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As a long time and heavy Uber user, I don't find this surprising. The service has gone completely down hill for me the last few months. The app is the buggiest

As a long time and heavy Uber user, I don't find this surprising. The service has gone completely down hill for me the last few months. The app is the buggiest it has ever been. I've been overcharged more time than I can count, and customer service is practically impossible to actually get in touch with. Even when I do get in touch with customer service, I can usually only extract an automatic token refund. The quality of rides, both vehicles and drivers, has drastically declined in my area. I frequently speak with drivers and they seem, anecdotally, the least happy with Uber that I've observed thus far. With UberEATS, hidden fees and markup have gotten so big that most orders are > 2x the cost at the actual restaurant (for example a pickup order) and this is constant with order size. For example, a $25 order ends up costing over $50 on UberEATS, and this is before any tip. A dark pattern I frequently encounter is a "buy one get one free" or other promotion that adds extra stuff to your cart, and does indeed discount the item, but still charges you fees on the cost of that item. For example, a "free" $10 item can easily add more than $10 to the bill (especially if you tip). This is obviously better than a $10 item costing you $20, but it's a dark pattern nonetheless. And of course, the tips and fees are always calculated "before discounts" which makes the default tip bananas, especially when I'm redeeming credit from customer service. The priority delivery fee is basically mandatory if you want warm food, otherwise your order always gets delayed until another order can be delivered alongside it. Delivery drivers frequently drive for multiple apps at the same time, meaning delivery estimates are frequently missed due to the driver going way out of their way to do some other task, before or after picking up your food. All in all, I can feel where the corners are being cut, where the customers and drivers and restaurants are being squeezed, and so I'm not surprised to see them post a profit. Is this sustainable? I sincerely doubt it. It's a race to the bottom. It always was.

