That is the happy path. It has a lot more possible sources of error/time consumption than the app and there are many benefits to the app.
1. The line is busy. The app is next to never busy.
2. The line has static and you are not heard correctly. Especially problematic for delivery or complicated orders. Or they may get your name wrong. My first name is common and my last isn't great over the telephone.
3. You have to remember what you ordered each time. Apps let me quickly re-order.
4. You cannot easily pre-pay (irrelevant if you have cash, but if you are like me and wish to never use cash again, having to pull out the card is annoying rather than just grabbing the pizza).
5. Most places now seem to be on DoorDash, so you can just order from there and avoid the additional friction. You also know you can get excellent customer service from DoorDash while a new restaurant is an unknown.
I don’t do delivery except pizza because I don’t want to pay a premium for cold food. Websites always have built in timers that take longer. Usually 45m.
Meanwhile I can call a pizza place, have pizza and wings ready in 15m, pay cash or whatever and have hot food. Order online, chances are it’s sitting there for 10m to avoid getting penalized on the SLA for online order pickup.
Plus, shitty middlemen like DoorDash are gross. Why would I want to have someone take a vig off my business and have a worse experience by any measurement?
The "its done" in the app or web page and it is within a minute or so of being able to walk out the door with it or have it show up. And ordering with Dominos you get a dominos driver - not a middleman.
Dominos is interesting to me as a product because it’s the result of decades of bean counters trying to strip everything good away from a product while still trying to make it appealing. Nowadays the technology itself seems to me like it’s more of a product than the pizza.
It's funny that this is a patent, as all that happens is every order gets put into the system, when the cook puts the order in the oven they hit an enter key. ~7 minutes later it says it's done. That's how long it takes to get through the oven.
Their ability to have every franchise and user connected to one site is impressive, and the recent addition of a driver tracker app is neat/creepy, but really it's a fancy timer.
Hmm... do you feel the same way about the middlemen who make it possible for you to buy bread without ordering the wheat direct from a farmer in 5,000 bushel lots, storing it, grinding it into flour, and then making it into bread?
Everyone hates "middlemen", but if they're really not adding value they tend to get disintermediated fairly quickly.
I remember the bad old days before Amazon where if I wanted some weird bit of kit I'd have to go to the library, blow a few hours doing research to figure out what companies might make the thing (not always successfully!), then blow more hours making long-distance phone calls (very expensive back then) to try to find a company that a) had what I needed and b) would sell it in quantity one. It sucked. Massively.
> Why would I want to have someone take a vig off my business and have a worse experience by any measurement?
Because then you don't have to hire your own drivers and maintain your own online ordering system. Not all restaurants participate in DoorDash, by any means. Presumably the ones that do find that it adds value.
Also, I disagree that the DoorDash experience is worse. Strongly. To name just one advantage over the old ways, there was no GPS app that showed me when the driver was nearby so I could be prepared.
Biggest issue is that DoorDash lies about how much you’re paying for delivery. They show you some of the fees, but hide the fact that the menu prices are often jacked up by 50% or more.
> hide the fact that the menu prices are often jacked up by 50% or more.
Wheat in metric tonne lots direct from the farmer costs about $350-400/tonne, or about $0.35-$0.40/kg. Kroger enriched white bread costs about $3.00/kg, more than seven times as much.
There are a lot of middlemen in there, each of which raises the price. On the other hand, I don't have to store a metric tonne of wheat, and maintain my own milling and baking facilities (I do make my own bread, but that's actually more expensive than buying cheap white bread... worth it, though).
Similarly, with DoorDash I don't have to interrupt what I'm doing, go to the restaurant, stand in line/wait for a table, then travel back home. Those are costs I avoid by using Dd.
Is it worth it? It depends on the individual. But no one is being forced into the transaction, and they are clearly adding value for many.
>But no one is being forced into the transaction, and they are clearly adding value for many.
Eh, there have been many stories over the years about these delivery platforms doing pretty awful things to insert themselves as a middleman where they aren't wanted. Here's one from a couple days ago. [1] Other strategies I've seen stories about include claiming the location on Google maps and changing the phone number listed, buying a domain for the restaurant and hosting the menu (setup to order through the delivery service), and modifying the prices shown in the app to help cover delivery costs which could distort the perception of the value of the restaurant unfairly.
I'm not sure where I personally fall on it all. On the one hand, a generic delivery service should be able to exist, and if that generic delivery service ordered food, maybe they should get served just as any other takeout does.
On the other, restaurants are ending up with bad reviews because consumers sometimes think they're ordering directly from the restaurants and end up with cold food, stolen food, etc. Restaurants might package things differently if they knew they'd be in the car longer than the average drive home. I'm empathetic to restaurants wanting to protect their reputations. This is a bigger issue than Amazon delivering your package 30 minutes late, the food has a pretty short time where it'll be considered "really good" by the consumer, and a delivery service maximizing profit would like to get just one more delivery on the trip if at all possible.
for places that never had delivery people, its a good proposition to expand their network and get food into more people's hands.
... but almost every pizza place has their own dedicated delivery people.
In short, by using the middleman, you're scamming yourself (through higher costs, and worse delivery because you're using random/shared agents rather than dedicated), or you're scamming the business (who ends up having to eat some of the costs).
That said, if you don't care about the business and you don't care about money (a single place to order pizza from is more valuable), then order away.
See above. I "don't care about money" in this context in exactly the same way that I "don't care about money" by not buying my own wheat in tonne lots and milling it into flour myself. Yes, that would be considerably cheaper (if I ignored the value of my time and the associated storage costs) but it would be highly inconvenient, and I don't just spend enough on bread to make it worth my time.
The amount you are paying for the convenience of delivery should be clearly laid out. To claim that delivery fees are X when really, your are paying significantly more is disingenuous.
No that’s very different as bakeries and flour mills add value to the commodity product.
DoorDash pays the drivers well, so it’s using investor dollars to subsidize the service to entrench it and drive out competitive processes.
Your argument was was the same as the Uber argument at the peak type period. When the Saudi sovereign wealth fund was kicking in $10-20 for each ride, the hype argument was we would not need to buy cars because some AI robot magic carpet would take care of everything. Now, Uber costs more than the cabs did before.
> No that’s very different as bakeries and flour mills add value to the commodity product.
Uber adds value by letting me call a ride by clicking on an app, and then telling me when it has arrived, rather than making me call the cab dispatch office, wait on hold, and then constantly look out the door to see if the cab is there.
> Now, Uber costs more than the cabs did before.
Not here, it doesn't. In virtually every city, operating a cab required that one purchase or lease a medallion, and those were very expensive (up to $1 million in NYC). Now that was a pure rent-seeking racket.
Those medallions are still out there, by the way. If Uber is really charging more than a cab, then the cabs will come back and undercut them.
> Those medallions are still out there, by the way. If Uber is really charging more than a cab, then the cabs will come back and undercut them.
The cabs are gone in most places. Why would someone go through the risk of getting cars, insurance, etc when Uber will notice a dip in business in days and crush you with discounts?
The NYC scenario is very different because medallions were a control in place to limit congestion; NYC in general and Manhattan in particular is a unique place.
Your experience is what parent refered to by that I think.
If you have the opposite of complicated orders, hard to orally convey name/address, no order to be remembered, and don’t want to prepay, yes your experience will probably be the opposite.
Websites have built in timers but restaurant is setting it based on how busy they are.
In my area I don't think I ever had anything ordered via phone or even walking to the counter ready in 15mins it is always at least 30 mins to 45mins, because they are busy with other orders. On the page I usually see they are setting it for 1h and then deliver earlier.
In the summer going to a normal restaurant was 1h waiting time for food as they were short staffed and not hiring more people because of pandemic.
My typical phone order for pizza lasts about 20-30 seconds, and goes as follows:
> "Hey could I get a large house special for pickup?"
> "Yeah it'll be ready in 15-20"
Then I go to the shop, tap the card while they grab the box with my phone number on it, and I leave. If it's a Friday, the time estimate is usually longer. Sometimes I'll order two.
Man. I phone, I order, I arrive 30 minutes later, and only then do they start making the pizza, so I sit and stare for 40 minutes, and then I pay my $40 and swear I’ll never do it again, until two weeks later.
That's unfortunate. I did have an experience recently where I ordered on a Friday and they gave me a "45-50" time estimate. I got there at 45 and they told me it'd be another 5 or 10. Saw a steady stream of app delivery people in and out the other door as I waited.
Usually I order on a Tuesday when they aren't busy and that's why I get the short and accurate time estimate - they likely start putting it together almost immediately.
Yeah, but if you don’t collect their email address, you can’t spam them at will with “Trending Pizza Shops!” and “New York Style vs. Chicago”, and everyone’s favorite “Privacy Policy Updates” and “Winter Storm Pizza Prep”
Just use separate emails? I really don't get all the ink spent on complaining about email spam and privacy of them taking emails and all that. I just use a different inbox for buying stuff.
This is true but for me a pizza is a fallback plan for a long day or plans that fell through. So it is almost always the same or very similar order and I just want it now. My local pizza place actually asks if I want to repeat my last order or hear their specials. I can (to your point, re-) order a pizza in like 9 seconds.
Chipotle’s app always says your food will be ready in < 10 minutes. Last week they had a 55 minute backlog due to sports and Covid-closures of neighboring stores. The poor workers.
Their server needs a feedback channel from the stores. Or it should count the number of incoming items ordered per minute, and auto-adjust the "ready" time. Don't always show 5 minutes.
Telling the customer to leave immediately for the store is the only viable solution for a time window that could be 7 to 55 minutes wide, if your priority is maximizing pipeline efficiency and throughout at the expense of occasionally making customers wait for up to 45 minutes in-store. Providing a <10 estimate to all customers ensures that they do their part by showing up in a timely manner, and removes their ability to blame the store for a cold pie. When the kitchen breaks down it may mean waiting in the store for an hour, but at least you’ll know that’s the case because you’re at the store on time.
If the pizza’s ready in 7 minutes, you’ll be there in 10 and receive a hot pizza.
If the pizza’s ready in 55 minutes, you’ll be there in 10 and receive a hot pizza eventually.
You could theoretically try to offer more accurate arrival times, but then you’ll have to play queuing theory “fairness” games with the pizza queue versus in-person and phone orders to try and ensure that the pizza isn’t made too soon, as well as have to deal with people thay show up late and lie about the estimate shown in-app so they can get a new freshly-made hot pizza (which generates food waste). Doing this requires competent pizza personnel with a good understanding of how to manage expectations fairness, and if there one thing I would not expect from a Chipotle-sized business, it’s that — they’ll have maximized efficiency by removing human consideration from the equation altogether.
The downside: you have 30-40 angry customers packed into a tiny restaurant, some unmasked, all crowding the pickup window, waiting for their name to be called.
Yes, this. I am about ready to give up on Chipotle entirely because of the incredible lie that is their Ready to Pickup time. Last time I was there I would have saved time if I had just waited in their incredibly long line and ordered that way instead of doing them the favor of ordering ahead.
