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Probably no one cares as it's only £4, but posting on HN has a therapeutic effect.
£4 over a million customers soon adds up.
Luckily, they all signed the class action waiver and didn't mail in their opt out with the address in green ink like the terms and conditions said.
I care. I've grown very embittered by big tech I want people to continue call out their bs.
Why should a customer pay for bad app design? The app allowed the code to be applied to that specific restaurant. Then backend refused it and customer pays the difference. In what world is that acceptable?
I recently(ish) discovered a legitimate billing error with Lyft/Bay Wheels that caused a few bucks of overage[1]. It wasn’t a lot of money to me, but I pointed it out to them as it was an obvious error. To their credit, they refunded several entire trips, not just the disparity, and I believe they refunded others’ affected rides as well. I think that’s a satisfactory approach: mistakes happen, but companies should make an effort to ensure that they don’t benefit if they make an accident that favors themselves.

[1] https://twitter.com/paulgb/status/1449779457200300033?s=21

This is so bad I can’t imagine even Uber Eats really thinks it’s acceptable. Probably a bug.

The problem is that tech support are useless automatons and there is no way to really escalate to those that can see it clearly should be fixed other than shouting on Twitter. Very frustrating when there’s no avenue for real review and redress other than chargebacks.

£4 times the millions of people they pull the same trick on, though.
In the US one would consider escalating to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, since this seems like lying (the price before the button press is different from the price after).

Not sure if the UK has a similar ministry you could appeal to? Though one would consider the risk of being banned from Uber Eats over $4.

Risk being banned from a service that stole your money and refused to give it back? You chargeback and move on with your life.
Yeah, this is a slam-dunk chargeback; the user has documented the disparity and documented their attempt at going through the businesses’ preferred channel. Assuming that what’s presented is true, of course.

I guess chargebacks are less of a thing in the UK?

They're not a problem in my experience. At worst you'll get banned by the merchant. Bank never required proof or anything the few times I charged back (for not delivering the items for over a month, pre Covid).
Chargebacks are a thing in the UK, and the only time I've ever gone to my credit card company with one they resolved the issue properly.
Chargeback is exactly what I'm going for, but need to wait until the payment settles (couple of days) and then I can start the dispute process (called my credit card provider right after I realised UberEats is not willing to refund), which with my credit card provider is the following: - Hold the phone for 40 minutes - Explain the situation - Wait for a paper letter on the post that includes an empty printed form with a return envelope - Fill out the form with the exact information I provided on the phone - Post the return envelope - Wait

Fortunately I don't mind playing along and I'm pretty sure having this deliberately crazy process (instead of an online form) is a much bigger pain for my credit card provider (who are hoping for churn and people abandoning the process) than myself. Well, not me. It's not the £4, it's the principal.

Good on you, mate! :)
I thought chargebacks also result in bans typically? If anything, I'd expect CFPB arbitration to be less likely to result in a megacorp ban than a chargeback. But I don't have any first or second-hand experience.
Even if it did, why would you want to continue a relationship with a company that has taken your money and won’t return it? Especially if they banned me from their service for getting my money back.

This isn’t a complex calculus. Don’t do business with companies that steal from you, especially when they get upset that you took your money back.

This is a bit simplistic and dismissive. If Uber and Lyft both mischarge me once, I may still find myself needing at least one of them while in a potentially tight spot.
And that’s a bit hypothetical, but who you choose to do business with is your choice.

Lyft in my experience has been pretty happy to give me my money back whenever I’ve had a problem. That’s the problem the OP ran into: Uber Eats didn’t just “mischarge” him, they refused to remedy the situation claiming impotence on their part. That’s what turns it from a “mischarge” into theft, and something a chargeback is both justified for and the correct remedy to resolve the situation.

Is there a place on Earth where there are Ubers but no local taxis?
Tons. One of the main problems that Uber solved was taxis who would pick you up but then refuse to take you where you wanted to go because it wasn't in a high-volume tourist area.

My friends and I played outside in the front lawn of a house in "Mid-City" district of New Orleans and called taxi cabs all day as an experiment. Every 30 minutes we'd call another taxi to come pick us up. Not one taxi arrived all day. All of them claimed they came, honked in the driveway, but no one came out. Again -- we were outside the whole day, with full view of the street and driveway.

Also, a month earlier, the only taxi driver who once did drop me off there tried to illegally charge double until I called the police, who arrived after he left.

Uber/Lyft we had no trouble with at all!

The other thing the UK has is the small claims court. Many large companies have insurance terms that mean that they have to be represented by competent lawyers, and unlike other tracks in civil law costs are not recoverable in the small claims track. So large companies often don't have any option but to lose money if you start to take them to court -- either spend a lot of money on lawyers, which is sunk forever, settle out of court, or don't show up and pay the bill when the order comes from the judge.

If I were in the OP's position I'd report Uber to trading standards, threaten to take them to court, and quite possibly follow through with it, representing myself. They're an odious company and have quite clearly just nicked money here with no recompense.

