#the delivery app orders

[life-of-eris]

I just did some quick math and the motherfuckers I work for pay me literally exactly enough so that I don't qualify for medicaid. Bastards.

[stellaralignment]

After reading @kira-serialfaggot 's post about inaccessible menus and @butterfly-sapphire post about non-customizable menus figured I now had sufficient excuse to rant about how I hate how every big restaurant's ""solution"" to these two problems is somehow always the worst fucking app I've ever had to use in my life.

So, to clarify real quick. I agree with both previous posts. Places that serve food should have their menu easily accessible somewhere if they have an online presence, and places that let you customize your order need to have that as a feature of any digital ordering solution they implement. Good? Good.

So, a lot of places I've seen (Wendys, Taco Bell, and McDonald to name a few) Have tried to get around how fucking horrible the DD app itself is by making their own apps with DD integration for the actual ordering/serving of delivery orders. Great, this lets them provide their own menu customization options, serve discounts/coupons, and generally have more control over the user experience. Fantastic. As a bonus, this usually also allows you to just look at the menu whenever you want.

Small issue. All of these apps were written by the worst fucking programmers I have ever witnessed in my life. I havn't gotten angry enough to de-compile or try to reverse engineer one yet, but my user experience has been so consistently bad and I've encountered issues that, as a software engineer, I honestly could not tell you how fucked their system has to be in order to allow that to happen.

Allow me to tell you the worst of these. I'm trying to order delivery from a store. It's late, like 7pm, but I know the place is open till 10. I can confirm this on their website (I do later for reasons that will become apparent) and google maps. So I punch in my address, make my order, and go to checkout. Unfortunately, the app tells me "Your payment method failed. Please select a new method and try again". Which was odd, but not unimaginable. I've had issues with my bank in the past. So I swap cards and try again, thinking nothing of it.

Except, my other card doesn't work either. Nor does using PayPal, or Google Pay, or any of the other payment options I tried. I'm getting desperate. I buy some games on steam just to make sure some of these are working, which they are. I was worried, but now that I've confirmed all my money hasn't been siphoned away somehow, I'm just confused and getting annoyed.

So I start going insane. I buy digital gift cards from several different sites and try using them. No dice, payment failed. I try using the website instead of the app, on my phone and PC. Payment failed. I boot up an android studio instance with a brand new virtual phone, install the app on it, and try to order. Again. Payment failed.

I'm starting to wonder if their servers are just completely down. A friend in a different state can order with no problems. A friend in the same town can order with no fanfare.

But my roommates can't. They have the same issue

Payment failed.

So. I'm going insane. I've now spent almost 3 hours attempting to order food, and I'm starving. It is at this point that my anger finally overcomes my social anxiety, and I do the one thing I never thought I'd do.

I call the store in question.

Now, in all of this there was one crucial mistake I made. See, that friend in the same town? Lived on the other side of town. And there's 2 different stores of this franchise in town. We didn't control for this, because the app doesn't let you pick a store anyways when doing delivery. It's hard locked to whatever one is closest, which isn't a terrible thing to do. You need to get the delivery address anyways, and you know where all your store are, so it cuts out a step for me. But having to choose a store might've clued us in to what was going wrong.

Because the store? Was closed. Not just closed, like mega closed. It was being shut down. It hadn't been open for two weeks, and would never be open again. The order was failing because they'd already taken all the computer systems out, and it couldn't confirm to have received the order.

So there was nothing wrong with the payment. Literally nothing I could have done about this. I am just barred completely from ordering because the app defaults to the nearest location for orders, and my nearest location didn't exist anymore.

And you'd think that there would be some way to communicate this to the user when making the app. But for reasons I can only assume are profit motivated (Though I have no idea how the fuck this is more efficient/profitable), the app just defaults to saying the payment failed.

Now, I wouldn't be this mad if this was just "oops edge case lol" where I suffered the unfortunate consequences of some procrastinator forgetting to do the thing that removes stores from the database. Unfortunate but not really anyone I can blame for it. But no. This is just the most extreme example, and it's not even confined to the one app.

Almost every single app like this I've used defaults to saying the payment failed and to try a new payment method when anything goes wrong. No drivers out on DoorDash to actually move the order? Payment failed. You're trying to order a seasonal item that got dropped today? Payment failed. The companies servers actually are down? Payment failed. You're not connected to wi-fi like an idiot and there's actually something you can do to fix the issue that's not related to payment whatsoever? Payment failed.

What the fuck is up with this lazy ass programming? I seriously doubt there's enough technical debt from these apps to justify not having a robust error catching system that communicates with the user what the issue is. By the fucking stars these people love collecting intrusive data, I'm surprised they havn't used this as an excuse to harvest everyone's fucking location at all times and send "error data" back to central.

But just don't tell me my debit card was declined when I'm trying to order a burger and you closed that store two weeks ago.

