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Wtf, pizza hut doesn't employ their own delivery drivers anymore? Sounds like they are complaining because they outsourced delivery and now they don't like how the work is getting done.
Exactly. Hire your own drivers if you want it the way you want it. They made a big deal when California minimum wage went up that they were going to fire every driver and use DoorDash. This is the quality you get with that choice
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doordash-pizza-hut-minimum-wage-hikes-california-new-york-city/
Pizza Hut is laying off more than 1,200 delivery drivers in California ahead of the state's nearly 30% increase in its minimum wage, to $20 an hour from $16. PacPizza, operating as Pizza Hut, and Southern California Pizza Co. — another Pizza Hut franchise, both gave notice of layoffs impacting workers in cities throughout the state, Business Insider reported, citing notices filed with the state.
They made a big deal when California minimum wage went up that they were going to fire every driver and use DoorDash.
I was a delivery guy for a local pizzeria once upon a time (and that place still has their own drivers, and even their own delivery vehicles, which is practically unheard of)
And I'm not gonna lie, door dash and such was great for a while because it let me get food delivered from restaurants that otherwise didn't do delivery.
But I've stopped using them, for a few reasons including their shitty business practices
But the straw that broke the camels back in each case that made me delete was them fucking up my order.
And that happens, I'm not particularly mad at the store or the driver, I've been there
But the way that these delivery apps handle it is, to me, unacceptable.
When I contacted them, their response was to just issue me a refund.
And to me, what should have happened, is I should have immediately had a replacement sent, expedited as much as possible, at no extra cost.
That's what we always did when I was a delivery guy, and often with a gift certificate as an apology.
And sure, a refund on top of that would be nice, but really the root issue is that I don't have the food I ordered. If I order it again, I'm going to the back of the delivery queue, and if I happened to order it when I was low on money I may not even be able to reorder it that day because that refund often takes a couple days to clear.
Consider yourself lucky.
I used them exactly one time. The driver brought the wrong food, the name and order weren't even close.
Doordash refused to send a new driver, best they could offer was a credit for not even half the price. Even escalating customer service just got the credit converted to a refund, again for less than half of the charge. The rep could not explain to me what service I had received to justify keeping most of my money.
Yeah how fucking stupid. Domino's isn't the greatest but still delivers their own pies and get added bonus of points to free pizza.
By the way Doordash always worked like that. Why only time ever use it was the last. Food arrived cold due to drivers picking up multiple different orders sometimes at different businesses. Horrible service.
By the way Doordash always worked like that
It really sucks when that happens, but at least DoorDash and Uber tell you that it's being delivered to someone else first.
What I really hate, is when they are working 2 different apps, have my food, and then go in the exact opposite direction of my home to do the other apps delivery first, and neither service cares as long as it's delivered to you by the latest expected time.
And the only reason it makes sense to do that at all is because Doordash pays their drivers like shit, so they have to find ways to make more money doing things like batching orders.
Honestly I would assume that when they had their own drivers they would leave woth a few orders at a time, (though I could definitely be wrong).
It doesn't seem like AI is actually the problem here, as any new tech system could have given that kind of visibility to the DoorDash drivers and resulted in this problem, but either way, it's an interesting fail, where a maybe good idea, falls apart because of human behaviour.
Seems like the software could have been updated to batch orders similar to how the drivers were.
That would address the cold food issue maybe, but it wouldn't fix the delay in delivery issue as they wait on starting the pizza so they batch better.
I work 1 day a week at Wendys because life is expensive.
25 years ago when I was a teenager, any fast food place had 2 sources of orders. The ones in the drive thru, and the ones in the lobby ordering at the counter. Thats it.
Now, the majority of the orders are doordash/ubereats/ect. Except here's the thing.
It's 4:12pm. You're at home, you order a daves double. Fair enough. It comes onto our screen at 4:12. Your order is probably ready for pickup by 4:14.
At 4:12 your order also went out to the drivers. They choose if they accept or not. I've seen completed orders literally sit there for HOURS. And I don't mean like 2 hours, but really it was 90 minutes.....
