I use Uber Eats for ordering food exclusively exactly because when there is a screw up and I receive the wrong item or none at all, I get refunded immediately by Uber with a few taps.
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.
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> 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_...
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 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.
[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.