, there have been many stories over the years about these delivery platforms doing pretty awful things to insert themselves as a middleman where they aren't wanted. Here's one from a couple days ago. [1] Other strategies I've seen stories about include claiming the location on Google maps and changing the phone number listed, buying a domain for the restaurant and hosting the menu (setup to order through the delivery service), and modifying the prices shown in the app to help cover delivery costs which could distort the perception of the value of the restaurant unfairly.
I'm not sure where I personally fall on it all. On the one hand, a generic delivery service should be able to exist, and if that generic delivery service ordered food, maybe they should get served just as any other takeout does.
On the other, restaurants are ending up with bad reviews because consumers sometimes think they're ordering directly from the restaurants and end up with cold food, stolen food, etc. Restaurants might package things differently if they knew they'd be in the car longer than the average drive home. I'm empathetic to restaurants wanting to protect their reputations. This is a bigger issue than Amazon delivering your package 30 minutes late, the food has a pretty short time where it'll be considered "really good" by the consumer, and a delivery service maximizing profit would like to get just one more delivery on the trip if at all possible.
[1] https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/restaurants/anti-doordash-re...
... but almost every pizza place has their own dedicated delivery people.
In short, by using the middleman, you're scamming yourself (through higher costs, and worse delivery because you're using random/shared agents rather than dedicated), or you're scamming the business (who ends up having to eat some of the costs).
That said, if you don't care about the business and you don't care about money (a single place to order pizza from is more valuable), then order away.
See above. I "don't care about money" in this context in exactly the same way that I "don't care about money" by not buying my own wheat in tonne lots and milling it into flour myself. Yes, that would be considerably cheaper (if I ignored the value of my time and the associated storage costs) but it would be highly inconvenient, and I don't just spend enough on bread to make it worth my time.
DoorDash pays the drivers well, so it’s using investor dollars to subsidize the service to entrench it and drive out competitive processes.
Your argument was was the same as the Uber argument at the peak type period. When the Saudi sovereign wealth fund was kicking in $10-20 for each ride, the hype argument was we would not need to buy cars because some AI robot magic carpet would take care of everything. Now, Uber costs more than the cabs did before.
This is the same.
Uber adds value by letting me call a ride by clicking on an app, and then telling me when it has arrived, rather than making me call the cab dispatch office, wait on hold, and then constantly look out the door to see if the cab is there.
> Now, Uber costs more than the cabs did before.
Not here, it doesn't. In virtually every city, operating a cab required that one purchase or lease a medallion, and those were very expensive (up to $1 million in NYC). Now that was a pure rent-seeking racket.
Those medallions are still out there, by the way. If Uber is really charging more than a cab, then the cabs will come back and undercut them.
The cabs are gone in most places. Why would someone go through the risk of getting cars, insurance, etc when Uber will notice a dip in business in days and crush you with discounts?
The NYC scenario is very different because medallions were a control in place to limit congestion; NYC in general and Manhattan in particular is a unique place.
Your experience is what parent refered to by that I think.
If you have the opposite of complicated orders, hard to orally convey name/address, no order to be remembered, and don’t want to prepay, yes your experience will probably be the opposite.
In my area I don't think I ever had anything ordered via phone or even walking to the counter ready in 15mins it is always at least 30 mins to 45mins, because they are busy with other orders. On the page I usually see they are setting it for 1h and then deliver earlier.
In the summer going to a normal restaurant was 1h waiting time for food as they were short staffed and not hiring more people because of pandemic.
- the restaurant is busy, nobody answers the phone.
- the restaurant is busy, somebody does answer the phone but they can't hear you over the noise of the patrons.
- the person who answers the phone marks down your order incorrectly
- the restaurant is busy, the printer ink or thermal paper smudges
- The app takes your order, because apps are never busy, but the restaurant is busy and they don't even start making your food until an hour later.
On the other hand Chipotle is always ready when I get there.
> "Hey could I get a large house special for pickup?"
> "Yeah it'll be ready in 15-20"
Then I go to the shop, tap the card while they grab the box with my phone number on it, and I leave. If it's a Friday, the time estimate is usually longer. Sometimes I'll order two.
2) Why does it take 40 minutes to make
3) Why didn't you just have it delivered
2) Shrug
3) They don’t deliver
Usually I order on a Tuesday when they aren't busy and that's why I get the short and accurate time estimate - they likely start putting it together almost immediately.
Even better, while you talk to the store you called, the order goes into some sort of pizza load balancer and gives the order to the least busy store with a good drive time to your house.
I’d seriously like to buy/have a beer for/with whoever designed it.
And in hindsight obvious in times of my phone transmitting my number to the other party.