I like the "simpler is better" sentiment but for me it's actually nicer to order pizzas via my regional pizza franchise's web app and then pick then up. Four people. Preferences. I much prefer clicking them in in the app. This does not invalidate the sentiment in general - be as simple as possible - but the chosen example perhaps is not as obvious in all geographies.
The local pizzeria I prefer runs their own website for orders, it's not as fancy as the app-based ones but it works and I know that 100% of the proceeds go to the pizza place and their drivers. Not some silicon valley giant who takes 99% off the top and gives 1% to their "platform economy" slaves.
Not only invasive but restaurant websites are so buggy.
For example, I tried ordering a Papa Murphy’s pizza the other day online. It used one of the major food ordering sites. It described “toppings. Pick 5. $2 per topping for extra toppings”
So I chose a few toppings. It added $2 per topping. Period. Didn’t matter if it were red flakes, Parmesan cheese, bacon, onions, olives: $2/ea.
So I’ll just order over phone from now on so I don’t have to worry about these crazy bug fees.
It feels like if a computer generated it… or a “wizard” from the 1990. So many pages and adding toppings on to the pizza is treated like an exception where you have to click a checkbox just to indicate you want your pizza to have toppings….
Meanwhile the Dominos pizza app is super fast and easy, provides updates on status.
Buggy restaurant websites pushed me the other way actually. If I am not in the mood to deal with a potentially/known buggy site, I will use DoorDash pickup instead. Costs a couple extra dollars, but would rather pay that than fill out a form 5 times, especially for complicated orders.
I'm sorry but I don't agree. Dominos pizza has coupons, deals, etc. Trying to get those deals over the phone is a chore. Ordering specific toppings can be a chore since it's a relay back and forth vs a button. Multiple pizzas with multiple toppings? The delay just compounds. If you live alone and order one pizza or one style of specific themed pizzas then sure, it might be faster, if that's the metric of "best" but in no way is the phone superior to the app or website. Ever call a pizza place when they are slammed, usually when you order pizza? The guy or girl on the phone is in an absolute rush to get you off the phone for the next person who still uses the phone to call in. I just don't agree.
There is one exception to this rule, pizza places who are not the big three. The mom and pop who doesn't have an app.
The coupons are the biggest advantage to placing orders online. If you place your order over the phone, they aren't going to offer any promos - they'll gladly charge you $16 for a medium 1 topping. Gotta get the coupon to get the 5.99 special.
You and the person you're responding to are saying the same thing.
If you call you won't have a coupon, and they aren't going to tell you about any, therefore you're paying more. How do you find coupons? Check online, but now you're already there so why not just order it there?
A lot of coupons work either online or over the phone, but they're only advertised online and therefore that advantaged is largely to avoid more accessibility/disability lawsuits.
>If you call you won't have a coupon, and they aren't going to tell you about any
They will, I worked at both Pizza Hut and Dominos twenty years ago and if you asked for the specials we'd basically tell you the coupons. I think our script even said "would you like to hear the specials today?"
That's just a generic special, that's not a coupon. A coupon is exactly what it sounds like - it literally requires a coupon to redeem, either a physical coupons or a digital "coupon."
When I worked at a restaurant we had both - specials that everyone got and coupons deals that you needed a piece of paper for. They were similar as it was just typing a code into the register, the big difference is typing in the coupon code without a piece of paper was considered stealing and anyone who did that was fired on the spot. You also couldn't redeem multiple coupons at once where you could get any number of open specials you wanted. We always directed customers towards specials.
The coupons were a significantly better deal than the general specials available to anyone. The coupons were mailed to every house in a ~20 mile radius once a month.
Yeah, neither Pizza Hut nor Dominos we're actually that concerned about the coupons. Both places had drivers apply coupons to orders and pocket the differences, and while I'm sure they would have gotten fired if caught, not having the correct amount of coupons would lead you to be caught.
I think there were one or two actual coupons at Pizza Hut, where you did need the actual code and the piece of paper, but they were things in the coupon books kids would sell to raise money. At Dominos basically the best deal was the carryout special, which is now even advertised online.
But then you would have to eat... Dominos. I get that its not the same everywhere, but in the pizza belt, I couldn't imagine going there. Luckily my local place has a good website though.
Otherwise in ten years we'll be reading an article on The Atlantic that leads with a CEO behind bars, jumps to a young kid learning about the world in his uncle's Pizzeria, then to a shady security team searching for the whistleblower by cross referencing HN posts against employee catering habits, and finally a retired FBI agent that steps in to provide protection.
So yeah, pizzasnob, please don't start talking about your love for dobermans.
That linked graphic seems to show Burgers is the main go-to in Chicago. That said, I'm a huge fan of Chicago deep dish. I know some don't call that a proper pizza (esp New Yawkers, and I'm in the area), but I do love that Gino's pizza.
If I had an office in Manhattan, I’d probably eat NY pizza for lunch at least once every two weeks. Chicago deep dish, on the other hand, is more like a special occasion food. Once a year, twice a year, maybe. But I’ll certainly go on record that the crust on a good Chicago deep dish is the best pizza crust you’ll ever encounter. I love that crunchy texture.
As far as delivery pizza goes, Dominos is actually not bad now. They upped their game considerably. Still not as good as my local mom & pop shop, but I wouldn't turn my nose up at a Dominos pizza.
Best trash pizza out there. We don’t have many places by me but we have one great Italian place. Guy running the shop makes a mean pie but not the best customer service and this pandemic has not eased things for him. But once again the pizza is amazing so I have no problem ordering early and still waiting at least an hour.
When I used to live in Rochester, NY I ate Dominos because it was the best pizza in town. Rochester is a pizza wasteland. Or at least it was when I lived there.
> Luckily my local place has a good website though.
My local place has a website that doesn't quite meet the standard I'd hope for. But it does work, and if you order through it, they'll get your order right. It's a lot less hassle than ordering over the phone.
Dunno if Domino's is comparable internationally (at least the sizes are smaller here in Germany), but I actually like ordering "unordinary" pizza from them now and then. Things any Italian would cringe at. They are cheap, deliver quick and have reasonable quality. It's just not at all Italian pizza.
Then again, from my experience it was hard to find true Italian pizza in the US.
Fun anecdote: When I was in NYC I walked into a corner pizza place in Little Italy that sold these giant slices to-go. I asked them if they also sold Tiramisu. To my utter surprise the 3 or 4 Italian Americans present didn't even know what Tiramisu is. That day I learned it was actually just invented around 1980 in Italy. Today it's one of the absolute favorite deserts in Germany and every Italian restaurant serves it and even many non-italian have it.
NYC pizza by the slice in its own unique category. It’s so iconic that living near Washington DC, there was a pizza place that imported the city water of NYC in order to be able to make authentic NYC pizza dough. Blanking on the name of the place unfortunately.
> Then again, from my experience it was hard to find true Italian pizza in the US.
A useful keyword to look out for if you want something (similar to) Italian pizza in the US is a restaurant that's marketed as "wood fired" or "brick oven". This will pretty much always get you a Napoletana-style pizza, regardless of your current US regional specialties.
An app or webpage is also a very good way to figure out what you want when you have 3 or 4 family members involved with their opinion and negotiations.
Dominos has been abusing push notifications on iOS recently. They have two push notification settings, one for order events (being made, in the oven, ready for pickup), one for marketing. Even with marketing off, they've been sending marketing notifications. Dislike.
The first time an order app starts abusing the notifications for advertisements I uninstall it and start looking for a competitor to give my business. No second chances.
For an app like Domino's or MacDonald's or the like, I just install it on demand and then uninstall it after using it. There's no way I'm keeping it around.
Dominos is happy to offer you those coupons and deals etc, in exchange for using Dominos's preferred platform (its website, which doesn't cost minimum wage) and providing your user data (via channel tracking the coupon, logging in etc).
A decent pizza place will charge more to let you skip all that.
In the age of data and free, ad driven services, "you get what you pay for" is paramount.
Dominos is totally still aggregating data like that for over the phone orders. They just tag it with your phone number and address instead of a user account.
So they get my address, phone number, and email as user data correct? I mean what could they possibly gain from that with my benefit being free pizza and much cheaper prices. Now with Apple login they don't even gain my real email address.
That data is worth shit, the only people that care when and to where you order pizza are the NSA, and they already have your cell data and the GPS from your car. What Domino's gets is you being mildly rewarded for committing time to learning their app, which will make you more likely to come back.
Tricking people into learning non-transferable skills is a tactic. If your hard earned skills in configuring your iphone aren't going to transfer to android, neither are you.
When I was in college I could call my local Dominos, ask for a large pizza and a two liter of soda and at the end say "if I pick it up will you double it?" They never said no. A local pizza shop always offered the same deal so Dominos had no choice. Good luck doing that in an app.
Is this in the 80s or, like, 2019? I've never heard of this "will you double it" thing before. Is it just because the other local shop did it, or would you expect this to work at any Dominos?
The Dominos app is actually extremely well done. The UI is intuitive, has a ton of options for payments, shows exactly whats going on with your order, etc.
I agree with the author and you. I think Dominos is the exception though. Pizza places aren't nearly as painful as other places that have javascript bloated, every single interaction has a spinner, there's too much whitespace ordering apps.
>Pizza places aren't nearly as painful as other places that have javascript bloated, every single interaction has a spinner, there's too much whitespace ordering apps.
Maybe I just have more patience than the average person, but I haven't seen a site with enough bloated javascript/spinners/whitespace that would cause me to reach for alternatives (phone or otherwise).
Pizza Hut is just as easy. Grub hub and other online ordering platforms have also been working fine for years now. What the author completely ignores is that you only enter your data once. Also there’s much less chance for any miscommunication and repeat orders are much easier and faster. It’s like having a shortcut for pizza.
Today I learned that Little Caesar's is a bigger pizza chain than Papa John's[1]. As of 2018, the top five are:
1. Domino's, with 14,856 "units" and $12.2 billion in gross sales.
2. Pizza Hut, with 16,784 units and $12.0 billion in gross sales.
3. Little Caesar's, with 5,500 units and $4.0 billion.
4. Papa John's, with 5,199 units and $3.7 billion.
5. California Pizza Kitchen, with 267 units and $840 million.
Everything after Papa John's is a long tail. Strangely, revenue in the long tail is not obviously proportional to the number of units. So instead of a top three, there's really a top two, a next two, and everyone else.
Hasn’t MOD Pizza effectively replaced California pizza kitchen (which closed all their locations in my metro after their 2020 bankruptcy) as the west coast choice (500 units, $390 million)? It helps that they don’t try to be a full service like California pizza kitchen and focus on just really custom pizza.
I find this part of the dominos model quite frustrating - you pay almost twice as much, or else spend an unreasonable amount of time dealing with the whole coupon thing. I guess it should be viewed as a tax against people who’s time is more valuable than hunting around the internet for coupon codes.
Domino's was best when they sold only pizza and Coca-Cola. Just Coca-Cola. No diet, no Sprite, no other choices. No choice of crust. No choice of sauce. That's what they built their empire on.
