Except the app gave no errors or notices about this, no "sorry, we can't find a driver right now, hang on..." prompt. Nor did it update the ETA for the order. It just happily kept pushing the ETA back, 5 minutes at a time, with no notice of any sort.
After about an hour I contacted the restaurant - I'm a regular there and they were puzzled - the order had been ready for quite some time and no one had shown up to pick it up. The Uber app on their end showed no errors or notifications to indicate something was wrong. So I contacted UberEats CS, where the agent revealed the "can't find a driver" part of the story, and then announced that there was nothing to be done about it.
That part really pissed me off - Uber charges surge pricing to customers to incentivize more drivers, but when push comes to shove on a poor customer experience is unwilling to increase the payout for a delivery to expedite it? Given the absolutely usurious rates Uber charges restaurants to use their service they weren't even willing to sacrifice a small part of their margin to try and get a stuck order moving?
The craziest part of this is how apologetic the restaurant was for something that absolutely had nothing to do with them. It sounds like UberEats fucks up regularly and customers take it out on the restaurants - meanwhile UberEats runs away to the bank with their absurd per-ticket commissions for failing to fulfill their role.
Oh wait, no, they're not running away to the bank at all. Somehow despite running a truly shitty service and charging usurious fees to restaurants they are still losing money hand over fist.
I will say - I have misgivings generally about the gig economy, but I now exclusively use DoorDash. I've had a couple of screwups with them but they have always responded promptly in a no-bullshit way.
I now check to see if the restaurant is on ChowNow, which is a subscription on the restaurant's end and is a bit more fair as far as I can tell. Usually it's quite a bit cheaper to order through them and my understanding is the restaurant is getting more of the money. Of course hilariously then the orders are "fulfilled with DoorDash".
As a former Uber driver, I can tell you that in the market where I drove, this happened quite a lot. The reason is that drivers who got kicked out of Uber would then rent other people's Uber accounts, or have other people sign up for them.
Another thing I learned is that when someone is such a terrible taxi driver that they actually somehow manage to lose their hack license (I know, hard to imagine someone that bad), they just sign up with Uber. You learn this when you're hanging out at the airport staging area at slow times. There were dozens and dozens and dozens of drivers who were people that the local government wouldn't allow to drive taxis anymore.
They constantly try to tempt us back with 40% promos, but we have sworn off ever using them again.
Last time we used them, every driver allocated to pick up the order abandoned the delivery when they got to the restaurant. I assume something was going wrong at the restaurant. This happened maybe 10-15 times, to the point that we were joking that the restaurant was murdering the drivers. The app didn't offer any ability to contact customer service, as it only seemed to unlock customer service after the order is actually delivered. None of the phone numbers online would get through to a human. We didn't want to order from elsewhere in case that order ended up getting delivered. It took 5hrs (!) before the app auto-cancelled the order.
Additional to that, the drivers rarely find my house, always turn up in different vehicles to what is claimed on the app and quite frequently a different person entirely. The order time is always longer than what it claims (much like Uber itself). The app is terribly unstable and frequency crashes, displays errors or loses my basket.
Deliveroo are so much better it's not even funny.