... unfortunately its then hooked up to a bad webui to review/complete the order, and their text to data interface is bad at trying to guess what you want unless if you specify things exactly how they're written in the menu.
That's likely to be the problem. Also, a financial institution has vastly more complex interactions than "same as last time?"
Which might, or might definitely not be the highest priority to me.
At worse the pizza place has to ask for the address again if they're in a rush.
I find it a quite clever solution.
Which sucks because then you pay the app fees on top of everything.
I feel this.
I can literally call and say "I want a pizza" and unless I want different toppings, that is the whole process.
The next iteration of this clearly for them to call you when you are likely to be hungry (and/or drunk) and ask you this. :)
(Similarly, I also hate ordering at drive-throughs because the intercoms are generally terrible. I'll get out of my car and walk inside to order if that's an option.)
When I drive up, I just say "online order for function_seven" and they say, "cool, we'll have it at the window".
The staff taking orders from the speaker are often doing 2 things at once. They're also taking money from another car or prepping orders as well. They don't catch every nuance, and screw it up half the time. Not their fault! They're not being allowed to focus on one thing.
The app is like skipping that unreliable middleman and putting my order directly into their system.
Having worked in fast food for a long time, I've noticed that with the rise of ordering on mobile apps, a lot of the apps have started to nudge customers to customize their orders way more. It can be somewhat frustrating to be on the receiving end of orders that would normally sound extreme to order over the counter or through a drive-thru speaker, but the app makes it seem fine. They're usually not a problem other than slowing down the line, but getting them in a rush can be a nightmare.
I do have to say though, I do like the ability to browse the menu without feeling like I have to hurry up and order, and I think the benefits of ordering through an app generally outweigh the downsides.
Oh I can imagine. I'm mindful of not making each item have 5 indented lines below it with crazy swaps, omissions, etc. Mine are always a simple thing. Always just one add, remove, or swap.
A long time ago I used to order a Quarter Pounder with extra onions and no pickles. About a quarter of the time (heh) I'd get one with a mountain of pickles and not an onion in sight. I finally decided that I might as well learn to love pickles, and simplified that order to just "extra onions". Error rate dropped and—bonus!—now I actually like pickles.
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/838967-special-delivery-inst...
Their app's frequent customer program maxes out at 500 points display. I have 11000+ points. 2500 points is redeemable for a large ice cream cake. The staff writes me love letters on my box. Seriously, I have pictures.
How to do a food app right: 1. Let me customize my order with all available options 2. Store my payment details 3. Let me re-order with one or two taps.
I get hungry while coding, open app, tap recent orders, order again, pay, and I am done.
By the time I walk into the store, my food is ready. I walk past all waiting customers and enjoy my meal. :)
As an iPhone user, allowing Apple Pay in your app is a HUGE boon. I absolutely hate filling out purchase forms; the one tap + Face ID experience is impressively polished. Even though I used PayPal in the chick-fil-a app originally, I have noticed that I order CFA more often since they added Apple Pay due to the smoothness of the experience.
Even seeing an Apple Pay button on a website increases my personal conversion because using it is so seamless. Do with that what you will.
The same could be said for Google Pay, but I would enjoy that experience more if it used biometrics for authentication instead of CVV, even though CVV is probably a more logical/secure choice.
With apps or website, if orders are wrong, at least I can rule out miscommunication, let alone arising from a lossy information over voice.
I find people’s ability to converse / comprehension very poor. I worked a pizza job answering the phone in a busy shop and getting verbal instructions while some people change their mind is terrible.
A good app / website takes me under a minute to order a pizza, and it is consistently reliable.
Logging in gives me my order history, address, and preferences. Usually I have to login maybe every couple months. If that.
That's the perspective from the business end. Maybe taking orders over the phone is worse for the shop and its workers, because of difficult calls like that. It's not a problem for the common case of a decisive caller whose speaking voice is understandable over the phone.
> Logging in gives me my order history, address, and preferences. Usually I have to login maybe every couple months. If that.
This could just as easily be saved locally without a login.
Have you ever worked taking orders of any kind over the phone? I suspect not. The "common case" isn't nearly as common as you seem to think it is.
No. As I said I’ve done it. Customer and working at a pizza place.
Outcome is the same.
There’s probably a reason that drive through systems often now display a summary for customers rather than just verbal.
That being said online order would fix the issue. Maybe they just meed the pizza configurator part as an app, and you call in and give them a code pointing to a preconfigured pizza.
As soon as you want anything remotely custom, using an app or website is a lifesaver.
And the good apps remember your order for one/two tap re-ordering. Chipotle’s app is one that does this extremely well.
