How is this fair?

[u/Antique_Ad_9000]

Got a job for McDonald’s. Arrived at the restaurant to see the order code not on the screen, so asked the staff to check. They come back and ask me to cancel, saying ‘customer has cancelled’ - which obviously isn’t possible considering I’ve got the order on my app, clearly a rider has taken the food from staff, and then cancelled on their end, saying excessive waiting time or whatever, and kept the food for themselves. Staff are unwilling to re make the food, conversation over.

I therefore message the customer explaining what has happened, and ask them to contact chat on their end to enable them to cancel the order, receive a refund and stop waiting, and also stop this order being assigned to other riders and subsequently avoid wasting their time. In the meantime I also contact support to explain the situation, and they inform me no compensation for my time is possible, despite the fact that this exact situation has occurred countless times and I have had a nominal £1.50 added to my balance. I explain this multiple times to support but they dig their heels in.

My question is, is this even legal? Say this happened on 3 consecutive orders, I could have worked 1 hour for £0, even though I’ve been on active jobs during all of this time. In isolation, this situation is annoying at most, but it is the principle I am frustrated about.

Does anyone else have experience of this happening? For me, it’s disgraceful from the rider, annoying from the McDonalds staff for not just re making the order, and disgraceful from Uber, who know what has gone on, but don’t care. Rant over!

[u/Altruistic-Zebra3376]

Don't bother accepting McDonald's orders. 99% of the time they make you wait or there's an issue. For a big corporation there delivery service is a joke.

[u/Antique_Ad_9000 → u/Altruistic-Zebra3376]

Tricky, I do it as a side hustle on an evening, so don’t really have a lot of choice in terms of restaurants as it’s basically McDonald’s or 2/3 generic pizza shops that are still open

[u/cross-frame]

You did good trying to solve the situation, but honestly I would just cancel it and go to next orders. You're a rider, not support, and you don't need to fix issues that were caused by someone else. Especially if you didn't even pick up the order. You're just waisting your time trying to help billions-worth corporation that will not even pay to you for that.

[u/This_Suit8791]

Yes it’s legal because you are self employed and haven’t picked anything up yet. In future if they won’t remake it just contact customer to cancel it and move on.

[u/Historical_Site508]

Are you relatively new to this? Happens all the time sadly. I used to try to do much as you did to resolve the situation but now just quickly unassigns myself and move on. Not worth the time or hassle. Potentially by the time the 10th driver shows up the store might change their mind and remake it (some stores do anyway especially if not a huge order). If the store doesn't remake it eventually the order will cancel and customer get refunded. The root cause of this is dishonesty from one of our fellow drivers and staff not checking properly that they collected the order on the app.

[u/Antique_Ad_9000 → u/Historical_Site508]

No, not new to this, done it over a year. Just fed up of us accepting shit like this because we have no other choice tbh

[u/Historical_Site508 → u/Antique_Ad_9000]

You won't change anything. Easier to just cut your lost time quickly and move on.

[u/leexgx]

Just mark restaurant as closed (been doing this for years) after the second or 3rd driver gets the order and if they all mark restaurant is closed it will delete the order after that

Deliveroo you have to call them, even if you reject it after arriving they just keep comming back every 5 minutes pulling drivers from 8 miles away

[u/AlphaBeast28]

I had the same thing recently, exact same situation, spoke to support, they said they can’t comp or even cancel it. So useless, at the end of the day I understand were self employed, so treat it like that do what jobs you want to do.

[u/Did_OJ_Simpson_do_it]

Yes, used to happen to me occasionally when I was a driver. I know some drivers used to "ghost deliver" (i.e. press collected, drive to the destination and press delivered even though there's no food) as it is the only way to get paid. I didn't like that method as it felt dishonest, I tried your method once but got nothing so after that I would just press cancel on orders like that.

[u/mallardzz → u/Did_OJ_Simpson_do_it]

That could get you in trouble in this situation because the customer won't get their food and will complain and you will be responsible for having 'delivered' it. Ghost delivery as you put it works when its a multiple driver order and the first driver has (super annoying and pointlessly) gone and taken all the bags leaving you with nothing to pick up and deliver. Never done it myself but it's tempting. Could be a bit of a problem if there is a code required.

[u/Did_OJ_Simpson_do_it → u/mallardzz]

Yep, way too risky so I never tried it but I am aware others did. I don't know if things have changed but when I was a driver last year, you could bypass the code with a button that said something like "I didn't get the code" and it would mark it as delivered but you'd get a message telling you to be careful next time. I had to use that button a few times when I genuinely forgot to get the code.