ajaimk 3y ago
The priority delivery fee is a hot mess for me. Every time I use it, the food actually takes more time to get to me cause they wait longer for a driver to come pick it up.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
at least here in India, Uber's service has become downright hostile. Drivers will cancel if the destination isn't to their liking. At airports, they refuse to even arrive if you don't pay them extra in cash. The only people who still use Uber are the ones who have no options or don't know about the options available. The worst part is that they've driven out all the existing private cab operators from many airports through their earlier aggressive pricing. So now you literally have no option but to take an Uber from some airports, except that the Uber driver will be hostile and charge extra in cash. I really want this company to crash and burn. From drivers to customers, no one has a good thing to say about them here.
- statictype 3y ago
  This has definitely been my experience in India as well. Upwards of 70% of rides get cancelled. Usually after waiting for 10-15 min. There is absolutely no certainty around when you will reach your destination if you decide to go by Uber. Its a complete shitshow. Ola is slightly better I guess but not by much.
  - spaceman_2020 3y ago
    If you're in Delhi, use BluSmart. Way, way better
- gumballindie 3y ago
  > The worst part is that they've driven out all the existing private cab operators from many airports through their earlier aggressive pricing. Basically, Uber’s strategy has worked and their goal has been achieved. They infused massive amounts of cash so they would kill the smaller players and now that they dominate they are just taking the piss. Amazon and Google did the same. Their products have become what we would have run away from a decade ago.
  - aikinai 3y ago
    Amazon and Google are still amazing. What better alternatives did they drive out?
_fat_santa 3y ago
The problem is in an industry like resturaunts that are low margins is that food ordering apps introduce a "too many cooks in the kitchen" problem. The restaurants add markup to the food to make a profit, this they split amongst themselves internally though there is usually very little to spare. Food delivery apps not only introduce a delivery driver into this mix that has to get paid but also a cash hungry VC startup that is burning R&D costs like there's no tomorrow. Suddenly what you end up with is no one is making enough money to cover their costs with the current food price so each party starts adding their own fees to cover the losses and cut on other costs to save money. And then what you end up with is very expensive food and maybe one or two parties in the "kitchen" actually turn a profit.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  I'm starting to think of capitalism as rule by "winner's curse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner's_curse) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner's_curse). The winners in VC-funded tech spend far too much to win the market, and now have to squeeze whatever value they can out by abusing their customers, their employees, and their reputations. Meanwhile, management socks away money by writing themselves checks, and original VC investment cashes out through the greater fools and co-conspirators of managed funds and the public. At best we're left with a company that goes belly-up and a destroyed industry that has to recreate itself, at worse we're left with a zombie exploitation machine of a awful company that limps on with enough reach that it still suppresses all competition in marginal markets.
  - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
    This seems like more of a tech thing than a capitalism thing. Other industries don’t have this issue. Part of the problem is people are used to getting some level of tech “for free” so it’s hard to introduce something new without subsidies.
- grotorea 3y ago
  What I find strange is that food delivery worked for at least some foods via phone before there were apps. Shouldn't the apps make things more efficient?
bombcar 3y ago
UberEATS is insane. The one time I tried it, it routed a burger from a A&W five miles away instead of the one just down the block from the hotel (both were open 24 hours) and it arrived cold and lifeless (and the order was wrong, anyway). edit - I tipped normally and reviewed high, I don't complain to UberEATS I just will never use it again, or at least not in the cities. Local door dash out here in the sticks has been fine the few times I've needed to get emergency food to home when I'm a thousand miles away.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  The restaurant is chosen by you, not them. Now you could argue that they should suggest a closer location, sure, but it does tell you where it’s coming from.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Sure, and when you're in a foreign city you should remember to cross-check what they're providing with Google, et al. I'm sure it's entirely my fault, but I won't bother using them again. I'd've been more understanding if I had refused location privileges, but I had even entered my exact address, and the nearer spots (which I checked later after getting the 1+ hour delivery estimate thing once you order) were UberEats enabled. So I don't know what went wrong, and this comment is more time than I've ever spent on it. Cold poutine is ... a thing.
  - everforward 3y ago
    I'm not sure when, but at some point they switched so that you don't pick a location for chains. E.g. you just order from "Wendy's" and Uber picks which location it comes from. That's why you don't see a dozen McDonald's in the list anymore. It does tell you how far the location they're using is if you keep an eye on that. I've also been bitten because I forgot to check and Uber decided to try to deliver from a Wendy's 15 miles away instead of the one a quarter mile away.
    - squeaky-clean 3y ago
SN76477 3y ago
> The service has gone completely down hill for me the last few months. The app is the buggiest it has ever been. I've been overcharged more time than I can count, and customer service is practically impossible to actually get in touch with. Welcome to the future!
rob74 3y ago
There's a recently coined word for that: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification
- capableweb 3y ago
  What Uber is doing is more similar to predatory pricing (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/predatory-pricing.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/predatory-pricing.asp) rather than enshittification. Their plan seems to have always been to survive on VC money to drive out competition, and then raise prices, rather than carefully degrading the platform experience to extract more money per user.
  - benjaminwootton 3y ago
    As I just mentioned in a peer comment though, did the strategy succeed? It's still as easy as it ever was to find a public taxi in big cities, and Uber never really got a choke hold in the second cities that I'm familiar with. There are also a bunch of competitors waiting in the wings. Brand loyalty and switching costs between all of these are low.
    - treis 3y ago
      A duopoly isn't much better in practice than a monopoly.
    - capableweb 3y ago
      I'm not sure there has been any bigger research done about it, but there are a few anecdotes in this submission about it. Here is one comment as an example: > at least here in India, Uber's service has become downright hostile. Drivers will cancel if the destination isn't to their liking. [...] The worst part is that they've driven out all the existing private cab operators from many airports through their earlier aggressive pricing. So now you literally have no option but to take an Uber from some airports [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36955957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36955957
  - 3y ago
jjulius 3y ago
I haven't used DoorDash/UberEats/etc. since early in the pandemic, but what you describe isn't unlike what I experienced then, either. It has always been significantly cheaper, the food warmer, and the arrival of food shorter, to go and pick the food myself via direct interaction with the restaurant (either by me calling in, or using their online ordering system). These services may have felt convenient to an extent, but that convenience also came with the feeling that - pardon my French - I was being fucked.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  Obviously the point is to save time by not going there. It’s not like it’s a big secret that it’s cheaper to get it yourself. It’s also huge if you have kids since loading them in the car and making them wait at a restaurant is a pain.
