[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.

[random314]

Serving a certain class of customers is definitely not a viable business model unless these customers are charged 100% markup.

I think these customers should just go pick up the food themselves, the rest of us can use the app. Department stores also ban problematic customers who return too many items, so this is not a new concept.

[rightbyte]

Pizzas maybe keep the heat longer than eg. a hamburger with Fries or a stake. I mean they are quite moist. I mean if you want hot food pizzas, soup etc. is probably what you can get unless the driver has a heater.