Uber Eats: couple who ordered pizza get part-eaten, mouldy sandwiches
Tuesday 6 June 2017 21.27 BSTLast modified on Tuesday 6 June 2017 21.28 BST
Uber has said it is investigating after a Toronto couple complained that Uber Eats brought them not the two pizzas and sodas they had ordered but instead two mouldy sandwiches – one of them partially eaten – and a salad that appeared to have been made days earlier.
The delivery, ordered by Anna Kotlikova and Blake Weinzettl on Sunday evening, arrived more than 30 minutes late and stuffed in a large brown bag. The couple opened it to find two decaying sandwiches alongside a few unidentifiable yellow patties and utensils that had been already opened.
“The smell overwhelmed the whole room,” Kotlikova told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “I don’t know where [the driver] got this mysterious big brown bag with an order number, which wasn’t even our order number, or the order number from the restaurant.”
The pair called the Montana’s restaurant they had ordered from to find out what had happened. They were told by the manager that the order had been put together as usual and handed over to the Uber Eats driver.
The restaurant later said it had received another, almost identical, complaint on the same night. It was the first time anything like this had ever happened, said the manager, Sathes Kumar, who said the restaurant had filed an official complaint with Uber.
Hints as to what might have happened could lie in the roundabout route that the driver seemingly took during the delivery, said Kotlikova. After they placed the order, the app sent her an alert saying the pizzas they had ordered were en route, but noted that the driver was at least 15 minutes away – despite the restaurant being just down the road from them.
“I don’t know where this guy was driving to, because he definitely did go somewhere,” she said. “And where is this old food coming from? And why is he doing this?”
The couple turned to Uber in hopes of answering some of their questions. Instead, they said, they received a scripted response, a refund and a C$25 voucher.
“So we don’t know if he regularly drives for Uber? We have no idea,” said Kotlikova. “That’s why we wanted Uber to have a sense of urgency and figure this out and at least update us on what’s going on.”
Uber told the CBC that the driver had a rating of 4.8 on 5 and that this was the first such complaint they had heard about him. “We are reviewing this order and reaching out to both the restaurant and the driver to understand what may have happened,” the company said in a statement.
Downloaded from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/06/uber-eats-gross-mouldy-sandwiches-toronto on 7 June 2017