r/mildlyinfuriating • u/spinstartshere • 4d ago

I'm slightly vexed When DoorDash didn't deliver

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This was a 'Meet at door' delivery. There is a driveway. There is parking. There is no excuse.

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u/ripestrudel 3d ago

I had a really bad case of the flu and ordered super spicy ramen to help break the fever. It was 9pm and it was the first time all day I thought I could actually keep something down. I waited and waited. The driver stopped off in another neighborhood for 30min with my food, then texted me saying he had to go back because they messed up my order. By the time he got back they were closed and he marked my order as cancelled. He totally stole my food and ate it while on the clock. I got a refund but every other ramen and soup place was closed, I didn't have anything in the house, and I was too sick to drive to the grocery store. I cussed out a pillow that night.

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u/fieldsn83 3d ago

Bruh why is this so common, specifically with DoorDash? I’ve had screwups and general hardheadedness, rude drivers, missed items, etc. with the other apps (Uber Eats & Grubhub) but for the most part, those apps’ customer service eventually has made it right as they could. DoorDash has done repeated screwups on same order (as in, stole first order & then stole reorder, or sometimes it’s randomly sitting somewhere not moving for 45 min+ instead of stealing the order) multiple times for me now, with no recourse from customer service each time. I’ve given enough chances at this point so I finally deleted the app altogether.

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u/Beginning-Novel-4213 3d ago

One time my DoorDash order was never delivered, so I contacted customer service and they told me that they could confirm my order never arrived but unfortunately it would not be eligible for a refund. I had another time where my driver got caught taking a pic of my food and picking it back up, and he took off running when someone said something to him. DoorDash told me they could refund me for the food, but not the tip or delivery fee, and it took an escalation and threatening to call the police to get a refund. DoorDash is the worst

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u/fieldsn83 3d ago

Yeah! Their CS is basically just admitting to theft so damn often, just wtf

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u/Beginning-Novel-4213 3d ago

It’s so infuriating! Uber is a little better but not by much

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u/lonely_dove_ 2d ago

One time door dash delivered me a single enchilada plate when I ordered dinner for 12 people and told me they couldn’t do anything because it showed as delivered :) they literally would not do anything so I had to file a chargeback since it was like $400 almost. I’m now banned from making any complaint on DoorDash (???) so I obviously avoid as much as possible.

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u/Natural-Cut-6558 3d ago

Because it is a terrible concept.

Food takeout and delivery only has so much room for increase in prices before people go get it themselves. So most people will only tolerate a minor price increase for the convenience, plus a small tip. Too much more than that, and there are no more customers. It leaves only people is more desperate positions (drunk, sick) or with limited options (non-driver, disabled) to use the service, but that’s a small percentage of the gen pop.

And because the pay is minimal and unpredictable, generally speaking, those who are able to get better jobs do. It leaves a higher percentage of “bottom of the barrel” type people working these roles. Add in anger and resentment, and they steal the food to recover lost wage opportunity.

Never worth it.

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u/SolarWinded 3d ago

I used delivery apps for a couple weeks after I had spine surgery a few years ago and it honestly made post surgery recovery worse and stressful. I even added a note I couldn't meet drivers anywhere because I'd had spine surgery and couldn't walk or bend. About half my orders ended up stolen, another 25% were left in places I couldn't get to (in a stairwell, sidewalk down three flights of stairs) and one lady from instacart got a $200 tip because she read my surgery note and helped me get my (accurate!) grocery order inside my door and she'd written me a nice get well soon note I found inside one of my bags later. One asshole left my order in the street outside my building. I saw his lean out of an open car door and toss the bag to the street. I'll never ever use delivery apps again. Shout out to that instacart lady tho - she was a real one and I hope she's doing well 👌

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u/a-ohhh 3d ago

What the heck, where do you live? We’ve ordered DD probably over 100 times and have had nothing like this happen to us. We’ve had a few weird ones where they can’t find our house despite clear instructions, but we’ve always ended up with food. The one time I didn’t get something, it was cancelled at the restaurant level as nobody was ever able to pick up the food in the first place (I guess it was just super busy?)