I'd go further, actually, and offer only one size; cheese, pepperoni, or sausage. No half this or that -- if you want two different toppings, buy two pizzas.
The apps suck (and ordering on the phone can suck also) because there are too many choices and apps suck when they have to offer lot of choices. That's why Apple tries to eliminate choices and options wherever they can.
I actually delivered for Dominos in those days. The 30 minute guarantee was not the reason drivers were dangerous. Stores had a limited delivery area that was set up so that you could get anywhere in about 10 minutes at normal traffic speeds. Drivers were not punished for late deliveries; in most cases when that happened, you and the manger both knew it was going to be late before it left the store.
The reason some drivers were reckless is because there was a commission on each delivery (and you often got tips as well). The more you delivered, the more money you made. In reality it didn't amount to much because you can't really drive much faster than the prevailing average traffic, you burned more fuel and wore out your brakes and tires if you drove like an idiot, but some drivers did anyway. It was heavily discouraged by the managers, at least where I worked.
No. I hope I never have to make another phone call in my life. One click in the app and the pizza is at my door step 30 minutes later. Can't beat that.
I find people’s ability to converse / comprehension very poor. I worked a pizza job answering the phone in a busy shop and getting verbal instructions while some people change their mind is terrible.
A good app / website takes me under a minute to order a pizza, and it is consistently reliable.
Logging in gives me my order history, address, and preferences. Usually I have to login maybe every couple months. If that.
Do you have an example of such an app/website? My local shop used to have a decent website but they recently redesigned it and now it loses my login token and adds a bunch of steps to re-order. My experience with food ordering apps is universally negative and not trending toward improvement.
> I find people’s ability to converse / comprehension very poor. I worked a pizza job answering the phone in a busy shop and getting verbal instructions while some people change their mind is terrible.
That's the perspective from the business end. Maybe taking orders over the phone is worse for the shop and its workers, because of difficult calls like that. It's not a problem for the common case of a decisive caller whose speaking voice is understandable over the phone.
> Logging in gives me my order history, address, and preferences. Usually I have to login maybe every couple months. If that.
This could just as easily be saved locally without a login.
I think this is the only important perspective. If online ordering makes it easier for a place to run their business, then it's probably the better option
Play the mobile game “Good Pizza, Great Pizza” and you will see it is the customer who makes things difficult. It’s a brilliant pizza ordering simulator.
That being said online order would fix the issue. Maybe they just meed the pizza configurator part as an app, and you call in and give them a code pointing to a preconfigured pizza.
I bought a burrito during lockdown in the UK, but it was such a miserable experience.
The menu wasn’t particularly intuitive, and took me a few minutes to pick out what I wanted — then I was greeted with a registration page. Email, password, phone, address, you name it, they wanted _everything_ — I only wanted to collect. They didn’t take mobile wallet payments either! Manual card entry!
I feel like the restaurant recognised they had a problem, but contracted out a solution to the lowest bidder that actively went out of their way to design the worst UX.
In the end I actually went ahead and built a platform that’s not user hostile.
Im going to rewrite the landing page and do another round of marketing soon. The page that I wrote in an afternoon is far too negative in hindsight. It needs a positive spin.
Most of the comments here are focused on the question of why you would prefer an app to calling. The author's point is a great one though, and something I've wondered a lot. Why should I create an account to order a pizza? The app should reduce friction even from the very first order. Instead it adds, and adds for every order... Got to go look up coupon codes! On the phone I just ask the guy what their best deal is in a large cheese and garlic knots and he gives it to me. The app or website should make my life better but instead it's harder.
Worse, the app pretends to be an unrelated party when something goes wrong. "Sorry, you need to call the store. Look up their number, it's on the website." For me it doesn't add anything to the transaction, it only takes away.
The literal only reason I use the pizza app at all is for chains where I have no idea which store delivers to me. Rest of the time I've gone back to calling. Much faster that way.
>> Why should I create an account to order a pizza?
Most of the apps in my area (Toronto, Canada) absolutely do not require account creation and allow you to just use a ‘guest’ account; usually just requiring (reasonably) your phone number.
As to why I’d want an account to order?
Let’s say I have a local favourite pizza joint and a favourite pizza I like to order. Having my personal info and payment info already filled out and hitting ‘reorder’ makes ordering and paying a literal 5 second experience.
Since it’s optional almost everywhere online and in app here; I don’t see the big fuss.
I ordered from Jolibee last night and was happy to find out I didn’t need to make an account, since I don’t eat there often; unlike my local pizza joint. I used the guest system and my girlfriend just gave them my name and picked it up.
Just FYI, this is something I really like about Google Maps integration with restaurant take-out ordering. They put the "Order Again" button front and center and let's face it, I'm not really planning to switch it up at my corner lunch spot. Obviously in that case I need an account, with Google, but I already had that and I trust them with my info more than I just some merchant's white-label mobile app.
I had a restaurant screw up my order via Google's ordering platform and there was no one to ask for a refund -- the Google platform doesn't accept complaints about the merchant, and there's no way to contact the merchant through the Google platform after your order is complete. They forgot an item in my order and so overcharged me by like 40%. YMMV
As far as I could determine the ordering button on Google works entirely via third parties. I get a receipt by email from e.g. postmates when I use it.
I do agree that the site which is closest to the customer should be providing the support.
because this kind of app gets built cheaply by a freelancer agency copy pasting the last app they did which followed a e-commerce template app that includes account creation
I use Uber Eats for ordering food exclusively exactly because when there is a screw up and I receive the wrong item or none at all, I get refunded immediately by Uber with a few taps.
Uber Eats sent my order to restaurants that were absolutely not open. After two times, and two refunds, they stopped refunding me because of a “pattern of suspicious behavior”. No way to escalate review to a human. None at all. So maybe be aware of your choice
I have probably used Uber Eats for 100+ times over the past two (pandemic) years, and I've maybe have my orders being messed up 3-5 times, each time refunded within the next ten minutes. YMMV.
That’s because you were refunded automatically without human intervention. This is what the author of the comment pointed out: once you do that too often in a short period of time, the bot assumes you’re scamming them and there’s no way to escalate that.
> Trouble is consumer protection law is decades behind where it ought to be.
Potentially, but on the other hand, card disputes are a thing and I'm baffled as to how little people know about them or have misunderstandings such as them only being available for credit cards (the law may give you extra protections there, but the standard Visa/Mastercard dispute rules apply equally regardless of whether it's debit or credit).
Just like Uber and similar Silicon Valley scum gets away with this because they have a monopoly and can do as they please, so do the card networks - and the card networks are on your side in this case, so use that to your advantage.
"I'm baffled as to how little people know about them or have misunderstandings such as them only being available for credit cards..."
Right, and reckon I'm no exception.
One of the principal reasons why we have democratic governments is that they are there for the protection of the citizenry.
The trouble is that by the time governments venture into these murky areas much damage has been done. Here, the problem is that no one has spelt out the details in advance —i.e.: what the ground rules are and the consequences if they are broken. Alas, governments are never proactive in many areas where they need to be.
There's just so much going on in modern life that we can't expect citizens to keep up with everything that's going on. We need short, actuate and informative one-liners that people can check before and or during any operation that they're involved in. This ought to be the role of government.
I don’t quite understand. Maybe Uber eats is different in asia to America. But in Taiwan when I raised issue with an order it goes to a chat. They asked for a photo. I sent. And they confirmed the issue and issued a refund.
In singapore there’s no Uber eats. But most popular is probably grab which is what I used. If I raised an issue with grab. I get a phone call. Explain to person over the phone and depending on the shop I get a new order or a refund.
The only time it’s difficult in singapore is some of the Indian food restaurants use their own delivery drivers, not the grab drivers. So there’s no status updates and any disputes must go with the restaurant directly. But when ordering it states the restaurant uses its own drivers so you can avoid ordering from them.
I had a huge delivery of Chinese food left on my doorstep (it was still quite hot). Obviously, delivered to the wrong address. The bill was fully itemized and stapled to one of the Uber bags and it came to just short of $200 but there was no correct address and no telephone number to be found on it anywhere.
Anyway, I did my best to contact Uber Eats to get the delivery person to collect it but to no awail. Checked everywhere for a telephone number including searching the internet and found nothing except the number that explained how to place an order. When I rang it, it had a recording - no hunan to be found anywhere.
I couldn't log in on online as I didn't have an account.
And no one reappeared from Uber to reclaim it.
Anyway, I gave up. There was so much food I couldn't get it all into the freezer. It lasted several weeks. Saved a lot on food bills over that time.
The restaurant had its name on the bill but no telephone number. Presumably, this done to stop or reduce telephone complaints direct to the restaurant. Seems that everything must be done online.
I was a very slow adopter of Uber rides many years ago. When talking to some evangelist at that time offering me codes for free rides, one of the reasons I gave for not using Uber at that time, was that it was completely dependent on smartphone apps, therefore being unusable to certain portions of the population (old non-technical people, those who lost their phone, those who use an OS other than Android or iOS, dead battery and no charging cable, etc.). I foresaw that should it outcompete traditional services to the point of bankruptcy, those people would be left unserviced. I proposed having a web UI and a phone line.
It is sad to see that prediction coming true in various fields. This strong bias against having customer service people, against customers having any way to talk to a person, is noxious to society at large.
I guess in the same line of thought, I find the abandonment of the public phone system to be sad. Instead of replacing old phones with newer terminals with internet capabilities, we abandoned the entire system. Therefore making the world a bit more unequal and a bit more dependent on personal devices.
Related anecdote: last time my smartphone battery died and i had to make a phone call, i walked into the nearest café just like i did many years back, and asked to borrow their phone. They were very suspicious and unfriendly, to say the least, despite having ordered a cup of coffee first. This was a very normal practice not long ago...
>therefore being unusable to certain portions of the population (old non-technical people, those who lost their phone, those who use an OS other than Android or iOS, dead battery and no charging cable, etc.)
FWIW uber has had a web app for years now, and before that there were a plenty of unofficial clients. I remember calling Ubers from my laptop in 2016.
Even if the bag was sealed, I don't think they could take it back once it left the delivery person's custody. That's usually how these operations work (but not sure about Uber Eats specifically). Too much risk of food tampering or other mischief.
Very likely. But he couldn't have gone more than a couple of minutes. I'm surprised I didn't hear him.
What I'm still unclear about is that someone nearby ordered the food, as I didn't answer immediately why didn't he ring hone to base or to the planned recipient for an address correction?
They only stopped refunding you? They completely banned my account and my wife's account. We're still not sure what we did and they won't explain to us. Even escalated on Twitter and communicated by email. All we were told is that they have a zero tolerance policy for fraudulent behaviour and that the decision was final. WTH?
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 with DoorDash and Grubhub these days, but both of those platforms have the same issues that UberEats does.
> I get by just fine with DoorDash and Grubhub these days, but both of those platforms have the same issues that UberEats does.
To get back to the original point, don't you think you would be better off saving as phone contacts the few restaurants you buy from, or maybe writing down the numbers on the fridge if you live with other people?
