I use these services infrequently and maybe as a result, I’ve never had a problem with a delivery. In fact, we ordered Chinese from a “restaurant near us” (according to Google) that ended up being like 5 miles away, ignoring maybe 4 closer Chinese joints. But the food arrived hot and we were even credited with the entire order amount (no idea why, since I did not complain or say anything about the order in the 1st place).
I have problems all the time, losing orders, delivering after a full hour, etc, and I just contact Grubhub or Seamless to complain and get a $10 coupon. I order daily, though, and have both Grubhub+ and Doordash+ subscriptions through a credit card promotion.
Yeah, we order maybe 2x a month. I guess you don’t cook much!
I sometimes make breakfast, and dinner maybe once or twice a week.
I am curious - what is the general line between getting a $10 credit vs these services eating the whole bill?
And where is the problem usually? A driver who picked your food up an hour ago and had you as delivery #4, or a restaurant that got in the weeds and released your order an hour late?
If the food is still hot I assume it was the restaurant who got behind. But a ten dollar credit for cold food? I guess if it was a meal for one and it was cheap, okay. But only ten for a non-fast food meal or one for a couple/family? There a very narrow range of food I would take and just reheat if it came in gloppy, cold and old.
I guess I don’t order enough to know, hence my questions about where GH/DD/Uber cross beyond a small credit to “we fucked your meal up so it’s on us?”
On the surface, this seems like a good thing. Underneath though, this is not a positive at all.
My experience is they start small without paying attention at all to the specific. Give them a little credit, shut them up.
The problem is no, I do not want 10 dollars for a meal that sat cold in a car for an hour. I could go to the freezer section of some grocery food store and reheat food if that is what I wanted. It’d be more sanitary too.
They’ve also tried to give me an auto 5 dollar coupon for getting a delivery of a cup of soup instead of the bowl that I asked for AND paid for. 5 dollars didn’t even cover the difference between those two.
I imagine it’s a lot like when I worked for a cellphone company in a call center, always give them minutes. If anyone was unhappy, offer them minutes, bucket loads of minutes if you have to. Minutes cost pennies compared to actually refunds. The problem is DoorDash doesn’t seem that great at actually fixing their problem. I mean here is 10 a dollar couple for your next cold dinner. Do they even… attempt to address the problem? Does the restaurant know their customers are getting poor service and bad food? They know the bundled dinners are a horrible experience so why do they keep doing it? Are not enough people complaining when it takes an hour in a cold car to get a delivery?
They never eat the entire bill, in my experience, they just fob you off with a $10 credit. Rarely $15.
I really don’t care why the food is late. Once it gets to an hour I call the restaurant and bitch, they always (ALWAYS) say it’ll be there in <10 minutes, I say if it isn’t I’ll call Grubhub and cancel the order, it doesn’t arrive in <10 minutes, I call Grubhub and get my $10.
This happens to me maybe 2, 3 times per month. But like I said, I order a lot of delivery.
Oh I have gotten a full refund and then some. They will not do it the first go though.
To be clear, that $10 is in addition to canceling the order and thus refunding the full amount.
My main issue is that failed orders or severe fuckups aren’t really corrected by any amount of money. Like, I ordered this burger an hour ago, and I got the wrong order, with half as much food as I requested, that’s also cold. But I still need dinner, and it’s an hour later and everything is closed up for the night. I don’t want a credit I want a hamburger, guh.
I totally agree. Service quality just isn’t very good.
Yeah, this is the major problem. Like Stusser I order a ton of delivery these days, and like Stusser the failure rate is non-trivial. The biggest issue is being left without dinner, or being left with half a dinner, or (this is my favotire) one of us getting dinner but the other one being left with nothing to eat.
Yeah, the last is especially an issue for us. My partner has a lot of rules/guidelines on what she wants to eat on any given night (e.g., “I had something cheesy earlier, so no pizza tonight,” or “We had General Tso’s two nights ago, so no fried chicken,” plus she’s been forced into a low-carb diet due to a medical issue), and she generally has a more limited palate than I do overall, so finding something she’s down to eat might involve narrowing the (pretty substantial) local selection to exactly one place, some weeks. And if her food doesn’t show up, or is wrong in a way she can’t eat, well, fuck, guess she just ain’t gonna have food tonight. PB&J it is!
Shame she doesn’t know anyone who cooks!
Generally an issue on the nights when we’ve ground down all the leftovers/groceries and are taking a break, or when I’m feeling like shit because I take horrible care of myself and don’t have the energy to make anything substantial.
Was just a leedle tease :)
I’m a bit surprised there’s any expectation of quality for food delivery though. Is that a thing that evolved and I just didn’t notice? I wouldn’t expect much fancier than a pizza to be successfully delivered, and even pizza isn’t necessarily hot. Expecting more challenging stuff from a business in pandemic year doesn’t seem optimistic to you guys?
Right!
And we’re talking about an industry where people either just accept garbage food or politely engage the kitchen and get it fixed. Now they’re just, oh well here’s some money that won’t actually make your special occasion special or fix that fact they canceled dinner at delivery time so there is no dinner. There is zero attempt to get the restaurant involved and fix it… right now. You just get to roll the dice with the next experience using a credit.
What probably should’ve happened is the restaurants reevaluated their menu and create dishes they could make with the quality they are known for and be delivered in a condition that is acceptable. Instead many just threw their full menus online and decided customers and drivers could figure that out.
Some food travels very well, should maintain their heat, and I order those. Nothing I order though is going to maintain heat for an hour in paper bag in someone’s car unless they have some sort of temperature control container. The pizza deliveries have that.
In my area, most of the non-chain, sit down places figured this out and offer a limited menu of things that can travel decent (I do pick up to take the delivery variable out of the equation; I know many can’t do that).
I have a friend that owns a few places that do this, and it is still a no-win situation - having to say “sorry, no, our signature, hand made wild mushroom and pea shoot risotto with seared scallops cannot be ordered for take out or delivery because we cannot get to you the way it should be presented” over and over has its downsides too.
I can understand that too. For the pandemic though, we had all our restaurants shutdown and planned to wait it out a few weeks… but it didn’t stay two weeks. They re-opened mostly with full menus. So mostly I am speaking about right now. I hope there will be some more delivery or at least To-Go options than we had before, but with places like DD not able to bring in a profit during the heydays of food delivery…
I did learn after a few mishaps to try and gauge the survivability of my dish during ordering. I didn’t punish driver or restaurant for those early… why did I think that would stay together in a twenty minute drive mishap.
I can say that I have seen some of the restaurants evolve though over a year. The smarter ones use paper bags that they put a stick on so the driver can’t open it in route. The containers have changed a bit with some having lids with holes in them which makes them cool faster but also keeps them from sogging out. I can tell some have been trying to do better, but the biggest issue is often times when something happens, it’s hard to know if it was delivery or the restaurant, and if it was delivery, was it the driver or DD itself. I suspect most just punish all three which is why some restaurants just wanted to avoid it all together.
I am so looking forward to ditching delivery and going back to sitdown.