Sometimes I've had the same intial screen with the code applied only to be told after trying to place the order that my account was not eligible for the promotion. I was sent back to the same screen with the appropriate amount (without the promo applied).

Judging by the screenshots, this could be the case so I will hold my judgement.

Edit: Just wanted to make this clearer, a way to reproduce this would be:

Take screenshot of code applied.

Place order.

App tells you the code didn't apply and sends you back to the order screen with the full price displayed.

Place order.

Take screenshot of receipt.

Boom UberEats scammed me!

Not necessarily saying that OP is lying but I am too cynical.

This is one of the reasons I've only used SkipTheDishes or try to avoid UberEats as much as possible. SkipTheDishes the customer service at least somewhat tries. UberEats doesn't give two anythings about you or your food.
> We understand you are not happy with your recent experience

> [Tick] no response needed!

I think companies really shoot themselves in the foot with responses like this. Surely it’s worth 4 bucks to avoid the potential PR shitstorm.

Oligopoly. There are very few popular food delivery services. If you are petty over 4 bucks, you end up cooking at home.

It is like saying that people outraged by FB will change anything. What are you going to do? Move to TikTok?

Cause a stink then quit for good... ideally
Funny enough, I encountered the is issue earlier this week. I assumed it was a bug and didn’t place the order.
This is the one thing I cannot wrap my head around. How does anyone make any money on orders this low? Based on the screenshot the total was 12.28. UberEats takes 1.00 for a fee and I think some from the vendor. The delivery person gets 1.29.

Does UberEats pay a minimum for the delivery to the delivery person and the tip is addtional? If so, whose end does it come out of?

Are the delivery services trying to make it up in volume?

UberEats is making money from VC and isn’t profitable [1]. They charge the customer a fee, and take 30% from the restaurant as a middleman fee.

[1] https ://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/if-uber-eats-isnt-profitable-now-when-can-it-be.html

30%. Thirty freakin percent. Plus a delivery fee. And they can't turn a profit? That's not a business model that can be fixed by optimizing some conversion rate or efficiency factor by any reasonable percentage.
> That's not a business model that can be fixed by optimizing some conversion rate or efficiency factor by any reasonable percentage.

Many, many people made this exact case during the heyday of gig economy companies. Many a VCs and investors (including those who run this illustrious site) mocked this criticism as that of know-nothing haters who simply could not understand the brilliance of the minds behind these operations.

They don’t. All of the delivery companies are massively (as in billions) unprofitable with no reasonable path to profitability due to competition from other equally unprofitable VC funded companies.
UberEats are shockingly bad in my experience (London, UK).

They constantly try to tempt us back with 40% promos, but we have sworn off ever using them again.

Last time we used them, every driver allocated to pick up the order abandoned the delivery when they got to the restaurant. I assume something was going wrong at the restaurant. This happened maybe 10-15 times, to the point that we were joking that the restaurant was murdering the drivers. The app didn't offer any ability to contact customer service, as it only seemed to unlock customer service after the order is actually delivered. None of the phone numbers online would get through to a human. We didn't want to order from elsewhere in case that order ended up getting delivered. It took 5hrs (!) before the app auto-cancelled the order.

Additional to that, the drivers rarely find my house, always turn up in different vehicles to what is claimed on the app and quite frequently a different person entirely. The order time is always longer than what it claims (much like Uber itself). The app is terribly unstable and frequency crashes, displays errors or loses my basket.

Deliveroo are so much better it's not even funny.

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Similar experience in the US for me. I wrote off UberEats completely after a truly abysmal experience where Uber accepted the order, and the restaurant made it, only for Uber to fail to find a delivery person to deliver it.

Except the app gave no errors or notices about this, no "sorry, we can't find a driver right now, hang on..." prompt. Nor did it update the ETA for the order. It just happily kept pushing the ETA back, 5 minutes at a time, with no notice of any sort.

After about an hour I contacted the restaurant - I'm a regular there and they were puzzled - the order had been ready for quite some time and no one had shown up to pick it up. The Uber app on their end showed no errors or notifications to indicate something was wrong. So I contacted UberEats CS, where the agent revealed the "can't find a driver" part of the story, and then announced that there was nothing to be done about it.

That part really pissed me off - Uber charges surge pricing to customers to incentivize more drivers, but when push comes to shove on a poor customer experience is unwilling to increase the payout for a delivery to expedite it? Given the absolutely usurious rates Uber charges restaurants to use their service they weren't even willing to sacrifice a small part of their margin to try and get a stuck order moving?

The craziest part of this is how apologetic the restaurant was for something that absolutely had nothing to do with them. It sounds like UberEats fucks up regularly and customers take it out on the restaurants - meanwhile UberEats runs away to the bank with their absurd per-ticket commissions for failing to fulfill their role.

Oh wait, no, they're not running away to the bank at all. Somehow despite running a truly shitty service and charging usurious fees to restaurants they are still losing money hand over fist.