I was banned from Deliveroo because I guess I should just be happy to absorb the cost for ~20% of orders which arrived wrong instead of calling them out and asking them to do their job properly.
I’ve had food sitting at restaurants for over an hour before while Uber attempts to find a driver.
After a particularly frustrating instance where Uber told me to cancel but didn’t refund me for me, I did manage to find a support inbox that’s read by an escalation team and I had a real life human calling from SF let me know that they would refund me.
The effort it took to get the refund was ridiculous though as every contact option Uber presented me resulted in robo responses telling me since I initiated the cancel that I’d be responsible for food costs, even when I included chat screenshots of their agents telling me to cancel.
> I’ve had food sitting at restaurants for over an hour before while Uber attempts to find a driver.
If you're in a metro area ordering during ordinary hours and having this happen, it's almost certainly because the restaurant has developed a bad reputation and people refuse to work with them. The thing about Uber's intermediation is that if you had this sort of experience by ordering directly through the restaurant, you'd rightly associate the experience with the restaurant's failures, but with Uber, it feels like Uber failing.
> a particularly frustrating instance where Uber told me to cancel but didn’t refund me for me
UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food. They have no special powers here. Expecting one to refund "for" you is like having a mail person show up at your door and then berating them for the screwup of whatever business sent you the wrong thing, etc.
> UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food.
This is to be expected, but it's not clear how this is relevant to your parent given it appears to have been Uber customer-service agents directing them to cancel, not a driver.
> the restaurant has developed a bad reputation and people refuse to work with them
Do you mean delivery drivers refuse to pick up from there? How is that a customer's problem? That's a potential breach of contract between Uber and the delivery drivers.
Uber Eats positions itself as an end-to-end managed service where you pay money to receive delivered food, and charges hefty fees (on both sides of the transaction) for doing so. It's up to them to make sure this works by implementing appropriate penalties for drivers or restaurants who default.
However in typical Silicon Valley fashion their business model is to screw everyone so I'm sure the restaurants and delivery drivers have equally little recourse when things go wrong or to provide feedback so bad/misbehaving actors are allowed to remain as long as it's not causing a problem for Uber.
> UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food
Not really. FedEx/USPS doesn't manage the customer relationship, doesn't broker the transaction nor takes a fee off the transaction amount itself.
> Do you mean delivery drivers refuse to pick up from there? How is that a customer's problem?
It's not (necessarily), but it's not the drivers' problem, either. It's the restaurant's problem—just like it's their problem if no customers want to do business with them because their food tastes bad, or if their suppliers refuse to do business with them because they're always late paying invoices, etc.
> That's a potential breach of contract between Uber and the delivery drivers.
You can't have a breach of contract for contracts you don't pick up... Or are you implying that you believe the relationship between Uber and their contractors is/should be one where the driver has to take every offer that Uber sends them? If so, are you a freelancer? How would you feel about an arrangement where, because you agreed to work with Marcy in Q2, then when Albert comes to you in Q3 and wants some work done, you have to take it no matter how bad Albert's offer is—e.g. one which very well might turn out to have you working for less than minimum wage—or without regard for whether you find Albert to be a loathsome, demanding prick?
> FedEx/USPS doesn't manage the customer relationship, doesn't broker the transaction
Neither do UberEATS drivers. That's the entire point of the metaphor. (Having said that, I misread your original comment, which other comments have pointed out.)
> UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food. They have no special powers here. Expecting one to refund "for" you is like having a mail person show up at your door and then berating them for the screwup of whatever business sent you the wrong thing, etc.
I'm not sure what this means exactly or how it's relevant. In these instances, it's not the driver's fault, it's Uber's fault. They are taking orders they can't fulfill and then denying refunds when you cancel until you figure out how to escalate it to a human who can do things other than press canned-response buttons.
Uber Eats will lie and blame the restaurant for being slow when they can't find a driver.
The order status will stay on "preparing your order" for an hour while I know full well (by calling the restaurant directly) that the food was ready for over an hour. Sometimes it'll switch to "driver on the way to pick up" and then back to "preparing your order" which makes no sense.
Deliveroo is was similar in that aspect back in 2018, not sure if that's changed now.
Regarding your refund, a chargeback is the typical way to deal with such scum, and the evidence (chat screenshots) will make it an open & shut case.
I usually at least make a decent attempt at resolving these types of conflicts before reporting to AMEX. Even though AMEX's chargeback process is probably the best of the credit card companies I've used, it's still not as ideal as simply getting the refund from the merchant, if possible.
Oddly enough, I've NEVER had this issue with DoorDash. I think DoorDash simply makes restaurants unavailable if they don't have drivers, whereas UberEats ALWAYS takes the order and then simply doesn't fulfill it if they can't. What you say about "preparing your order" is 100% correct. There isn't a "waiting for driver" status, so if there is no driver on the way, it stays at "preparing..."
This is a particularly terrible customer experience since you almost always time your deliveries so you eat them right when they get there and you are hungry when they arrive. By the time you realize Uber is not going to bother fulfilling your order, you've already probably been waiting 30 minutes, cannot cancel then without being charged, and have to start making other plans for food as you get hangrier and hangrier. It's even worse when you're getting food for the whole family delivered and have to deal with hangry kids!
I don't use Ubereats anymore because of multiple bad experiences, but I've found that often now even if you call the restaurant directly to order they will use Ubereats to deliver.
If that happens, that is the last time I order from that restaurant.
I got banned from Deliveroo for a similar reason. I was a heavy user (several times a day every day) and mistakes are bound to happen - I'd estimate that maybe 20% of my orders ended up having something wrong. I guess they just assumed that 20% is an acceptable cost that the users should bear despite all the fees they add (to both the user-facing price and the fees they charge to restaurants)?
Uber Eats wasn't much better and tried to still make me pay for delivery fees even when the only item in the order was wrong/damaged, but a chargeback quickly took care of that.
This is an open & shut case for a card dispute. I'm surprised there is any country in the world where taking money without delivery the promised goods is legal, but I guess the US legal system doesn't care.
Restaurant driver is not a highly paid or long term job, so I wouldn't expect the incidence of this is actually any lower amongst restaurant employed delivery drivers.
Like you say, it is a job, though, and not gig work. I don't know what it's like now or everywhere but I did delivery work in the pre-app era. I got an hourly wage, cash tips and one staff meal per shift. That's what often happens when you get employed by humans who have to look you in the face. They treat you like a human.
It would never have occurred to me to take bites out of customers food but if you see just how little these app drivers earn and consider how little loyalty they feel to any one restaurant or platform, it's kind of understandable.
Uber has been helpful a few times when restaurants wouldn’t. I had the worst sushi order of my life. Order was missing items, fish was stinky, just gross. I called the restaurant and they offered 10% off my next order. They wouldn’t even replace the missing orders or gross items.
It was so weird as this was about a $150 sushi order and the restaurant was fairly nice.
Uber refunded the meal immediately after seeing a picture.
It meant a much larger range of restaurants became available to me - I don't drive, and these restaurants would otherwise not get my business.
Uber Eats has often been very good about giving me refunds for restaurant screwups.
However they sent me an email after a string of restaurants fucking up orders - missing whole meals, or significant parts thereof. At the time, they didn't ask for any kind of supporting evidence, just click through the app and it would instantly refund you.
Then they sent me an email saying that they've detected an "unusual" number of problems, and that they'd like to remind me that fraud is illegal and they may take further action if they detect it. No way to appeal, no way to say "Hey, if you're going to subtly accuse me of being a fraud, at least let me have an opportunity to provide some information".
Uber Eats now (sometimes) asks for some evidence, and it apparently goes off to some human for review (or they just stick a ~30-90 minute delay timer on the processing queue to make it look like a human reviewed it).
Now, most restaurants around me no longer have their own delivery options, and direct you to Uber Eats or a whitelabelled service that just submits the order through Uber Eats or Menulog anyway.
There's a number of fake restaurants now listed on Uber Eats around me, even some chains of fake restaurants.
One of these fake-chains is operating out of low-quality hotel kitchens and is clearly heating up commercial cook-chill/frozen meals.
Another is operating out of a residential apartment building from someone's home (not a commercial kitchen).
Good luck trying to report these to Uber. They don't give a shit.
While I'm dumping these on Uber, they're unfortunately not the worst.
Menulog are IMO worse - they have all the same problems as Uber in terms of fake listings, but also work with restaurants that keep getting bad reviews to wipe out the bad reviews and re-list them as New.
All the business has to do is say they've been sold to new owners, delete the old listing and re-add and hey presto, those 500 1-star reviews saying you've got a shit product are turned into 30 5-star reviews about this amazing "new" restaurant, rinse and repeat every few months when business drops off.
A lot of times with food apps I don't immediately see how to set the pickup time or don't have a lot of faith that it really is going to be ready when I want it.
When I talk to somebody on the phone I feel a lot more sure.
I worked at a place near Union Square, NYC and was in the habit of ordering food for pickup from sweetgreen because I knew it all worked. I have thought about ordering from restaurants in Collegetown, Ithaca from the web but just haven't gotten in the habit because I don't feel the certainty.
Without talking to somebody on the phone, often I don't have a lot of faith that the order will even be received. Sometimes the place closes but the app happily continues to take orders. Other times the order simply gets lost in the ether. After a while, you learn which places are not worth the risk of ordering from online.
I remember a long time ago when food apps were really new putting in an online order at a sub shop which is a well oiled machine. (The kind of place they'd write a business school case study about.)
A restaurant with absolutely excellent process for handling walk-in traffic can fail entirely faced with an occasional online order. In their case they made the sub half an hour before I requested it be ready and stuffed it in some corner where they couldn't find it.
In the last two years I've seen the small facilities run by Cornell Dining go from handling almost all in-person order to handling a large fraction (between 1/3 and 2/3) of online orders. In-person orders are handled by Kanban-style process where the people making the food take orders at they clear work-in-progress. I'm not really sure how they handle online orders that aren't gated by this. I suspect there are many indirect effects, for instance, I think because the traffic patterns are more complicated it would be easier to walk out without paying for your food. (On the other hand, I'm a member of a cohort of middle-aged people who complicate traffic flows by going into line to pay for food before it is ready because that's efficient.)
Anyhow, once I know a place is good for handling online orders I'm inclined to do so. But if I'm not sure I'm much more inclined to go in and do things the old fashioned way.
The author's point isn't a good one. You have an "account" regardless. Putting in your name and e-mail is near irrelevant since he indicated it might be reasonable to provide a credit card. Unless he can say, "Large Pizza for Pickup, I have a CC", which is usually the case. The only thing better about calling or app is dependent on when and how you want to pay.
I think this might differ if you're in the U.S or out, here in Europe often it is like this:
In the app/website you have an "account" that you get by entering data into form fields which takes a while, and which then gets stored into a database and is saved forever unless you go through some extra steps to make sure it doesn't which will be complicated by how well the app / website has been programmed to handle these potential extra steps (if at all)
On the phone you have an address that the guy writes down on the piece of paper for the delivery guy and is thrown out afterwards.