No. My one day a week shift starts at 3pm. It runs until 1am. I've seen orders that have a reciept printed at 11:30am. I'm showing up at 3pm. The order gets picked up at 9pm.
You know thats not even safe to eat at that point. It wasn't in a refridgerator. It was just on a counter. Sitting out. I've seen frostys get picked up that were just a cup of liquid.
One other thing I noticed. When I was 16, front counter basically never stopped. And if it did, it was like 2 minutes.
Drive thru used to always have a line out the parking lot, sometimes into the street backed up.
These days? It's like maybe 10 customers total in the lobby for my shift. And the drive thru gets a customer or doordash pickup every few minutes. No lines.
And the reason is simple. There's two reasons.
First reason is that during covid they tried shifting all business over to these pickup services. Well....without direct control of the services, you're kind of at the mercy of the workforce that can't get jobs that have a boss. You are not their boss. They are their boss. You're allowing them to do your work without any oversight on your behalf. So why would Joe the delivery driver, whos 4 hours late picking up this order, give a shit about quality control? Do you even know if he's washed his hands? Wendys knows that I wash my hands several times a day. Wendys knows that the sandwich maker wears gloves when handling food. Wendys has no way to say if Joe the doordasher masturbated in his car 30 seconds after picking up an order. A LOT of people don't like that, and instead just stopped ordering fast food.
The second reason business has collapsed, is the portions. Everything is smaller, and they've found ways to make it shittier. Reduce quality. Reduce portions. Cut corners any way you can.
Wendys has two patty sizes for their burgers. A JR and a single. The single is bigger. I had a woman in the lobby a few months ago break my heart. She comes up, and politely tries to say we gave her a JR instead of a single. So we got our gloves on, opened it up, and.....it was a single.
When we told her that was what a single looked like these days, she was devistated. She asked "Whys it so small? It didn't used to be so small...."
And she's right. A single today is 6oz meat patty. A jr is 4oz meat patty. Those are weights before they cook. When I was a teenager, JR was 5oz, and single was either 8 or 10oz. I can't remember.
This means a single today is almost as small as a JR 25 years ago. They wonder why young people don't eat at burger shops like the boomers did in the 60s. It's because young people aren't interested in eating that crap. Then they wonder why the boomers aren't interested in eating there anymore either. It's because they're old enough to remember the burgers dave thomas sold when he was alive. They look like premium options compared to today. And even if you adjust for inflation, the burgers back then were still 40% cheaper.
So combine the two reasons. And you got a situation where you order food, from a fast food place. You pay $30 on an order that would have been $8 if you picked it up yourself. It gets to you soggy, cold, and bacteria filled 7 hours later. Would you ever order it again?
This is why the entire fast food business is collapsing.
You remember that old saw about getting a job done: "fast, cheap, and good - pick two". Well fast food used to be cheap, and it used to be fast: I could pull up to Burger King drive-through and drive away with a burger, fries and drink in 5-10 minutes for like $7. It might not have been the best food, but it was tasty enough and filling enough that it was worth it.
A few years ago, I was on a road trip and tried stopping at a McDonald's. It took me 45 minutes to get through the drive-through lane and I was about ready to scream because the layout didn't show the backup until there was no way to get out. Last year, I was on another trip and stopped at Burger King. Got a burger, fries and drink, and it was over $20.
If fast food is no longer fast, no longer cheap, and was never very good, why would I opt for it?
What the article fails to mention is that part of this door dashers aren't paid well enough. Door dashers are paid such shit wages that they felt like they had to game the system like this to make the wages worth it. Why leave as soon as a delivery pops, when I can wait a little longer for a second or third order, which reduces how much I am driving and spending on fuel?
The obvious answer to the problem no one seems to have mentioned yet:
Pay the drivers by the hour, not by the amount of orders.
Performance-based pay has never worked, and always incentivises bad behaviour. They wouldn't try to batch so many orders for a single trip if it wasn't the only way they could make passable money.
These drivers are their own business and they're just maximizing revenue according to market incentives, just like any other business. So Pizza Hut has enshittified themselves. Well done. I guess it looked a lot better in the excel sheet and presentation.
