FTA: "and other things to and from stores (eg, getting your broken iPhone to a Postmates-using repair shop)."
Yeah, about that. We run repair shops, and were approached by Favor (Postmates competitor) about doing this. We love Favor; they are local to us in Austin and we'd like to do more business with them.
The problem was insurance. Our insurance refused to cover it as the phone wouldn't be in our possession. And (at least at the time) Favor's insurance also was not covering if a phone was lost or stolen during a "run."
When it's a small food order (most of the food orders they run are around $20-$30, or even less), it's not the end of the world if something gets lost or stolen. It's a lot bigger deal if it's a $969 iPhone 7+. Even with a broken screen and iCloud locked, they're still (unfortunately) worth significant money on the black market.
As far as I know, no delivery company has overcome this hurdle.
I've always wanted to to use Favor or Postmastes to deliver packages to UPS, but it never ends up being worth the risk. It's interesting to hear that insurance ends up being the issue. Presumably UPS and Fedex have insurance for this, I wonder if they'd ever partner, and use their insurance.
UPS and Fedex don't pickup on the weekends. In the past when I looked, you couldn't specify a time with very much granularity, but it looks like that is an option now, so I'll have to try it out.
Unfortunately it doesn't work in my city, and requires you to buy the label from them as far as I can tell. I am shipping to Amazon FBA, so they provide the label (at a large discount).
Yes unfortunately. People often forget this. A friend had his latest iPhone stolen by a prostitute one night walking home from a bar. He wasn't too concerned, and eventually his insurance paid out and he didnt care about being robbed as his thinking was it was locked and then disabled by an Apple store so 'she got nowt'. But I'd wager that it was sold immediately for parts for say $100 at a local independent repair store who probably made another $200 out of it for parts, I daren't tell him as the issue has pasted given his thinking.
I am part of a group of independent repair shops (see http://repair.org ) and most of us are quite vocal about our policy of not buying iCloud-locked phones.
Unfortunately, Apple doesn't make it easy to see whether a phone is iCloud locked. They used to have a convenient online tool for this, but took it down. So a lot of folks, repair shops or not, get suckered into buying one.
From my perspective as someone who owns several stores, the majority of them get sold to people who don't know any better through platforms like Craigslist or Facebook marketplace.
A lot of repair shop owners do lurk on, say, FB Marketplace and comment on posts where people are obviously trying to sell stolen goods, but there will unfortunately always be someone willing to buy something because they got "such a good deal."
Typically repair shops aren't going to put used parts in a customer phone, so an iCloud locked phone isn't much use "for parts."
Can you explain why you wouldnt put working used parts in a customers phone (excluding time degrading parts like a battery I guess). I'm sure in Asia all little 1-2 people phone and laptop stores (which are very popular - in some cases whole shopping centres floors dedicated to such repeated stalls) do? If I need a new headphone jack in an out of warranty phone I guess a second hand part is probably much cheaper for everyone? Ignoring the stolen issue (and morality around stolen) for a second. Same reason independent mechanics will often source from a scrap yard where appropriate - say a cheap phone $150 (like my y6-ii) with one thing broken?
Using used parts might be twice as much labor for one thing, you have to remove the part carefully from one phone and then install it into another one. Another is that you can't always guarantee the repair is done well if it's done with used parts as you can't really be certain what kind of conditions they were subjected to over time. Also, as you have to charge less for used parts, you might not have as good of a margin on the repair. I don't work in phone repair, but I used to work as a bicycle mechanic, and sourcing used parts for repairs was generally not considered worthwhile in most shops I've worked in.
>I'm sure in Asia all little 1-2 people phone and laptop stores do?
Can't speak for all of them, but one that I visited in Hong Kong to do a screen replacement definitely had a guy sitting at a counter breaking down a stack of used iPhones for parts.
> Unfortunately, Apple doesn't make it easy to see whether a phone is iCloud locked. They used to have a convenient online tool for this, but took it down.
Huh, that seems like an obvious thing for Apple to not just provide, but to make extremely easy to use and actually promote. Run a simple stolen/not stolen check from NFC by tapping another phone, or something like that. Perhaps be able to put a message on the check from iCloud to enable easy positive proof of ownership.
I think there were some issues that robbers would be checking it, so demanded passwords etc. in the robbery to prevent it from being locked. So Apple made it harder to access to the public.
If the robbers were willing to go to that much trouble, they could just ask the victims to wipe the phone on the spot to remove the activation lock. It'll work either way, no need to know in advance whether it's locked or not.
Ha, in this incident he was. I was actually there when we were approach by two Uganda prostitutes after several or more beers, he was in his talky / huggy mood, where you from? blah blah blah.. I was tired and thought f'this see you later. Now was he robbed there or not that's unknown I grant.
Most holiday insurance. Most direct mobile phone insurance too from UK. I think many decent UK house insurance does for personal possessions away from home too. Id hazard a guess he was triple covered but that would complicate things on sub $1000 item. Is US really different?
