Six hungry 14-year-olds and two frazzled parents – one of them me – returned from a bowling birthday party last weekend.
Against my better judgement I promised our teen a Deliveroo. Even though we don’t live out in the sticks, we know from bitter experience that delivery times from Deliveroo – no matter which restaurant they are coming from – tend to be very slow.
So it was with some trepidation that I placed the order with Five Guys on the bus home to speed things up. The app pinged to say that our driver had picked up the order from Five Guys but had to make another pick up before getting to us, and my heart sank.
Since when is a takeaway delivery an all around the houses, stopping service? Especially one that charges a £2.49 service fee, plus a £5.49 delivery fee.
The food finally arrived more than an hour later, and it was cold. We bunged it all in the oven to heat it up and I filed a complaint on the app. Deliveroo gave us a £22.83 account credit – a quarter of the eye watering £91.33 total.
But then, things got worse when we took the food out of the oven to serve up to the by now ravenous teens and realised there was very little filling in the veggie sandwich – an empty bun with garnishes and relishes. The second veggie sandwich we ordered without the bread (one child was vegan – and Five Gun’s buns contain eggs) was missing altogether, with only a tray of soggy onions to show for it.
Mortified that two of our veggie guests were going hungry I tried to contact Deliveroo (again). Only because I’d already flagged the cold food on the app it wouldn’t allow us to raise the problem of the missing items. I tried the live chat function but that timed out before giving up the ghost altogether. Struggling to find a phone number to explain the situation to a human being I hurriedly made a second order from scratch.
The single veggie sandwich without the bread (the other guest decided he’d stick with the bun of garnishes) came to £16.12: £5.15 for the veggie filling, plus a £2 small order fee, a 99p service fee and another £5.49 delivery fee. I paid an extra £2.49 for premium delivery, hoping this would fast track the patty to us sooner.
No such luck. The second “premium” delivery also took well over an hour, arriving at 9.20pm, almost three hours after the original order was placed. As my husband closed the front door I jokingly told him to double check they hadn’t just sent the garnish again. Imagine our aghast faces when we peeled back the foil to reveal only a tray of sad and soggy onions.
In desperation, we placed a third order with Deliveroo – this time for a McPlant burger from McDonalds – again forking out not just for the food but another £2 small order fee, a 99p service fee, a £1.99 delivery fee and another £2.49 premium delivery surcharge in order to get the delivery to us as quickly as humanly possible (in theory).
Care to guess our total Deliveroo spend for the evening? £119.41, including £11.96 McDonalds bill and £91.33 plus £16.12 at Five Guys. All this for eight burgers and three portions of fries. An email to Deliveroo customer service on Saturday night remained unanswered, despite their promise to respond within 24 hours.
In truth, the writing has been on the wall for many months for me and Deliveroo as well as other similar takeaway apps. This weekend’s Five Guys fiasco was just the final nail in the coffin. I’m not a heavy user of the apps – it’s not much more than a once a month treat. But a quick scan through my back orders shows multiple issues with what is supposed to be a service based on ease, speed and convenience.
From the crispy duck that arrived after 11pm, to the cold ramen from Wagamama to food that is massively hiked up in price. A Deliveroo Gail’s breakfast order last month featured a tub of overnight oats that cost £5.10 through Deliveroo as opposed to £4.20 if I’d ordered direct through the Gail’s website. The Five Guys burgers we ordered on Saturday night are a pound more each on Deliveroo than when ordered for click and collect on the Five Guys website.
A quick straw poll on the local WhatsApp groups shows I’m not the only one to feel mugged off by these delivery apps. One friend shuddered at the memory of another birthday party thrown into disarray when a phantom “burger” arrived – a cardboard carton containing only tomato ketchup and nothing else.
Deliveroo had confused removing the sauce with providing only the sauce. Others bemoan interminable incorrect orders (polenta sticks instead of dough balls and/or the wrong pizza) ordered every Friday night in a triumph of optimism over experience. Search up Deliveroo on X and you’ll find similar stories of users bemoaning the poor customer service and multiples charges but ordering from them again anyway.
Our busy lives and reluctance to turn on the oven after a hard week mean many of us are locked in a love/hate relationship with Deliveroo and its rivals, despite the sub-standard service. Could the tide be about to change given the ongoing cost of living crisis? It seems the jury’s still out. While earlier this year Deliveroo reported order numbers falling by 6 per cent, more recently it posted a 5 per cent rise in sales by gross transaction value across the group in the third quarter.
When I contacted the Deliveroo press office they told me that the veggie sandwich was not a burger, which explains (sort of) why it was just a bun and what I had assumed to be garnish which turned out to be the sandwich filling, but not why our veggie sandwich without the bread was just a tray of onions.
The spokesperson pointed out the company had compensated me for the cold food and credited £2.49 to my account to cover one of the premium delivery fees of that fateful night, adding they took “these allegations seriously and have investigated the matter”. But I still feel I’ve been left out of pocket.
If you’re thinking more fool me for forking out for so long, I’m inclined to agree with you. But while I like to think that next time I’ll jump in the car to pick up the burgers myself, just like everybody did in the olden days, in my heart of hearts I know I can’t be bothered. I fear it’s only a matter of time until the memory of this weekend’s debacles fades and I succumb again in a moment of weakness.
Five Guys have been approached for comment.