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Comment by cgriswald | Hacker News Reader

My favorite part of the process is that they only refund you for the part of the meal that is missing as if they didn’t just ruin your entire meal by leaving out your kid’s cheeseburger.

On that note, we had a driver eat our entire meal and not deliver it at all. The sad part was we’ve ordered some nice meals and this one was just fast food. We had to contact them to find out why our food wasn’t arriving.

We’ve watched drivers clearly go about their own business and show up whenever they feel like it and then our food is cold.

These delivery companies have all this data and yet there are still constant shenanigans...

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Isn't this just a case of "we get what we pay for". These delivery services are extremely cheap - the people who are doing the delivery are paid peanuts and worked half to death (actually they are sometimes worked to death!) The business is created and developed with the single intention of creating a monopoly or near monopoly by out capitalizing/advertising/recruiting the opposition and then later raising prices to cash in. This is what we all want - you can tell it is because we are all using it - so we shouldn't complain about it. Rather we should praise our overlords of startup/venturecapital/unicorns-with-no-IP-or-technology.

Its literally not getting what you paid for. If a company offers you something for cheap, they still have to give it to you. Sure they can compromise on quality, but if they literally don't deliver the product, its fraud regardless of how little they charge.

The thing is that it’s not even cheap. The prices you see as a customer already include a hidden commission that the restaurant pays, but on top of that there’s a delivery fee and even a “service charge”.

They are extremely cheap for something that is so labor intensive. Even with all of those ways of hiding the cost, the driver is often barely making minimum wage after paying their expenses and the delivery company is often losing money on the hope that they will eventually grow enough to make it back.

It seems the real story is Americans can’t afford the lifestyle they expected.

These services are not cheap at all. Many of them are tacking on over 10% in just service fees, and still expect you to pay surcharges and tip the driver on top of that.

It's not inexpensive. They mark up individual food items (which has the added bonus of increasing tax and increasing tip if you pay by percentage), charge a percent service fee, a delivery fee, and an assortment of other fees; and encourage you to tip (which for awhile, they were deducting from the amount they promised the driver).

No, we are not all doing this. Over the last year, we have done pick-up on all our restaurant meals, along with nice tops for the staff. We are cutting out the sleazy middleman, and ensuring the margins on our meals go 100% to the restaurant.

Maybe the delivery companies should datamine the drivers and not the customer. Or someone should start a service that supply delivery companies with stable drivers and charge them 30% of their 30%?

Seriously, why aren’t the resturants demanding some level of insurance from the apps who take the order? E.g if more than 3% are fraud, the app company has to pay 75% of the cost of all the fraud above those 3%. There needs to be an insentive to the apps to reduce fraud.

I assume the restaurants often don’t have any choice (it costs the platform near nothing to drop a restaurant unless it’s a major nationwide chain, on the other hand a restaurant not on the platform will get out-competed by those who are). This problem is big enough that some consumer protection agencies should take action - at the end of the day the platforms are most likely breaking some laws by blaming restaurants for issues that are outside of their control.

Right now during COVID delivery apps may be their lifeline.

That being said, I imagine that once indoor dining operates normally again, and consumers are willing to eat outside, we are going to see a stampede off these platforms. The margins aren't very enticing.

I don't live in an area where these services are available, but I wonder why you continue to use them?

I'd pretty much be 2 strikes and you're out. Maybe 1 if the food arrived cold.

Because you get your food as described 9/10 times, and the 1/10 times you don't, you can report the driver who messed up and they will, most likely, lose their job. (One of the benefits of the new "gig economy.") It's very much against the driver's best interest to deliberately mess up orders.

The thing is in the late 90s early 2000s if you complain to Domino's about a bad Pizza you just got another one for free it's called slippage. It was one of those college hacks to eat for free.

> as if they didn’t just ruin your entire meal by leaving out your kid’s cheeseburger

I'm sorry for your kid they missed a cheeseburger. But i'm not sorry for you because you feel entitled to exploit so many people in the kitchens and for delivery. Food delivery is a rich people's fantasy and should not exist at all except as a public service for disabled folks.

By maintaining/supporting an economy based on wage slavery, you're not ruining a kid's meal. You're ruining actual lives. I hope you realize that.

Re Cold food: I've had curbside pickup before and even then orders get sent out with some components not even warming lamp warm. Like if someone orders french fries during a non-rush time. Only you also can't reliably order during rush times, because then the place might be too busy to do it properly at all.

I hope we all get vaccinated and deliver the finishing blow to this pandemic so that I can safely eat hot fresh food inside again.

Heck my local McDonald’s drive thru is hit or miss. Cold fries, no fries, smashed burgers, missing nuggets all too common. The reviews of it are in the toilet too. there’s basically no competition nearby except for a Dairy Queen which is just as bad. This location is staffed by teenagers because we live just outside the main metro to get any labor that would care about doing a good job.

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