I doubt most folks take out holiday insurance. Typically it's sold in a fairly scammy way similar to how ski pass insurance is sold -- "protect your trip!!" all for a ripoff fee with tons of exclusions. Mobile phone carrier insurance you would also have to elect to pay for and also has a negative expected value.
Homeowner's insurance/renter's insurance would likely cover it. I'm not sure I'd want to make a claim against my homeowner's policy for such a small amount though. I've fortunately never had to rely on it but i've heard rumor of not using it on small ticket items.
IMO, trip insurance mostly makes sense if you have a large non-refundable pre-pay in which case the insurance is also covering you if you have some injury or other covered reason for not being able to go. There are also some trips that have a greater probability of injury and expensive evacuation, e.g. treks in remote areas.
Some argue that you should always buy it because there's always the possibility of bad things happening that could be very expensive. But personally I (like I assume most people) am very selective.
Right, I tend to avoid any non-required warranty or insurance due to expected value of the coverage being negative.
That said, if you've been planning an African Safari for a decade, and everything is pre-paid to the tune of $20k, the $100 on trip insurance is probably money well-spent! For example, I did a long motorcycle trip where I paid $250 for a year's worth of medical evacuation coverage, which was nice peace of mind.
Of course, the more "stuff" a policy covers, the more expensive it is, but you bring up a good point about pre-paid expenses. My last trip was on airline miles, with $25/night AirBnBs that could be cancelled the day before.. train tickets weren't bought until I was in-country, and naturally no food/drink/museum entry/subway passes were prepurchased.
Location dependent. I hazard a guess 80% of UK people going on holiday take out travel insurance, it's practically pushed down your throat at every turn and in the media too about dangers of being medically insured abroad without insurance. The airline travel insurance for lost baggage and delay is pretty scummily pushed and generally doesnt cover medical. Luckily it is usually only 5-20GBP per person per trip or 50gbp-100gbp for an annual policy (with max time out of country limited to X months usually 6). I suspect this is because we dont generally have medical insurance in the UK due to the NHS where as I guess your $$$pm medical insurance covers you abroad so primary reason for holiday insurance doesnt exist.
The first two are not things I generally purchase. My home insurance does not cover personal possessions away from home. So yes, it's a bit different here.
It's usually called "off premises theft" coverage. It's a somewhat expensive option for most homeowner's policies. (Some policies include it by default, and some don't.)
In the US most Renter's or Homeowner's Insurance covers "off premises" theft too. Though depending on your deductible it might not be worth making a claim.
Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but can't they just act as their own insurance? Reimburse customers themselves? As I understand it, insurance costs more than expected payouts (or the insurance company wouldn't make money), and is purchased only to amortize cost spikes too large to handle. So it doesn't make sense when the spikes are small (on the company's scale) and semi-regular.
Maybe the actual expected loss from theft is too high?
I've noticed that even in San Francisco's Mission District, I can almost never get a Postmate to accept my order. Could be high demand, or could be no supply. My guess is the latter.
I've noticed the same. It's been striking in the last few months. There used to be plenty of availability, but recently, the service is almost unusable due to lack of supply. It makes me wonder if things are much more seriously wrong than they are admitting.
I've checked in on Postmates and Instacart both over the course of more than a year and both were unavailable in my area then and now. At the same time, Lyft and Uber have been here a while and now local businesses have been started to fill the Postmates/Instacart void. It feels like a missed opportunity for growth.
It may be difficult to compare directly. Instacart isn't available for me. (It's available closer in to the nearest major urban center but I live too far out.) Uber is ostensibly available but the couple of times I've looked out of curiosity it's not clear that there are enough drivers to actually be generally useful.
I think the rideshares plus the local companies moving in to the space make for an OK vehicle of comparison.
Yes, there was a time when there were so few drivers for Uber and Lyft here that it was hit or miss. That went away though. At the same time, the little local versions of Instacart and Postmates started showing up. Missed opportunity for growth. Uber and Lyft got it done
This seems incredibly short-sighted because the best way to build up a business in a market is to have market experts. What does someone in San Francisco know about the needs of people in DC who might use Postmates delivery? How do you get a business to pick Postmates over any of half a dozen competitors if you don't have boots on the ground building relationships?
I've never been sure that Postmates has a model that can scale internationally. FWIW, China basically runs Postmates equivalents all across the board -- with low labour costs, you can get things delivered for pennies on the dollar. It feels like a regional play at best in my opinion...
That's the general issue with so many of these personal service gig things in developed countries. There's a market for them. But a lot of people don't really have the spare cash to have a $10/hr. or so worker to do jobs for them that they could do but just don't feel like doing.
Full-time drivers and house-related help are very common in some countries. In the US, you're pretty wealthy at that point.
I hate to say it but I've found the overall experience (and cost) doesn't compete with DoorDash, who seem to be executing extremely well on both the app and the business front.
I find Postmates pricing and user experience very irritating. No transparency in fees and final price. Their fee waiving plan is ridiculous. I never pay over 25 dollars for delivered food.
Also, their app user experience is simply terrible. Just the fact that they are constantly and aggressively pushing their referral program and subscription plan, makes the app feel like a cheap adware.