I will say - I have misgivings generally about the gig economy, but I now exclusively use DoorDash. I've had a couple of screwups with them but they have always responded promptly in a no-bullshit way.

If you're a regular at the restaurant (and willing to speak to them on the phone), why not order from them directly?
Also in the US, and decided to try out UberEats one day because my friend had a pretty good referral code deal. Opened the website, set up my order, but the checkout button was just greyed out with no error message. Figuring it was a browser issue as I run Firefox and many companies don't give a shit, I tried it on Edge, but it still didn't work. I ended up needing to download their stupid app just to place the order, and uninstalled it right after.
I had almost this exact same experience with DoorDash. I was mostly just frustrated to be using DoorDash at all, because the restaurant's website makes no mention that delivery orders are fulfilled by DoorDash. That'll teach me to order delivery.
DoorDash has been pretty good in my experience, but they gouge restaurants pretty bad. Minneapolis passed an ordinance preventing that, which DoorDash now just charges the person ordering calling it a "Regulatory Response Fee". Which is added to their existing delivery fee, service fee, etc. It's like over $10 to get anything delivered, before a tip.

I now check to see if the restaurant is on ChowNow, which is a subscription on the restaurant's end and is a bit more fair as far as I can tell. Usually it's quite a bit cheaper to order through them and my understanding is the restaurant is getting more of the money. Of course hilariously then the orders are "fulfilled with DoorDash".

> This happened maybe 10-15 times

The fact that you tried this many times kind of makes you lose all credibility...

> Deliveroo are so much better it's not even funny.

It's like reading a reply from a bot account. Fool me once, fool me twice... but fool me 10-15 times, and deliveroo it is!

always turn up in different vehicles to what is claimed on the app

As a former Uber driver, I can tell you that in the market where I drove, this happened quite a lot. The reason is that drivers who got kicked out of Uber would then rent other people's Uber accounts, or have other people sign up for them.

Another thing I learned is that when someone is such a terrible taxi driver that they actually somehow manage to lose their hack license (I know, hard to imagine someone that bad), they just sign up with Uber. You learn this when you're hanging out at the airport staging area at slow times. There were dozens and dozens and dozens of drivers who were people that the local government wouldn't allow to drive taxis anymore.

I once worked on a reasonably complex e-commerce system with millions of products, add-to-cart, taxes, promo codes, etc. Every so often, an order total changed between the time that the user saw the total on the confirmation screen and when they actually hit the button to place the order (which seems to be what happened here). This happened because of promo applicability changes, product price changes, products being de-listed, etc.

But it was relatively easy to prevent problems with this. When the user clicked the button to place the order, we sent along the expected order total, the expected item IDs to purchase, the expected tax, etc. In the backend, one of the last validation step before the order was finalized was just to compare the final order details against those expected values. If there were any differences, the order was rejected with an error message to try again. There were then monitors on these types of errors which would go off if there was a higher-than-normal frequency of these sorts of errors, so we could track down any bugs causing price discrepancies.

I'm kind of surprised that UberEats doesn't seem to have a similar validation step.

> Every so often, an order total changed between the time that the user saw the total on the confirmation screen and when they actually hit the button to place the order (which seems to be what happened here).

I don't see any reason from the post to believe this kind of race condition is what happened here.

Uber's CS says the promotional code used was not valid for this restaurant, but presumably the app accepted it anyway. That's also likely a validation error, but of a different class.

> I'm kind of surprised that UberEats doesn't seem to have a similar validation step.

That's what OP was saying.

> an order total changed between the time that the user saw the total on the confirmation screen and when they actually hit the button to place the order

> …but presumably the app accepted it anyway…

Not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure things like this would constitute a contract. Of course, whether there’s squirrelly language in the Terms of Service is another question…

EDIT: formatting

If I have to guess, something something microservices/event-system. One separate team handles code consumption which is not he same who handles the validation, and because its a distributed mess, it is eternally broken.
Similar thing happened to me with Square. I used their debit card and applied a boost for grocery shopping. This promised some percent discount if I shopped at a grocery store. I did a sizable purchase (>$50) and at checkout withdrew $20 in cashback. Turned out, they had hidden conditions for denying the boost if the transaction involves cashback (no way to know this at all). I contacted support who just gave the templated "can't do anything about it sorry" and they force closed the ticket. I would have accepted if they just applied the promised discount on the grocery portion of the bill (since they can clearly detect the cashback), but this seems beyond their ability to program... and at the consumer's expense?

These big companies power themselves by automation, losing sight of the fact that they should be designed to serve humans, not harvest nickel and dimes off of them. It's so easy for them to profit off of massive scale but they can't find any port of the budget to cover their own programming errors and bugs (as rarely as they do occur)??? It's easy to prosecute companies on egregious scams, but these small programming errors that probably affect a non-trivial amount of customers in small ways probably add up to big scams in scale but fly under the radar.

