[Nextgrid]

> more reasonable people who know how to heat food up

If the food was advertised as potentially cold or wrong upfront with no guarantees it would be one thing and the market will adjust (only people who want to take the gamble would order).

It is not advertised as such, and the prices don't reflect it either. You are offered a deal where you pay money for warm, or at least correct food to be delivered. The problem is that one side doesn't want to uphold their part of the deal but still expects the other side to uphold its part (aka paying the money). That sounds like false advertising to me and we have laws against it for a reason.

> how many times did you heat up and eat the food anyways after getting your refund?

Cold food actually results in a partial refund which is fine by me (though the option for the full refund should still be offered IMO, as some foods might not taste the same after reheating though I haven't experienced this personally). For me cold food was never a big deal, it was the incorrect food that made up the majority of the problems, often they wouldn't respect the extra options like "no cheese", the food would be completely different from the description (I guess the restaurant changed the dish but didn't update the menu on the app) or outright receiving the wrong order with someone else's order receipt attached to it.

[hombre_fatal]

It's likely not the restaurant's fault it's cold. And the guy making $6/hr to deliver it to you tried their best, or got there later than they wanted to.

Once again, if you can't suck up the gamble that is delivery food, I'm glad you get kicked off the platform. I just wanted to give a response from another pov since you felt like you were wronged: I read your account of events and think "nice, the system is working."

[drevil-v2]

This is worst kind of argument one makes. You are constructing it in a manner that only serves to make the other person look like a jerk while the reality is much more nuanced.

Without any prior knowledge of the actors involved you assign all good traits to one side; the restaurant created a hot meal and the delivery person really tried their best to deliver on time, and then assign bad traits to the customer, they were unreasonable and should be more understanding.

There are people who don't do the right thing and if I am paying for something then I expect to receive what I paid for. You don't know me. Maybe I am struggling financially and the meal I ordered was a once in month treat for my wife and children and we can't afford the luxury of eating out. Maybe we were all looking forward to a family dinner. Maybe the restaurant fucked up. Maybe the driver is running multiple delivery apps and making a killing in these while the orders go cold.

So you can just fuck off.

[apatters]

His argument is faulty, but the fact of the matter is that Deliveroo owns the relationship with the customer. It's ultimately Deliveroo's job to make sure good food shows up in the right place at the right time. Failing that in a competitive market they will likely lose customers.

There's lots of examples in this thread and elsewhere that frankly most of these delivery companies aren't great at what they do.

Additionally a lot of them are shitty to their vendors (restaurants) - the post that spawned this whole debate being a perfect example. It's not necessarily Deliveroo's job to treat their vendors like royalty, but we give Walmart plenty of well deserved shit for abusing its vendors, no reason Deliveroo should be immune to criticism.

[randallsquared]

This viewpoint is bizarre to me.

I get that it's difficult to reliably deliver food from restaurant to apartment in a time which is short enough that the food is still hot (or still frozen, or whatever). But I notice that some restaurants from which I order on Seamless are always correct, always hot, and typically delivered within 20-25 minutes. Others are hit or miss with some or all of those considerations. If some restaurants always get this right, it's hard to imagine that the fault lies with Seamless or gambling.

[Nextgrid]

> It's likely not the restaurant's fault it's cold. And the guy making $6/hr to deliver it to you tried their best.

I never said it was either those people's fault (although I have seen drivers do other stupid things, like keeping pizzas vertically in their delivery backpack).

However it is the fault of the platform for advertising something and not delivering on its promise. The platform should be aware of how long it takes to deliver (taking traffic into account, especially for Uber which has access to that data already) and shouldn't risk offering deliveries if they can't reasonably guarantee the food won't be cold (or at least make it clear upfront - "this restaurant is far away and this might be cold - continue anyway?").

Again the problem here is we're talking about "move fast and break things" scum so being upfront and doing business fairly isn't part of their textbooks. Instead they hope most people don't kick up too much of a fuss and kick the ones that do. For what it's worth, I've never lost a chargeback case on these problems so seems like at least MasterCard agrees with me?

Not to mention if these were one-offs and everything else was great it would be somewhat excusable, but the other scummy things I've noticed (like lying about the restaurant being slow for their failure to have enough capacity) seems like this is not a one-off and the entire business plan is to be as scummy as they can get away with, preying upon unsuspecting customers who might not know they can do chargebacks.

> if you can't suck up the gamble that is delivery food

The problem is that it is not advertised as a gamble, quite the opposite actually. When a supplier sells me a product/service I expect them to deliver on their promise or compensate me if they get it wrong (I have been on the other side of this and made sure to compensate my client to make up for my failure). This is how business works in most industries, there's no reason why it should be different here IMO.

[blotter_paper]

I feel that both you and the commenter you've been arguing with are making mostly reasonable statements. I also think that for this particular industry you're probably part of the 20% of customers who cause 80% of the problems, and that this is why you're being booted from these platforms. Note that I have not made any statements about the ethics of the platforms' advertising.

[lnanek2]

> The platform should be aware of how long it takes to deliver (taking traffic into account, especially for Uber which has access to that data already) and shouldn't risk offering deliveries if they can't reasonably guarantee the food won't be cold

In my experience, the platforms are doing the exact opposite. A lot of times the driver is there, the food is there, and the driver is being told to wait for more orders. I've called and asked before on some of the platforms where you have the phone number.

That said, I've never seen someone bothered by having to put some delivery food in the microwave, though. It's sort of expected. About the only case where I've seen that is for pizza, and pizza places have their own drivers anyway.

So it's probably a good bet for the platform doing what they do. If you can serve twice as many customers this way, and have to ban 1/5 customers who have no microwave, you'd still come out ahead as a business.

[zerocrates]

> keeping pizzas vertically in their delivery backpack

This is a failstate in the recent video game Death Stranding, which yes, sometimes involves pizza delivery.

[random314]

Here is a tip - If you don't own a microwave, you should not use any delivery app.

[alpaca128]

If you're fine paying for the company's mistakes yourself that's your problem, but don't expect others to do the same and accept a lower value than was promised and advertised.

[random314]

No wonder these delivery apps can't turn a profit even with such a high markup. These customers are jerks ruining the ecosystem for everyone else.they just keep hopping from app to app as they get banned issuing chargebacks on food they ordered and ate, because it was cold!

We might need a food credit score to get on these apps soon

[alpaca128]

If they can't turn a profit by reliably delivering the product that was ordered & paid then either they're doing something wrong or it's not a viable business model.

The expectation of regularly getting hot food has been set over the years by the usual pizza delivery services and others. If new competition cannot match that then banning unsatisfied customers will only be a long-term solution if the majority of customers accepts the lower standard, but they are not obliged to do that.

I'm not saying one should always refund the delivery based on any imperfection, but most customers don't do that, otherwise delivery services would never turn a profit. But apparently some people got really bad series of wrong or late deliveries, and that doesn't have to be accepted silently.