And their customer service is nonexistent. I was charged way more than I should have been, and tried filing a ticket that never got answered or responded too so I just had to pay up. There's a right way to approach these delivery services, but Postmates doesn't seem to be close enough.
I never pay over $3 to deliver food. Oh and it is delivered by the same delivery people who know the building, know where the buzzer is, know how the customer looks like. And they work for the restaurant from which the food is being ordered.
Err seamless is just a grubhub brand no? If so, they frequently will partner with companies like Delivery Dudes who aren’t much different than Grubhub’s own contractors.
My experience with Seamless is only in a few major markets. In every one of them the delivery people were the people who worked for the restaurants, which is why different restaurants in the same general area delivered or did not deliver to the same address, had different delivery fees and had different minimum orders.
I have used postmates before, but don't understand how Uber Eats won't make them go out of the business. They are adding ton of new places which were not available on Seamless(NYC) and the delivery is going to be faster on UberEats.
While it scratches my 'lazy don't want to move' itch pretty well, I find Postmates pretty awful. Customer service is just dreadful.
I once ordered food from a place maybe 10-15 blocks away. It took ~hours~ for the food to arrive because the delivery driver decided to take an hour phone call right down the street, food in hand. We had to go find him, as support was non-existent. A little while later they offered to credit $3 for the issue: not even covering the delivery fee we paid to go hunt down our own food. This is a typical experience: anytime anything goes wrong Postmates support is worthless.
There are a lot of these types of services and if I were at one, I would make customer service my hallmark. This seems like a no brainer to me, and yet it seems farther down the priority list for most of these delivery companies.
Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot?
>>Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot?
I haven't figured this one out. I think they all buy into the myth that customer service doesn't scale / is a cost center / doesn't have ROI, etc.
Except in my business we don't do anything even close to a Postmates (where I agree, CS should be priority #1) but we ship items around the country and do like 60-80 orders per day, and we made the decision a few years ago to seriously care about email response time, always pick up the phone between certain hours, return voicemails, ship things within a discrete timeline, and more importantly, offer refunds and accept blame 99% of the time something goes wrong.
The goodwill we get and social media cred from the customer service is worth a lot (tough to measure), but we also can measure ROI on the emails we reply to and phone calls we take. We find that tons of people will email or call in with an irrelevant question that has nothing to do with buying something, we'll answer it well, and they are then very likely to buy something immediately after. Customers like to know a human is there for them! Our CS department nearly has positive ROI from measurable tasks, to say nothing of the untrackable rewards mentioned above (and the feeling that we aren't scumbags, which is really the main reason we decided to do it).
In an era where everyone runs customer service like Comcast, standing out can be worth a ton. We also ship product slightly worse than Amazon Prime, which is pretty damn good - in today's market everyone wants things as fast as Amazon and don't want to buy things from random websites, and I understand! So if we can come close to that shipping time (USPS Priority Mail flat rate boxes are 2 days to most major metropolitan areas - even from the coast like we are), then that picks up repeat business and people talking about how fast we ship on Twitter/Instagram/etc.
It just doesn't seem that difficult to get right. But maybe it is.
EDIT: Well, "difficult" is subjective. It took us over 12 months to get our CS pipeline working well. But that was more "hard" than "difficult" - it just required a lot of work to mold it into the shape we wanted. The overall design was pretty simple: Just take care of customers at any cost.
>>What did it take for you to get it to that point?
Honestly, I just refused to run customer service like Comcast. I didn't want to contribute to what I think is one of the worst trends in business today. I didn't really care if it was good for the business or not.
>>Was it mostly a training & process change or did you invest in technology to help?
I worked for a year or so in call centers and I've worked a lot of crappy retail jobs in my life, so that was its own form of training I found very useful.
As for technology, we use Help Scout, Google Voice, Acuity Scheduling, Stitch, and Agile CRM. I can't remember what we use for postage and printing labels... it's pretty decent though. Nothing that spectacular or groundbreaking. Our online shop is powered by WordPress and various plugins, which works pretty well and is funny to talk about here on Hacker News.
Our warehouse manager reconfigured all of our USPS packaging and saved us a lot of money using various different types of flat rate based on zip code, that was a big cost savings with no impact to delivery time. That probably took the longest; getting logistics software to work well with our inventory management system and printing labels/postage properly. We did it by hand on USPS.com for months and managed inventory in Excel. But like anything else, you do it that way as a startup until it's too painful then you figure out a solution.
It's odd how few CEOs figure this out and bake it into the DNA of their company.
There is one notable exception, and they seem to be destroying their competition. Scaling doesn't appear to be a problem either. Amazon are doing pretty well. Bezos is known to indoctrinate his employees with a few strong principles, and customer obsession is #1.
Their straight-up customer support is outsourced, but works well enough from a scaling perspective. Given how large the company is, I also agree that they get an A- at worst.
But more importantly, their domination of logistics is a truly impressive feat. There is a constant flow of articles on HN, reddit, and everywhere else about how Amazon's prices are no longer the cheapest and how they are a monopoly and how you should shop around and JET.com and blah blah.
