Every few weeks I get an email from Uber Eats with a generous-looking promotional code, to the tune of 25% off. If I line up an order on the website and enter the promotional code, no discount appears on the order. If I refresh the page and re-enter the code, it tells me That code has already been used.

This has happened to me 3 times now, if I recall correctly.

It's not as if this can be blamed on my using a peculiar browser. Last time this happened I was using Edge, with no plugins or funky configuration changes.

This has repeated at least six times. I'm just morbidly curious how long this cycle will go.

Submitted a request for a quote from a moving company, and included the specific date of move in the request. They called me, gave me a quote, but I opted to go with someone else. Moving date came and went, we got settled in, and about a week later the emails came in.

I would get one email per day informing me that they hadn't heard from me yet and needed to hear from me ASAP if I was still interested. They proceeded to include a comment that said they would not stop emailing me until they heard from me. Each email also appeared to be hand-typed by this person every day.

I wrote an email asking them if they even bothered to notice that my move date had come and gone, but stopped myself because, like you, I was morbidly curious. It took them three months of ignoring their, "We won't stop until you call us," emails for them to finally stop.

I realize that maybe the person was forced to do it by their boss, and people hate being ghosted, but it was so far out of my idea of social norms that I didn't want to talk to them even more.

If they're not taking the hint after 10 calls with no response, what are they thinking? How far will it escalate?

If I was just busy for a few days and wasn't ghosting them, what do they think they've accomplished?

The salesman was ~half my age, and I knew someone ~twice my age who had bought and serviced a car there and simply said they had no such experience, like I had.

I guess that older people do feel it's more of a faux pas to not return a call. But it's never been normal to go nuclear even so.

I have wondered if the reason for weird stuff at car dealers is simply that, with a commission-based position, you can basically let anybody who thinks they can do it try, and some of them are going to be weird overconfident people.

But I also figure that as a rule, really weird "customer service" is probably management coercion for some stupid reason.

Possibly forever. This is the Bed, Bath, and Beyond advertising model.

Flooding your in/mail-box with coupons is a way of keeping the brand fresh in your mind. Considering the worthlessness of the coupons, and the small number of people who use them, it's more than worth the expense.

Are there a bunch of restrictions? $20 off sure sounds pretty good.

At first I figured it was a bug, after a couple more rounds I wondered if they counted on me deciding “whatever I’m hungry”.

Had similar issues with coupon codes from other non food services too…

How on earth did that make it all the way into the app.

You weren't kidding. Fraud doesn't get more blatant than this

Besides they're as likely to tell the developers to code it up so they could do this in theory and then turn it on themselves.

Nobody's absolving the managers or owners from their part in this issue. The point is that the guy with the mortgage decided that an extra room in his house or a bigger backyard is worth stealing from others. This isn't some ethically grey area, its outright theft that the engineer enabled.

> Besides they're as likely to tell the developers to code it up so they could do this in theory and then turn it on themselves.

I've never worked at Uber or any other big corp so I can't speak to how they do things there. This seems quite probable, but still doesn't completely absolve the engineer from responsibility. All it does is reduce their share of blame.

Whether consciously or not, scapegoating their minions does exactly that.

This is a pervasive feature of American culture where the most guilty parties with the most power who have the least defensible motives use FUD to spread the blame around and it actually works. People buy this shit and even internalize it - something this thread is a living testament to.

This is the same shit that happened when the CEO of Boeing tried to blame the dead pilots and subsequently tried to throw his engineers under the bus and each time where there was even a shade of doubt a ready cohort of people stood ready to defend the self serving FUD he pumped out.

>I've never worked at Uber or any other big corp so I can't speak to how they do things there.

Only at small companies have I ever been asked to build $evilfeature. At big companies I get asked to build $featurethatcouldbeabused. The bigger the impact and the more morally wrong it is the more feature indirection there will be.

Either way it's good to know that when somebody with the power to deprive me of my sole income asks me to build a kitchen knife they intend to stab someone with there's a willing crowd on hacker news ready to claim that they dont get to hog all of the blame because I technically could have refused to make that kitchen knife and joined the unemployment queue.

Normally I'd tend to believe it was a mistake, but after several reports and their lax attitude to them it's clear it works as intended, at least for now.

I guess this is your choice but I find it unethical. If you're a good engineer at Uber chances are 100% you can get a job at any other high-paying organization, so why choose to participate in this scheme?

As for the core of your point, frankly, half of the Silicon Valley would be jobless. Not just Uber programmers who already proved who they are by developing Greyball. The whole business of Facebook and Google is centered around tracking people. Amazon will happily accept fake reviews and products as long as customers pay they're happy. Netflix officially says they're competing with the time their customers use for sleeping. Apple will do everything to make their products environment unfriendly, unupgradeable, with ton of additional accessories produced only to increase their profit. So really, I understand your idealism, but the ship has already sailed and you can call yourself lucky if you can work on a product and for a company that are 100% ethical.

However, in this case, things are quite black and white. Someone pays money for food, they don't get any and then you keep the money anyway. Calling it anything other than theft is being delusional. If they did partial refunds or they only gave uber eats credit instead of money then this case would be in the same bucket as the ones you mentioned in your comment.

Thankfully my company isn’t scum of the earth, but it’s easy to see how multiple people assumed the features were being used for good intention, and a non-engineer used it to make a few extra bucks.

Is there some limitation to this approach that I'm not aware of?

They essentially ghosted me support wise so I did a chargeback. They then banned me from buying games. It took > 100 days to resolve it. Never buy hardware from oculus/facebook directly.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14545053

In an ideal world.

Your movies/books should be local. Your apps still exist on your local android phone.

Amazon seems to have customer service same as Apple but Google and Uber? Those places laugh at you when you need support..

This makes sense, as the feedback loop from how you feel about their product to how much revenue they make is immediate, unlike Google. If Uber were to piss me off enough, I wouldn't think twice about just opening Lyft every time I needed a car instead of Uber. I'm not very price-sensitive, but even my price-sensitive friends find it too much of a burden to check both options every time they call a car. This means we're all locked into an equilibrium where we spend large amounts of money with a single company, but can shift into a different equilibrium for very minor reasons. Hell, I think the last time I switched was because I got tired of all the little usability papercuts the Lyft app is filled with.

Interesting, this makes total sense