GrubHub offered $15 off orders from 11am to 2pm in NYC without notifying workers | Hacker News Reader

GrubHub offered $15 off orders from 11am to 2pm in NYC without notifying workers

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48 pointsjunebug414 comments

This seems like a pretty surprising process failure for a mature company like Grubhub, for such a marketing campaign to be greenlit without any guardrails. Wouldn't this be the kind of mishap you might expect from a startup or a 2-year old company?

Edit: I stand corrected. Per the Buzzfeed article, their spokesperson seems to be spinning this as an unexpected hit. So it wasn't a mistake, they were genuinely convinced it was a good idea?

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kelseyweekman/grubhub-f...

I think the thing that baffles me here is that based on the basic math - 180 minutes, 6000 orders per minute, $15 credit per order - this would seem to be a ~$16M promotion. That's, like, two or three Superbowl ads. For, what? To create chaos? To sow distrust that GrubHub can complete orders? It seems very unlikely here that more people will be delighted by the promotion than frustrated.

Does Grubhub offer a way for a restaurant to limit the number of orders that it can take per hour? That seems like it would solve at least part of the problem

Get the feeling many wouldn't take that up except in dire circumstances. Modern kitchens are actually quite efficient and can pump out a lot of meals in a short time. Once you run out of prepped ingredients it does get harder.

I don't remember the name of it, but a service I only used once required me to pick an available timeslot.

I am intrigued that a restaurant can seemingly just be flooded with orders without regard for capacity. Surely this has been an issue before?

Grubhub once accepted and completed an order for me, for a restaurant that was closed. They kept closing my support ticket too and I was never able to resolve the issue.

I explained my issue, sent a pic of the restaurant with chains on the doors, and they closed the issue as solved and wouldn't let me reopen the ticket.

This does not surprise me in the least.

Every order should be guaranteed money for the restaurant regardless if someone from grubhub shows up to pick it up - problem solved.

Even so, it’d be pretty miserable to cook the busiest lunch rush of one’s year only to watch the food spoil in a to-go container.

Interesting mistake. Lets see if and how GrubHub learns from it.

It's possible they will, and have some good results for restaurants in future from the next time around. Assuming they implement rate limiting (for restaurants, delivery staff, etc).

That being said, they could just ignore everything and not care at all. Hopefully they take the improvement road though.

They need to have a "Max in-production number or orders". That should be set per restaurant with some default.

Seems like GrubHub didn't even give the food vendors a heads-up "hey, we're gonna be doing a big promotion" notice. Wtf.

According to GH, they sent out multiple emails prior to the promotion, so it’s a they-said-they-said situation

GrubHub has enough money to just give it away?

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