No one cares that it's not the cheapest. It's almost like people forgot that 10 years ago, buying things online and dealing with horrendous shipping was a nightmare, complete pain in the ass, and took forever. Amazon decided to grab USPS by the neck and make them work Sundays (how do you get a government institution to do that?!) and develop their own logistics network to deliver many items same-day, or even within an hour. It's truly an amazing feat that puts customers' minds at ease; there is no wonder why there is such loyalty to Amazon.
Solving that customer problem is like an act of God to the masses.
I used to work for Postmates Customer Service. The environment is a boiler room staffed with under-qualified and normally unemployable people with an extremely high churn rate due to immature "management" (people who never learned how to manage in their lives) and a vindictive CEO.
I am not surprised their customer service has gone further downhill.
I was a team lead for Postmates CS and I can confirm this. They have serious quality, training, and performance evaluation problems.
Conway's law is pretty evident there in that the lack of care for customers is reflected in the lack of engagement between management and the agents and team leads.
I have noticed over the years that good customer service comes from the top down. If the CEO doesn't give a crap, that attitude slides downhill to the people actually talking to customers.
I'm not sure which which service for finding cheap airline tickets was posted here, HN will jump on this for me I'm sure, but I recall them saying from day 1 that CS was their focus.
As I set up my own service based business I got a CS phone number and when asked why before I have customers, I said: "We need to be ready to respond to issues long before we're needed".
UberEats has been pretty amazing for me support-wise. They've always made it right when I've had issues - and there typically aren't issues. I use it a ton - 3+ times/week - and of those times I've had issues, only 2 required me pushing them to do the right thing, and one of those was when I was traveling in Stockholm where they'd just rolled it out.
Postmates, on the other hand, has absolutely disastrous support and consistently laughable "resolutions" as the parent comment noted. Postmates is one of those things that felt like magic the first time I used it in the early days when they were the only game in town, but they just got so surpassed by competitors to the point where I hate it. Their "taxes+fees" are ridiculous for an inferior product. UberEats gives me a flat $4.99 plus taxes that actually reflect legitimate taxes. Postmates, on the other hand, is a minimum of $3.99, often more, plus maybe it's surging, plus the "taxes and fees" is often some obscene amount (Tacolicious seems to have a $4-5 "fee" on Postmates), oh and if you're treating yourself to a small fast food order there will be another $2 "small order fee."
The last straw for me was when they started adding "walking" postmates, who would literally walk an order from ~40 minutes away when I'm paying them $10-ish to deliver it. Then when I complained and (half-jokingly) suggested they give people paying $10 for delivery the option to not have a walking postmate deliver it because my food was extremely cold, I got the typical Postmates support brush-off. Utter joke of a service.
UberEats grosses me out though. I've been in way too many Uberpools where the driver has food on the floor of the front seat and asks the passengers to not step on the food... Just doesn't seem sanitary. At least the other services seem to have insulated bags for transportation.
It was definitely an UberEats order--I asked them. And it's happened more than once so I'm guessing Uber doesn't have any strict policy about putting the food in a closed/sanitary container for transporting.
> Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot?
You may disagree (for yourself as a customer), but there's no reason to believe your preference is held by a majority of the total addressable market (by user count or profit margin), let alone that everyone else has a blind spot.
It may be that relatively few users share your willingness to pay for support (which seems very possible to me), or even that they've tested different approaches to support and measured how much support actually affects a customer's future purchases - ie, revealed preferences/values. In that case, it wouldn't be a blind spot, it would be that they have better data than any of us do.
> Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot?
I find that companies driven more by hubris and marketing's version of data science, are inherently opposed to boots-on-the-ground service operations. Is the company's valuation driven by its customers or by promises to investors? I don't Postmates but I suspect it's the later. It's almost as if the more you focus on the customer, the more you expose the weaknesses and assumptions built into a years-old sketch of a business plan. So the customer issues get swept under the rug.
One of the things I've noticed is that everyone focuses on new users, to the detriment of existing users. They don't care if 10 users leave if 50 are on-boarding.
What they typically don't realize is that those 50 are going to leave too, but hey, at least they have big numbers for their reports!
Postmates support used to be great - call a number from within the app, talk to a real person, get your issue resolved while on the phone. Now their support is almost nonexistent.
I've also noticed their emails trying to get me to refer friends have increased to almost daily. Which is obnoxious. And they aren't even good deals - get 5 friends to order within a week for $15 delivery credit? It used to be I get $10 credit, my friend got $10 credit.
I pretty much only use them when they offer free food - combined with my insane amount of delivery credit, and I pretty much just pay to tip the driver.
A year ago they delivered food right to my hospital room. I'm about to head back in for an extended stay, so I'm hoping they still do that.
2015 Postmates was great. 2017 Postmates is almost useless.
>I pretty much only use them when they offer free food - combined with my insane amount of delivery credit, and I pretty much just pay to tip the driver.