Their server needs a feedback channel from the stores. Or it should count the number of incoming items ordered per minute, and auto-adjust the "ready" time. Don't always show 5 minutes.
If the pizza’s ready in 7 minutes, you’ll be there in 10 and receive a hot pizza.
If the pizza’s ready in 55 minutes, you’ll be there in 10 and receive a hot pizza eventually.
You could theoretically try to offer more accurate arrival times, but then you’ll have to play queuing theory “fairness” games with the pizza queue versus in-person and phone orders to try and ensure that the pizza isn’t made too soon, as well as have to deal with people thay show up late and lie about the estimate shown in-app so they can get a new freshly-made hot pizza (which generates food waste). Doing this requires competent pizza personnel with a good understanding of how to manage expectations fairness, and if there one thing I would not expect from a Chipotle-sized business, it’s that — they’ll have maximized efficiency by removing human consideration from the equation altogether.
Surely technology can help improve this?
This is like ordering a chair by phone from a furniture store by dialing the number, saying "Armchair for pickup" and heading on over to the store.
Why reserve books online from the library? Just call them and say "10 books for pickup" and then hang up.
In my experience, if the guy on the phone is rude and lets you mess up your order, they are much more likely to produce a good pizza. Places will only be polite (or offer lots of options) if they can't compete on quality.
Me: I'd like a large plain pie for pickup.
Pizzeria: what's your name? [Name]. Okay $name, 15 to 20 minutes.
And we're done.
If you're ordering from a big 3 chain then you have to deal with a bunch of non-dedault options, but if you know what you want it can still be as easy as "I'd like a large stuffed-crust pizza with the hearty marinara". (Though plenty of people consider the big 3 to be pizza the same way that Olive Garden is Italian food... A rough facsimile, but not the real thing. I'm a little more open minded than that).
Pizzas are a lot more fungible than furniture or books.
When I’m at a decent pizza place, it’s spinach, Stilton, bacon, and red potato. Possibly with broccoli or a vodka base, if I’m in the mood.
At a more generic chain place, it’s pepperoni, feta, and pineapple.
Never seen those on the menu at any pizzeria.
The menus usually has 50~80 different pizzas listed, so there's usually something for everyone without major changes.
This sounds like the type of pizza common on the west coast, maybe California in particular? Possibly other parts of the world, but I'm less familiar with regional pizza varieties outside the US. In a traditional Italian pizzeria on the east coast those are simply not part of the regional variety. "Stilton" would get you a strange look. "red potato" would probably be met with "we can put fries on it". Bacon is very common. Broccoli and vodka sauce are a lot less common, but I see the options sometimes. A plain pie (crust, mozzarella, red tomato sauce) is the most common though maybe about tied with the most common topping, pepperoni. "Detroit" pizza is seen as an abomination by many pizza afficionados on the east coast, west coast, and Chicago, but I'm no pizza snob, and have been looking for the opportunity to try it, but have only seen the option from one of the big 3 chains and they're.never the same as the authentic regional varieties.
Also, if you’re ever in the French Alps, I highly recommend getting the raviolis on you pizza. Never seen that offered anywhere else.
35 minutes later, I go get the pizza.
I used to spend a lot more time giving specific ingredients, but I reached the point where it was easier to pick one or two of the 3–4 vegetarian pizzas they offer. No crust options (type _or_ thickness; it’s always thin crust).
Lots of traditional pizzerias will understand that and not offer much else.
LOL. All the time.
Me: "One large pie." Them: "Anything else?" Me: "Nope." Them: "15 minutes."
In NY/NJ, pizza is a language unto itself.
I don't have pizza place that would recognize me by voice because I might order from any place like 1x a year or 2x a year.
I love that I can go to most of medium cities and I don't have to drive around searching for food places because I can find them via app, whether I stay with friends or in a hotel and just order food for evening.
Then calling on the phone in English is not really a good option, calling using broken local language might be even worse than trying English :)
Then payment before order with my app account and card is also super easy and convenient.
That said, I think it is not super common use case but that delivery app makes my life a lot easier.
There is one exception to this rule, pizza places who are not the big three. The mom and pop who doesn't have an app.
Probably a midwestern thing.
It was a chore.
If you call you won't have a coupon, and they aren't going to tell you about any, therefore you're paying more. How do you find coupons? Check online, but now you're already there so why not just order it there?
A lot of coupons work either online or over the phone, but they're only advertised online and therefore that advantaged is largely to avoid more accessibility/disability lawsuits.
They will, I worked at both Pizza Hut and Dominos twenty years ago and if you asked for the specials we'd basically tell you the coupons. I think our script even said "would you like to hear the specials today?"