[mossdeep]

i ordered doordash to the motel and the dasher called me and i was like "oh yeah you can just bring it to the door, its room number blah blah" and she said "i can't bring it to the door, because of the kidnappings" and i was like "ooohkay, my fiance will meet you downstairs" which like weird like i understand not coming up to a hotel room but this is like. a motel. the door is right there. but alright.

so then the dasher shows up. my fiance is in the parking lot. she pulls up, and asks my fiance "did you call for an uber?" and they were like... "no. i'm here for the pizza?" and so she calls me to verify and i'm like "yeah, thats my fiance-" and she promptly hung up, handed off the pizza, and drove off with my drink.

so i'm like. fuck. also my pizza is ice cold and there's no microwave at this motel, so i eat my cold pizza and call doordash to get a refund for the drink and maybe even a partial for the cold pizza. i call them, am placed on hold, and the lady comes back like "ok your refund will be on the card you used" so i say "ok thank you! is there a dollar amount i should be looking for-?" and she hangs up.

what the fuck i just wanted a pizza and a drink

[papermonkeyism]

HI ok I gotta ask - your post has made me insanely curious - you mention having cash at hand while waiting for your new card (resourceful) but none of the sources of cash was a bank or ATM.

Where I'm from cash is still used a lot (as we minimum wage workers get paid in cash) and as a result there are multiple ATM's within walking distance at all times and banks no more than 15-20 minutes drive away. Is this... different where you're from? (For context I'm from Africa)

We get paychecks directly to the bank account here, and I usually just pay with my card everywhere I need to, because it's more convenient than having a lot of coins and bills around. While there are ATM machines here (there are several within a walking distance from where I live), you use them with your card, so without having one, I can't get money out of the money withdrawing machine. I don't know how you do it, but without a card I can only get money out of the bank account by (online) bank transfers, and that's pretty hard at grocery store register.

Our bank offices stopped handing out cash several years ago, of which I am still very salty about.

I got some cash from my mom, and I had a handful of coins left over from the last time I had used an ATM a while back, but that's kinda rare for me, since most places accept card.

[twinkskeletons]

twitter is once again doing doordash discourse and i need to ask do restaurants in america just not have their own delivery guys

[kittydeliverycomic]

Yes they asked this in a mall food court with a big flashing sign right behind me.

[nexus-nebulae]

omg i placed a jimmy johns order for the first time using their app and i got a "do you love our app" type popup and i like to be honest, i liked how the app worked compared to others so i clicked "yes" so it would prompt me to leave a review and instead the popup window just said "we love you too!" sobbing

[crimeronan]

customer in an affluent suburb with fuckoff-tall don't-touch-me hedges around his whole-ass house left me a $45 tip on a $30 mcdonalds order last night (MAY have intended $4.50, but doordash covers lost tips, so if it Was a mistake i still make the $45). only noticed after dropping the food that he had both a black lives matter and progress pride flag flying outside his fuckoff-tall don't-touch-me hedges. which immediately changed my entire perspective. dude saved me 2 to 3 more hours of driving income-wise and probably annoys the Everloving Piss out of his affluent suburban HOA-loving neighbors by being loudly obnoxiously leftist and having solidarity with poor people. what a chad

[salsflore]

everyday i wake up and have to start a new boss challenge called dealing with my mother

[witchstone]

desperate enough for the pork dumplings the local chinese place makes to consider paying for an uber to get there tomorrow

[batsugame]

I want a burguer with fries so much I think I'm going crazy

[tadpal]

reblogged the foundational girl+dog posts so that everyone can understand what's going on

[cosmogyros]

I just made an order on my food delivery app, and a minute later I got a notification saying "The restaurant is really busy right now :( Your order won't be able to be delivered until 9:32 pm :("

It's 8:47 pm right now. That's 45 minutes. Oh no. I have to sit on the couch relaxing and doing absolutely nothing for a mere 45 minutes, and then someone will bring a freshly cooked meal right to my door without me having to lift a finger. What horror. What tragedy.

I think we've come to expect too much these days.

[haahka]

my first covid experience :")

[the-kipsabian]

while i try to figure out what bracelets i can make with the colors i have, if any moots want anything lemme know 💜

[softgrungeprophet]

the new safeway pharmacy app has been out for a fucking year and i still can't get my medications reliably mailed! two fucking weeks and it was never sent out! i never had this issue on the old app, which coincidentally also sent real email confirmations for orders instead of the shitty app showing you one popup confirmation and then never providing any other info. no real confirmation that's for damn sure

at least i didn't have to pay for it to not be delivered 🙄

but now i got a notification from the Albertsons pharmacy (??? i don't go to Albertsons?) that they're holding it for two more days before restocking, how considerate. so the length of time the pharmacy holds stuff, that you cannot find anywhere on their website, is in fact two weeks. at least i know that now!