This is basically every order on Postmates at this point. No one is actually paying their insane delivery fees. I worked as a driver for a few weeks in Berkeley and it was like clockwork. Postmates sends out a free credit promo, get a bunch of ultra cheap short orders, and make like $6 to deliver someone an Iced Tea. There's no possible way the economics can work out for this.
Sounds like they're trying to artificially inflate their metrics to keep investors happy. New customers and more orders = growth, even if they're burning a ton of cash to get it.
> Postmates support used to be great - call a number from within the app, talk to a real person, get your issue resolved while on the phone. Now their support is almost nonexistent.
Pretty much says that they are walking dead. As a service business, service is the only differentiation and it costs. That is why these businesses spend huge amounts of time on process to minimize service problems, monitoring and metrics to get to problems before they become service issues, and then maximizing the likelihood that a service call can be resolved satisfactorily in short order.
It does not sound like they have internalized any of those requirements.
I threaten to chargeback when a company doesn't take responsibility for their goofs. Works every time.
In this case, after 60 minutes or so, I'd just call up and say, "it's been 1 hour since the meal was picked up. If you don't refund my money I'm charging back."
(Edit) I should add that I only threaten about once every 5-6 years, and it needs to be obvious that the company is just not taking responsibility for their goofs. It's not something that I do because the delivery boy showed up 5 minutes late.
I ordered a meal which Postmates estimated to be ~$16. When they finally billed me it was charged at $32.
When I contacted them they told me that the prices reflected aren't always accurate, but I'd say a price going up double is a bit of a goof on their part. They were unwilling to refund the payment, and so I called my bank and explained the situation. The bank associate on the phone took care of the charge back as a measure against them.
After that, I've never ordered from postmates again. I get that prices can vary, I'd forgive it to a certain degree. But double the price? Nope.
Similar happened to me. Since then stuck with prime now for restaurants since the cost is set in stone and as far as I can tell, drivers can't decide to bail out if it's a delivery they don't want.
I had my first experience with them yesterday, we paid $70 for 2 pizzas 1 mile away. More precisely the "total" is $60 on the page and $70 in the tip popup, so I guess we'll get charged the later. People online think it might be an outdated menu price in their system (they have employees all the time going in the shop and nobody takes a picture of the flyer to fix the prices?), but there is no exact and reliable explanation anywhere. Next time we'll find another delivery service, that one looks scamy.
So, well, couriers aren’t employees and they don’t have time to do things like this. Customers are extremely vindicative for every minute they perceive as wasted. Time is money, unfortunately.
I can't prove it but I suspect Postmates was hacked last week. One morning I got a login alert from Postmates (I haven't used them in at least a year, don't even have the app installed anymore). I promptly reset the password. An hour or two later I got a fraudulent charge on the credit card that was on file with them. I've had this card for years and am extremely careful with it (always use chip, etc). I suspect they are storing full numbers without the requisite security controls (a big PCI violation).
I find it immensely telling that this point is the only one you've addressed so far in this thread. Nothing about how your CS sucks, the flawed business model, or the sexist comments..
He's probably too busy screaming at Customer Service over some perceived problem with his dinner tonight.
I am not even kidding about that comment. I have heard him scream and seen him physically throw things around the office over the tiniest things and threaten to fire the entire Customer Service team because a VC's order was late.
Shortly after I signed up for Postmates earlier this year, they locked my account and asked me to send a scan of my passport and a recent utility bill. Not to _work_ on Postmates -- to order food. I'm not sure if that's a sign of a huge fraud problem or something else, but I'm not totally convinced that company is as successful as they claim.
You'd think people would have learned their lesson from Kozmo. There's clearly some market for home delivery. Pizza places and random Chinese restaurants have been doing it forever. But it's teenagers and other people largely working for tips. Not VC-scale "disruption."
And grocery delivery works too. But it's mostly just an adjunct to B&M.
I'm surprised by the complaints about Postmates in this thread. I use it 1-2 times/week for various pickup tasks (food, items from walgreens, items from safeway), and I'm always pleased with the service / speed.
Postmates is a disaster of immature management. I worked in engineering for a while. I spent many Fridays at Hotel Utah Saloon listening to Bastian try to argue his points like "Women couldn't possibly write code as well as men." I also watched the company transition from a point where Bastian and Sean would get into open fights in the middle of the office. Bastian would tell everyone they were fired. Eventually the company got bigger, they moved into a new office and Sean reasoned to keep Bastian away from the company. Bastian's hot head and immoral demeanor makes Travis Kalanik look like a good person. The only way to get ahead at Postmates is to be part of the "f-ck buddy" group in the office. Go out drinking with Sean and you will get a raise and a promotion. They brought on new managers and new middle-tier but as all of us saw, it was more of the same like minded childish ways that ran wild.
I'm guessing they're referring to a group of people who go and get drinks? I don't really understand it either, but that's my guess from the followup being about going out for drinks with one of the founders.
On one hand reading hacker news left me with the impression that creating a business is incredibly difficult with so many things to get right, and on the other there are companies like this successfully raising money and growing, I'm really puzzled. Sure they are not sustainable but are investors still fooled by this? By my limited experience in the B2B space they are usually quite smart and know how to do a serious due diligence
Edit: I understand the investors could have taken a conscious high risk bet on an unsustainable business model, but how it comes the founding team didn't raise any red flag to the investors before?