My local in NYC does a booming cash business (they offer a hugely popular cash special on Tuesdays & if you pay cash, tax is “included” - I think charging tax on card orders is to cover their transaction fees? But maybe a bunch of this is unreported.)
They’re on apps, but they write your order on a paper ticket if you are a phone, pickup order and only take your name.
Possibly it is different in Europe. Here in the US, when you call in an order your address is also stored in a database forever and tied to your phone number. That is exactly why next time you call they already know your address.
In the US a few places I order from when you call they associate your phone number with an "account" on their POS system, which comes up automatically when you call. It gets created automatically the first time you call/order. It stores your name, address (if you get delivery), order history, and credit card number (if you pay by card).
Exactly, Just like going to a restaurant you visit regularly and the staff know you, you'll get better service and quicker food if you have a relationship with the people taking the order, and making and delivering the food.
Use an app for discovering new places and seeing what they offer and order direct by phone.
The problem with ordering direct by phone is that delivery companies have monopolized the market and make it unprofitable for restaurants to have their own delivery staff, so a lot of them no longer do.
As a customer I have the right to not order if it's crappy Uber delivery which IMO has way too many problems, and I exercise that right and let the restaurant know.
When I call the restaurant I ask them if they have their own delivery person, or if it's Uber. If it's Uber, I politely decline to order from them.
In my country there's a website that works in every major city and their suburbs that aggregates basically all restaurants, pizzerias, pierogarnias etc.
And you don't have to have an account, the address and payment details are filled in by the browser autocomplete.
So the friction is - click on the menu, click "order", type in the wireless transfer code.
Also - almost nobody orders "pick up" pizza here, so phone requires you to specify the address every time which is significantly more friction.
Chat, or message apps might be the best way yet. They don't need signup but easy to get your point across precisely.
I ordered pickup through an app because I don't speak the local language but I had a flat tire so I needed to coordinate the delivery through phone (again, in a language I barely speak). They couldn't understand my address so we switched to whatsapp and could send them the coordinates. Twenty minutes later the person was there with a still hot pizza.
In another case I just texted the local pizza guy on whatsapp what I wanted and he replied 'where to deliver it?', and then 10 minutes later it arrived.
This is also a very cheap solution for merchants: only requires a mobile phone and a free app that almost everyone has in some countries. If push comes to shove, install Signal/Telegram or accept SMS.
> so phone requires you to specify the address every time which is significantly more friction.
For some restaurants this is not true, they save your (phone number -> address) mapping the first time you call, and in the future ask for confirmation whether the address is correct.
> The app or website should make my life better but instead it's harder.
This is the sub-goal, but not ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to maximize the profit, with accounts created, all the analytics will work out, and they could do all kinds of promotions or targeted ads.
I guess that's the same reason why you are asked to install a mobile app whenever you visit Reddit mobile WEBSITE. It does not attempt to make your life better. At least it's not the ultimate goal of ecosystem.
Yet here there is more pressure to not scare customers away. To not make their life troublesome.
Woe to the pizza company who thinks "we don't need to care about customer retention, our pizza is just too good."
I have dozens of pizza places to order from, all within delivery distance. Make ordering difficult, and as long as the competition is pretty much as tasty, I'll move on.
> I guess that's the same reason why you are asked to install a mobile app whenever you visit Reddit mobile WEBSITE.
Yeah, Reddit's approach to making so difficult to access the mobile on a whim, especially in an ephemeral browser, is a straight up UX dark pattern. I use Reddit less on mobile because of it...
I want to stay in the browser where I have things like ad blockers and can open a bunch of tabs at once and bounce around easily, etc.
I’ve literally never bargained with the pizza joint, and I would get smacked in the face and thrown out on my ass if I did it in person. Are you kidding me?
As far as when there’s a problem, with the major food delivery app I use, I am refunded merely for asking. I’ve used it heavily during the pandemic and literally every problem was solved through the app.
This is 100% backward from my experience. Having an account is a 1-time cost, and not only a small one, but one I do for hundreds of other things every day. Logging in is a keystroke that has my password manager auto type my username and password; again something I repeat daily.
With the situation in the US at least, trying to get anyone on the phone is an exercise in frustration. The app (for me, so far) has always been up. The employees don't have to stop making the product to take an order. They don't know the specials, or don't care to look them up which might be changing on an HOURLY basis. The app knows. On the phone I have to go through my order painstakingly each time; the app knows what I've ordered and I can single-click repeat it.
And honestly, all they're doing is taking my order and putting it into probably an admin version OF THE SAME APP. It's LITERALLY the old game of "telephone", but for something I want to buy.
In theory you have a point. But installing a user hostile app is a total dealbreaker. And I guarantee that the eula is not only illegal but an absolute shitshow of trying to exploit paying customers so that the library of whatever third party module required to view an image could earn a sixteenth of a cent per pizza.
And that is always the case. Just call instead.
Unfortunately you can't do that for everything. Just today I was practically forced to install and give away "my" phone number to the worst app you can ever imagine, just to be able to park.
I will say that when I say "app", I mean web app. I don't use the phone app, although most of my post is still relevant there. My reasons for that are mainly that I'm at home on my big screen with a real keyboard 99% of the time that I'm ordering pizza and it's just easier.
I have "account fatigue"; I am so tired of having to create accounts and log in to things - yes, it's something I repeat daily, and that's the problem. Just let me buy the damn pizza, or whatever it is! I always use the "guest" option when available.
That's what the login with Google and login with Facebook options are for. They're there to help you and improve Your life. Come along now, and relinquish your daily quota of private information. We can either do this the easy way or the hard way. Don't you want to be a good model Product? We'll send you to the new colony on Mars when it gets built!
---
While typing the above (a bit of ▧am improv) I had this a bit of a "oh" moment as I envisioned the idea of the "good model citizen" a la China or the USSR, except instead of the... ideal being like *that* it's about being Your Best Most Optimally Saleable You.
I have a dream that one day I will leave Google, and that won't ever happen if every site that I use is connected to my Google account.
I should really have a password manager set up properly as well, but that's just another job, and scary in some way. I have a password manager but it's all manual, no autogenerating accounts or fancy stuff.
I totally agree, especially when it comes to creating an account on a corporate/national app when the business I deal with is local only.
Having said that I think Domino's Pizza has a great process for ordering pizza on their web site where you build you own pizza and can then track the progress all the way to your doorstep.
> On the phone I just ask the guy what their best deal is in a large cheese and garlic knots and he gives it to me
damn, you're lucky. I remember a few phone calls a decade ago where some brand had a sale on burgers, but they had a policy of waiting for me to dictate the coupon code over the phone... ugh
Large, semi-national pizza chain says "text your order and receive 20% off", so I skeptically text my order and promptly receive a reply with a link to continue to their website for confirmation and payment. Pointless.
I actually like this, in theory. Our local Jets does this and it makes it really simple to reorder pizza since all you do is look back 2 or 3 messages and copy the previous message. However, the implementation is not so great, it seems like randomly the pizza shop does not get the order or respond to it.
I’ve been using this for months now and the 20% offer has been there forever. After the initial jaunt to a webpage for payment you set up a pin. Every subsequent order you text the order, they respond, you enter the PIN, you go pickup a paid for pizza.
My order is consistent and for me it works amazingly!
Good reading. Seeing emails with 1990 as the date on them is amazing, and I love how they discuss things like banning discussing certain topics at work. I thought that was a creation of the 2020s, but nope... ever since people have been working together, some manager has been prescribing what they should and should not discuss. I also see that it was as ineffective then as it is now.
I used to work at a company that ran all their proprietary applications on x86 Solaris 10 and used OpenWindows (same greenish color scheme) all the way up to 2014 or so. I would have loved to have had that pizza app! :)
I still have a fondness for the simplicity of OpenWindows and how well it it handled virtual desktops. It was really cool to use on quad monitor setups.
The biggest issue with phone call pizza ordering is currently that many places are still curbside pickup. I don't like giving my credit card over the phone, so an app is better.
No idea why the author had to make such a silly strawman to make such a cynical take about technology. Most of the pizza spots in my area have online websites that dump orders directly to the business. My partner and I frequently use that to order, and while we rarely do delivery, it's been unproblematic the few times we have ordered delivery.
> Why not just have an image of a menu and a box where you type the order.
Because then the menu wouldn't be readable, searchable, or adaptable by many people, including blind, low vision or dyslexic users. Meanwhile, the people who could read it could type any old freeform nonsense into the box... nobody has to care about spelling on a phonecall or proper ordering system.
Also assumes that people will type useful instructions and not "I want two of the pizzas with the red stuff", failing to note size, crust type, or what the "red stuff" they are referring to is.
Apple ID w/ pseudonymous relay and maybe phone number verification and Apple Pay is a tolerable sign up process for me
My food was even delivered by a robot that texted me
Granted, I had called the restaurant first because I didnt know why they werent on the other food delivery apps anymore and they told me which one, I also wasnt picking up as it was delivery.
The sign up is more complicated but once you’re in, it’s much easier. Pretty sure I can re-order on most app in less time it takes someone to answer the phone.
On top of the UX, ordering by phone (or walking up and ordering, if you have that privilege) keeps companies from firing their dedicated delivery guys.
It's already a dangerous and physically taxing job; I'd rather tip them cash and know that they have a dedicated route than having to zip around the city trying to figure out whether The Algorithm is going to nudge people to buy McDonald's or Taco Bell today.
I hate ordering anything on the phone in the USA because no-one understands my British accent. "No, I want extra tomatoes. TOM-AH-TOES. Oh jesus. Onions. Just put some onions on there."
Ordering on the phone means that I need to pay cash, which means I need to have cash, which means I need to walk to the ATM, which means I may as well walk the extra two to three minutes further that the takeaway place is from the ATM and skip the delivery fee altogether.
Also yeah, trying to explain an order to be heard by someone trying to relay it back to a noisy kitchen in some of these takeaway places which don't have a dedicated person to man the phones is also a problem.
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[ 38.3 ms ] story [ 444 ms ] threadSome notable results when I searched for the above:
1. cli tool written in go to order dominos: https://github.com/harrybrwn/apizza 2. vim plugin: https://github.com/arithran/vim-pizza
1. The line is busy. The app is next to never busy.
2. The line has static and you are not heard correctly. Especially problematic for delivery or complicated orders. Or they may get your name wrong. My first name is common and my last isn't great over the telephone.
3. You have to remember what you ordered each time. Apps let me quickly re-order.
4. You cannot easily pre-pay (irrelevant if you have cash, but if you are like me and wish to never use cash again, having to pull out the card is annoying rather than just grabbing the pizza).
5. Most places now seem to be on DoorDash, so you can just order from there and avoid the additional friction. You also know you can get excellent customer service from DoorDash while a new restaurant is an unknown.
I don’t do delivery except pizza because I don’t want to pay a premium for cold food. Websites always have built in timers that take longer. Usually 45m.