  - jjulius 3y ago
    >Obviously the point is to save time by not going there. A benefit that was, in my experience, significantly outweighed by all of the other negatives with the experience (higher prices, mismatched or missing items from menu, dogshit customer service, cold food upon arrival, items missing from order upon arrival, etc.). In point of fact, that it would take 90+ minutes to have to wait for my food when I'm hungry (I had the unique experience of watching my driver on DoorDash's app and saw him drive by my house with my food to go to other stops further away from me one time, and he didn't make it back to me for another 45 minutes) didn't actually feel like it saved time - the more time passes, the hungrier I get, which only encourages frustration with the process. Directly contacting a restaurant and picking up from them, in my experience, almost always results in a 10-25 minute block of time for the food to be ready depending on the restaurant, in my experience. With these apps, it's far, far longer and never consistent, and to your point about kids, if my kids are hungry, waiting for some driver to futz around for an hour only to show up without the one thing my oldest wanted most is only going to make the situation worse. >It’s also huge if you have kids since loading them in the car and making them wait at a restaurant is a pain. Anecdotally, I'm also a parent (3yo and 1yo) and don't really experience this issue. I time my restaurant pickups accordingly, and I've never had to wait around with my kids for our takeout - it's always ready to go as soon as we arrive, and I can check the order either right in the restaurant or in the parking lot in order to rectify any errors with it immediately. My kiddos (again, anecdotally) also enjoy going to restaurants to eat out and usually do well waiting when we're there, or if we're in a long line for fast food, or whatever - but at least in those instances I can usually guesstimate with decent accuracy how long the wait will take relative to how patient or impatient my kids seem at the time, and decide whether or not to proceed accordingly - delivery apps don't give you that flexibility, they're just an overpriced coin toss in that regard. But I do recognize that our experience here is our own and likely doesn't match what other parents experience.
benjaminwootton 3y ago
It's been a predictable playbook since they started. Burn cash, win the market, then increase prices and decrease their own costs. The problem is, they seem to have failed to drive out the competition. It's still quite easy to find a public taxi in most big cities, and there are a bunch of competitors ready to step in as Uber declines. In London for instance, they seem to be totally out of the game and people have gone back to taxis and to competitors such as Bolt in the blink of an eyelid.
- mplanchard 3y ago
  Thank god the taxis haven't all been driven out of business. I still find it much easier to grab a taxi out of most decently sized airports and train stations than to futz around on my phone, worry about battery, type in my destination, etc. In Manhattan it's still very possible to just grab a taxi without any kind of advance planning, and again it's way easier than having to mess around on my phone. That said, Uber/Lyft have made it impossible to get taxis at smaller airports and train stations in mid-sized cities, which I find super frustrating. There are never any taxis waiting at the Providence Amtrak station, for example.
  - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
    That’s great but as someone that doesn’t travel in Manhattan or major airports it used to be impossible to get a taxi. Uber is a vast improvement over the previous status of calling the dispatcher, having to wait 30 min, and knowing it’s 50/50 if they will even show up.
  - Fernicia 3y ago
    I regularly get Uber/Lyfts from JFK and Newark without hassle. I don't know why I'd want to ride with a regular taxi. Taxis still suffer from all the things that created the impetus for ride sharing platforms: - Lack of price transparency. Will tourists landing in JFK know that $100 is an acceptable price for a trip into the city? Or that $150 is a scam? - Lack of driver rating (or passenger rating) - Maligned incentives. The taxi driver has incentives to extend the trip as long as possible via traffic or a long route. This is not the case in ride sharing apps. - Accountability. Doesn't happen in NY, but seedier parts of the world taxis have abducted and robbed/raped their customers. Ride sharing provides centralised ride records and GPS data for passenger and driver.
WorldMaker 3y ago
My weird view of the race to the bottom was a couple years back that I was a happy, paying user of Postmates and received within minutes of each other the emails that Postmates was switching to Uber accounts and that my Uber account was being deleted due to inactivity. I took that as a sure sign that Uber's left-hand wasn't talking to its right-hand, made sure to unsubscribe from my Postmates membership, let their system auto-delete my account, and moved to different apps.
scarface_74 3y ago
My wife and I “nomad” 7 months of the year and I travel for work occasionally. We don’t own cars. We spend around $900 a month on Uber and we have been to 18 different cities in the US over the past year. I have never had a problem with Uber.
- genocidicbunny 3y ago
  > We spend around $900 a month on Uber So...like 6 rides a month? I only joke a little. The last time I checked, the average cost for an uber ride from Oakland to San Jose was like $70. SFO to San Jose was usually about $150.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    About 20 per month for the last two months. I have a separate card that is just used for Uber - the Capital One SavorOne. It gives you 10% cash back for Uber and UberEats and free UberOne through 9/24.
    - genocidicbunny 3y ago
      Out of curiosity, how far are these trips? I think a far more salient comparison would be around the $/mile cost of Uber rather than the individual rides.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        Mostly short trips during the week. My wife is a part time fitness instructor and we try to stay near a gym where she knows someone in her organization. On the weekend when we got out, it might be a longer ride. To and from the airport is usually the longest one. But the comparison is how much we spent per month on cars before we got rid of them. My wife’s car was $670/month (the median price of a new car in the US was $35K when we bought it) and mine was an old paid for car. We spent at least an average of $1100+ for car notes, car insurance, gas and maintenance. And the quality and convenience of Uber is much better than a taxi ever was. You know your price up front and you always just get your card charged
doctorpangloss 3y ago
> As a long time and heavy Uber user, I don't find this surprising. I suppose they succeeded then. You keep on using it despite the problems. There must be a huge audience of people like this.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  Until an alternative the use could be reduced drasitcally. I personally use Uber as the last resort
dayvid 3y ago
I never use food delivery apps unless I get a work credit for this reason. The food is always overpriced and cold. It's faster if I pick it up myself or use the rare restaurants that have their own delivery service.
deleted 3y ago
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Jcampuzano2 3y ago
I've ordered via UberEATS a few times in the past couple years and always just resort to the pickup in store option. I'm not entirely sure if theres a markup from the restaurant or not but I know that it always ends up saving so much on fees that its basically useless to order delivery. Just changing between the two options you see the price skyrocket without adding a tip. I don't really know how people still justify delivery via apps when nowadays all of them basically double your cost by default. And all of them use predatory methods/don't tell you the cost up front. Only when you get to the final screen do you see the enormous markup.
moneywoes 3y ago
Hmm isn’t this the YC, big startup playbook Is it strange they can afford to do this with DoorDash
annexrichmond 3y ago