This is just part of growing pain trying to improve the efficiency. Yes it sucks for people who lost the job but I am sure Postmates treated them really well.
As a business, they have the strong brand among restaurants and customers (maybe except few HN'ers). They can certainly use some help with couriers.
They will be fine all the people whining has the same reasons when Amazon got started (this will never work, this is a bad business model, shipping cost alone is bad etc). I have been hearing these arguments for past 20 years about Amazon they have grown to be the powerhouse. It always seems impossible until its done. I am pretty sure these same people still think Amazon is on verge of collapsing next day.
There are people who point fingers and whine. If you listen to them they make very good convincing arguments but in the end, accomplish nothing and then there are people who go make things happen, who make impossible possible.
I applaud Postmates efforts to help little guys compete with big guys. We are better off not living in Amazon monopoly.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadFixed that for ya!
Either way, so long as you admit it's actually "being polite" then I'm weirdly, enthusiastically okay with that.
Yeah, about that. We run repair shops, and were approached by Favor (Postmates competitor) about doing this. We love Favor; they are local to us in Austin and we'd like to do more business with them.
The problem was insurance. Our insurance refused to cover it as the phone wouldn't be in our possession. And (at least at the time) Favor's insurance also was not covering if a phone was lost or stolen during a "run."
When it's a small food order (most of the food orders they run are around $20-$30, or even less), it's not the end of the world if something gets lost or stolen. It's a lot bigger deal if it's a $969 iPhone 7+. Even with a broken screen and iCloud locked, they're still (unfortunately) worth significant money on the black market.
As far as I know, no delivery company has overcome this hurdle.
Why? You can schedule pickups for Fedex and UPS for no fee, and have same-day pickup in some areas.
http://www.fedex.com/us/fcl/pckgenvlp/pickup/ https://wwwapps.ups.com/pickup/schedule?loc=en_US
Unfortunately, Apple doesn't make it easy to see whether a phone is iCloud locked. They used to have a convenient online tool for this, but took it down. So a lot of folks, repair shops or not, get suckered into buying one.
From my perspective as someone who owns several stores, the majority of them get sold to people who don't know any better through platforms like Craigslist or Facebook marketplace.
A lot of repair shop owners do lurk on, say, FB Marketplace and comment on posts where people are obviously trying to sell stolen goods, but there will unfortunately always be someone willing to buy something because they got "such a good deal."
Typically repair shops aren't going to put used parts in a customer phone, so an iCloud locked phone isn't much use "for parts."
Can't speak for all of them, but one that I visited in Hong Kong to do a screen replacement definitely had a guy sitting at a counter breaking down a stack of used iPhones for parts.
Huh, that seems like an obvious thing for Apple to not just provide, but to make extremely easy to use and actually promote. Run a simple stolen/not stolen check from NFC by tapping another phone, or something like that. Perhaps be able to put a message on the check from iCloud to enable easy positive proof of ownership.
http://www.idownloadblog.com/2017/01/31/apple-probably-took-...
Homeowner's insurance/renter's insurance would likely cover it. I'm not sure I'd want to make a claim against my homeowner's policy for such a small amount though. I've fortunately never had to rely on it but i've heard rumor of not using it on small ticket items.
Some argue that you should always buy it because there's always the possibility of bad things happening that could be very expensive. But personally I (like I assume most people) am very selective.
That said, if you've been planning an African Safari for a decade, and everything is pre-paid to the tune of $20k, the $100 on trip insurance is probably money well-spent! For example, I did a long motorcycle trip where I paid $250 for a year's worth of medical evacuation coverage, which was nice peace of mind.
Of course, the more "stuff" a policy covers, the more expensive it is, but you bring up a good point about pre-paid expenses. My last trip was on airline miles, with $25/night AirBnBs that could be cancelled the day before.. train tickets weren't bought until I was in-country, and naturally no food/drink/museum entry/subway passes were prepurchased.
If my phone is broken, how will I even use the Postmates app?
Maybe the actual expected loss from theft is too high?
Yes, there was a time when there were so few drivers for Uber and Lyft here that it was hit or miss. That went away though. At the same time, the little local versions of Instacart and Postmates started showing up. Missed opportunity for growth. Uber and Lyft got it done
Full-time drivers and house-related help are very common in some countries. In the US, you're pretty wealthy at that point.
It used to be that you used Postmates if you wanted your food hot, and DoorDash for other deliveries.
I've literally never had a DoorDash order arrive not stone cold. Maybe they've changed?
Also, their app user experience is simply terrible. Just the fact that they are constantly and aggressively pushing their referral program and subscription plan, makes the app feel like a cheap adware.
I never pay over $3 to deliver food. Oh and it is delivered by the same delivery people who know the building, know where the buzzer is, know how the customer looks like. And they work for the restaurant from which the food is being ordered.
Seamless for the win.