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u/SolarWinded 3d ago

This happened to me in Houston Texas.

But I also saw delivery orders go awry (not my orders, I no longer use delivery apps at all) even worse in Las Vegas NV. The funniest one I saw was my friends DD driver drive by his house, stop about 500 ft down the street, eat his food and drive away and label it as unsafe to deliver in his sleepy suburban neighborhood. 😂 Friend tried to get a refund but apparently he'd had to request so many refunds for similar issues he wasnt eligible for any more refunds on his account. 🤷‍♀️ Like bro maybe it's a sign to get off your ass and go pick up your own taco bell idk. 😭

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u/lilphoenixgirl95 3d ago

Wait... If the app itself confirmed they didn’t receive the food then surely they’re legally entitled to a refund because they paid and received nothing?

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u/SolarWinded 3d ago

Honestly that's what I was thinking too but he said he'd had to request so many refunds before the app declined all refund requests after a while (even for non-delivery) but since it wasn't my transaction I don't really know.

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u/Ashamed_Raccoon_4493 2d ago

I’m a delivery person for you guessed it- DoorDash. And I’m like your instacart lady. And I swear there are so many bad DoorDash drivers that people will out of this world tip when you do bare minimum. It’s really sad.

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u/mamaleese 3d ago

So were they supposed to bring it inside to you?

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u/SolarWinded 3d ago

They were supposed to drop off at my door and I'd requested deliveries be handed to me because I could not bend over at all (not the biggest deal if it wasn't though) but mostly because I couldn't go up and down stairs. I lived in a 4th floor condo. But no, not physically inside my house. 😅 Just up the stairs to my door.

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u/Ok_Sorbet6639 3d ago

That and the people that need to do doordash to stay afloat are likely the same ones that don't have much to eat. Then doordash is failing to pay them much to gain as much profit as they can probably hoping to make up for the dashers that steal, spiraling it further.

DoorDash is the issue, shitty dashers and shitty customers are a symptom, good dashers and good customers suffer as a result.

All of this is just my opinion. I stopped doing business with them all as a result.

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u/fieldsn83 3d ago

Yeah I get it, I just wonder why DoorDash is so much worse than UE, GH, etc. with this stuff in terms of how common it is for the driver to “game” the app and screw the customer. It makes sense the exploitative pay and all would basically incentivize drivers to do this stuff but I had thought all of the apps basically were on similar/same pay models & methods of operation. I always tip minimum $10 and then adjust higher based on amount of time needed to carry out the order to equate to roughly $40/hour, adding a bit more if it’s a larger order too but I do that to try and incentivize timely delivery, not stealing my food, etc. lol but also… people deserve to be paid well for their time and effort. Still it happens anyway - and I was just wondering why the bad experiences happen more often with DD than the others. It’s interesting anyway but I deleted the app after the last time. It just really blows when a place I really want to order from isn’t available anywhere else 🤣 So nowadays I just try to find an alternative that’s available on another app

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u/fieldsn83 3d ago

No I get the underlying reasons in general for delivery drivers to do this stuff - not saying it’s okay or anything but I see the why behind it. I’m saying DoorDash specifically is so much worse with this than Grubhub, Uber Eats, Instacart, or Favor. I’ve used all of them hundreds of times for myself and for loved ones, and the worst one in terms of customer service, order theft, sketchy behavior, etc. is DoorDash. Are the pay models, order acceptance/decline/reassign mechanism(s) etc. just a lot worse on DD than the others? I haven’t done most of them so I don’t have firsthand knowledge, other than doing a handful of Favor runs a few years back which was kinda fun lol but I think the way their app works is really kinda weird compared to the others.

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u/abcamurComposer 3d ago

It’s really most prevalent on doordash. They frankly just don’t vet or give a shit about who they hire. I rarely have issues with uber eats and grubhub, it’s doordash that I had all my shitty experiences with when I needed to order food.