Last time I used Uber Eats they had a 2 for 1 burger like deal. The order total was X, but after checking out, the coupon wasn’t applied and my credit card was over charged. I was basically charged double what the invoice said Impossible to reach customer service, I just issued a charge back. (It wasn’t about the money really, it was the principle.) Then customer service did reach out to me, and asked me to undo the charge back in exchange for a gift card. I said no, I just want a refund of the difference of what I was supposed to be charged. They wouldn’t do it for some reason. Strange company. Strange practices.
- cft 3y ago
  Did they ban your card and your account after that in retaliation?
  - annexrichmond 3y ago
    Surprisingly they did not. Though I heard that is what typically happens. Maybe they just forgot.
    - tmpz22 3y ago
      Have you spent a significant amount with them? Odds are they have different rules for big-spenders versus infrequent customers.
      - annexrichmond 3y ago
        Account has been open for years, though I’ve been using it sparingly over the last 2
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        Our company doesn't ban after the first chargeback. If you keep making chargebacks though eventually you will be downranked in our risk model until you cannot buy from us, but you will never be manually banned unless you are a credit card fraudster doing something annoying. I would be surprised if Uber, a company that has put a lot of effort into standard credit card anti-fraud procedure would ban after the first chargeback. Doing so is an explicitly hostile, anti-consumer, and petty action that doesn't improve your business.
m463 3y ago
I think about these companies destroying their goodwill in pursuit of a profit and am reminded: employees -> 0, profit -> ∞ The remaining employees are the ones that will do anything in this existential crisis. Will we ever be able to get a hotel, airfare, food delivery, a tow truck, an emergency plumber or anything urgent or convenient without profit being maximized?
wfleming 3y ago
> And of course, the tips and fees are always calculated "before discounts" which makes the default tip bananas I agree Uber is employing a ton of dark patterns and their fees are absurd, but for tips at least I think this is appropriate and ethical and is how I tip in person if I have a coupon or something. Tipping is about compensating workers for the value of their labor when their base compensation doesn’t appropriately do that, as it generally doesn’t for restaurant workers in the US. If you get a sandwich for half off or whatever, the cook & the delivery person still had the same amount of work to do, and the tip should reflect that.
- djaychela 3y ago
  >Tipping is about compensating workers for the value of their labor when their base compensation doesn’t appropriately do that Is it really? Genuine question! I'm from the UK, and here a tip is generally seen as something which is given for exceptional service, rather than subsidising an employer's lack of remuneration for the job at hand.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    It's a fiction. You can tell because the rule is consistent across differing legal regimes: tipped wage permitted or not.
  - wfleming 3y ago
    In the UK that's correct because those kinds of positions pay a reasonable wage. In the US, restaurant workers can easily be making less than minimum wage without tips. (The legality is weird and varies by state, but my understanding is that "traditionally tipped" jobs like waitstaff are exempt from minimum wage regulations on the assumption the tips will make up the gap. The restaurant owner is required to make up the gap if tips don't, so in theory you could just not tip and implicitly force the restaurant owner to raise wages that way, but in practice restaurants are the kind of low-legal-enforcement business in the US where owners already frequently try to under-pay staff so this strategy would probably mostly just hurt workers.) So my personal approach to tipping in the US is that it starts at a base level as appropriate compensation, and goes up from there for quality of service (or very rarely goes down if service is atrocious).
edgyquant 3y ago
I’ve completely stopped using Uber eats and door dash. There is zero customer support, I’ve had completely different orders show up and was only refunded the minimum amount of the order while still taking the money for the driver. For groceries these apps are useless if you want what you actually order. I’ve ordered chocolate ice cream and received instead pop tarts as a “replacement item” and customer support basically told me tough luck. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every single time I place a grocery order through these apps I get different items than I selected. If I say I don’t want replacements I get 1-2 out of 10 items from my order (never the things I placed the order needing.) All of this seems blatantly illegal, advertising and charging for items you can’t deliver. Yet I’m powerless to do anything about it.
- brickteacup 3y ago
  > Yet I’m powerless to do anything about it. it's called a chargeback. the worst they can do is ban you from their platform
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    The two times I have tried that (one for Uber eats, one for a tea delivery place) I have not won the investigation. Both times I did not receive the item I ordered and for the tea place I didn’t receive any item at all. Charge backs are not the recourse people online claim they are, in my experience they do not give customers the preference.
deleted 3y ago
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reaperducer 3y ago
With UberEATS, hidden fees and markup have gotten so big that most orders are > 2x the cost at the actual restaurant Even without the hidden fees, it can be crazy expensive. But there doesn't seem to be a shortage of people who don't care about the fees. I ran into an Uber Eats guy in the elevator a couple of weeks ago. He was delivering a single cup of McDonald's coffee. I can't imagine what that might have cost. Ona side note, I've also recently seen Uber Eats being delivered on Segways in my neighborhood. They have Uber Eats-branded panniers and the delivery guys have Uber Eats-branded insulated backpacks.
shreyshnaccount 3y ago
Wasn't that always the point of vc funded big tech apps? Lure in users while burning through enough cash to power a steam locomotive, kill most competition and then take their money? At least in India I am seeing alternatives emerge already in the form of indrive, which I have been using a lot more
- shreyshnaccount 3y ago
  (indrive is an alternative to uber the ride hailing service, not uberEats, which never really took off in India)
bena 3y ago
Because the drivers can't be held accountable. Drivers can do all of that and restaurants can't fire them. Users can't just order from places that do better delivery. And drivers simply don't give a fuck. There's only profit in quantity. They know quality is so bad that the only way they can get a tip is if they hold service hostage. So they do. And they do all the dumb shit like sitting on food for tens of minutes so they can "optimize" their deliveries. The services don't give a fuck either. They don't make the food or deliver the food. If you don't like the food or the delivery, that's other people's problems, not theirs. The service worked as advertised. You were able to order food from a place that doesn't do delivery, pay for it, and get it delivered. And at the end of the day, the one who gets fucked the most is the customer. They get tepid food over an hour after they order for prices two to three times what they would pay if they were at the restaurant.
rickyc091 3y ago
Priority delivery fee is a scam on all services. If your order is sitting a while, it's generally because the $ to mile ratio is too low. A $2/mi order is considered a base line for most drivers. Orders will start with a low base pay of $2-$2.75 + tip. If drivers keep declining to pick up your order, it'll get batched with another order. Priority delivery fee goes to the delivery service, so you might as well put that towards the tip instead to get it picked up faster by a driver.
smugma 3y ago
All that crap they make you deal with and you're still a heavy user? Why?! Is it still that much better than the alternatives (taxis, Door Dash, eBike, picking up your own food?)
- thefounder 3y ago
  Many people will never return to taxis and will even prefer to pay a premium for uber.