When I worked at a restaurant we had both - specials that everyone got and coupons deals that you needed a piece of paper for. They were similar as it was just typing a code into the register, the big difference is typing in the coupon code without a piece of paper was considered stealing and anyone who did that was fired on the spot. You also couldn't redeem multiple coupons at once where you could get any number of open specials you wanted. We always directed customers towards specials.
The coupons were a significantly better deal than the general specials available to anyone. The coupons were mailed to every house in a ~20 mile radius once a month.
I think there were one or two actual coupons at Pizza Hut, where you did need the actual code and the piece of paper, but they were things in the coupon books kids would sell to raise money. At Dominos basically the best deal was the carryout special, which is now even advertised online.
>would lead you to be caught.
Wouldn't. Pretty significant mistake from me.
One guy barely hid that he did it, he spent like ten minutes on the computer before any delivery. Except when the owner was there.
I am describing just giving them that deal regardless.
https://i.imgur.com/GOvnHcv.png
Sorry coasties, Chicago's the new pizza capital
Otherwise in ten years we'll be reading an article on The Atlantic that leads with a CEO behind bars, jumps to a young kid learning about the world in his uncle's Pizzeria, then to a shady security team searching for the whistleblower by cross referencing HN posts against employee catering habits, and finally a retired FBI agent that steps in to provide protection.
So yeah, pizzasnob, please don't start talking about your love for dobermans.
My local place has a website that doesn't quite meet the standard I'd hope for. But it does work, and if you order through it, they'll get your order right. It's a lot less hassle than ordering over the phone.
Then again, from my experience it was hard to find true Italian pizza in the US.
Fun anecdote: When I was in NYC I walked into a corner pizza place in Little Italy that sold these giant slices to-go. I asked them if they also sold Tiramisu. To my utter surprise the 3 or 4 Italian Americans present didn't even know what Tiramisu is. That day I learned it was actually just invented around 1980 in Italy. Today it's one of the absolute favorite deserts in Germany and every Italian restaurant serves it and even many non-italian have it.
A useful keyword to look out for if you want something (similar to) Italian pizza in the US is a restaurant that's marketed as "wood fired" or "brick oven". This will pretty much always get you a Napoletana-style pizza, regardless of your current US regional specialties.
Same experience as the app, no notifications
Dominos is happy to offer you those coupons and deals etc, in exchange for using Dominos's preferred platform (its website, which doesn't cost minimum wage) and providing your user data (via channel tracking the coupon, logging in etc).
A decent pizza place will charge more to let you skip all that.
In the age of data and free, ad driven services, "you get what you pay for" is paramount.
Tricking people into learning non-transferable skills is a tactic. If your hard earned skills in configuring your iphone aren't going to transfer to android, neither are you.
The connection I was trying to make is I didn't have to cut a coupon, that is pretty much the best possible pizza deal and it was always available.
Looking at you Applebee's.
Maybe I just have more patience than the average person, but I haven't seen a site with enough bloated javascript/spinners/whitespace that would cause me to reach for alternatives (phone or otherwise).
What do you even want to takeout order from there?
Edit: tried to look it up, I think your original list is accurate
1. Domino's, with 14,856 "units" and $12.2 billion in gross sales.
2. Pizza Hut, with 16,784 units and $12.0 billion in gross sales.
3. Little Caesar's, with 5,500 units and $4.0 billion.
4. Papa John's, with 5,199 units and $3.7 billion.
5. California Pizza Kitchen, with 267 units and $840 million.
Everything after Papa John's is a long tail. Strangely, revenue in the long tail is not obviously proportional to the number of units. So instead of a top three, there's really a top two, a next two, and everyone else.
[1] https://pizzatoday.com/pizzeria-rankings/2018-top-100-pizza-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterslatin/2019/10/08/the-supr...
https://medium.com/front-end-weekly/dominos-pizza-and-web-ac...
I find this part of the dominos model quite frustrating - you pay almost twice as much, or else spend an unreasonable amount of time dealing with the whole coupon thing. I guess it should be viewed as a tax against people who’s time is more valuable than hunting around the internet for coupon codes.
I'd go further, actually, and offer only one size; cheese, pepperoni, or sausage. No half this or that -- if you want two different toppings, buy two pizzas.
The apps suck (and ordering on the phone can suck also) because there are too many choices and apps suck when they have to offer lot of choices. That's why Apple tries to eliminate choices and options wherever they can.
The reason some drivers were reckless is because there was a commission on each delivery (and you often got tips as well). The more you delivered, the more money you made. In reality it didn't amount to much because you can't really drive much faster than the prevailing average traffic, you burned more fuel and wore out your brakes and tires if you drove like an idiot, but some drivers did anyway. It was heavily discouraged by the managers, at least where I worked.
