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Phone is still the best way to order pizza

dan.bulwinkle.net

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Re: Phone is still the best way to order pizza

#371

Post by Spooky23 »

alar44 wrote: post #96
Spooky23 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird. Literally the opposite of my experience. I don’t do delivery except pizza because I don’t want to pay a premium for cold food. Websites always have built in timers that take longer. Usually 45m. Meanwhile I can call a pizza place, have pizza and wings ready in 15m, pay cash or whatever and have hot food. Order online, chances are it’s sitting there for 10m to avoid getting penalized on the SLA for online order…

Sounds like your proximity to the restaurants is the issue, not using an app.

Nope. I live in the middle of a small city. I’m probably within 10m of 100 food outlets.

Re: Phone is still the best way to order pizza

#372

Post by Ekaros »

bee_rider wrote: post #185
kzrdude wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wild, I didn't know such default pizzas existed (my context: scandinavia)

Cheese pizza must be the default, right? It is the lack of toppings. Although whether they follow up to clarify about toppings must depend on the place. In my experience, if the guy on the phone is rude and lets you mess up your order, they are much more likely to produce a good pizza. Places will only be polite (or offer lots of options) if they can't compete on quality.

Not in Nordics or at least in Finland. From search of about dozen pizza places, single one had "Margherita" with cheece and sauce only. Rest don't even have an option for one.

Re: Phone is still the best way to order pizza

#373

Post by Nextgrid »

ssharp wrote: post #323
mvid wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber Eats sent my order to restaurants that were absolutely not open. After two times, and two refunds, they stopped refunding me because of a “pattern of suspicious behavior”. No way to escalate review to a human. None at all. So maybe be aware of your choice

I’ve had food sitting at restaurants for over an hour before while Uber attempts to find a driver. After a particularly frustrating instance where Uber told me to cancel but didn’t refund me for me, I did manage to find a support inbox that’s read by an escalation team and I had a real life human calling from SF let me know that they would refund me. The effort it took to get the refund was ridiculous though as every…

Uber Eats will lie and blame the restaurant for being slow when they can't find a driver.

The order status will stay on "preparing your order" for an hour while I know full well (by calling the restaurant directly) that the food was ready for over an hour. Sometimes it'll switch to "driver on the way to pick up" and then back to "preparing your order" which makes no sense.

Deliveroo is was similar in that aspect back in 2018, not sure if that's changed now.

Regarding your refund, a chargeback is the typical way to deal with such scum, and the evidence (chat screenshots) will make it an open & shut case.

Re: Phone is still the best way to order pizza

#374

Post by astura »

>On average, it takes no more than 20 seconds

I order a lot of pickup. You're calling a busy restaurant whose employees don't have time to answer the phone and take your order so you end up spending at least 3x that waiting on hold or waiting for someone to answer/not busy signal.

I thought online ordering was silly when I first heard of it (it was the year 2003, Papa John's was the restaurant) but after using it, I totally get it.

Re: Phone is still the best way to order pizza

#375

Post by Ekaros »

wingerlang wrote: post #231
hnal943 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you don't order toppings? They don't ask?

You order toppings for all pizzas? We usually just order by number/names (via menu). Toppings are very rarely adjusted, and NEVER "built" from scratch. At least I've never seen anyone do that.

Yes, pretty much standard for anyone serving pizza here. Have a list of ready made options and then 2, 3 or 4 choices. Allows me to order pizza just like I want.

Re: Phone is still the best way to order pizza

#376

Post by pessimizer »

urthor wrote: post #39
post_break wrote: post #9

I'm sorry but I don't agree. Dominos pizza has coupons, deals, etc. Trying to get those deals over the phone is a chore. Ordering specific toppings can be a chore since it's a relay back and forth vs a button. Multiple pizzas with multiple toppings? The delay just compounds. If you live alone and order one pizza or one style of specific themed pizzas then sure, it might be faster, if that's the metric of "best" but i…

That's the entire point. Dominos is happy to offer you those coupons and deals etc, in exchange for using Dominos's preferred platform (its website, which doesn't cost minimum wage) and providing your user data (via channel tracking the coupon, logging in etc). A decent pizza place will charge more to let you skip all that. In the age of data and free, ad driven services, "you get what you pay for" is paramount.

That data is worth shit, the only people that care when and to where you order pizza are the NSA, and they already have your cell data and the GPS from your car. What Domino's gets is you being mildly rewarded for committing time to learning their app, which will make you more likely to come back.

Tricking people into learning non-transferable skills is a tactic. If your hard earned skills in configuring your iphone aren't going to transfer to android, neither are you.

