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One of the most unethical companies that I know. Pushes restaurants to the brink of bankruptcy and pays their riders close to nothing. Abusive human rights in t

One of the most unethical companies that I know. Pushes restaurants to the brink of bankruptcy and pays their riders close to nothing. Abusive human rights in third world countries (much worse than how they treat riders in UK and other markets) Tried to manipulate pricing & food choices with various algorithms (hiding restaurants, making them pay for screen estate) Trying to run ghost kitchens and further capture market share / margin with poor quality ingredients and misleading advertising (nice photos make it look like a restaurant but it’s some sweat shop instead, likely with unhygienic conditions and slave labor) With the pandemic receeding, I LOVE walking in fresh air and eating fresh food at a restaurant On a general note, the world is so beautiful and needs to be enjoyed in person. All these apps are a cheap and manipulative substitution that really reduce quality of life for many. I’m looking at you Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Deliveroo etc

FartyMcFarter 6y ago
> Trying to run ghost kitchens Is a ghost kitchen that different from the kitchen in a regular restaurant? Either one doesn't strike me as the best working environment, not necessarily anyway.
- Tsiklon 6y ago
  A ghost kitchen is a kitchen associated with a restaurant that doesn’t serve walk-in customers or have the capacity to allow customers to sit-in. Often times these kitchens are anonymous looking from the outside, often located outside of the town centre In the UK they should be beholden to the same hygiene standards as any other food preparation business Some of these kitchens have their own branding and are not associated with a restaurant, but if you know your local area and see some restaurants which you don’t recognise on deliveroo or the other food delivery services, it’s possible that they are a ghost kitchen.
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago
  The Guardian ran a few alarmist articles on them going back a while which might have sparked some of the outrage, including this opinion piece [1]. It turns out these "dark satanic mills" are often: hot, without windows and cold in winter. I don't advocate for bad working conditions, but it must be hard for anyone who has ever worked in a kitchen to keep a straight face when reading that. Even many Michelin starred kitchens are horrible environments. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/09/dark-kitchens-satanic-mills-deliveroo https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/09/dark-k... Edit: This isn't meant to be whataboutism, just pointing out that a "ghost kitchen" is only really different from a normal kitchen in its business structure. By and large, catering is not, and has never been, a glamorous industry. If you want to stop kitchens being difficult places to work, that's a worthwhile cause, but much, much bigger than Deliveroo.
  - corobo 6y ago
    It would be better to report those too rather than dismiss something because something else is worse.
  - arkitaip 6y ago
    So what if the rest of the industry is terrible, how does that make ghost kitchens acceptable?
    - FartyMcFarter 6y ago
      It doesn't make ghost kitchens acceptable. However it does mean that it's misleading to criticise ghost kitchens specifically, while implying they're worse than other kinds of restaurants.
    - Griffinsauce 6y ago
      It's not the fact that it's a ghost kitchen that's bad right? It's the poor treatment of workers. Focusing on a poor correlation is not solving the core problem.
- feu 6y ago
  The ghost kitchens are really consistent, the quality of food is much better than the majority of restaurants on Deliveroo.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  I think one issue is, they separate branding from production. Ordinarily, you expect each restaurant to be independent, have their own style and recipes and quality standards. It's something you can learn, and then choose the restaurants that suit your standards and taste the most. In a world of on-line orders and delivery, a ghost kitchen operator - or a "clever" entrepreneur subcontracting one or more of such kitchens - can set up an arbitrary amount of "restaurants", each with completely different marketing copy, but all ultimately delivering the exact same food. Or totally random food, if there are multiple ghost kitchens placed behind a (food ordering equivalent of) load balancer. This makes it very hard for an established restaurant to compete on-line - from outside, the five real restaurants in your neighbourhood look no different than 20 "virtual" restaurants. There's no way to tell. In this reality, as a customer, I have to resign to expect completely random results when I try to order food. These are also perfect conditions for a race to the bottom.
  - fnord123 6y ago
    It's hard for established restaurants to compete on-line because they are kitted out for a dining room, paying a lease on the square meters for said dining room, and a kitchen setup to only handle a single set of menus. > Ordinarily, you expect each restaurant to be independent, have their own style and recipes and quality standards. Pretty sure no one who works in the restaurant industry thinks this. There's always a supply chain. Further, traditional restaurants are also running multiple virtual restaurants (e.g. one menu for katsu curry, and another for sushi).
