Did they ban your card and your account after that in retaliation?

Surprisingly they did not. Though I heard that is what typically happens. Maybe they just forgot.

Have you spent a significant amount with them? Odds are they have different rules for big-spenders versus infrequent customers.

Account has been open for years, though I’ve been using it sparingly over the last 2

Our company doesn't ban after the first chargeback. If you keep making chargebacks though eventually you will be downranked in our risk model until you cannot buy from us, but you will never be manually banned unless you are a credit card fraudster doing something annoying. I would be surprised if Uber, a company that has put a lot of effort into standard credit card anti-fraud procedure would ban after the first chargeback. Doing so is an explicitly hostile, anti-consumer, and petty action that doesn't improve your business.

Which is sensible. Bu I have heard anecdotes from other services of 1-event termination polices, for example ad words fraud resulting in termination of all Google services.

From what I can tell, this kind of gaslighting mistreatment has become common in this market. The delivery app race to the bottom has nearly brought us to that final destination.

We've used the "Caviar" delivery app since moving to SF, since the deliveries are always direct so the food shows up fresh and hot. Caviar was bought by DoorDash a while ago, and DoorDash heavily promotes the "direct delivery" feature, specifically upcharges all Caviar orders for the direct delivery, and will even notify you that fee is being increased because a restaurant is more than 15ish minutes away.

At some point in the last few months DoorDash simply stopped upholding that claim despite billing for it. If they are sufficiently busy, your order will be merged with a regular DoorDash order and go to one or more other addresses. It's a remarkably brash example of corporate gaslighting to see a delivery screen proudly advertising that "your order is going directly to you" literally directly underneath text that says "your dasher is completing another order nearby first."[0]

Each time this happens I open a chat with support and they explain ah yes, direct delivery is guaranteed on caviar, but sometimes your delivery will be batched instead. Then they give me a credit. For some funny reason DoorDash does not automate the process of refunding the fee specifically advertised for direct delivery when they opt to just not deliver directly anyway.

That's not even "weird" behavior, it's just blatantly false advertising. How come they can get away with this?

[0]https://i.redd.it/nnr9vo75enab1.jpg

That sounds like a future class action lawsuit where everyone gets a $5 coupon, and the initial complainant and the lawyers get millions. Maybe if you get a law firm to go after them, you'll get more than $5?

I think you are misunderstanding the screenshot you shared. What the screenshot shows is that your driver has accepted the order you placed but is currently in the process of finishing a previous delivery, similar to an Uber driver accepting a ride while they are driving someone else to their destination. It doesn’t mean your order is being “merged”, once your driver gets to your order they will go directly from the restaurant to you.

I am not misunderstanding the screenshot I shared. When I took that screenshot the driver had already visited the restaurant and picked up my order, and then gotten off the highway a couple stops early for this delivery. Hence why I had reopened the app, I had seen them picking up the order 20+ minutes earlier and was wondering where it was.

This has happened to me multiple times, and when I posted that elsewhere online I confirmed it happens to other people.

Like I said in the comment, I’ve brought this up to support each time it happens and they’ve described it as standard practice for DoorDash to violate its promises and then refunded me the delivery fee. I am truly confused how you read that comment and came away with this theory - do you work with DoorDash? Can you ask someone there to stop doing this?

Are these services really needed in SF? I live in a smaller city than SF and have plenty of restaurants that either I live close enough to where I can pick up my food without a problem or handle their own delivery with an advertised flat fee and sometimes a minimum. I can't imagine it being much different in SF.

I got a doordash gift card for Christmas, so I had to try it out. The whole pricing scheme seemed silly and the price was considerably cheaper ordering direct from the restaurant. I mean it sucks, yeah, but this is probably an easy service to skip on.

I live in an area of Bayview where the only restaurants open after 5pm are a 30m walk across a risky pedestrian intersection. There’s something to be said for the cost of rent vs these other addon expenses with living in such an area I’m sure. We try to cook at home a lot. But, the only grocery stores are the outlet bargain mart or getting on the highway.