One margarita large.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...
>The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet.
I still have a fondness for the simplicity of OpenWindows and how well it it handled virtual desktops. It was really cool to use on quad monitor setups.
‘Large pizza for pickup.’
Hilarious. The author must know this is an absolute best-case scenario.
The #1 issue anyone who has ordered pizza on the phone is of course them getting the order right. Lots of us are not content with ‘large (whatever) pizza’.
I have had orders wrong via phone orders probably a couple dozen times. I’ve never had a mobile order go wrong. I’m not sure if I’m just lucky, but the margin for error is certainly higher on the phone.
What if the line is busy; and you are put on hold? I actually tried to order Pizza Hut off the phone by calling my local Pizza Hut and was sent to a generic call center where I was put on hold for at least a couple minutes before I reached someone who even asked for my phone number and the location of the store…
It might take a moment to set up the app the first time (many of these apps here in Canada offer a guest signup page), but if that’s your pizza joint of choice, an app kicks ass. Assuming I’m ordering the same thing as last time; I typically spend about 5 seconds in the app.
And how about paying in the app and just picking it up?
I could honestly go on - but calling into pizza places is one thing I sure as hell don’t miss; and my only recent experience was a rough reminder of why I’m so glad this much more straightforward web/mobile option exists.
We initially automatically logged people in silently on Android by detecting their phone number, sending a verification SMS and intercepting it in the app. This was viewed as more spooky than good UX, so we had to reverse course a little and add another manual step in that case. But other little UX niceties remained, like extrapolating the customer’s name from the name of their iPhone (chances are you phone us called “[first name]’s iPhone”) to save them typing it in.
I think it would be quite difficult to manage a production system that lets people pay with cash but not log in, as it would be so easy for a single script kiddy to take all your restaurants offline by placing fake orders over and over.
You would be amazed (or maybe you wouldn’t) at how little business owners think about UX. We get so many requests to require a DOB before being allowed placing an order so they can send birthday messages to customers.
A nice summary of the state of affairs by UK comedian Michael McIntyre https://youtu.be/O5FeZti1cjs
Sometimes it's an uphill battle to even explain to business owners why being on takeaway.com is stupidly expensive - after all, at the end of the month they _receive_ money from them, instead of paying a monthly subscription fee.
Congratz to your unicorn status :)
But then I haven't ordered from a chain pizza place in years. The little local shops are far better, and appreciate your direct business over using any service that adds fees, etc. I'm more than happy to pay more to help keep them around.
Some notable results when I searched for the above:
1. cli tool written in go to order dominos: https://github.com/harrybrwn/apizza 2. vim plugin: https://github.com/arithran/vim-pizza
If, say, my brother is over I need to order at least 3 pizzas including something vegan and a salad for my wife. Specifying all of that over the phone while somebody is at the store with everything going on in the background is always a PITA.
Plenty of places have order systems that allow guest checkout with no account if you don’t want to create one.
Ordering on the phone might be faster for some people and bad apps, but I find ordering on the app more chill. I can be sure what I ordered, see the whole menu with the latest pricing, and get delivery updates without ringing back.
(As a sidenote - i'm not sure it's actually faster though, particularly as most people seem to be talking about repeat customers. I usually order from Dodo's Pizza (dodopizza.co.uk) and just opened the app and attempted to order a pepperoni pizza for pickup, and the whole interaction took c10 seconds. I logged out and tried and it took 15 seconds instead as they have sign in with Apple).
And hope the staff member has taken proper notes while dealing with everything else going on and not put the extra bacon on the vegan burger or the coleslaw in with the picky eater's meal?
Delivery works so well in my area that i just make some taps on my phone and food arrives at my door with no human contact. Incomparable experience compared to talking on the phone and then going out and picking it up.
I also don't understand the “Large Pizza for Pickup” bit, do you just get a random pizza? What size is 'large'? 25cm? 35cm? 40cm? more? What is on it? Cold fish and milk? Used car oil and yesterday's bread? This all seems to be hyper-personal and while that is fine, it doesn't really mean that everyone wants to order this way. Especially when you simply do not want to call or talk to someone.
It was used to make someone give up his Twitter/Instagram account handle. They sent him tons of pizzas from different restaurants, and started also attacking other family members
I've lived all over the USA, and I like pizza. In big cities, the closest pizza place is not a franchise. In small towns, often no pizza place is listed on an online service, the closest pizza place is literally a gas station, nobody takes credit cards, and delivery makes no sense. People in the suburbs are the only ones whose closest pizza place is a franchise with an app.