ajaimk 3y ago

The priority delivery fee is a hot mess for me. Every time I use it, the food actually takes more time to get to me cause they wait longer for a driver to come pick it up.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

at least here in India, Uber's service has become downright hostile. Drivers will cancel if the destination isn't to their liking. At airports, they refuse to even arrive if you don't pay them extra in cash. The only people who still use Uber are the ones who have no options or don't know about the options available. The worst part is that they've driven out all the existing private cab operators from many airports through their earlier aggressive pricing. So now you literally have no option but to take an Uber from some airports, except that the Uber driver will be hostile and charge extra in cash. I really want this company to crash and burn. From drivers to customers, no one has a good thing to say about them here.

statictype 3y ago
This has definitely been my experience in India as well. Upwards of 70% of rides get cancelled. Usually after waiting for 10-15 min. There is absolutely no certainty around when you will reach your destination if you decide to go by Uber. Its a complete shitshow. Ola is slightly better I guess but not by much.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  If you're in Delhi, use BluSmart. Way, way better
gumballindie 3y ago
> The worst part is that they've driven out all the existing private cab operators from many airports through their earlier aggressive pricing. Basically, Uber’s strategy has worked and their goal has been achieved. They infused massive amounts of cash so they would kill the smaller players and now that they dominate they are just taking the piss. Amazon and Google did the same. Their products have become what we would have run away from a decade ago.
- aikinai 3y ago
  Amazon and Google are still amazing. What better alternatives did they drive out?

_fat_santa 3y ago

The problem is in an industry like resturaunts that are low margins is that food ordering apps introduce a "too many cooks in the kitchen" problem. The restaurants add markup to the food to make a profit, this they split amongst themselves internally though there is usually very little to spare. Food delivery apps not only introduce a delivery driver into this mix that has to get paid but also a cash hungry VC startup that is burning R&D costs like there's no tomorrow. Suddenly what you end up with is no one is making enough money to cover their costs with the current food price so each party starts adding their own fees to cover the losses and cut on other costs to save money. And then what you end up with is very expensive food and maybe one or two parties in the "kitchen" actually turn a profit.

pessimizer 3y ago
I'm starting to think of capitalism as rule by "winner's curse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner's_curse) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner's_curse). The winners in VC-funded tech spend far too much to win the market, and now have to squeeze whatever value they can out by abusing their customers, their employees, and their reputations. Meanwhile, management socks away money by writing themselves checks, and original VC investment cashes out through the greater fools and co-conspirators of managed funds and the public. At best we're left with a company that goes belly-up and a destroyed industry that has to recreate itself, at worse we're left with a zombie exploitation machine of a awful company that limps on with enough reach that it still suppresses all competition in marginal markets.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  This seems like more of a tech thing than a capitalism thing. Other industries don’t have this issue. Part of the problem is people are used to getting some level of tech “for free” so it’s hard to introduce something new without subsidies.
grotorea 3y ago
What I find strange is that food delivery worked for at least some foods via phone before there were apps. Shouldn't the apps make things more efficient?

bombcar 3y ago

UberEATS is insane. The one time I tried it, it routed a burger from a A&W five miles away instead of the one just down the block from the hotel (both were open 24 hours) and it arrived cold and lifeless (and the order was wrong, anyway). edit - I tipped normally and reviewed high, I don't complain to UberEATS I just will never use it again, or at least not in the cities. Local door dash out here in the sticks has been fine the few times I've needed to get emergency food to home when I'm a thousand miles away.

zeroonetwothree 3y ago
The restaurant is chosen by you, not them. Now you could argue that they should suggest a closer location, sure, but it does tell you where it’s coming from.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Sure, and when you're in a foreign city you should remember to cross-check what they're providing with Google, et al. I'm sure it's entirely my fault, but I won't bother using them again. I'd've been more understanding if I had refused location privileges, but I had even entered my exact address, and the nearer spots (which I checked later after getting the 1+ hour delivery estimate thing once you order) were UberEats enabled. So I don't know what went wrong, and this comment is more time than I've ever spent on it. Cold poutine is ... a thing.
- everforward 3y ago
  I'm not sure when, but at some point they switched so that you don't pick a location for chains. E.g. you just order from "Wendy's" and Uber picks which location it comes from. That's why you don't see a dozen McDonald's in the list anymore. It does tell you how far the location they're using is if you keep an eye on that. I've also been bitten because I forgot to check and Uber decided to try to deliver from a Wendy's 15 miles away instead of the one a quarter mile away.
  - squeaky-clean 3y ago