That's the brilliant thing about being "at scale": as long as the incidents are infrequent enough that doesn't happen to essentially everyone, it's much cheaper to leave a wake of pissed-off ex-customers than it is to hire and support actual customer service.
It's also the sort of thing that is catnip to senators who want to score points against Big Tech.
Yep. And the thing is, despite reading all the awful shit Uber/UberEats has done in this thread, I'll continue using them, because it's convenient, and still better than most of the alternatives. (The Lyft app has decided over the past few weeks that taking my money is too difficult for it, so I'm a transportation app down at the moment.)

I feel a little bad about this, but not bad enough to change my behavior.

At some point the reputation precedes the company. I think Google has abused customers at edge cases enough that people think twice about their consumer paid product offerings.
Meanwhile trending on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rj0a19/made_...

> Bill's Kitchen couldn't complete your order and has to cancel. We're sorry we couldn't complete your order this time but thanks for continuing to support restaurants.

> You'll still be charged

Commenters are saying this is flat-out illegal and OP should contact their bank.

If you contact the bank or a card company for a chargeback they will likely block you on Uber. Which might be PIA when traveling. All hail monopolies.
At least there's also Lyft. The same can't be said for the broadband internet market, for example.
Not outside the US!
I used grab in Vietnam. There's a pretty good chance there's another app to use. I don't have an Uber account
Taxi
(comment deleted)
I'd rather walk with my shoes full of pins than give my money to taxis.
I’d take a taxi over a random person who decided to drive Uber/Lyft to make a few extra bucks. Furthermore, taxi prices over last couple years are at or better compared to same Uber/Lyft ride. Lastly, the apps taxis have are effectively the same. Last time I was in PHX I scheduled a 4am taxi ride, got a text 30 minutes ahead to confirm, once driver was en-route received a text with link to a real time map tracking cars location to my destination. The experience is the same.
> Which might be PIA when traveling. All hail monopolies.

That's the beauty of having a uniform, consolidated experience, whether or not you are in San Francisco, Zurich, or Bangkok.

I was blacklisted on Uber a few years ago when I reported a security vulnerability to them.

They said no such vulnerability existed. I sent them video. They said I must have been doctoring the video because they couldn't reproduce it. They then banned me.

This was in 2015.

They were then sued because the vulnerability apparently identified someone's affair[0].

I sent my email exchange with Uber to the attorney who sued Uber, letting them know that they were aware of the bug two years prior. You know, because no good deed goes unpunished.

I get by just fine on Lyft these days.

---

0: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38948281

I originally tried/preferred Lyft because of all the bad publicity and stigma about Uber.

However, I read that many drivers work for both anyway, and over time, on the infrequent occasions I needed a ride, I realized only one thing really mattered to me.

That is, that a driver keeps at least one hand on the wheel at all times while driving. That's my definition of professionalism.

I just feel like I have better odds of that with Uber, maybe they simply have more drivers these days.

I knew that all those apps have tons of bugs like that but holy cow.
The good thing about Uber (and similar) is that they have no legitimate reason to know your name or personal details, so for the rare time you need it you can make a new account with a fake name, new phone number & email address.
They ban you via a name on a credit card AFAIKR and other fraud detection algs, which are good
Wow. I initially thought before clicking that you'd kinda mixed two sources of info...but nope...right there together in your face. Sorry we're not going to give you anything, but you're not getting your money back. The nerve honestly leaves me a bit speechless.
I had a similar issue with GrubHub. I ordered a pizza from a local shop. Got charged for it, drove there to pick it up and the pizza shop was closed.

I opened a support ticket but GrubHub kicked me out of the support chat claiming my issue had been solved, and I couldn't open a new one.

I meant to file a charge-back but never got around to it.

You can open chargebacks for years after the fact. Do it.
You sure? I believe there's only a window of 2-3 months. It has happened to me couple times
DoorDash refused to give me my money back four years ago and I haven't used them since.

I'm not normally the kind of person to constantly complain about service or ask for refunds, but there was a period of time where their service was terrible. 90-120 minutes to get food, wrong food, spills, so on and so forth.

My first complaint, they gave me credit for the full order. Used that on a second order, which I ended up canceling after 2 hours with no delivery, so they reapplied the credit. The next order was the same thing - 2 hours, no food. So I tried calling them and just asking them to give me my money back instead, and said that I no longer wanted to use their service.

They refused, said I would only be offered credit, but they still closed my account and I get an error any time I try and log in. They just up and kept my ~$60.

DoorDash is/was awful. I don't think I ever got warm food from them. Haven't used them in years now.
Every one's experiences are different but i just switched from GrubHub because their drivers are assholes. door dash has been much better already I contacted grub hub about the problem but don't expect much acknowledgement. They did refund a dinner that was stolen pretty much instantly and comped me for a next meal for the troubles atleast. But that was just one good resolution over a number of instances where drivers simply don't give a fuck
Oh I once had a driver from another service (GrubHub or UberEats, can't remember which) balance a pizza on top of a 1" wide metal railing.† But at least it was still warm.