I have run into a slew of tech problems when trying to order online. Often I am not ordering from a chain, so I have to either walk through some bizarro custom website that doesn't work half the time, or I have to call anyway. If I want a deal, I'll look online, but I make the order by phone and pay at pick-up. The phone is the only thing that always works. Speaking my order is literally faster than clicking through a form. Even if you're deaf or blind, you can order pizza over the phone without issue.
And besides all of that, "ordering services" (Slice, GrubHub, Uber Eats, Doordash, etc) are actively detrimental to small business. Because people aren't calling in and ordering and are instead trusting these websites' listings (that the business owners did not list), the customer doesn't get their order or it's delayed or screwed up, and then they leave a negative review for the business on Yelp/Google, even though it's not the business's fault. More people should order over the phone, if only to ensure they actually get what they want, and how long it will take before they order.
I just wanted to point out one nitpick, when you mentioned this: "Even if you're deaf or blind, you can order pizza over the phone without issue."
That is true, but that doesn't mean that online ordering systems cannot help people with disabilities. My brother does not have to live alone, but if he did, he is mute and has trouble using a speaking device. An app would be far easier for him than a phone call. In other words, accessibility requires both systems, not one or the other.
Because then the menu wouldn't be readable, searchable, or adaptable by many people, including blind, low vision or dyslexic users. Meanwhile, the people who could read it could type any old freeform nonsense into the box... nobody has to care about spelling on a phonecall or proper ordering system.
My order is consistent and for me it works amazingly!
Of course they could always collect the info they need over the phone and provide you with an order number once they enter it into their system. But then it really isn't any faster than me just ordering through their web site.
While we're on the subject of shaving seconds off how long it takes for us to order pizzas, I've noticed that this thread currently has about 10,000 words of user-generated content. At an average of 50 words per minute, it represents about 200 minutes of effort so far. (Back-of-the-envelope, suspicious method of word counting, but it's in the neighborhood.)
My point about the accent is still valid in my opinion. It's difficult to call someone in a loud restaurant and and try to get a point across.
It’s been a loong time since I last phoned in a pizza order, but for restaurant reservations it’s a daily thing (lots of places do have tables even though online booking says “full”).
Estimates for when the food will be ready tend to be way more accurate over the phone (as the person taking the order actually knows how busy the restaurant is). In my experience, most online ordering estimates are padded by 20-30 minutes (so the website will say it'll be ready in 40 minutes, but it's actually ready in 10), presumably because the restaurant doesn't have the time/ability to be updating ETAs throughout the night, and it's better to overestimate than underestimate.
You also have the option of easily cancelling your order if it's going to be too long - I've even had a restaurant warn me it was going to be a long time:
> > Name of Restaurant, how may I help you?
> I'd like to order for pickup.
> > We're very busy right now, it would be at least an hour.
> Oh, nevermind, thank you.That is, until they realise that adding an artificial 10 minute delay, with elevator music interspersed with "Our operators are all busy. You are in a queue. Have you tried our app?" before a phone operator is even alerted to your call, will likely drive people back to the app where the real data is collected and profiled.
My gas company provides a number for you to call, which is 'great' for those queries that aren't covered by their FAQ section ... but this has never been answered sooner than 30 minutes, and that's excluding the initial menus to get to the point you want, which easily take about 10 minutes to get through. My average wait on the phone is about 50 minutes.
"Did you know you can do this on the app?" typically comes up every 2-3 minutes during that call.
My food was even delivered by a robot that texted me
Granted, I had called the restaurant first because I didnt know why they werent on the other food delivery apps anymore and they told me which one, I also wasnt picking up as it was delivery.
The menu wasn’t particularly intuitive, and took me a few minutes to pick out what I wanted — then I was greeted with a registration page. Email, password, phone, address, you name it, they wanted _everything_ — I only wanted to collect. They didn’t take mobile wallet payments either! Manual card entry!
I feel like the restaurant recognised they had a problem, but contracted out a solution to the lowest bidder that actively went out of their way to design the worst UX.
In the end I actually went ahead and built a platform that’s not user hostile.
Im going to rewrite the landing page and do another round of marketing soon. The page that I wrote in an afternoon is far too negative in hindsight. It needs a positive spin.
As for "why do they need the last name" = credit card? As for adding my address in... It was already saved from last time. As for the pizza place mishearing my order on the phone... o wait, that didn't happen.
And lately, I don't want to wait on hold or talk to another person. This is just displacing personal opinion on everyone else.
Also: Please avoid posting the "dominos sucks" comments. Let's focus on the tech here.