Meanwhile I can call a pizza place, have pizza and wings ready in 15m, pay cash or whatever and have hot food. Order online, chances are it’s sitting there for 10m to avoid getting penalized on the SLA for online order pickup.
Plus, shitty middlemen like DoorDash are gross. Why would I want to have someone take a vig off my business and have a worse experience by any measurement?
The "its done" in the app or web page and it is within a minute or so of being able to walk out the door with it or have it show up. And ordering with Dominos you get a dominos driver - not a middleman.
The app and the screen on the wall said that my order was ready for 10 minutes while I stood there waiting for them to finish my order.
The food was terrible. Their chicken actually used to be good! Tonight the whole thing was just gross.
Their ability to have every franchise and user connected to one site is impressive, and the recent addition of a driver tracker app is neat/creepy, but really it's a fancy timer.
Hmm... do you feel the same way about the middlemen who make it possible for you to buy bread without ordering the wheat direct from a farmer in 5,000 bushel lots, storing it, grinding it into flour, and then making it into bread?
Everyone hates "middlemen", but if they're really not adding value they tend to get disintermediated fairly quickly.
I remember the bad old days before Amazon where if I wanted some weird bit of kit I'd have to go to the library, blow a few hours doing research to figure out what companies might make the thing (not always successfully!), then blow more hours making long-distance phone calls (very expensive back then) to try to find a company that a) had what I needed and b) would sell it in quantity one. It sucked. Massively.
> Why would I want to have someone take a vig off my business and have a worse experience by any measurement?
Because then you don't have to hire your own drivers and maintain your own online ordering system. Not all restaurants participate in DoorDash, by any means. Presumably the ones that do find that it adds value.
Also, I disagree that the DoorDash experience is worse. Strongly. To name just one advantage over the old ways, there was no GPS app that showed me when the driver was nearby so I could be prepared.
Wheat in metric tonne lots direct from the farmer costs about $350-400/tonne, or about $0.35-$0.40/kg. Kroger enriched white bread costs about $3.00/kg, more than seven times as much.
There are a lot of middlemen in there, each of which raises the price. On the other hand, I don't have to store a metric tonne of wheat, and maintain my own milling and baking facilities (I do make my own bread, but that's actually more expensive than buying cheap white bread... worth it, though).
Similarly, with DoorDash I don't have to interrupt what I'm doing, go to the restaurant, stand in line/wait for a table, then travel back home. Those are costs I avoid by using Dd.
Is it worth it? It depends on the individual. But no one is being forced into the transaction, and they are clearly adding value for many.
Eh, there have been many stories over the years about these delivery platforms doing pretty awful things to insert themselves as a middleman where they aren't wanted. Here's one from a couple days ago. [1] Other strategies I've seen stories about include claiming the location on Google maps and changing the phone number listed, buying a domain for the restaurant and hosting the menu (setup to order through the delivery service), and modifying the prices shown in the app to help cover delivery costs which could distort the perception of the value of the restaurant unfairly.
I'm not sure where I personally fall on it all. On the one hand, a generic delivery service should be able to exist, and if that generic delivery service ordered food, maybe they should get served just as any other takeout does.
On the other, restaurants are ending up with bad reviews because consumers sometimes think they're ordering directly from the restaurants and end up with cold food, stolen food, etc. Restaurants might package things differently if they knew they'd be in the car longer than the average drive home. I'm empathetic to restaurants wanting to protect their reputations. This is a bigger issue than Amazon delivering your package 30 minutes late, the food has a pretty short time where it'll be considered "really good" by the consumer, and a delivery service maximizing profit would like to get just one more delivery on the trip if at all possible.
[1] https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/restaurants/anti-doordash-re...
... but almost every pizza place has their own dedicated delivery people.
In short, by using the middleman, you're scamming yourself (through higher costs, and worse delivery because you're using random/shared agents rather than dedicated), or you're scamming the business (who ends up having to eat some of the costs).
That said, if you don't care about the business and you don't care about money (a single place to order pizza from is more valuable), then order away.
See above. I "don't care about money" in this context in exactly the same way that I "don't care about money" by not buying my own wheat in tonne lots and milling it into flour myself. Yes, that would be considerably cheaper (if I ignored the value of my time and the associated storage costs) but it would be highly inconvenient, and I don't just spend enough on bread to make it worth my time.
DoorDash pays the drivers well, so it’s using investor dollars to subsidize the service to entrench it and drive out competitive processes.
Your argument was was the same as the Uber argument at the peak type period. When the Saudi sovereign wealth fund was kicking in $10-20 for each ride, the hype argument was we would not need to buy cars because some AI robot magic carpet would take care of everything. Now, Uber costs more than the cabs did before.
This is the same.
Uber adds value by letting me call a ride by clicking on an app, and then telling me when it has arrived, rather than making me call the cab dispatch office, wait on hold, and then constantly look out the door to see if the cab is there.
> Now, Uber costs more than the cabs did before.
Not here, it doesn't. In virtually every city, operating a cab required that one purchase or lease a medallion, and those were very expensive (up to $1 million in NYC). Now that was a pure rent-seeking racket.
Those medallions are still out there, by the way. If Uber is really charging more than a cab, then the cabs will come back and undercut them.
The cabs are gone in most places. Why would someone go through the risk of getting cars, insurance, etc when Uber will notice a dip in business in days and crush you with discounts?
The NYC scenario is very different because medallions were a control in place to limit congestion; NYC in general and Manhattan in particular is a unique place.
Your experience is what parent refered to by that I think.
If you have the opposite of complicated orders, hard to orally convey name/address, no order to be remembered, and don’t want to prepay, yes your experience will probably be the opposite.
In my area I don't think I ever had anything ordered via phone or even walking to the counter ready in 15mins it is always at least 30 mins to 45mins, because they are busy with other orders. On the page I usually see they are setting it for 1h and then deliver earlier.
In the summer going to a normal restaurant was 1h waiting time for food as they were short staffed and not hiring more people because of pandemic.
- the restaurant is busy, nobody answers the phone.
- the restaurant is busy, somebody does answer the phone but they can't hear you over the noise of the patrons.
- the person who answers the phone marks down your order incorrectly
- the restaurant is busy, the printer ink or thermal paper smudges
- The app takes your order, because apps are never busy, but the restaurant is busy and they don't even start making your food until an hour later.
On the other hand Chipotle is always ready when I get there.
> "Hey could I get a large house special for pickup?"
> "Yeah it'll be ready in 15-20"
Then I go to the shop, tap the card while they grab the box with my phone number on it, and I leave. If it's a Friday, the time estimate is usually longer. Sometimes I'll order two.
2) Why does it take 40 minutes to make
3) Why didn't you just have it delivered
2) Shrug
3) They don’t deliver
Usually I order on a Tuesday when they aren't busy and that's why I get the short and accurate time estimate - they likely start putting it together almost immediately.
As soon as you want anything remotely custom, using an app or website is a lifesaver.
And the good apps remember your order for one/two tap re-ordering. Chipotle’s app is one that does this extremely well.
Their server needs a feedback channel from the stores. Or it should count the number of incoming items ordered per minute, and auto-adjust the "ready" time. Don't always show 5 minutes.
If the pizza’s ready in 7 minutes, you’ll be there in 10 and receive a hot pizza.
If the pizza’s ready in 55 minutes, you’ll be there in 10 and receive a hot pizza eventually.
You could theoretically try to offer more accurate arrival times, but then you’ll have to play queuing theory “fairness” games with the pizza queue versus in-person and phone orders to try and ensure that the pizza isn’t made too soon, as well as have to deal with people thay show up late and lie about the estimate shown in-app so they can get a new freshly-made hot pizza (which generates food waste). Doing this requires competent pizza personnel with a good understanding of how to manage expectations fairness, and if there one thing I would not expect from a Chipotle-sized business, it’s that — they’ll have maximized efficiency by removing human consideration from the equation altogether.
Surely technology can help improve this?
For example, I tried ordering a Papa Murphy’s pizza the other day online. It used one of the major food ordering sites. It described “toppings. Pick 5. $2 per topping for extra toppings”
So I chose a few toppings. It added $2 per topping. Period. Didn’t matter if it were red flakes, Parmesan cheese, bacon, onions, olives: $2/ea.
So I’ll just order over phone from now on so I don’t have to worry about these crazy bug fees.
It feels like if a computer generated it… or a “wizard” from the 1990. So many pages and adding toppings on to the pizza is treated like an exception where you have to click a checkbox just to indicate you want your pizza to have toppings….
Meanwhile the Dominos pizza app is super fast and easy, provides updates on status.
There is one exception to this rule, pizza places who are not the big three. The mom and pop who doesn't have an app.
Probably a midwestern thing.
It was a chore.
If you call you won't have a coupon, and they aren't going to tell you about any, therefore you're paying more. How do you find coupons? Check online, but now you're already there so why not just order it there?
A lot of coupons work either online or over the phone, but they're only advertised online and therefore that advantaged is largely to avoid more accessibility/disability lawsuits.
They will, I worked at both Pizza Hut and Dominos twenty years ago and if you asked for the specials we'd basically tell you the coupons. I think our script even said "would you like to hear the specials today?"
When I worked at a restaurant we had both - specials that everyone got and coupons deals that you needed a piece of paper for. They were similar as it was just typing a code into the register, the big difference is typing in the coupon code without a piece of paper was considered stealing and anyone who did that was fired on the spot. You also couldn't redeem multiple coupons at once where you could get any number of open specials you wanted. We always directed customers towards specials.
The coupons were a significantly better deal than the general specials available to anyone. The coupons were mailed to every house in a ~20 mile radius once a month.
I think there were one or two actual coupons at Pizza Hut, where you did need the actual code and the piece of paper, but they were things in the coupon books kids would sell to raise money. At Dominos basically the best deal was the carryout special, which is now even advertised online.
>would lead you to be caught.
Wouldn't. Pretty significant mistake from me.
One guy barely hid that he did it, he spent like ten minutes on the computer before any delivery. Except when the owner was there.
I am describing just giving them that deal regardless.
https://i.imgur.com/GOvnHcv.png
Sorry coasties, Chicago's the new pizza capital
Otherwise in ten years we'll be reading an article on The Atlantic that leads with a CEO behind bars, jumps to a young kid learning about the world in his uncle's Pizzeria, then to a shady security team searching for the whistleblower by cross referencing HN posts against employee catering habits, and finally a retired FBI agent that steps in to provide protection.
So yeah, pizzasnob, please don't start talking about your love for dobermans.
My local place has a website that doesn't quite meet the standard I'd hope for. But it does work, and if you order through it, they'll get your order right. It's a lot less hassle than ordering over the phone.
Then again, from my experience it was hard to find true Italian pizza in the US.
Fun anecdote: When I was in NYC I walked into a corner pizza place in Little Italy that sold these giant slices to-go. I asked them if they also sold Tiramisu. To my utter surprise the 3 or 4 Italian Americans present didn't even know what Tiramisu is. That day I learned it was actually just invented around 1980 in Italy. Today it's one of the absolute favorite deserts in Germany and every Italian restaurant serves it and even many non-italian have it.