It's the worst of all worlds. We entered a Faustian bargain to allow these corporations to usher in techno-libertarian dystopia, but instead of the Hiro Protagonist we were promised, we get an angry Walter White.

† Horizontally, not vertically, though really, who's counting?

There is currently a thread on Reddit where hundreds are reporting having their orders cancelled but still being charged.

https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rj0a19/made_...

A similar thing happened to me. I still have an email that says "your order was cancelled but we'll refund you in 3 weeks". Three weeks later I still had no refund but since so much time had passed, their support refused to consider my complaint. After trying everything I could think of I eventually reversed the charge with my bank which took another 4 weeks or so. Then shortly after that I tried to book a taxi through Uber (not UberEats) and was unexpectedly charged the original amount for my cancelled food order. Again I had to get that amount refunded through my bank which again took weeks.

Most people will not bother to get their money back. Uber's business model is literal theft.

Haha, what is that screen?! "We didn't keep our part of the contract, but we are charging you anyway"?

How on earth did that make it all the way into the app.

Here you wonder what the programmers implementing this were thinking
They were implementing what they had been asked to.
at a certain point you have to take responsibility for your actions and the impact it has on the world. Sure, if you don't do it somebody else will. But what matters is that you weren't the one who did it and dirtied your hands. Yes, the CEO/management are responsible for the overall direction and tactics used by the business but the engineers are also complicit since without them the plan isn't executed.
1. I can't imagine a scenario where someone asks me to implement the message in question and I reply "I won't do it and if you insist I quit." 2. I believe the components on the screen ("You will still be charged" and the actual message) have been designed independently. Of course in the end there was someone somewhere who decided to combine them in the logic of the app.

Normally I'd tend to believe it was a mistake, but after several reports and their lax attitude to them it's clear it works as intended, at least for now.

> 1. I can't imagine a scenario where someone asks me to implement the message in question and I reply "I won't do it and if you insist I quit."

I guess this is your choice but I find it unethical. If you're a good engineer at Uber chances are 100% you can get a job at any other high-paying organization, so why choose to participate in this scheme?

My point is, neither of the 3 separate messages on the screen is morally wrong on its own. It is only when you combine them it becomes obvious is totally wrong.

As for the core of your point, frankly, half of the Silicon Valley would be jobless. Not just Uber programmers who already proved who they are by developing Greyball. The whole business of Facebook and Google is centered around tracking people. Amazon will happily accept fake reviews and products as long as customers pay they're happy. Netflix officially says they're competing with the time their customers use for sleeping. Apple will do everything to make their products environment unfriendly, unupgradeable, with ton of additional accessories produced only to increase their profit. So really, I understand your idealism, but the ship has already sailed and you can call yourself lucky if you can work on a product and for a company that are 100% ethical.

All the examples that you gave are strictly in the morally grey area. Where they end up on the spectrum is up to you as a person and what values you consider more important than others.

However, in this case, things are quite black and white. Someone pays money for food, they don't get any and then you keep the money anyway. Calling it anything other than theft is being delusional. If they did partial refunds or they only gave uber eats credit instead of money then this case would be in the same bucket as the ones you mentioned in your comment.

I work on an app for my company where requirements start as “we wish to show a message to the customer if their order is abandoned”. So I build out the feature and the requirements change to “we want that message to be customizable from the dashboard”. Now I have built a feature that could theoretically be built to function as in the screenshot, since I’m not longer in control of the text that is showed.

Thankfully my company isn’t scum of the earth, but it’s easy to see how multiple people assumed the features were being used for good intention, and a non-engineer used it to make a few extra bucks.

Why blame the greedy managers and owners at the top your overpriced pizza when you can blame the guy with a mortgage who did as he was told?

Besides they're as likely to tell the developers to code it up so they could do this in theory and then turn it on themselves.

> Why blame the greedy managers and owners at the top your overpriced pizza when you can blame the guy with a mortgage who did as he was told?

Nobody's absolving the managers or owners from their part in this issue. The point is that the guy with the mortgage decided that an extra room in his house or a bigger backyard is worth stealing from others. This isn't some ethically grey area, its outright theft that the engineer enabled.

> Besides they're as likely to tell the developers to code it up so they could do this in theory and then turn it on themselves.

I've never worked at Uber or any other big corp so I can't speak to how they do things there. This seems quite probable, but still doesn't completely absolve the engineer from responsibility. All it does is reduce their share of blame.

>Nobody's absolving the managers

Whether consciously or not, scapegoating their minions does exactly that.

This is a pervasive feature of American culture where the most guilty parties with the most power who have the least defensible motives use FUD to spread the blame around and it actually works. People buy this shit and even internalize it - something this thread is a living testament to.