SN76477 3y ago

> The service has gone completely down hill for me the last few months. The app is the buggiest it has ever been. I've been overcharged more time than I can count, and customer service is practically impossible to actually get in touch with. Welcome to the future!

rob74 3y ago

There's a recently coined word for that: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification

capableweb 3y ago
What Uber is doing is more similar to predatory pricing (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/predatory-pricing.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/predatory-pricing.asp) rather than enshittification. Their plan seems to have always been to survive on VC money to drive out competition, and then raise prices, rather than carefully degrading the platform experience to extract more money per user.
- benjaminwootton 3y ago
  As I just mentioned in a peer comment though, did the strategy succeed? It's still as easy as it ever was to find a public taxi in big cities, and Uber never really got a choke hold in the second cities that I'm familiar with. There are also a bunch of competitors waiting in the wings. Brand loyalty and switching costs between all of these are low.
  - treis 3y ago
    A duopoly isn't much better in practice than a monopoly.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    I'm not sure there has been any bigger research done about it, but there are a few anecdotes in this submission about it. Here is one comment as an example: > at least here in India, Uber's service has become downright hostile. Drivers will cancel if the destination isn't to their liking. [...] The worst part is that they've driven out all the existing private cab operators from many airports through their earlier aggressive pricing. So now you literally have no option but to take an Uber from some airports [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36955957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36955957
- 3y ago

jjulius 3y ago

I haven't used DoorDash/UberEats/etc. since early in the pandemic, but what you describe isn't unlike what I experienced then, either. It has always been significantly cheaper, the food warmer, and the arrival of food shorter, to go and pick the food myself via direct interaction with the restaurant (either by me calling in, or using their online ordering system). These services may have felt convenient to an extent, but that convenience also came with the feeling that - pardon my French - I was being fucked.

zeroonetwothree 3y ago
Obviously the point is to save time by not going there. It’s not like it’s a big secret that it’s cheaper to get it yourself. It’s also huge if you have kids since loading them in the car and making them wait at a restaurant is a pain.
- jjulius 3y ago
  >Obviously the point is to save time by not going there. A benefit that was, in my experience, significantly outweighed by all of the other negatives with the experience (higher prices, mismatched or missing items from menu, dogshit customer service, cold food upon arrival, items missing from order upon arrival, etc.). In point of fact, that it would take 90+ minutes to have to wait for my food when I'm hungry (I had the unique experience of watching my driver on DoorDash's app and saw him drive by my house with my food to go to other stops further away from me one time, and he didn't make it back to me for another 45 minutes) didn't actually feel like it saved time - the more time passes, the hungrier I get, which only encourages frustration with the process. Directly contacting a restaurant and picking up from them, in my experience, almost always results in a 10-25 minute block of time for the food to be ready depending on the restaurant, in my experience. With these apps, it's far, far longer and never consistent, and to your point about kids, if my kids are hungry, waiting for some driver to futz around for an hour only to show up without the one thing my oldest wanted most is only going to make the situation worse. >It’s also huge if you have kids since loading them in the car and making them wait at a restaurant is a pain. Anecdotally, I'm also a parent (3yo and 1yo) and don't really experience this issue. I time my restaurant pickups accordingly, and I've never had to wait around with my kids for our takeout - it's always ready to go as soon as we arrive, and I can check the order either right in the restaurant or in the parking lot in order to rectify any errors with it immediately. My kiddos (again, anecdotally) also enjoy going to restaurants to eat out and usually do well waiting when we're there, or if we're in a long line for fast food, or whatever - but at least in those instances I can usually guesstimate with decent accuracy how long the wait will take relative to how patient or impatient my kids seem at the time, and decide whether or not to proceed accordingly - delivery apps don't give you that flexibility, they're just an overpriced coin toss in that regard. But I do recognize that our experience here is our own and likely doesn't match what other parents experience.

benjaminwootton 3y ago

It's been a predictable playbook since they started. Burn cash, win the market, then increase prices and decrease their own costs. The problem is, they seem to have failed to drive out the competition. It's still quite easy to find a public taxi in most big cities, and there are a bunch of competitors ready to step in as Uber declines. In London for instance, they seem to be totally out of the game and people have gone back to taxis and to competitors such as Bolt in the blink of an eyelid.

mplanchard 3y ago
Thank god the taxis haven't all been driven out of business. I still find it much easier to grab a taxi out of most decently sized airports and train stations than to futz around on my phone, worry about battery, type in my destination, etc. In Manhattan it's still very possible to just grab a taxi without any kind of advance planning, and again it's way easier than having to mess around on my phone. That said, Uber/Lyft have made it impossible to get taxis at smaller airports and train stations in mid-sized cities, which I find super frustrating. There are never any taxis waiting at the Providence Amtrak station, for example.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  That’s great but as someone that doesn’t travel in Manhattan or major airports it used to be impossible to get a taxi. Uber is a vast improvement over the previous status of calling the dispatcher, having to wait 30 min, and knowing it’s 50/50 if they will even show up.
- Fernicia 3y ago
  I regularly get Uber/Lyfts from JFK and Newark without hassle. I don't know why I'd want to ride with a regular taxi. Taxis still suffer from all the things that created the impetus for ride sharing platforms: - Lack of price transparency. Will tourists landing in JFK know that $100 is an acceptable price for a trip into the city? Or that $150 is a scam? - Lack of driver rating (or passenger rating) - Maligned incentives. The taxi driver has incentives to extend the trip as long as possible via traffic or a long route. This is not the case in ride sharing apps. - Accountability. Doesn't happen in NY, but seedier parts of the world taxis have abducted and robbed/raped their customers. Ride sharing provides centralised ride records and GPS data for passenger and driver.