My experience with Seamless is only in a few major markets. In every one of them the delivery people were the people who worked for the restaurants, which is why different restaurants in the same general area delivered or did not deliver to the same address, had different delivery fees and had different minimum orders.
I once ordered food from a place maybe 10-15 blocks away. It took ~hours~ for the food to arrive because the delivery driver decided to take an hour phone call right down the street, food in hand. We had to go find him, as support was non-existent. A little while later they offered to credit $3 for the issue: not even covering the delivery fee we paid to go hunt down our own food. This is a typical experience: anytime anything goes wrong Postmates support is worthless.
Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot?
I haven't figured this one out. I think they all buy into the myth that customer service doesn't scale / is a cost center / doesn't have ROI, etc.
Except in my business we don't do anything even close to a Postmates (where I agree, CS should be priority #1) but we ship items around the country and do like 60-80 orders per day, and we made the decision a few years ago to seriously care about email response time, always pick up the phone between certain hours, return voicemails, ship things within a discrete timeline, and more importantly, offer refunds and accept blame 99% of the time something goes wrong.
The goodwill we get and social media cred from the customer service is worth a lot (tough to measure), but we also can measure ROI on the emails we reply to and phone calls we take. We find that tons of people will email or call in with an irrelevant question that has nothing to do with buying something, we'll answer it well, and they are then very likely to buy something immediately after. Customers like to know a human is there for them! Our CS department nearly has positive ROI from measurable tasks, to say nothing of the untrackable rewards mentioned above (and the feeling that we aren't scumbags, which is really the main reason we decided to do it).
In an era where everyone runs customer service like Comcast, standing out can be worth a ton. We also ship product slightly worse than Amazon Prime, which is pretty damn good - in today's market everyone wants things as fast as Amazon and don't want to buy things from random websites, and I understand! So if we can come close to that shipping time (USPS Priority Mail flat rate boxes are 2 days to most major metropolitan areas - even from the coast like we are), then that picks up repeat business and people talking about how fast we ship on Twitter/Instagram/etc.
It just doesn't seem that difficult to get right. But maybe it is.
EDIT: Well, "difficult" is subjective. It took us over 12 months to get our CS pipeline working well. But that was more "hard" than "difficult" - it just required a lot of work to mold it into the shape we wanted. The overall design was pretty simple: Just take care of customers at any cost.
Honestly, I just refused to run customer service like Comcast. I didn't want to contribute to what I think is one of the worst trends in business today. I didn't really care if it was good for the business or not.
>>Was it mostly a training & process change or did you invest in technology to help?
I worked for a year or so in call centers and I've worked a lot of crappy retail jobs in my life, so that was its own form of training I found very useful.
As for technology, we use Help Scout, Google Voice, Acuity Scheduling, Stitch, and Agile CRM. I can't remember what we use for postage and printing labels... it's pretty decent though. Nothing that spectacular or groundbreaking. Our online shop is powered by WordPress and various plugins, which works pretty well and is funny to talk about here on Hacker News.
Our warehouse manager reconfigured all of our USPS packaging and saved us a lot of money using various different types of flat rate based on zip code, that was a big cost savings with no impact to delivery time. That probably took the longest; getting logistics software to work well with our inventory management system and printing labels/postage properly. We did it by hand on USPS.com for months and managed inventory in Excel. But like anything else, you do it that way as a startup until it's too painful then you figure out a solution.
There is one notable exception, and they seem to be destroying their competition. Scaling doesn't appear to be a problem either. Amazon are doing pretty well. Bezos is known to indoctrinate his employees with a few strong principles, and customer obsession is #1.
Their straight-up customer support is outsourced, but works well enough from a scaling perspective. Given how large the company is, I also agree that they get an A- at worst.
But more importantly, their domination of logistics is a truly impressive feat. There is a constant flow of articles on HN, reddit, and everywhere else about how Amazon's prices are no longer the cheapest and how they are a monopoly and how you should shop around and JET.com and blah blah.
No one cares that it's not the cheapest. It's almost like people forgot that 10 years ago, buying things online and dealing with horrendous shipping was a nightmare, complete pain in the ass, and took forever. Amazon decided to grab USPS by the neck and make them work Sundays (how do you get a government institution to do that?!) and develop their own logistics network to deliver many items same-day, or even within an hour. It's truly an amazing feat that puts customers' minds at ease; there is no wonder why there is such loyalty to Amazon.
Solving that customer problem is like an act of God to the masses.
Also, customer service in that space is costly, particularly because these businesses already operate at a loss to gain market share.
I am not surprised their customer service has gone further downhill.
Conway's law is pretty evident there in that the lack of care for customers is reflected in the lack of engagement between management and the agents and team leads.
I'm not sure which which service for finding cheap airline tickets was posted here, HN will jump on this for me I'm sure, but I recall them saying from day 1 that CS was their focus.
As I set up my own service based business I got a CS phone number and when asked why before I have customers, I said: "We need to be ready to respond to issues long before we're needed".