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > Pretty sure no one who works in the restaurant industry thinks this. There's always a supply chain. Perhaps not. And yes, I know there's a supply chain. But every restaurant I've been to - or ordered from - where I live[0], each one has its own distinct and consistent style. For instance, being a pizza aficionado, I could tell you just by looking and tasting, which restaurant you ordered a pizza from in the town I now live, and which major pizza parlor[1] you ordered from in Kraków (the city I spent most of my life in). This is what I'm concerned about. While not perfect, the restaurant's name was something you could use to "hash" a particular style of a particular dish by. They may have all supplied themselves at few well-known wholesalers[2], but they each processed the ingredients differently. Ghost kitchens + "virtual restaurants" kill that mechanism. To be clear: I don't mind the concept of ghost kitchens per se. Done well (i.e. regulated well), they'll be able to deliver consistent quality at good price. My problem is with the other half of the equation - the virtual restaurants. Something like this has already happened with consumer goods - so many of them are white-label goods these days, each sold by many fly-by-night brands. Consumer's ability to use branding as a proxy for quality (or quality of support) has been destroyed, DDoSed by the proliferation of such transient brands. I consider this a loss to customers and to the market at large (it increases information asymmetry). I worry the same is about to happen with food delivery. -- [0] - I love my country for being just enough developed to get all the fun stuff conceived in the US, but just enough not developed that they come with a delay of a few years - giving us time to see the expected social impact things will have :). [1] - At least until recently. Now there's too many small operators offering delivery services to track - but I can still distinguish between the ~6-8 places I used to order from. When these small operators started showing up, many of them were delivery-only, so I suspect they may have graduated to ghost kitchen frontends by now. [2] - Or discount supermarkets :). My wife and I have a bunch of stories about it. Notably, I remember once being in the queue behind a couple who were buying the entire stock of chicken breast and invoicing it to a company - presumably the Asian restaurant nearby :).
chrisseaton 6y ago
> Trying to run ghost kitchens ... likely with ... slave labor If you know that Deliveroo are using slave labour then you should call the Police right now.
- krageon 6y ago
  If a company is doing bad things on that scale that'll just ruin your life.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- fakedang 6y ago
  I think he was referencing non Western markets Deliveroo operates in. In the Middle East for instance, deliveries are taken by severely underpaid workers in delivery contracting agencies which are the "contractors" for Deliveroo.
  - conjectures 6y ago
    From the news, this sounds like the general economic model in the richer parts of the middle east.
    - sammorrowdrums 6y ago
      It's presumably not isolated. I lived for a while in Oman, and for example construction workers and bar staff are significantly shipped in from India and a few other places, and are not paid well, and are put up in cheap cramped accommodation, work very long hours and the places hold on to all their passports. They also held all my band's passports as a musician, but we knew that if we were to rock up to the British embassy / consulate and requested assistance we'd have been helped to leave the country without our passports on emergency travel document, and I suspect that the Indian workers who were, in my opinion, poorly treated - they had a lot less options.
Nextgrid 6y ago
They will also ban you if you call them out on their bad service and request refunds for wrong/damaged food (and persist even if their CS tries to fob you off, which in an of itself is wrong in my opinion). I'm assuming they have a per-user metric of overall profit and mine ended up being in the negative so it makes sense from a business point of view. However, I would be worried about their business if they can't properly deliver enough orders to make a profit when someone is holding them accountable. The business model appears to be based on fobbing the customer off and letting them hold the bag should things go wrong, which is sadly a common thing in large-scale VC-funded startups.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tweetle_beetle 6y ago
The growth at all costs model also tends to treat things like hygiene standards as annoying red tape. I remember seeing a journalist a few years ago demonstrating, tongue in cheek, how there is zero vetting of restaurents. He set up an account as a restaurent, put up a barbecue in front of his house on the same day and got an acquaintance to order from him. Driver showed up shortly afterwards to pick up the food (which had been dropped on the floor to make a point for the camera), no questions asked. They're happy to run marketing campaigns about "Food Freedom" [1], but it seems like it's old "we're just a platform" selectively applied when it suits them. [1] https://invidiou.site/watch?v=o2HaQEH6MPo https://invidiou.site/watch?v=o2HaQEH6MPo
- boudin 6y ago
  I think you meant this BBC article with the fake burger restaurant: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-48762211 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-48762211
  - fatfox 6y ago
    Unrelated to Deliveroo, but "How to Become TripAdvisor’s #1 Fake Restaurant" (2018) was very telling as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8 From the video description: > The Shed at Dulwich was the number one rated restaurant in London, with foodies, celebrities and bloggers trying to get a table. The main obstacle for them, however, was that it didn't exist. Over the course of 8 months VICE's Oobah Butler used an assault of fake reviews to get his 'restaurant' to the hallowed top spot on TripAdvisor.
  - tweetle_beetle 6y ago
    That's the one. Well found :)
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
Maybe I had an unusual experience, but while in London I never once got a Deliveroo order correctly. Items missing, order forgotten, double charges, et cetera. The cream on top of it all was their lack of phone or chat support. Instead, one emails an address that auto replies with a “we will get back to you within three business days” message. Not helpful when I’m trying to eat tonight!
- jeffwass 6y ago
  In London the deliveroo motorcycle drivers are often very aggressive and dangerous. The company seems to incentivise drivers to deliver as quickly as possible without regard to safety or traffic rules.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Similar experience here. I ended up requesting so many refunds that they banned my account. I guess they didn't expect someone to actually hold them accountable? No billing issues on my side though. I've always found the platform itself to be solid.