WorldMaker 3y ago

My weird view of the race to the bottom was a couple years back that I was a happy, paying user of Postmates and received within minutes of each other the emails that Postmates was switching to Uber accounts and that my Uber account was being deleted due to inactivity. I took that as a sure sign that Uber's left-hand wasn't talking to its right-hand, made sure to unsubscribe from my Postmates membership, let their system auto-delete my account, and moved to different apps.

scarface_74 3y ago

My wife and I “nomad” 7 months of the year and I travel for work occasionally. We don’t own cars. We spend around $900 a month on Uber and we have been to 18 different cities in the US over the past year. I have never had a problem with Uber.

genocidicbunny 3y ago
> We spend around $900 a month on Uber So...like 6 rides a month? I only joke a little. The last time I checked, the average cost for an uber ride from Oakland to San Jose was like $70. SFO to San Jose was usually about $150.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  About 20 per month for the last two months. I have a separate card that is just used for Uber - the Capital One SavorOne. It gives you 10% cash back for Uber and UberEats and free UberOne through 9/24.
  - genocidicbunny 3y ago
    Out of curiosity, how far are these trips? I think a far more salient comparison would be around the $/mile cost of Uber rather than the individual rides.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Mostly short trips during the week. My wife is a part time fitness instructor and we try to stay near a gym where she knows someone in her organization. On the weekend when we got out, it might be a longer ride. To and from the airport is usually the longest one. But the comparison is how much we spent per month on cars before we got rid of them. My wife’s car was $670/month (the median price of a new car in the US was $35K when we bought it) and mine was an old paid for car. We spent at least an average of $1100+ for car notes, car insurance, gas and maintenance. And the quality and convenience of Uber is much better than a taxi ever was. You know your price up front and you always just get your card charged

doctorpangloss 3y ago

> As a long time and heavy Uber user, I don't find this surprising. I suppose they succeeded then. You keep on using it despite the problems. There must be a huge audience of people like this.

lacrimacida 3y ago
Until an alternative the use could be reduced drasitcally. I personally use Uber as the last resort

dayvid 3y ago

I never use food delivery apps unless I get a work credit for this reason. The food is always overpriced and cold. It's faster if I pick it up myself or use the rare restaurants that have their own delivery service.

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Jcampuzano2 3y ago

I've ordered via UberEATS a few times in the past couple years and always just resort to the pickup in store option. I'm not entirely sure if theres a markup from the restaurant or not but I know that it always ends up saving so much on fees that its basically useless to order delivery. Just changing between the two options you see the price skyrocket without adding a tip. I don't really know how people still justify delivery via apps when nowadays all of them basically double your cost by default. And all of them use predatory methods/don't tell you the cost up front. Only when you get to the final screen do you see the enormous markup.

moneywoes 3y ago

Hmm isn’t this the YC, big startup playbook Is it strange they can afford to do this with DoorDash

annexrichmond 3y ago

Last time I used Uber Eats they had a 2 for 1 burger like deal. The order total was X, but after checking out, the coupon wasn’t applied and my credit card was over charged. I was basically charged double what the invoice said Impossible to reach customer service, I just issued a charge back. (It wasn’t about the money really, it was the principle.) Then customer service did reach out to me, and asked me to undo the charge back in exchange for a gift card. I said no, I just want a refund of the difference of what I was supposed to be charged. They wouldn’t do it for some reason. Strange company. Strange practices.

cft 3y ago
Did they ban your card and your account after that in retaliation?
- annexrichmond 3y ago
  Surprisingly they did not. Though I heard that is what typically happens. Maybe they just forgot.
  - tmpz22 3y ago
    Have you spent a significant amount with them? Odds are they have different rules for big-spenders versus infrequent customers.
    - annexrichmond 3y ago
      Account has been open for years, though I’ve been using it sparingly over the last 2
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      Our company doesn't ban after the first chargeback. If you keep making chargebacks though eventually you will be downranked in our risk model until you cannot buy from us, but you will never be manually banned unless you are a credit card fraudster doing something annoying. I would be surprised if Uber, a company that has put a lot of effort into standard credit card anti-fraud procedure would ban after the first chargeback. Doing so is an explicitly hostile, anti-consumer, and petty action that doesn't improve your business.

m463 3y ago

I think about these companies destroying their goodwill in pursuit of a profit and am reminded: employees -> 0, profit -> ∞ The remaining employees are the ones that will do anything in this existential crisis. Will we ever be able to get a hotel, airfare, food delivery, a tow truck, an emergency plumber or anything urgent or convenient without profit being maximized?

