> Give hilariously bad estimates for delivery time.

They lie and try to blame restaurants for slowness too. I've found that most of them have a specific timer for the all the stages before "driver waiting at the restaurant". If they can't allocate a driver or he doesn't arrive there by that time, the status will switch to "driver waiting at the restaurant" even if that's not yet the case, putting the blame on the restaurant.

I had suspicions about most of them doing it but what I can say for sure is that I caught Uber Eats doing this by calling the restaurant directly and confirming that there was absolutely nobody there and the food has been ready for 40 minutes.

Ever since the dominos pizza tracker came into the market I’ve noticed more and more places copying it - and outright lying about the status.

I got a “free” door dash related thing and I tried it (no markup, made the poor guy deliver an avocado from the convenience store, did tip) and it was marked as “picked up” after it had been dropped off.

The Dominos pizza tracker “lies” too in the sense that it’s just a well-calibrated timer, but at least they’re only hurting themselves and their own reputation.

The food delivery companies on the other hand ruin the restaurant’s reputation by lying about them being slow, not to mention that they have zero excuse for doing so considering they actually have all the true information behind the scenes since the drivers are geolocated in real-time.

People who do not understand the role of balking and price information act at their own peril. This economic backpressure is something that executives hate - it keeps line from going up - but people who actually do the work love, because it keeps workloads manageable.

If you ever wanted a feature-length explanation of queueing theory and how ignoring it makes everything worse, well... here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yjZpBq1XBE . The context is Disney parks and Fastpass, but the lessons are applicable to basically any business. Everything is a queue.

> Give hilariously bad estimates for delivery time.

Huh, I wonder how universal this is. I agree with this take for Lyft and Uber (for rides), but for Uber Eats, at least, it's been incredibly rare for it to take longer than the estimate, and in the majority of cases the food arrives 5-10 minutes faster than the estimate suggests.

If the majority of time the delivery happens 5-10 minutes faster than the estimate, then either the delivery was scheduled to take a huge amount of time (50 minutes) and we are looking at a small error, or indeed, the estimates are hilariously bad.