So... the phone should give your personal data to any app that pretends to deliver pizza?
On a tangent, I think the best thing about food delivery apps is they inform you there is other food than pizza in the world. Even if most of it is junk-y, still some variation sounds more healthy than the same thing every day.
For me, the ideal way to order pizza is one where I can order exactly what I want quickly.
Trying to order a pizza I want through a phone takes a _hell_ of a lot longer than using a website.
An example of a pizza I typically order:
* Thin crust medium, low cheese, BBQ sauce instead of tomato sauce, half with jalapenos and pineapple, half with mushrooms and diced tomatoes
Phone orders are slower and prone to miscommunication. Online apps, however, are precise and quick.
Therefore, the best way to order pizza given the criteria I specified above is through a website.
I submitted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30137434. Among the arguments is hourly wages paid for an inefficient job duty.
If done right, or if you are ok accepting lost business from disgruntled customers, ditching the phone can be a decent idea. I’d like to hobble my work phone by removing voice mail.
Also yeah, trying to explain an order to be heard by someone trying to relay it back to a noisy kitchen in some of these takeaway places which don't have a dedicated person to man the phones is also a problem.
1) Why would I go out and pick it up
2) What is a "large pizza". What toppings?
3) What happens when someone walks in and says "I ordered a large pizza", they take yours, you then turn up and yours is no longer there
It also misses steps like "find out what the number is of the pizza place in the first place"
We have one Vietnamese restaurant nearby that doesn’t do app ordering, and a Thai me that does. Suffice it to say, we get lunch from the Thai one alot more than the Vietnamese one because it’s sooo much easier than calling the order in and then fumbling with a credit card to pay once there.
Facebook makes the sign up friction disappear, but if you don’t use Facebook, you wouldn’t get that benefit.
Took maybe a minute or two, including taking the card out. If I’d called I might have had to wait on hold while they dealt with another order, they only have the one line. I am pretty sure that’s what happened when the site was broken for a month or two last year.
Is this something specific to the USA? Perhaps in the US there is a way for the pizza shop to retrieve an address from a phone number?
Also, the pizza shop is probably using a landline phone, how are they going to know the caller's number? I know that some landline phones are supposed to show the caller's number on a display, but in my experience (Italy, Australia) that feature doesn't work half of the times. Do you folks in the US have a more reliable system?
On average, it takes no more than 20 seconds:
Dial number Say: “Large Pizza for Pickup” Hear: “OK. 15-20 minutes.”
Pickup is the keyword here, they'll be driving over to get it instead of delivery.
Contrast this with using Papa John’s (or whoever’s) app. Since I didn’t sign up for an account, it makes me re-enter my address every time instead of storing it locally on my phone, etc. Not to mention the constant upsells. Do you want a large 2-liter bottle of cola with that? No. How about butter sauce? What? No. Chicken wings? Kill me.
Could be a personality thing, like how some people actually like taking meetings and working from the office. To each his own, glad we have options.
Seriously, I can open the Toast (they started off making POS software) for my go-to pizza place. I can look to see if their special of the day looks worth ordering. If not, I go to my default.
Then comes the fun part: payment. They have Apple Pay enabled, so I let them save my Apple Pay token. So even if Toast gets compromised, they won’t have my card number. And I definitely have to worry about some underpaid cashier taking the card number I read off over the phone.
When I was in Mexico, delivery people carried devices to process credit card payments with them. That's less common here.
We have programmable chatbots running today that will accept payment for goods and services with just a phone number and cryptocurrency (caveat emptor, crypto is volatile and we're still in the very early days of building the on and off-ramps for mobilecoin, but we'll get there).
You can reduce fraud a few ways.
One is friction:
- Calling takes time. It can’t be automated.
- The pizza shop can blacklist a phone number. Acquiring new ones to keep defrauding is difficult.
- Creating an account and solving a captcha can be automated, but the barrier for entry is higher.
- Requiring pre-payment is a big one… it costs you money! If you actually pay with your own card, it’s not really even fraud anymore. If you pay with stolen details, then you had to acquire those which is really difficult.
- Emails can be blacklisted. Re-usable email domains (such as Mailinator) can be blacklisted. Creating a new email on most sites is a bit of effort.
Another is traceability (make the fraudster scared):
- Most countries require a real identity to be linked to phone numbers. Hence phone orders are a worthy gamble to accept without requiring a voice captcha, pre-payment, an email, etc.
- Pre-payment requires a real card. If it’s yours and you do a chargeback, you can be traced. Cards can be blacklisted. If you’re using stolen details, then the store can get the police involved.