wfleming 3y ago

> And of course, the tips and fees are always calculated "before discounts" which makes the default tip bananas I agree Uber is employing a ton of dark patterns and their fees are absurd, but for tips at least I think this is appropriate and ethical and is how I tip in person if I have a coupon or something. Tipping is about compensating workers for the value of their labor when their base compensation doesn’t appropriately do that, as it generally doesn’t for restaurant workers in the US. If you get a sandwich for half off or whatever, the cook & the delivery person still had the same amount of work to do, and the tip should reflect that.

djaychela 3y ago
>Tipping is about compensating workers for the value of their labor when their base compensation doesn’t appropriately do that Is it really? Genuine question! I'm from the UK, and here a tip is generally seen as something which is given for exceptional service, rather than subsidising an employer's lack of remuneration for the job at hand.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  It's a fiction. You can tell because the rule is consistent across differing legal regimes: tipped wage permitted or not.
- wfleming 3y ago
  In the UK that's correct because those kinds of positions pay a reasonable wage. In the US, restaurant workers can easily be making less than minimum wage without tips. (The legality is weird and varies by state, but my understanding is that "traditionally tipped" jobs like waitstaff are exempt from minimum wage regulations on the assumption the tips will make up the gap. The restaurant owner is required to make up the gap if tips don't, so in theory you could just not tip and implicitly force the restaurant owner to raise wages that way, but in practice restaurants are the kind of low-legal-enforcement business in the US where owners already frequently try to under-pay staff so this strategy would probably mostly just hurt workers.) So my personal approach to tipping in the US is that it starts at a base level as appropriate compensation, and goes up from there for quality of service (or very rarely goes down if service is atrocious).

edgyquant 3y ago

I’ve completely stopped using Uber eats and door dash. There is zero customer support, I’ve had completely different orders show up and was only refunded the minimum amount of the order while still taking the money for the driver. For groceries these apps are useless if you want what you actually order. I’ve ordered chocolate ice cream and received instead pop tarts as a “replacement item” and customer support basically told me tough luck. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every single time I place a grocery order through these apps I get different items than I selected. If I say I don’t want replacements I get 1-2 out of 10 items from my order (never the things I placed the order needing.) All of this seems blatantly illegal, advertising and charging for items you can’t deliver. Yet I’m powerless to do anything about it.

brickteacup 3y ago
> Yet I’m powerless to do anything about it. it's called a chargeback. the worst they can do is ban you from their platform
- edgyquant 3y ago
  The two times I have tried that (one for Uber eats, one for a tea delivery place) I have not won the investigation. Both times I did not receive the item I ordered and for the tea place I didn’t receive any item at all. Charge backs are not the recourse people online claim they are, in my experience they do not give customers the preference.

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reaperducer 3y ago

With UberEATS, hidden fees and markup have gotten so big that most orders are > 2x the cost at the actual restaurant Even without the hidden fees, it can be crazy expensive. But there doesn't seem to be a shortage of people who don't care about the fees. I ran into an Uber Eats guy in the elevator a couple of weeks ago. He was delivering a single cup of McDonald's coffee. I can't imagine what that might have cost. Ona side note, I've also recently seen Uber Eats being delivered on Segways in my neighborhood. They have Uber Eats-branded panniers and the delivery guys have Uber Eats-branded insulated backpacks.

shreyshnaccount 3y ago

Wasn't that always the point of vc funded big tech apps? Lure in users while burning through enough cash to power a steam locomotive, kill most competition and then take their money? At least in India I am seeing alternatives emerge already in the form of indrive, which I have been using a lot more

shreyshnaccount 3y ago
(indrive is an alternative to uber the ride hailing service, not uberEats, which never really took off in India)

bena 3y ago

Because the drivers can't be held accountable. Drivers can do all of that and restaurants can't fire them. Users can't just order from places that do better delivery. And drivers simply don't give a fuck. There's only profit in quantity. They know quality is so bad that the only way they can get a tip is if they hold service hostage. So they do. And they do all the dumb shit like sitting on food for tens of minutes so they can "optimize" their deliveries. The services don't give a fuck either. They don't make the food or deliver the food. If you don't like the food or the delivery, that's other people's problems, not theirs. The service worked as advertised. You were able to order food from a place that doesn't do delivery, pay for it, and get it delivered. And at the end of the day, the one who gets fucked the most is the customer. They get tepid food over an hour after they order for prices two to three times what they would pay if they were at the restaurant.

rickyc091 3y ago

Priority delivery fee is a scam on all services. If your order is sitting a while, it's generally because the $ to mile ratio is too low. A $2/mi order is considered a base line for most drivers. Orders will start with a low base pay of $2-$2.75 + tip. If drivers keep declining to pick up your order, it'll get batched with another order. Priority delivery fee goes to the delivery service, so you might as well put that towards the tip instead to get it picked up faster by a driver.

smugma 3y ago

All that crap they make you deal with and you're still a heavy user? Why?! Is it still that much better than the alternatives (taxis, Door Dash, eBike, picking up your own food?)

thefounder 3y ago
Many people will never return to taxis and will even prefer to pay a premium for uber.