Postmates, on the other hand, has absolutely disastrous support and consistently laughable "resolutions" as the parent comment noted. Postmates is one of those things that felt like magic the first time I used it in the early days when they were the only game in town, but they just got so surpassed by competitors to the point where I hate it. Their "taxes+fees" are ridiculous for an inferior product. UberEats gives me a flat $4.99 plus taxes that actually reflect legitimate taxes. Postmates, on the other hand, is a minimum of $3.99, often more, plus maybe it's surging, plus the "taxes and fees" is often some obscene amount (Tacolicious seems to have a $4-5 "fee" on Postmates), oh and if you're treating yourself to a small fast food order there will be another $2 "small order fee."
The last straw for me was when they started adding "walking" postmates, who would literally walk an order from ~40 minutes away when I'm paying them $10-ish to deliver it. Then when I complained and (half-jokingly) suggested they give people paying $10 for delivery the option to not have a walking postmate deliver it because my food was extremely cold, I got the typical Postmates support brush-off. Utter joke of a service.
Yes, I am Mad On The Internet.
Are you sure it was an UberEats order and not their own lunch or something?
You may disagree (for yourself as a customer), but there's no reason to believe your preference is held by a majority of the total addressable market (by user count or profit margin), let alone that everyone else has a blind spot.
It may be that relatively few users share your willingness to pay for support (which seems very possible to me), or even that they've tested different approaches to support and measured how much support actually affects a customer's future purchases - ie, revealed preferences/values. In that case, it wouldn't be a blind spot, it would be that they have better data than any of us do.
I find that companies driven more by hubris and marketing's version of data science, are inherently opposed to boots-on-the-ground service operations. Is the company's valuation driven by its customers or by promises to investors? I don't Postmates but I suspect it's the later. It's almost as if the more you focus on the customer, the more you expose the weaknesses and assumptions built into a years-old sketch of a business plan. So the customer issues get swept under the rug.
What they typically don't realize is that those 50 are going to leave too, but hey, at least they have big numbers for their reports!
I've also noticed their emails trying to get me to refer friends have increased to almost daily. Which is obnoxious. And they aren't even good deals - get 5 friends to order within a week for $15 delivery credit? It used to be I get $10 credit, my friend got $10 credit.
I pretty much only use them when they offer free food - combined with my insane amount of delivery credit, and I pretty much just pay to tip the driver.
A year ago they delivered food right to my hospital room. I'm about to head back in for an extended stay, so I'm hoping they still do that.
2015 Postmates was great. 2017 Postmates is almost useless.
This is basically every order on Postmates at this point. No one is actually paying their insane delivery fees. I worked as a driver for a few weeks in Berkeley and it was like clockwork. Postmates sends out a free credit promo, get a bunch of ultra cheap short orders, and make like $6 to deliver someone an Iced Tea. There's no possible way the economics can work out for this.
Pretty much says that they are walking dead. As a service business, service is the only differentiation and it costs. That is why these businesses spend huge amounts of time on process to minimize service problems, monitoring and metrics to get to problems before they become service issues, and then maximizing the likelihood that a service call can be resolved satisfactorily in short order.
It does not sound like they have internalized any of those requirements.
In this case, after 60 minutes or so, I'd just call up and say, "it's been 1 hour since the meal was picked up. If you don't refund my money I'm charging back."
(Edit) I should add that I only threaten about once every 5-6 years, and it needs to be obvious that the company is just not taking responsibility for their goofs. It's not something that I do because the delivery boy showed up 5 minutes late.
I ordered a meal which Postmates estimated to be ~$16. When they finally billed me it was charged at $32.
When I contacted them they told me that the prices reflected aren't always accurate, but I'd say a price going up double is a bit of a goof on their part. They were unwilling to refund the payment, and so I called my bank and explained the situation. The bank associate on the phone took care of the charge back as a measure against them.
After that, I've never ordered from postmates again. I get that prices can vary, I'd forgive it to a certain degree. But double the price? Nope.
I am not even kidding about that comment. I have heard him scream and seen him physically throw things around the office over the tiniest things and threaten to fire the entire Customer Service team because a VC's order was late.
UberEATS and Amazon PrimeNow will probably survive, but their parent companies can afford to run them at a loss pretty much forever.
And grocery delivery works too. But it's mostly just an adjunct to B&M.
? What does that mean
Edit: I understand the investors could have taken a conscious high risk bet on an unsustainable business model, but how it comes the founding team didn't raise any red flag to the investors before?
As a business, they have the strong brand among restaurants and customers (maybe except few HN'ers). They can certainly use some help with couriers.
They will be fine all the people whining has the same reasons when Amazon got started (this will never work, this is a bad business model, shipping cost alone is bad etc). I have been hearing these arguments for past 20 years about Amazon they have grown to be the powerhouse. It always seems impossible until its done. I am pretty sure these same people still think Amazon is on verge of collapsing next day.
There are people who point fingers and whine. If you listen to them they make very good convincing arguments but in the end, accomplish nothing and then there are people who go make things happen, who make impossible possible.
I applaud Postmates efforts to help little guys compete with big guys. We are better off not living in Amazon monopoly.