FartyMcFarter 6y ago

> Trying to run ghost kitchens Is a ghost kitchen that different from the kitchen in a regular restaurant? Either one doesn't strike me as the best working environment, not necessarily anyway.

Tsiklon 6y ago
A ghost kitchen is a kitchen associated with a restaurant that doesn’t serve walk-in customers or have the capacity to allow customers to sit-in. Often times these kitchens are anonymous looking from the outside, often located outside of the town centre In the UK they should be beholden to the same hygiene standards as any other food preparation business Some of these kitchens have their own branding and are not associated with a restaurant, but if you know your local area and see some restaurants which you don’t recognise on deliveroo or the other food delivery services, it’s possible that they are a ghost kitchen.
tweetle_beetle 6y ago
The Guardian ran a few alarmist articles on them going back a while which might have sparked some of the outrage, including this opinion piece [1]. It turns out these "dark satanic mills" are often: hot, without windows and cold in winter. I don't advocate for bad working conditions, but it must be hard for anyone who has ever worked in a kitchen to keep a straight face when reading that. Even many Michelin starred kitchens are horrible environments. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/09/dark-kitchens-satanic-mills-deliveroo https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/09/dark-k... Edit: This isn't meant to be whataboutism, just pointing out that a "ghost kitchen" is only really different from a normal kitchen in its business structure. By and large, catering is not, and has never been, a glamorous industry. If you want to stop kitchens being difficult places to work, that's a worthwhile cause, but much, much bigger than Deliveroo.
- corobo 6y ago
  It would be better to report those too rather than dismiss something because something else is worse.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  So what if the rest of the industry is terrible, how does that make ghost kitchens acceptable?
  - FartyMcFarter 6y ago
    It doesn't make ghost kitchens acceptable. However it does mean that it's misleading to criticise ghost kitchens specifically, while implying they're worse than other kinds of restaurants.
  - Griffinsauce 6y ago
    It's not the fact that it's a ghost kitchen that's bad right? It's the poor treatment of workers. Focusing on a poor correlation is not solving the core problem.
feu 6y ago
The ghost kitchens are really consistent, the quality of food is much better than the majority of restaurants on Deliveroo.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
I think one issue is, they separate branding from production. Ordinarily, you expect each restaurant to be independent, have their own style and recipes and quality standards. It's something you can learn, and then choose the restaurants that suit your standards and taste the most. In a world of on-line orders and delivery, a ghost kitchen operator - or a "clever" entrepreneur subcontracting one or more of such kitchens - can set up an arbitrary amount of "restaurants", each with completely different marketing copy, but all ultimately delivering the exact same food. Or totally random food, if there are multiple ghost kitchens placed behind a (food ordering equivalent of) load balancer. This makes it very hard for an established restaurant to compete on-line - from outside, the five real restaurants in your neighbourhood look no different than 20 "virtual" restaurants. There's no way to tell. In this reality, as a customer, I have to resign to expect completely random results when I try to order food. These are also perfect conditions for a race to the bottom.
- fnord123 6y ago
  It's hard for established restaurants to compete on-line because they are kitted out for a dining room, paying a lease on the square meters for said dining room, and a kitchen setup to only handle a single set of menus. > Ordinarily, you expect each restaurant to be independent, have their own style and recipes and quality standards. Pretty sure no one who works in the restaurant industry thinks this. There's always a supply chain. Further, traditional restaurants are also running multiple virtual restaurants (e.g. one menu for katsu curry, and another for sushi).
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > Pretty sure no one who works in the restaurant industry thinks this. There's always a supply chain. Perhaps not. And yes, I know there's a supply chain. But every restaurant I've been to - or ordered from - where I live[0], each one has its own distinct and consistent style. For instance, being a pizza aficionado, I could tell you just by looking and tasting, which restaurant you ordered a pizza from in the town I now live, and which major pizza parlor[1] you ordered from in Kraków (the city I spent most of my life in). This is what I'm concerned about. While not perfect, the restaurant's name was something you could use to "hash" a particular style of a particular dish by. They may have all supplied themselves at few well-known wholesalers[2], but they each processed the ingredients differently. Ghost kitchens + "virtual restaurants" kill that mechanism. To be clear: I don't mind the concept of ghost kitchens per se. Done well (i.e. regulated well), they'll be able to deliver consistent quality at good price. My problem is with the other half of the equation - the virtual restaurants. Something like this has already happened with consumer goods - so many of them are white-label goods these days, each sold by many fly-by-night brands. Consumer's ability to use branding as a proxy for quality (or quality of support) has been destroyed, DDoSed by the proliferation of such transient brands. I consider this a loss to customers and to the market at large (it increases information asymmetry). I worry the same is about to happen with food delivery. -- [0] - I love my country for being just enough developed to get all the fun stuff conceived in the US, but just enough not developed that they come with a delay of a few years - giving us time to see the expected social impact things will have :). [1] - At least until recently. Now there's too many small operators offering delivery services to track - but I can still distinguish between the ~6-8 places I used to order from. When these small operators started showing up, many of them were delivery-only, so I suspect they may have graduated to ghost kitchen frontends by now. [2] - Or discount supermarkets :). My wife and I have a bunch of stories about it. Notably, I remember once being in the queue behind a couple who were buying the entire stock of chicken breast and invoicing it to a company - presumably the Asian restaurant nearby :).