This is the same shit that happened when the CEO of Boeing tried to blame the dead pilots and subsequently tried to throw his engineers under the bus and each time where there was even a shade of doubt a ready cohort of people stood ready to defend the self serving FUD he pumped out.

>I've never worked at Uber or any other big corp so I can't speak to how they do things there.

Only at small companies have I ever been asked to build $evilfeature. At big companies I get asked to build $featurethatcouldbeabused. The bigger the impact and the more morally wrong it is the more feature indirection there will be.

Either way it's good to know that when somebody with the power to deprive me of my sole income asks me to build a kitchen knife they intend to stab someone with there's a willing crowd on hacker news ready to claim that they dont get to hog all of the blame because I technically could have refused to make that kitchen knife and joined the unemployment queue.

Typical modern tech approach to user problems. Sorry we tried, most customers are happy though so we're winning, move fast and break things etc
I'll share my less dramatic experience, on the off chance others have seen the same:

Every few weeks I get an email from Uber Eats with a generous-looking promotional code, to the tune of 25% off. If I line up an order on the website and enter the promotional code, no discount appears on the order. If I refresh the page and re-enter the code, it tells me That code has already been used.

This has happened to me 3 times now, if I recall correctly.

It's not as if this can be blamed on my using a peculiar browser. Last time this happened I was using Edge, with no plugins or funky configuration changes.

I had the same experience with a couple food delivery services.

At first I figured it was a bug, after a couple more rounds I wondered if they counted on me deciding “whatever I’m hungry”.

Had similar issues with coupon codes from other non food services too…

Yeah, I never use Uber eats it sometimes do when I get one of those big discounts… but every time I do, I have issues like this. I usually get it to eventually work by following the email link and retrying a bunch, but the fact that it fails so often is always suspicious to me… are they hoping I don’t notice, or that I will say fuck it and order anyway?
I have a coupon code that keeps showing up in my email for something like $20 off from Uber Eats. I usually use Doordash, so I don't end up using it. Eventually they send an email warning that the coupon is going to expire soon, don't let it go to waste, etc. I don't care, so it expires. Then two days later, I get another coupon code for the same offer, and the same set of emails repeat.

This has repeated at least six times. I'm just morbidly curious how long this cycle will go.

Sort of unrelated, but I had a similar email issue after I moved between states earlier this year.

Submitted a request for a quote from a moving company, and included the specific date of move in the request. They called me, gave me a quote, but I opted to go with someone else. Moving date came and went, we got settled in, and about a week later the emails came in.

I would get one email per day informing me that they hadn't heard from me yet and needed to hear from me ASAP if I was still interested. They proceeded to include a comment that said they would not stop emailing me until they heard from me. Each email also appeared to be hand-typed by this person every day.

I wrote an email asking them if they even bothered to notice that my move date had come and gone, but stopped myself because, like you, I was morbidly curious. It took them three months of ignoring their, "We won't stop until you call us," emails for them to finally stop.

I looked at a used car (at a new car dealer) a few years ago, and got phone calls, one or more per day for weeks, until I called them back.

I realize that maybe the person was forced to do it by their boss, and people hate being ghosted, but it was so far out of my idea of social norms that I didn't want to talk to them even more.

If they're not taking the hint after 10 calls with no response, what are they thinking? How far will it escalate?

If I was just busy for a few days and wasn't ghosting them, what do they think they've accomplished?

wonder if this is just because these places are operated/owned by older people who are used to an era where people called all the time? Norms might have been different then… but even if that’s the case, they should be aware of the current norms.
I don't think older people expect to be treated like that.

The salesman was ~half my age, and I knew someone ~twice my age who had bought and serviced a car there and simply said they had no such experience, like I had.

I guess that older people do feel it's more of a faux pas to not return a call. But it's never been normal to go nuclear even so.

I have wondered if the reason for weird stuff at car dealers is simply that, with a commission-based position, you can basically let anybody who thinks they can do it try, and some of them are going to be weird overconfident people.

But I also figure that as a rule, really weird "customer service" is probably management coercion for some stupid reason.

I’ve had similar experiences occasionally with a few tech recruiters (this is an outlier experience not the general one). Incessant emails until finally one with something cute and a gentle note that they won’t bother me anymore. It’s really annoying because I feel cruel for ignoring their emails but it’s not like it’s going to change my mind. If your email got ignored just move on, but I do understand that the business incentivizes that behavior.
Literally every time I order from Amazon they offer me a free trial of Amazon Prime. I take them up on the offer around 80% of the time, use the free trial, and immediately cancel. I've had probably 8 free trials of Amazon Prime over the last five or so years and they are still offering it.
Genius. I keep declining it out of some misplaced sense of morality.
This has repeated at least six times. I'm just morbidly curious how long this cycle will go.

Possibly forever. This is the Bed, Bath, and Beyond advertising model.

Flooding your in/mail-box with coupons is a way of keeping the brand fresh in your mind. Considering the worthlessness of the coupons, and the small number of people who use them, it's more than worth the expense.