A useful keyword to look out for if you want something (similar to) Italian pizza in the US is a restaurant that's marketed as "wood fired" or "brick oven". This will pretty much always get you a Napoletana-style pizza, regardless of your current US regional specialties.
Same experience as the app, no notifications
Dominos is happy to offer you those coupons and deals etc, in exchange for using Dominos's preferred platform (its website, which doesn't cost minimum wage) and providing your user data (via channel tracking the coupon, logging in etc).
A decent pizza place will charge more to let you skip all that.
In the age of data and free, ad driven services, "you get what you pay for" is paramount.
Tricking people into learning non-transferable skills is a tactic. If your hard earned skills in configuring your iphone aren't going to transfer to android, neither are you.
The connection I was trying to make is I didn't have to cut a coupon, that is pretty much the best possible pizza deal and it was always available.
Looking at you Applebee's.
Maybe I just have more patience than the average person, but I haven't seen a site with enough bloated javascript/spinners/whitespace that would cause me to reach for alternatives (phone or otherwise).
What do you even want to takeout order from there?
Edit: tried to look it up, I think your original list is accurate
1. Domino's, with 14,856 "units" and $12.2 billion in gross sales.
2. Pizza Hut, with 16,784 units and $12.0 billion in gross sales.
3. Little Caesar's, with 5,500 units and $4.0 billion.
4. Papa John's, with 5,199 units and $3.7 billion.
5. California Pizza Kitchen, with 267 units and $840 million.
Everything after Papa John's is a long tail. Strangely, revenue in the long tail is not obviously proportional to the number of units. So instead of a top three, there's really a top two, a next two, and everyone else.
[1] https://pizzatoday.com/pizzeria-rankings/2018-top-100-pizza-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterslatin/2019/10/08/the-supr...
https://medium.com/front-end-weekly/dominos-pizza-and-web-ac...
I find this part of the dominos model quite frustrating - you pay almost twice as much, or else spend an unreasonable amount of time dealing with the whole coupon thing. I guess it should be viewed as a tax against people who’s time is more valuable than hunting around the internet for coupon codes.
I'd go further, actually, and offer only one size; cheese, pepperoni, or sausage. No half this or that -- if you want two different toppings, buy two pizzas.
The apps suck (and ordering on the phone can suck also) because there are too many choices and apps suck when they have to offer lot of choices. That's why Apple tries to eliminate choices and options wherever they can.
The reason some drivers were reckless is because there was a commission on each delivery (and you often got tips as well). The more you delivered, the more money you made. In reality it didn't amount to much because you can't really drive much faster than the prevailing average traffic, you burned more fuel and wore out your brakes and tires if you drove like an idiot, but some drivers did anyway. It was heavily discouraged by the managers, at least where I worked.
One margarita large.
I find people’s ability to converse / comprehension very poor. I worked a pizza job answering the phone in a busy shop and getting verbal instructions while some people change their mind is terrible.
A good app / website takes me under a minute to order a pizza, and it is consistently reliable.
Logging in gives me my order history, address, and preferences. Usually I have to login maybe every couple months. If that.
That's the perspective from the business end. Maybe taking orders over the phone is worse for the shop and its workers, because of difficult calls like that. It's not a problem for the common case of a decisive caller whose speaking voice is understandable over the phone.
> Logging in gives me my order history, address, and preferences. Usually I have to login maybe every couple months. If that.
This could just as easily be saved locally without a login.
Have you ever worked taking orders of any kind over the phone? I suspect not. The "common case" isn't nearly as common as you seem to think it is.
No. As I said I’ve done it. Customer and working at a pizza place.
Outcome is the same.
There’s probably a reason that drive through systems often now display a summary for customers rather than just verbal.
That being said online order would fix the issue. Maybe they just meed the pizza configurator part as an app, and you call in and give them a code pointing to a preconfigured pizza.
The menu wasn’t particularly intuitive, and took me a few minutes to pick out what I wanted — then I was greeted with a registration page. Email, password, phone, address, you name it, they wanted _everything_ — I only wanted to collect. They didn’t take mobile wallet payments either! Manual card entry!
I feel like the restaurant recognised they had a problem, but contracted out a solution to the lowest bidder that actively went out of their way to design the worst UX.
In the end I actually went ahead and built a platform that’s not user hostile.
Im going to rewrite the landing page and do another round of marketing soon. The page that I wrote in an afternoon is far too negative in hindsight. It needs a positive spin.
https://plated.direct
Worse, the app pretends to be an unrelated party when something goes wrong. "Sorry, you need to call the store. Look up their number, it's on the website." For me it doesn't add anything to the transaction, it only takes away.
The literal only reason I use the pizza app at all is for chains where I have no idea which store delivers to me. Rest of the time I've gone back to calling. Much faster that way.
I just stay logged in and several apps I have let me just browse and click on coupons.
Most of the apps in my area (Toronto, Canada) absolutely do not require account creation and allow you to just use a ‘guest’ account; usually just requiring (reasonably) your phone number.
As to why I’d want an account to order?
Let’s say I have a local favourite pizza joint and a favourite pizza I like to order. Having my personal info and payment info already filled out and hitting ‘reorder’ makes ordering and paying a literal 5 second experience.
Since it’s optional almost everywhere online and in app here; I don’t see the big fuss.
I ordered from Jolibee last night and was happy to find out I didn’t need to make an account, since I don’t eat there often; unlike my local pizza joint. I used the guest system and my girlfriend just gave them my name and picked it up.
I do agree that the site which is closest to the customer should be providing the support.
The only way that'll be fixed will be with legislation. It's not only Uber, it's Google et al - they all into it.
Simply, they need to be halled kicking and screaming to plow some of their enormous profits back into customer servive.
Trouble is consumer protection law is decades behind where it ought to be.
Potentially, but on the other hand, card disputes are a thing and I'm baffled as to how little people know about them or have misunderstandings such as them only being available for credit cards (the law may give you extra protections there, but the standard Visa/Mastercard dispute rules apply equally regardless of whether it's debit or credit).
Just like Uber and similar Silicon Valley scum gets away with this because they have a monopoly and can do as they please, so do the card networks - and the card networks are on your side in this case, so use that to your advantage.
Right, and reckon I'm no exception.
One of the principal reasons why we have democratic governments is that they are there for the protection of the citizenry.
The trouble is that by the time governments venture into these murky areas much damage has been done. Here, the problem is that no one has spelt out the details in advance —i.e.: what the ground rules are and the consequences if they are broken. Alas, governments are never proactive in many areas where they need to be.
There's just so much going on in modern life that we can't expect citizens to keep up with everything that's going on. We need short, actuate and informative one-liners that people can check before and or during any operation that they're involved in. This ought to be the role of government.
In singapore there’s no Uber eats. But most popular is probably grab which is what I used. If I raised an issue with grab. I get a phone call. Explain to person over the phone and depending on the shop I get a new order or a refund.
The only time it’s difficult in singapore is some of the Indian food restaurants use their own delivery drivers, not the grab drivers. So there’s no status updates and any disputes must go with the restaurant directly. But when ordering it states the restaurant uses its own drivers so you can avoid ordering from them.
I had a huge delivery of Chinese food left on my doorstep (it was still quite hot). Obviously, delivered to the wrong address. The bill was fully itemized and stapled to one of the Uber bags and it came to just short of $200 but there was no correct address and no telephone number to be found on it anywhere.
Anyway, I did my best to contact Uber Eats to get the delivery person to collect it but to no awail. Checked everywhere for a telephone number including searching the internet and found nothing except the number that explained how to place an order. When I rang it, it had a recording - no hunan to be found anywhere.
I couldn't log in on online as I didn't have an account.
And no one reappeared from Uber to reclaim it.
Anyway, I gave up. There was so much food I couldn't get it all into the freezer. It lasted several weeks. Saved a lot on food bills over that time.
Damn fuckwits!
In that sense they're not fuckwits but their ethics are in the gutter.
It is sad to see that prediction coming true in various fields. This strong bias against having customer service people, against customers having any way to talk to a person, is noxious to society at large.
I guess in the same line of thought, I find the abandonment of the public phone system to be sad. Instead of replacing old phones with newer terminals with internet capabilities, we abandoned the entire system. Therefore making the world a bit more unequal and a bit more dependent on personal devices.
FWIW uber has had a web app for years now, and before that there were a plenty of unofficial clients. I remember calling Ubers from my laptop in 2016.
Glad to hear they have a web UI now. Even if I use the phone app, the web app is an important backup to have.
Ironically, that's exactly what the intended recipients were complaining about too!
What I'm still unclear about is that someone nearby ordered the food, as I didn't answer immediately why didn't he ring hone to base or to the planned recipient for an address correction?
> Moreover, you can't even phone Uber Eats!
Uber Eats does have human phone support.
https://gethuman.com/chat/UberEATS
UberEATS Phone Number: 800-253-9377
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 with DoorDash and Grubhub these days, but both of those platforms have the same issues that UberEats does.
---
0: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38948281
> I get by just fine with DoorDash and Grubhub these days, but both of those platforms have the same issues that UberEats does.
To get back to the original point, don't you think you would be better off saving as phone contacts the few restaurants you buy from, or maybe writing down the numbers on the fridge if you live with other people?
After a particularly frustrating instance where Uber told me to cancel but didn’t refund me for me, I did manage to find a support inbox that’s read by an escalation team and I had a real life human calling from SF let me know that they would refund me.
The effort it took to get the refund was ridiculous though as every contact option Uber presented me resulted in robo responses telling me since I initiated the cancel that I’d be responsible for food costs, even when I included chat screenshots of their agents telling me to cancel.
If you're in a metro area ordering during ordinary hours and having this happen, it's almost certainly because the restaurant has developed a bad reputation and people refuse to work with them. The thing about Uber's intermediation is that if you had this sort of experience by ordering directly through the restaurant, you'd rightly associate the experience with the restaurant's failures, but with Uber, it feels like Uber failing.
> a particularly frustrating instance where Uber told me to cancel but didn’t refund me for me
UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food. They have no special powers here. Expecting one to refund "for" you is like having a mail person show up at your door and then berating them for the screwup of whatever business sent you the wrong thing, etc.
This is to be expected, but it's not clear how this is relevant to your parent given it appears to have been Uber customer-service agents directing them to cancel, not a driver.
Do you mean delivery drivers refuse to pick up from there? How is that a customer's problem? That's a potential breach of contract between Uber and the delivery drivers.
Uber Eats positions itself as an end-to-end managed service where you pay money to receive delivered food, and charges hefty fees (on both sides of the transaction) for doing so. It's up to them to make sure this works by implementing appropriate penalties for drivers or restaurants who default.
However in typical Silicon Valley fashion their business model is to screw everyone so I'm sure the restaurants and delivery drivers have equally little recourse when things go wrong or to provide feedback so bad/misbehaving actors are allowed to remain as long as it's not causing a problem for Uber.
> UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food
Not really. FedEx/USPS doesn't manage the customer relationship, doesn't broker the transaction nor takes a fee off the transaction amount itself.
It's not (necessarily), but it's not the drivers' problem, either. It's the restaurant's problem—just like it's their problem if no customers want to do business with them because their food tastes bad, or if their suppliers refuse to do business with them because they're always late paying invoices, etc.
> That's a potential breach of contract between Uber and the delivery drivers.
You can't have a breach of contract for contracts you don't pick up... Or are you implying that you believe the relationship between Uber and their contractors is/should be one where the driver has to take every offer that Uber sends them? If so, are you a freelancer? How would you feel about an arrangement where, because you agreed to work with Marcy in Q2, then when Albert comes to you in Q3 and wants some work done, you have to take it no matter how bad Albert's offer is—e.g. one which very well might turn out to have you working for less than minimum wage—or without regard for whether you find Albert to be a loathsome, demanding prick?
> FedEx/USPS doesn't manage the customer relationship, doesn't broker the transaction
Neither do UberEATS drivers. That's the entire point of the metaphor. (Having said that, I misread your original comment, which other comments have pointed out.)
I'm not sure what this means exactly or how it's relevant. In these instances, it's not the driver's fault, it's Uber's fault. They are taking orders they can't fulfill and then denying refunds when you cancel until you figure out how to escalate it to a human who can do things other than press canned-response buttons.
The order status will stay on "preparing your order" for an hour while I know full well (by calling the restaurant directly) that the food was ready for over an hour. Sometimes it'll switch to "driver on the way to pick up" and then back to "preparing your order" which makes no sense.
Deliveroo is was similar in that aspect back in 2018, not sure if that's changed now.
Regarding your refund, a chargeback is the typical way to deal with such scum, and the evidence (chat screenshots) will make it an open & shut case.
Oddly enough, I've NEVER had this issue with DoorDash. I think DoorDash simply makes restaurants unavailable if they don't have drivers, whereas UberEats ALWAYS takes the order and then simply doesn't fulfill it if they can't. What you say about "preparing your order" is 100% correct. There isn't a "waiting for driver" status, so if there is no driver on the way, it stays at "preparing..."
This is a particularly terrible customer experience since you almost always time your deliveries so you eat them right when they get there and you are hungry when they arrive. By the time you realize Uber is not going to bother fulfilling your order, you've already probably been waiting 30 minutes, cannot cancel then without being charged, and have to start making other plans for food as you get hangrier and hangrier. It's even worse when you're getting food for the whole family delivered and have to deal with hangry kids!
If that happens, that is the last time I order from that restaurant.
Uber Eats wasn't much better and tried to still make me pay for delivery fees even when the only item in the order was wrong/damaged, but a chargeback quickly took care of that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rj0a19/made_...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-eats-delivery-drivers-e...
It would never have occurred to me to take bites out of customers food but if you see just how little these app drivers earn and consider how little loyalty they feel to any one restaurant or platform, it's kind of understandable.
It was so weird as this was about a $150 sushi order and the restaurant was fairly nice.
Uber refunded the meal immediately after seeing a picture.
When my kid doesn't get the meal we ordered for them, they don't really care that Uber Eats was quick to refund the order.
They're still hungry.
I don't particularly care about the cost being refunded, I've wasted 2 hours waiting for food that didn't arrive.
I've been using UberEats for years.
It meant a much larger range of restaurants became available to me - I don't drive, and these restaurants would otherwise not get my business.
Uber Eats has often been very good about giving me refunds for restaurant screwups.
However they sent me an email after a string of restaurants fucking up orders - missing whole meals, or significant parts thereof. At the time, they didn't ask for any kind of supporting evidence, just click through the app and it would instantly refund you.
Then they sent me an email saying that they've detected an "unusual" number of problems, and that they'd like to remind me that fraud is illegal and they may take further action if they detect it. No way to appeal, no way to say "Hey, if you're going to subtly accuse me of being a fraud, at least let me have an opportunity to provide some information".
Uber Eats now (sometimes) asks for some evidence, and it apparently goes off to some human for review (or they just stick a ~30-90 minute delay timer on the processing queue to make it look like a human reviewed it).
Now, most restaurants around me no longer have their own delivery options, and direct you to Uber Eats or a whitelabelled service that just submits the order through Uber Eats or Menulog anyway.
There's a number of fake restaurants now listed on Uber Eats around me, even some chains of fake restaurants. One of these fake-chains is operating out of low-quality hotel kitchens and is clearly heating up commercial cook-chill/frozen meals. Another is operating out of a residential apartment building from someone's home (not a commercial kitchen).
Good luck trying to report these to Uber. They don't give a shit.
While I'm dumping these on Uber, they're unfortunately not the worst.
Menulog are IMO worse - they have all the same problems as Uber in terms of fake listings, but also work with restaurants that keep getting bad reviews to wipe out the bad reviews and re-list them as New. All the business has to do is say they've been sold to new owners, delete the old listing and re-add and hey presto, those 500 1-star reviews saying you've got a shit product are turned into 30 5-star reviews about this amazing "new" restaurant, rinse and repeat every few months when business drops off.
When I talk to somebody on the phone I feel a lot more sure.
I worked at a place near Union Square, NYC and was in the habit of ordering food for pickup from sweetgreen because I knew it all worked. I have thought about ordering from restaurants in Collegetown, Ithaca from the web but just haven't gotten in the habit because I don't feel the certainty.
A restaurant with absolutely excellent process for handling walk-in traffic can fail entirely faced with an occasional online order. In their case they made the sub half an hour before I requested it be ready and stuffed it in some corner where they couldn't find it.
In the last two years I've seen the small facilities run by Cornell Dining go from handling almost all in-person order to handling a large fraction (between 1/3 and 2/3) of online orders. In-person orders are handled by Kanban-style process where the people making the food take orders at they clear work-in-progress. I'm not really sure how they handle online orders that aren't gated by this. I suspect there are many indirect effects, for instance, I think because the traffic patterns are more complicated it would be easier to walk out without paying for your food. (On the other hand, I'm a member of a cohort of middle-aged people who complicate traffic flows by going into line to pay for food before it is ready because that's efficient.)
Anyhow, once I know a place is good for handling online orders I'm inclined to do so. But if I'm not sure I'm much more inclined to go in and do things the old fashioned way.
I think this might differ if you're in the U.S or out, here in Europe often it is like this:
In the app/website you have an "account" that you get by entering data into form fields which takes a while, and which then gets stored into a database and is saved forever unless you go through some extra steps to make sure it doesn't which will be complicated by how well the app / website has been programmed to handle these potential extra steps (if at all)
On the phone you have an address that the guy writes down on the piece of paper for the delivery guy and is thrown out afterwards.
They’re on apps, but they write your order on a paper ticket if you are a phone, pickup order and only take your name.
Use an app for discovering new places and seeing what they offer and order direct by phone.
When I call the restaurant I ask them if they have their own delivery person, or if it's Uber. If it's Uber, I politely decline to order from them.
And you don't have to have an account, the address and payment details are filled in by the browser autocomplete.
So the friction is - click on the menu, click "order", type in the wireless transfer code.
Also - almost nobody orders "pick up" pizza here, so phone requires you to specify the address every time which is significantly more friction.
The competition is fierce and the delivery apps are very affordable.
For some restaurants this is not true, they save your (phone number -> address) mapping the first time you call, and in the future ask for confirmation whether the address is correct.
What is this wireless transfer code? Like some sort of payment system?
This is the sub-goal, but not ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to maximize the profit, with accounts created, all the analytics will work out, and they could do all kinds of promotions or targeted ads.
I guess that's the same reason why you are asked to install a mobile app whenever you visit Reddit mobile WEBSITE. It does not attempt to make your life better. At least it's not the ultimate goal of ecosystem.
Woe to the pizza company who thinks "we don't need to care about customer retention, our pizza is just too good."
I have dozens of pizza places to order from, all within delivery distance. Make ordering difficult, and as long as the competition is pretty much as tasty, I'll move on.
Yeah, Reddit's approach to making so difficult to access the mobile on a whim, especially in an ephemeral browser, is a straight up UX dark pattern. I use Reddit less on mobile because of it...
I want to stay in the browser where I have things like ad blockers and can open a bunch of tabs at once and bounce around easily, etc.
I do not install apps or create accounts.
As far as when there’s a problem, with the major food delivery app I use, I am refunded merely for asking. I’ve used it heavily during the pandemic and literally every problem was solved through the app.
With the situation in the US at least, trying to get anyone on the phone is an exercise in frustration. The app (for me, so far) has always been up. The employees don't have to stop making the product to take an order. They don't know the specials, or don't care to look them up which might be changing on an HOURLY basis. The app knows. On the phone I have to go through my order painstakingly each time; the app knows what I've ordered and I can single-click repeat it.
And honestly, all they're doing is taking my order and putting it into probably an admin version OF THE SAME APP. It's LITERALLY the old game of "telephone", but for something I want to buy.
And that is always the case. Just call instead.
Unfortunately you can't do that for everything. Just today I was practically forced to install and give away "my" phone number to the worst app you can ever imagine, just to be able to park.
So the hostility is perhaps less there.
And the user hostility only starts at the surface.
I do use guest checkout on sites I don't think I'll order from again or at least infrequently.
What's one more auto-generated row in my password manager's database anyway?
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While typing the above (a bit of ▧am improv) I had this a bit of a "oh" moment as I envisioned the idea of the "good model citizen" a la China or the USSR, except instead of the... ideal being like *that* it's about being Your Best Most Optimally Saleable You.
Uhhhhh.
I should really have a password manager set up properly as well, but that's just another job, and scary in some way. I have a password manager but it's all manual, no autogenerating accounts or fancy stuff.
Having said that I think Domino's Pizza has a great process for ordering pizza on their web site where you build you own pizza and can then track the progress all the way to your doorstep.
damn, you're lucky. I remember a few phone calls a decade ago where some brand had a sale on burgers, but they had a policy of waiting for me to dictate the coupon code over the phone... ugh
My order is consistent and for me it works amazingly!
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...
>The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet.
I still have a fondness for the simplicity of OpenWindows and how well it it handled virtual desktops. It was really cool to use on quad monitor setups.
Because then the menu wouldn't be readable, searchable, or adaptable by many people, including blind, low vision or dyslexic users. Meanwhile, the people who could read it could type any old freeform nonsense into the box... nobody has to care about spelling on a phonecall or proper ordering system.
My food was even delivered by a robot that texted me
Granted, I had called the restaurant first because I didnt know why they werent on the other food delivery apps anymore and they told me which one, I also wasnt picking up as it was delivery.
It's already a dangerous and physically taxing job; I'd rather tip them cash and know that they have a dedicated route than having to zip around the city trying to figure out whether The Algorithm is going to nudge people to buy McDonald's or Taco Bell today.
Also yeah, trying to explain an order to be heard by someone trying to relay it back to a noisy kitchen in some of these takeaway places which don't have a dedicated person to man the phones is also a problem.