Re: Phone is still the best way to order pizza

#377

Post by Spooky23 »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #199
Spooky23 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird. Literally the opposite of my experience. I don’t do delivery except pizza because I don’t want to pay a premium for cold food. Websites always have built in timers that take longer. Usually 45m. Meanwhile I can call a pizza place, have pizza and wings ready in 15m, pay cash or whatever and have hot food. Order online, chances are it’s sitting there for 10m to avoid getting penalized on the SLA for online order…

> Plus, shitty middlemen like DoorDash are gross Hmm... do you feel the same way about the middlemen who make it possible for you to buy bread without ordering the wheat direct from a farmer in 5,000 bushel lots, storing it, grinding it into flour, and then making it into bread? Everyone hates "middlemen", but if they're really not adding value they tend to get disintermediated fairly quickly. I remember the bad old…

No that’s very different as bakeries and flour mills add value to the commodity product.

DoorDash pays the drivers well, so it’s using investor dollars to subsidize the service to entrench it and drive out competitive processes.

Your argument was was the same as the Uber argument at the peak type period. When the Saudi sovereign wealth fund was kicking in $10-20 for each ride, the hype argument was we would not need to buy cars because some AI robot magic carpet would take care of everything. Now, Uber costs more than the cabs did before.

This is the same.

Re: Phone is still the best way to order pizza

#378

Post by Nextgrid »

pwdisswordfish9 wrote: post #328
ssharp wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had food sitting at restaurants for over an hour before while Uber attempts to find a driver. After a particularly frustrating instance where Uber told me to cancel but didn’t refund me for me, I did manage to find a support inbox that’s read by an escalation team and I had a real life human calling from SF let me know that they would refund me. The effort it took to get the refund was ridiculous though as every…

> I’ve had food sitting at restaurants for over an hour before while Uber attempts to find a driver. If you're in a metro area ordering during ordinary hours and having this happen, it's almost certainly because the restaurant has developed a bad reputation and people refuse to work with them. The thing about Uber's intermediation is that if you had this sort of experience by ordering directly through the restaurant,…

> the restaurant has developed a bad reputation and people refuse to work with them

Do you mean delivery drivers refuse to pick up from there? How is that a customer's problem? That's a potential breach of contract between Uber and the delivery drivers.

Uber Eats positions itself as an end-to-end managed service where you pay money to receive delivered food, and charges hefty fees (on both sides of the transaction) for doing so. It's up to them to make sure this works by implementing appropriate penalties for drivers or restaurants who default.

However in typical Silicon Valley fashion their business model is to screw everyone so I'm sure the restaurants and delivery drivers have equally little recourse when things go wrong or to provide feedback so bad/misbehaving actors are allowed to remain as long as it's not causing a problem for Uber.

> UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food

Not really. FedEx/USPS doesn't manage the customer relationship, doesn't broker the transaction nor takes a fee off the transaction amount itself.

Re: Phone is still the best way to order pizza

#379

Post by Nextgrid »

hilbert42 wrote: post #238
cromka wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s because you were refunded automatically without human intervention. This is what the author of the comment pointed out: once you do that too often in a short period of time, the bot assumes you’re scamming them and there’s no way to escalate that.

"...once you do that too often in a short period of time, the bot assumes you’re scamming them and there’s no way to escalate that." The only way that'll be fixed will be with legislation. It's not only Uber, it's Google et al - they all into it. Simply, they need to be halled kicking and screaming to plow some of their enormous profits back into customer servive. Trouble is consumer protection law is decades behind…

> Trouble is consumer protection law is decades behind where it ought to be.

Potentially, but on the other hand, card disputes are a thing and I'm baffled as to how little people know about them or have misunderstandings such as them only being available for credit cards (the law may give you extra protections there, but the standard Visa/Mastercard dispute rules apply equally regardless of whether it's debit or credit).

Just like Uber and similar Silicon Valley scum gets away with this because they have a monopoly and can do as they please, so do the card networks - and the card networks are on your side in this case, so use that to your advantage.

Re: Phone is still the best way to order pizza

#380

Post by Nextgrid »

PakG1 wrote: post #229
mvid wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber Eats sent my order to restaurants that were absolutely not open. After two times, and two refunds, they stopped refunding me because of a “pattern of suspicious behavior”. No way to escalate review to a human. None at all. So maybe be aware of your choice

They only stopped refunding you? They completely banned my account and my wife's account. We're still not sure what we did and they won't explain to us. Even escalated on Twitter and communicated by email. All we were told is that they have a zero tolerance policy for fraudulent behaviour and that the decision was final. WTH?

I was banned from Deliveroo because I guess I should just be happy to absorb the cost for ~20% of orders which arrived wrong instead of calling them out and asking them to do their job properly.
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