For what it's worth, the general vibe I've gotten from couriers has been that Caviar is one of the best food delivery apps for them, and that DoorDash is among the worst.
As a user though, Caviar is the worst delivery service I have ever used though. Food is often cold & sometimes wrong across 3 cities. I have stopped using it, even when it is the only option for a restaurant I like.
Super interesting it varies by person. Caviar has had the best delivery experiences consistently and if I've ever had an issue like a squished pizza they immediately dispatched a new one or gave me a refund. Plus they are cheaper than Uber Eats (the consistently worst app for me) and Doordash delivering to Pacific Heights/Cow Hollow in SF.
Agreed, I've recently stopped using Caviar altogether after numerous wrong or undelivered orders in a row, all of which they failed to take any real responsibility for and blamed on the drivers. Adding insult to injury, Caviar seems to be more expensive than alternatives.
It's funny, I know almost no two people with similar experiences (user or courier).
For example as a user I have literally never had a good experience with Caviar. It almost always wrong in different ways.
As a courier one time the guy called and said that the restaurant was taking so long that Caviar would no longer pay him to wait so we ended up paying him out of pocket to cover it (he said we could cancel and get our money back but that he'd also get nothing after waiting for a very long time).
Uber Eats, as a user, has usually worked pretty well. As a courier one of them told us they constantly have out of date restaurant menus, people order from them, the restaurant substitutes or ignores it completely and now they have to deal with an angry person.
It really feels like restaurants are not equipped to handle these types of services and all of the services don't train their people if at all, as well as treating them kinda like crap many times.
I was a Caviar courier in a past life, it paid very well for someone with just a bike ($20-$25/hr before taxes).
That courier was full of shit. You get paid regardless of customer status, and you also get paid per minute over a certain delay threshold. Sounds like you just got a bad actor.
> That courier was full of shit. You get paid regardless of customer status, and you also get paid per minute over a certain delay threshold. Sounds like you just got a bad actor.
I mean, that's basically what he said but that it had been an hour and a half (IIRC) and he said Courier would stop paying him to wait.
I live in a building that has a confusing relationship with it's name vs. the street its on. Uber (and Uber Eats) has never worked for me properly, and I always have to meet the courier at the door. Caviar always delivers directly to my door.
I hear you. It was so difficult for couriers to deliver where I live that I literally developed a single page website with pics and instructions. Now I just text them the url and access code.
I had to provide detailed instructions as well, and as soon as I did I never had another problem. But I don’t know why. My house isn’t hard to find at all. I even asked around and all my friends thought it was bizarre. (I moved here about five years ago so at the time ‘the first time’ was fresh in minds). I suspect they were relying on the map instead of address numbers because their map used to be off by two houses.
I also once opened the door after waiting about five minutes after getting the “driver is approaching” notification to hear two people bitching about “how ridiculous” it was finding my place. They were in my driveway but could not find the front door. My house is on a hill so the door is down a flight of stairs from the garage but it’s only about 20 feet away and plainly visible from the street.
The problem with where we live is more a circumstance of bad environment that messes with drivers, which upon realizing this, spurred me to make the website to include pictures.
The building itself looks like a garage from the road, so many pass by the unmarked door they need to enter the code on. Also, there's three consecutive lanes you can turn right onto, so when Waze tells them to turn right, only 33% of drivers get it correct else they get lost in a maze of parking lots and dead ends. This is also after the driver successfully navigates a roundabout (hard for some US drivers) and does not accidentally getting back onto the interstate because the lanes are not clearly marked.
Can I steal this idea? I have the same issue. I had been dealing with it via detailed instructions that I'd paste into any comment box possible thats not the restaurant one (postmates has two, at least)
Interestingly, that is exactly what Square planned to do with Caviar: integrate with Square POS so both use the same system and build a tightly integrated marketplace.
As a customer, I’ve quit Doordash. They used to have decent customer service, where, although your order was screwed up, they’d generally fix it. They had a weird habit of always offering a $5 credit though, sometimes even when the part of the order that was screwed up cost more. But you could reach a real person pretty easily.
A lot has changed since then, and we’ve had several pretty negative encounters with them including one where the CS rep basically accused us of lying about not receiving our food. (I suspect it was misdelivered because the map software they used put our address as our neighbors house two doors down.)
My last experience with them: The app told us to contact them for an ETA on our food. The actual status of our order wasn’t clear. We had a dasher and then we didn’t have a dasher. There was no way to contact them. We tried “Contact the dasher” and the number didn’t go through. We tried to use the chat functionality (which is ridiculously buried under four or five levels of clicks and even then not immediately obvious” when it used to be basically automatic if you clicked “help”) and it wouldn’t connect us. We tried another number which also didn’t go through. The website had a message about difficulty placing orders at that time but ours was already placed.
So there we sat in limbo not knowing if the food would ever arrive and no way to contact anybody. Should we just go out to eat? We didn’t know. We did use their web form contact them, but the response came way too late to not have ruined our meal time. Eventually our order was cancelled and to their credit they gave us $50 credits but meh.
This may have changed since I don't really use Caviar, but I'n not surprised since I think Caviar's delivery/service fees are the highest (which is why I don't really use it).