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Comment by jtokoph | Hacker News Reader

Uber still can’t get consumer Eats right. My last order roamed the city for 30 minutes before arriving cold. The order before that was stolen by the driver. They picked it up and left San Francisco.

Good luck getting an Uber driver to carry up 5 catering trays plus utensils and sides for your office. Maybe there’s a chance if Uber gives every driver a foldable cart that fits in the trunk without taking up luggage space for airport Uber rides.

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Reading the press release this is just allowing individual employees to order a regular meal via uber eats and have the company pay for it directly rather than having to expense it. The only mention of catering was a box of donuts.

I order from Ubereats constantly – at least once a day, sometimes two or even three – and this is my number one issue.

For some reason Uber thinks it's appropriate to assign multiple deliveries to a single driver even when those deliveries are in the complete opposite direction to one another. Doesn't make any sense at all.

You'd think that the whole point of using computers for managing deliveries is to avoid precisely that.

I mean, either optimization classes I took at uni were a bunch of hokum, or for some reason companies in XXI century still don't use/can't write simple route/schedule optimizers.

Or - or, and just hear me out, there are occasional real world complications that cause unforeseen errors and people only talk about the tail end of poor predictions rather than the 95+% good experiences.

That seems unlikely, everybody in my area (that I speak to) loathes these delivery services because they consistently screw these things up. It’s not 1 in a 100, it’s more like 9 out of 10..

I never ever had this problem in London and I never heard of any friend having it either.

If it's like the Taxi app, there is a button in a corner of the app to report and they will refund you.

That doesn't mean they can't get business eats right. Your experience is probably a win for them, it means they're getting a lot of drivers of varying quality. Also if you complained about it, that helps them to deactivate drivers that steal food and improve their process (they can probably keep ones that make the food cold, some don't mind (like me, at least for most types of foods and if I'm eating by myself) and some will just use a microwave). If they only had high quality drivers, they wouldn't be the growth company that they are. For businesses they can change it up, maybe even hire W2 employees. And they can even have a good experience in places that get press like SF and a mediocre experience for places outside of it. Only a handful of decision makers will judge their business service based on their consumer performance or performance in other markets. They also have name recognition - nobody got fired for buying Microsoft.

It's weird how positive you are about a business venture failing at the only thing that they are required to do -- bring you food in a timely fashion. "Your experience is probably a win for them" is a very strange way to prioritise what's important when running a business -- unhappy customers are a win somehow?

> If they only had high quality drivers, they [...]

... would actually be a good service?

> nobody got fired for buying Microsoft.

IBM, not Microsoft.

The thing that's important when running a business is making money. Having happy repeat customers is one way to do this, but there are many others. Having unhappy customers and crushing the competition is another. Having a steady stream of new customers is another (see also, MLM schemes). Selling a product where customers cannot meaningfully evaluate quality is another (see also, Facebook video marketing).

If you don't like it, help the rest of us figure out a sustainable alternative to capitalism.

I'm sure that this is the reasoning they use to justify it, it doesn't mean that we should use the same reasoning to judge them as a company.

Sure. I guess my argument is, judge them all you want, nothing will change unless they have a concrete incentive to act differently.

People may not like this answer, but it is a good summary of their internal thought process.

I didn't read the article, so I deserve downvotes. Uber might go after ZeroCater eventually, but this announcement is about making it so businesses can conveniently pay for meals that their staff order using the UberEats service. The screenshot is of someone just ordering one meal, for about 10 bucks plus tax (which is 22% for some reason - does it include SF Mandates? [1]) and a five dollar delivery charge. It doesn't really change it much.

1: https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/Explainer-Wh...

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