> Considering the worthlessness of the coupons

Are there a bunch of restrictions? $20 off sure sounds pretty good.

$20 is good to you. To Uber, it's an insignificant spec.
I haven't been in London in four years but still get regular offers of discounts quoted in Pounds Sterling.
I get similar codes and emails from a variety of delivery and meal kit services that don't work. I figure it's just another "innovative" growth/revenue hack.
I have also had this issue, but only in the last few weeks. The promotions used to work before.
The same happened to me. I didn't notice that the discount wasn't on the bill until 2 days later. I contacted UberEats and they said it was over 48 hours so they wouldn't do anything about. It was about 52 hours after.
I have used Uber Eats before and they are constantly sending me emails with $30 off coupons for first time orders only. Are they hoping I give them to someone else or something?
I have never had to do this, but I always figure that I can just cancel the transaction as fraud via my credit card. Possession is 9/10 of the law and all that.

Is there some limitation to this approach that I'm not aware of?

It depends - can you do without whatever account you are disputing a charge for? Amazon, Uber, Apple, Google and so on will basically just immediately close your account when you dispute any transaction. No more access to apps or books or movies associated with that account.
Yup I made the mistake of doing this with oculus sending me 4(!) quest 2 unit's when I only ordered 1.

They essentially ghosted me support wise so I did a chargeback. They then banned me from buying games. It took > 100 days to resolve it. Never buy hardware from oculus/facebook directly.

A chargeback is a nuclear option, and pretty much every company you will ever deal with will burn you as a customer if you exercise it.
If you have to do a chargeback you should never give that company access to your credit card again.
Yes indeed, so, companies that you can't trust, but can't afford to piss off, should be the definition of anti-trust targets.

In an ideal world.

Apparently Steam used to have a policy of shutting down the accounts of people who did too many chargebacks, locking them out of whatever else they'd bought before. [0] I'm not sure whether they still do, although their refund policy has changed since [0]. I'm also unsure if it's even legal to do this, especially in countries with consumer protection laws.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14545053

That's probably a good thing. Leaving an open credit card in the trust of companies without support is a recipe for trouble. If you purchased something download it immediately if you can't don't purchase vapor.

Your movies/books should be local. Your apps still exist on your local android phone.

Amazon seems to have customer service same as Apple but Google and Uber? Those places laugh at you when you need support..

FWIW, I've generally gotten quite good support from Uber in the past. I can't think of an interaction that didn't go very smoothly, on either Uber or UberEats.

This makes sense, as the feedback loop from how you feel about their product to how much revenue they make is immediate, unlike Google. If Uber were to piss me off enough, I wouldn't think twice about just opening Lyft every time I needed a car instead of Uber. I'm not very price-sensitive, but even my price-sensitive friends find it too much of a burden to check both options every time they call a car. This means we're all locked into an equilibrium where we spend large amounts of money with a single company, but can shift into a different equilibrium for very minor reasons. Hell, I think the last time I switched was because I got tired of all the little usability papercuts the Lyft app is filled with.

> Amazon, Uber, Apple, Google and so on will basically just immediately close your account when you dispute any transaction. No more access to apps or books or movies associated with that account.

Interesting, this makes total sense

That sounds about right for Uber. My wife got screwed for £47 for food that didn’t turn up. The delivery driver stole it, support was useless, chargeback was instantly taken again within two weeks.

The probability of success, the poor support and questionable acts against users mean I will never deal with them again.

This actually went as far as walking back home 7 miles from a club at 1AM because fuck them.

This stuff is normal for them as well https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/ubereats.com

I saw that reddit thread this morning and it was infuriating to see. What is the rationale here? Like at what meeting at Uber did they come to the conclusion a business can accept an order, cancel it, then keep the money. If a business is about to close, don't accept the order.
I had them not deliver an order once. They kept telling me it looked like it was delivered on their end, and they refused to do anything about it. I regret not doing a chargeback.
We need a standard protocol for the customer-restaurant-delivery market. UberEats has no business owning both the app and the delivery service.
The irony here is that through your own laziness and sloth (who has a $10 order delivered) of wanting your food delivered to you like a machine needs a top off of oil, you become scammed by a tech company seeking to enrich itself and hide behind a cloak of none other than the only thing it knows —- technology.
If I buy a jar of peanut butter made in a factory and it contains a shard of glass, is that my fault for being too lazy to grind my own peanut butter?
Laziness and sloth are the same thing
Uber has always been generous with refunds to me. Anyone had this come up and then asked for a refund and not gotten it?
Where do you live? Here in NL my experience with ubereats is good. But I think they know they need to compete here. There are other more popular options.

I could see customer service drop as alternatives fall away.

Your post history is basically all complaints about losing a few dollars or glitches in software that are annoying but ultimately not that big a deal.
Go get a poster board and stand in front of the restaurant "Uber Eats stole my money."

Contact Google or Apple and tell them their App is fraudulent.

Contact the police about the theft, non emergency line.

