> 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, you'd rightly associate the experience with the restaurant's failures, but with Uber, it feels like Uber failing.
> a particularly frustrating instance where Uber told me to cancel but didn’t refund me for me
UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food. They have no special powers here. Expecting one to refund "for" you is like having a mail person show up at your door and then berating them for the screwup of whatever business sent you the wrong thing, etc.
> 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.
> Do you mean delivery drivers refuse to pick up from there? How is that a customer's problem?
It's not (necessarily), but it's not the drivers' problem, either. It's the restaurant's problem—just like it's their problem if no customers want to do business with them because their food tastes bad, or if their suppliers refuse to do business with them because they're always late paying invoices, etc.
> That's a potential breach of contract between Uber and the delivery drivers.
You can't have a breach of contract for contracts you don't pick up... Or are you implying that you believe the relationship between Uber and their contractors is/should be one where the driver has to take every offer that Uber sends them? If so, are you a freelancer? How would you feel about an arrangement where, because you agreed to work with Marcy in Q2, then when Albert comes to you in Q3 and wants some work done, you have to take it no matter how bad Albert's offer is—e.g. one which very well might turn out to have you working for less than minimum wage—or without regard for whether you find Albert to be a loathsome, demanding prick?
> FedEx/USPS doesn't manage the customer relationship, doesn't broker the transaction
Neither do UberEATS drivers. That's the entire point of the metaphor. (Having said that, I misread your original comment, which other comments have pointed out.)
> UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food. They have no special powers here. Expecting one to refund "for" you is like having a mail person show up at your door and then berating them for the screwup of whatever business sent you the wrong thing, etc.
I'm not sure what this means exactly or how it's relevant. In these instances, it's not the driver's fault, it's Uber's fault. They are taking orders they can't fulfill and then denying refunds when you cancel until you figure out how to escalate it to a human who can do things other than press canned-response buttons.
> UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food.
This is to be expected, but it's not clear how this is relevant to your parent given it appears to have been Uber customer-service agents directing them to cancel, not 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, you'd rightly associate the experience with the restaurant's failures, but with Uber, it feels like Uber failing.
> a particularly frustrating instance where Uber told me to cancel but didn’t refund me for me
UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food. They have no special powers here. Expecting one to refund "for" you is like having a mail person show up at your door and then berating them for the screwup of whatever business sent you the wrong thing, etc.