chrisseaton 6y ago

> Trying to run ghost kitchens ... likely with ... slave labor If you know that Deliveroo are using slave labour then you should call the Police right now.

krageon 6y ago
If a company is doing bad things on that scale that'll just ruin your life.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
fakedang 6y ago
I think he was referencing non Western markets Deliveroo operates in. In the Middle East for instance, deliveries are taken by severely underpaid workers in delivery contracting agencies which are the "contractors" for Deliveroo.
- conjectures 6y ago
  From the news, this sounds like the general economic model in the richer parts of the middle east.
  - sammorrowdrums 6y ago
    It's presumably not isolated. I lived for a while in Oman, and for example construction workers and bar staff are significantly shipped in from India and a few other places, and are not paid well, and are put up in cheap cramped accommodation, work very long hours and the places hold on to all their passports. They also held all my band's passports as a musician, but we knew that if we were to rock up to the British embassy / consulate and requested assistance we'd have been helped to leave the country without our passports on emergency travel document, and I suspect that the Indian workers who were, in my opinion, poorly treated - they had a lot less options.

Nextgrid 6y ago

They will also ban you if you call them out on their bad service and request refunds for wrong/damaged food (and persist even if their CS tries to fob you off, which in an of itself is wrong in my opinion). I'm assuming they have a per-user metric of overall profit and mine ended up being in the negative so it makes sense from a business point of view. However, I would be worried about their business if they can't properly deliver enough orders to make a profit when someone is holding them accountable. The business model appears to be based on fobbing the customer off and letting them hold the bag should things go wrong, which is sadly a common thing in large-scale VC-funded startups.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

tweetle_beetle 6y ago

The growth at all costs model also tends to treat things like hygiene standards as annoying red tape. I remember seeing a journalist a few years ago demonstrating, tongue in cheek, how there is zero vetting of restaurents. He set up an account as a restaurent, put up a barbecue in front of his house on the same day and got an acquaintance to order from him. Driver showed up shortly afterwards to pick up the food (which had been dropped on the floor to make a point for the camera), no questions asked. They're happy to run marketing campaigns about "Food Freedom" [1], but it seems like it's old "we're just a platform" selectively applied when it suits them. [1] https://invidiou.site/watch?v=o2HaQEH6MPo https://invidiou.site/watch?v=o2HaQEH6MPo

boudin 6y ago
I think you meant this BBC article with the fake burger restaurant: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-48762211 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-48762211
- fatfox 6y ago
  Unrelated to Deliveroo, but "How to Become TripAdvisor’s #1 Fake Restaurant" (2018) was very telling as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8 From the video description: > The Shed at Dulwich was the number one rated restaurant in London, with foodies, celebrities and bloggers trying to get a table. The main obstacle for them, however, was that it didn't exist. Over the course of 8 months VICE's Oobah Butler used an assault of fake reviews to get his 'restaurant' to the hallowed top spot on TripAdvisor.
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago
  That's the one. Well found :)

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

Maybe I had an unusual experience, but while in London I never once got a Deliveroo order correctly. Items missing, order forgotten, double charges, et cetera. The cream on top of it all was their lack of phone or chat support. Instead, one emails an address that auto replies with a “we will get back to you within three business days” message. Not helpful when I’m trying to eat tonight!

jeffwass 6y ago
In London the deliveroo motorcycle drivers are often very aggressive and dangerous. The company seems to incentivise drivers to deliver as quickly as possible without regard to safety or traffic rules.
Nextgrid 6y ago
Similar experience here. I ended up requesting so many refunds that they banned my account. I guess they didn't expect someone to actually hold them accountable? No billing issues on my side though. I've always found the platform itself to be solid.