The best way is detection:
- Even if you can automate phone calls, the employees taking the orders would notice patterns eventually, even in the short conversations where you give only first name, number, and the order. People are really good at detecting patterns (though it might take a few successful fraud attempts before they become aware).
- As accounts & emails get blacklisted, the online site can employee expensive third-party fraud detection software, which does work AFAIK. It looks at thing like data entry speed, IP addresses, order size, issuing card bank, etc. If fraud is suspected, it usually results in an additional soft barrier, such as SMS verification, rather than a hard block. This brings it back to phone numbers & their need for real identity verification — increasing friction & traceability.
This should explain nearly all the things mentioned by the OP. Anything else, like needing to enter your age or whatever, can be explained by some marketing executive desperately trying to hit their KPIs.
I order a lot of pickup. You're calling a busy restaurant whose employees don't have time to answer the phone and take your order so you end up spending at least 3x that waiting on hold or waiting for someone to answer/not busy signal.
I thought online ordering was silly when I first heard of it (it was the year 2003, Papa John's was the restaurant) but after using it, I totally get it.
And usually from a little regional pizza chain - which has ~30 "Gourmet" options (popular combinations of sauce and 3-5 items, at a slight discount) to speed up deciding & ordering. Plus a Caller ID/Order History system, so I can tell a new employee "my usual".
For example, I tried ordering a Papa Murphy’s pizza the other day online. It used one of the major food ordering sites. It described “toppings. Pick 5. $2 per topping for extra toppings”
So I chose a few toppings. It added $2 per topping. Period. Didn’t matter if it were red flakes, Parmesan cheese, bacon, onions, olives: $2/ea.
So I’ll just order over phone from now on so I don’t have to worry about these crazy bug fees.
It feels like if a computer generated it… or a “wizard” from the 1990. So many pages and adding toppings on to the pizza is treated like an exception where you have to click a checkbox just to indicate you want your pizza to have toppings….
Meanwhile the Dominos pizza app is super fast and easy, provides updates on status.
Any specials they have the week gets applied without an account, unlike other grocery stories (Looking at you, Kroger...selling customer's digital data).
I’d take the app any time.
It's already a dangerous and physically taxing job; I'd rather tip them cash and know that they have a dedicated route than having to zip around the city trying to figure out whether The Algorithm is going to nudge people to buy McDonald's or Taco Bell today.
My local pizza place knows me.
"Hey [name], you want the usual?"
"Yeah, and add some chicken, 8 piece, mixed"
"You got it, that will be [total], anything else?"
"Nope, delivery please."
Sometimes I pick it up too.
I literally call them up and rattle off what I want. Or say, same order as last time, and done. They then show up at the door with the food and I can put the tip or the receipt.
English is a second language for me, maybe that's why, but even in my native language I dread making a call to a live person. I have to hype myself up for a few minutes, before I pick up the phone.
Last time I ordered from Dominos, it was clear that the person on the other end was not located on site (sounded like she was working from home), and was putting my order into an app or site. I was only ordering a pizza and salad and it took about 5 minutes: way longer than it should have. Most of it was waiting on her part.
How else will you pay back the VC money and expensive software-engineers, marketing and everything else...
The reality is that using humans to deliver food is expensive. And food is already low margin business...
First recently ordered restaurant on first tab waw my favorite pizza place.
Top item on the most popular menu was cheese pizza.
Add to cart, checkout
The fact that when implemented properly I can just select what I want on a website and my fingerprint pays for it while also filling in my shipping address. Sold.
I actually have to REALLY want something to order it online otherwise. Finding my card and dealing with account creation is a barrier.
Best for whom? [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/dining/restaurant-phone-l...
My orders are always right when I do it online, but only like 50% right when I do it over the phone.
- it helps to find new places I wouldn’t otherwise have ordered from
- I can spend 15 minutes being indecisive if I want. I’m not sure someone in the shop would want to spend that amount of time reading the menu to me over and over
Local pizza place - most times I have no choice but phone and it's all good. Usually local pizza place is better tasting but more expensive. You know you're gonna pay more.
- "hello" - "medium cheese pizza for delivery" - "1 main st?" (they have caller id) - "yes" - "should be there in 20 mins" (it was)
We have some okayish delivery websites here in Germany that don't even require a sign up.
Open the website, enter my address, choose a shop, choose food, and pay.
Ordering a pizza is like a 5 clicks for me and it will be also already paid online - I've noticed a pattern that if some restaurants doesn't have its own online way of ordering stuff I do really avoid ordering from them (or I order waay less often)
to be put on hold for a few minutes.
or https://slicelife.com/ lets you use google or apple IDs. or your sign up on your own. so maybe no need for Web3 here.