Partially related: I remember some months ago, down here in Brazil, UberEats and iFood drivers were getting restless about the complete lack of any rights when working with the apps - no rest time, no charging stations, low pay, all while being told that you're "being your own boss, working when you want to!". They usually formed whatsapp groups to complain about that.
In an almost inexplicable twist, the majority that wanted more rights also wanted the govt to stay the fuck away and were against a law that was meant to regulate working for apps. Said law included many of the rights they wanted.
Glad to see American idiocy is spreading /s
A tremendous amount of money has been invested to ensure that it is.
batch multiple orders together.. waiting up to 15 minutes to do so? increased delivery times? disappointed customers?
sounds like doordash is doing an exemplary job replacing restaurant-employed drivers.
This shit drives me up a wall. The local, formerly awesome pizza place switched to DoorDash for delivery and it has sucked ever since. Pizza arrives cold since door dash drivers don’t have insulated bags, half the time they chuck it on the front porch and it sits there on the cold concrete even longer.
Delivery driver was always a reliable stoner job, I had so many friends in my youth who delivered pizza. Despite the cloud of weed smoke that came with the pizza, it was always hot and fast. They were motivated to get those tips after all.
the franchisee bringing the suit operates ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN pizza huts, i don't give a shit what happens to them
Fire the executives responsible.
Let they who reap the benefits of success be also reamed by the flames of failure.
Pizza hut should be a fucking textbook case study on how to run a much-beloved brand into the ground.
Quiznos might be slightly worse- they were in financial trouble so their brilliant solution was let's fuck over our franchisees. I'll give you 3 guesses how that worked out, but you'll only need one.
For context, here is an actual Uber Eats offer to a driver from 5 days ago:
That's 5.68 an hour, ridiculous. The system should reject anything that's below minimum wage equivalent at a bare minimum.
I've been driving (passengers, not food) for 2 years and you really can't imagine how predatory and exploitative it is these days. Gas prices way up, fares way down, and Uber just spent $10 billion in our stolen wages on driverless vehicles to replace us. I'm trying to get out ASAP.
Edit: Also, just wanted to add that it's $5.68/hr BEFORE gas and wear-and-tear expenses.
Love how on the page for this article taking about how an AI system fucked up so bad there is a 100m lawsuit over it.... there are AI ads offering to sumerize the article...
Also, I can't lie, I feel no fucking sympathy for the massively wealthy elites that own this 100+ franchise company. If they hired their own drivers and payed their employees well I'd be singing a different tune but fuck these capitalist pigs. I hope they sue each other into oblivion.
Pizza Hut discovers that customers are disappointed when they don't pay a living wage.
Upper management can't even see it.
Upper Management: WTF are they complaining about, we don't promise hot food or on time delivery on our website.
Last time I ordered from them. I selected pick up and waited until a few minutes before the time was up to leave to get it. When I got there on their screen it showed my name and ready. I waited an additional twenty minutes to get my pizza. Don't know if the people working there marked it completed or if it was their system but I haven't been back in a while.
Pizza Hut and Donatos around here both have approximately 5 customers a day. Me and my wife are sure they're both fonts for money laundering.
We have some restaurants like that here. Always empty, somehow manage to survive while restaurants all around them close, open as something else and close again etc.
I knew a guy who went to prison for 8 years for running a drug delivery service out of a pizza franchise. Word got out, he got popular, then arrested. Lol.
There used to be a place at a local shopping center that was all glass and mirrors and was staffed by very serious young Asian men in sharp suits.
They sold - and only sold - boutique toffee apples.
When profits are paramount, the people suffer.
Years ago when a company could have bad days and nobody was punished and the customer was always right, now its fuck you customer we need profits.
I was with Pizza Hut when we got that directive of empowerment to do what was best to retain the customer. No manager needed for most things, just treat them well. We had a lot of regular customers, I wonder why. That was a long time ago.
Guess some finally out-pizza'd the Hut
Raise your hand if you're surprised.
Anyone? Anyone? No?
What a lame cyber punk dystopia. Can’t even get our pizzas on time.
Maybe we should ~~make~~ put Uncle Enzo in charge of the Pizza delivery agents. Pizza would be on time.
This is exactly how Skynet started
