4 ms·

Similar thing happened to me with Square. I used their debit card and applied a boost for grocery shopping. This promised some percent discount if I shopped at

Similar thing happened to me with Square. I used their debit card and applied a boost for grocery shopping. This promised some percent discount if I shopped at a grocery store. I did a sizable purchase (>$50) and at checkout withdrew $20 in cashback. Turned out, they had hidden conditions for denying the boost if the transaction involves cashback (no way to know this at all). I contacted support who just gave the templated "can't do anything about it sorry" and they force closed the ticket. I would have accepted if they just applied the promised discount on the grocery portion of the bill (since they can clearly detect the cashback), but this seems beyond their ability to program... and at the consumer's expense? These big companies power themselves by automation, losing sight of the fact that they should be designed to serve humans, not harvest nickel and dimes off of them. It's so easy for them to profit off of massive scale but they can't find any port of the budget to cover their own programming errors and bugs (as rarely as they do occur)??? It's easy to prosecute companies on egregious scams, but these small programming errors that probably affect a non-trivial amount of customers in small ways probably add up to big scams in scale but fly under the radar.

mcguire 5y ago
That's the brilliant thing about being "at scale": as long as the incidents are infrequent enough that doesn't happen to essentially everyone, it's much cheaper to leave a wake of pissed-off ex-customers than it is to hire and support actual customer service.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  It's also the sort of thing that is catnip to senators who want to score points against Big Tech.
- kelnos 5y ago
  Yep. And the thing is, despite reading all the awful shit Uber/UberEats has done in this thread, I'll continue using them, because it's convenient, and still better than most of the alternatives. (The Lyft app has decided over the past few weeks that taking my money is too difficult for it, so I'm a transportation app down at the moment.) I feel a little bad about this, but not bad enough to change my behavior.
  - chrischen 5y ago
    At some point the reputation precedes the company. I think Google has abused customers at edge cases enough that people think twice about their consumer paid product offerings.

mcguire 5y ago

That's the brilliant thing about being "at scale": as long as the incidents are infrequent enough that doesn't happen to essentially everyone, it's much cheaper to leave a wake of pissed-off ex-customers than it is to hire and support actual customer service.

notreallyserio 5y ago
It's also the sort of thing that is catnip to senators who want to score points against Big Tech.
kelnos 5y ago
Yep. And the thing is, despite reading all the awful shit Uber/UberEats has done in this thread, I'll continue using them, because it's convenient, and still better than most of the alternatives. (The Lyft app has decided over the past few weeks that taking my money is too difficult for it, so I'm a transportation app down at the moment.) I feel a little bad about this, but not bad enough to change my behavior.
- chrischen 5y ago
  At some point the reputation precedes the company. I think Google has abused customers at edge cases enough that people think twice about their consumer paid product offerings.