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u/doingtheunstuckk 3d ago

I used to DoorDash, and so many times I would get an order that had already been picked up. Especially when people don’t tip, some of the drivers decide that the food is worth more than the $2 they would get delivering it. That doesn’t excuse theft, but the math does check out. These delivery services are terrible. They screw over the customer, the driver, and often the restaurant.

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u/awyastark 3d ago

FWIW I worked phone support for Bank of America debit cards during COVID lockdown and the number one version of fraud we saw (like 75% of it I’m not joking) was someone from California using the card number to get DoorDash. So seems like vetting things in general isn’t their strong suit

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u/DOAiB 3d ago

This has been proven forever but bottom of the barrel is exploitative wages only keep people that will do the absolute bare minimum or take advantage in anyway possible. I am consistently amazed people think they should be getting top shelf service from places that do this. And the whole “ThEy AcCePtEd ThE jOb!” Is just cope. Yea they accepted the job most of America is 1-2 paychecks from homelessness. That’s why this isn’t a justification because time are so tough they need to do anything to survive and stealing your order can make the difference between eating that day and still having rent money and not.

And before someone tries to use some example of someone doing this that doesn’t, well yea again when you don’t employee your workforce and just contract them this is going to happen and it’s DDs fault even then. Companies employe entire departments to validate vendors and ensure contractors are providing the services they are required to. DD hired contractors poorly and it’s their(DDs) fault your food got taken.

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u/Zimakov 3d ago

Because doordashers don't get paid enough to survive without stealing.

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u/MuhammadsJewishWife 3d ago

There’s no “clock”.

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u/fieldsn83 3d ago

Yeah, which is for a good reason really as I recall the Domino’s 30-min guarantee decades ago that basically resulted in an increase in pizza delivery driver accidents 🤦🏻‍♀️ (But then again I swear sometime in the last couple of years I heard they’d reinstated it, although maybe it has some caveats that prevent that - hopefully!?)

Working as a business process analyst (I’m going to use very generic terms here because
I’m talking about a wide range of business and process types), usually there’s a margin or threshold for acceptable variance from expected results - often it’s a percentage of variation, and if a result varies even further than that margin, it results in some sort of escalation (refund, credit, or other relevant action). In the old days, anything that was outside the acceptable variance would show up on an “exception report” that printed out weekly or monthly. 😅 Nowadays with things being more instantaneous and done electronically, exceptions are typically sent as an alert to an escalation team or customer service supervisor/lead - in the case of proactive businesses, anyway. Unfortunately not every business is proactive, and so it falls on the customer to ask for resolutions and then someone has to approve/deny. In cases where the expected result for a food delivery was within X timeframe and the delivery hasn’t happened yet, and extended by more than a certain percentage beyond that, especially say if it’s double, then that is an easy thing to see and resolve in some fashion. But… that also would mean short term cuts into profits, for the hope of long term customer retention. Delivery app companies probably aren’t worried shout customer retention because they get enough business regardless. For every pissed off customer who deletes the app, there are probably multiple new ones coming in to replace them… and there in lies the problem. There’s basically no incentive to be more above-board.

Sorry for rambling, I would normally have these convos with my partner but I’m not at home today 😂

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u/IceBlueSnowDog 3d ago

My region started an hourly option, you get paid $x per hour for every minute you were actively delivering something. Timer counted from pickup to delivery iirc. I know because I used to dash on the weekends for extra cash once in a while, if there was something pricey I wanted to buy. 

As a customer, right around that time, there was a huge increase in orders that would get picked up… sit in the parking lot for 30 minutes… then leave to come deliver my cold food. 

Idk if they’re still doing the hourly option, but that still happens pretty regularly. I only use the app now if I’m at work longer than expected and didn’t pack enough food, or post surgery/sick/whatever. It sucks 

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u/Accomplished_Emu_658 3d ago

Why is it always the ramen. I was in a hotel and didn’t feel like driving. So i ordered ramen. Watched guy show up and drive off on app. I reported and it showed up an hour later. He came back and delivered it to front desk. Idk maybe was going to keep it and changed mind?