Charge back from your bank.

File a complaint with the town chamber of commerce.

Contact your state's attorney general office.

Contact your town's newspaper and tv.

Remember that pounds are not US currency and the advice doesn't apply.

This sort of thing is why I still use cash as much as possible.

That way you have an atomic transfer. I get food, you get money.

It could easily work with card, just pay on arrival and show the driver the payment confirmation.

But that would mean Uber taking a small risk of fraud (e.g. people ordering food they didn't want before their account gets banned).

So it won't happen unless people force it. It's the sort of thing that makes me wish that everyone else just, well, had a backbone. There are so many minor examples of bad systems all over the place that continue to exist because most people just put up with bad practice.

Not an advert, but I predominantly use Just Eat in the UK for this reason, or just go directly to restaurants. Their fees are lower too.

That is funny because I always use credit cards because I want to protect myself… if I give you cash for something and then you fail to give it to me, I have no way of getting my cash back. If I use a credit card, my bank can get it back for me.
Right, except with an atomic transfer this is impossible.

You can literally stand at the door, check that the food is there, done.

The worst case is that the restaurant scams you and it's not good food. This happens far far less than the middleman scams or pseudo-scams like oversubscribing delivery drivers so that everything is cold or late.

I'd like to hear more about the industry of delivering food without prepayment.
I mean, almost all pizza delivery was cash on delivery until fairly recently, which is food delivery without prepayment. The driver would tell you how much you owed, and you hand them the cash plus a tip. Yes, sometimes pizza places would have issues with people prank ordering a bunch of pizzas to someone else’s house, but pizza shops had ways to try to mitigate that risk.

If you are really too young to remember this, you can watch “Home Alone” to see some examples of how this worked.

Right, the fancy delivery apps aren't even ten years old yet. You couldn't even pay by card at all until ~2010 in the UK, I'm sure the odd weird pizza shop might have allowed you to read out details over the phone...?
Thanks, but I wasn't asking about history. You can't roll the clock back.

I'm old enough to remember when you could pump gas before paying, and there was actually at least one place that had full service in town (I've never lived in NJ or OR).

Umm, you can still order from most pizza places and pay on delivery. You just call them up on the phone.
Er, basically every takeaway I've ever bought?

Is this a joke? Come to mine and we'll get an Indian in? lol.

I'm getting the impression that people are avoiding saying "it's a thing outside the US".

I'm in the US, though, so I was interested if it was a thing in the US.

I am also in the US (California) and still sometimes order pizza to be paid with cash on delivery. It is a thing in the US
>This sort of thing is why I still use cash as much as possible. >That way you have an atomic transfer. I get food, you get money.

Oh no you don't.

I got burned at a food truck that only took cash. I gave them money, they produce the food a minute later and say I haven't paid. I have no receipt and it's too busy for witnesses.

How many places do you pay cash and they don't give receipts? Don't you think there is a positive correlation? Why might that be? Who does it benefit?

I bailed on ubereats a long time ago due to abysmal service and zero support. Switched to DoorDash, who has had phenomenal support and even automates refund requests while giving you the option to talk to a human if the proposed credit/refund isn’t satisfactory (I’ve done that only a few times and they always hooked me up, sometimes beyond what I asked for). I highly recommend them over UE.
The monopolization of the market has been much worse here in Germany.

Delivery Hero controls everything, and you can tell. Nonexisting support, double charges if you happen to break their frontend (no nonces here), addresses, phone numbers and emails leaking to spammers without any consequences or even acknowledgement. (I only know this because I use unique data)

Please consider cutting these services out of your transactions, or at least the ones that are too big to care about consumers or providers having a good experience.

Similar thing happened to me. Uber put a random charge on my card. I totaled up all my orders/invoices and made sure it didn't belong. Then fought with them for a month, every time they either refused to help or told me it must have been someone else in the family. Luckily Discover had my back and refunded the money immediately when I asked. Never used UberEats again.

Either way, just lay these transgressions on the heaping pile of Uber's toxic business practices. Stealing self driving secrets from Google, maliciously targeting politicians and police, and now just petty theft.

> maliciously targeting politicians and police

I hadn’t heard anything like this. Can you provide details?

They were tracking reporters and regulators using a "God View" function.
I regret the moment I signed up for uber eats. When things don't to well you are completely on your own. It is a legit scam. If there was a fundraiser to get a lawyer to sue them i would chip in.
Sharing the opposite experience: 1 out of 5-10 orders I've placed over the years have arrived with missing/different items. Every time, I got refund either for that item or the entire order instantly, effectively resulting in free meals. This is why I'm reluctant to use any other food ordering app since my experience trying to get a refund with the other ones have been bumpy.
I guess when there is a mistake they can put on the restaurant, they are happy to have the restaurant pay for the refund.

When they do the mistake, understandably they'd rather keep the money too :)

I thought this was common knowledge at this point.

I am legitimately surprised to hear that people are still using this service.