When Orders Go Wrong

So I'd like to talk about an issue that has a huge effect on us drivers. Occasionally, after arriving at a restaurant and letting staff know that I’m there to collect an order, they say “sorry, but the customer cancelled, you need to cancel it”.

This creates a significant problem because asking the driver to cancel the order does not actually remove the order from the system.

It drives me crazy when they say this, it really does, as someone who knows the correct process.

This is not the correct process, and this doesn’t actually cancel the order on the system. I have a plausible theory that the reason they do this is because they don’t want to spend 5 minutes waiting to get through to Deliveroo to cancel it, due to being in a busy restaurant environment. In other words, it’s not important to them.

However, these workers do not seem to understand the significance of taking money out of other workers' pockets. Sometimes these staff members keep this up all day, probably until someone at Deliveroo notices the order hasn’t been completed.

It could also be that they genuinely believe the order has been dealt with once the driver cancels it. The problem is that the driver cancellation option generally removes the assignment from that driver, rather than cancelling the order itself.

What that button does is put the order back on offer for other drivers. This means that while the issue remains unresolved, multiple drivers can be sent to collect an order that no longer exists.

As a result, several drivers may waste time travelling to the same restaurant, only to be told exactly the same thing.

In case you’re still confused, remember the important detail: we’re paid per drop. We’re also not paid for the time travelling to the restaurant. By the time we’ve travelled, locked our bike, and entered the restaurant, it’s usually been more than 5 minutes.

Now, you might be thinking, surely 5 minutes doesn’t make a difference? Well yes, it’s a small difference in this case in terms of our earnings, but what often happens is the same order will go out to you, the driver who just cancelled, again. Wasting even more of your time.

A few wasted minutes on one order may not sound like much, but when the same problem affects multiple drivers throughout the day, the lost time adds up very quickly.

This is why it’s really important that there’s an understanding between Deliveroo and the restaurant that asking the driver to cancel the order is not the correct process.

I can see an obvious cause for the initial confusion though. The food isn’t being delivered anymore, therefore the smartest thing for the driver to do is cancel it as soon as that fact becomes available.

Perhaps the staff see the driver cancel and simply assume everything is resolved. That would be an understandable assumption, but unfortunately it isn't how the system works. The system just sees: driver cancelled, therefore driver does not want to deliver the order.

Regardless of the annoyance, it usually is just a simple case of moving on and not thinking about the time we’ve wasted. In fact I made a solid rule for courier work: whatever nonsense happens, don’t let it bother you, because it is ALWAYS going to happen. Since I made that rule, I see irritated drivers all the time and I just think “just shrug it off bro... it’s part of the job” haha.

There is another issue that can look very similar from the driver's perspective. Sometimes the order hasn't been cancelled at all. Instead, another driver has already collected the food, or the order has been stolen. When restaurant staff tell drivers to simply cancel the order, it becomes difficult to distinguish between a genuine customer cancellation and an order that has already left the premises.

Clearer reporting options could help identify the real cause of the problem and prevent more drivers from being sent unnecessarily.

I’ll tell you one experience that really changed how I do orders for Deliveroo though. This one is a scam in my opinion.

Deliveroo rarely offers a job from far away, perhaps around 2 miles away. Never do those. I travelled those two miles, went into the restaurant, ready to collect the order. So I’d spent more than 15 minutes just getting there.

By the time I was told that it had been cancelled by the customer, it had nearly been half an hour.

You’d assume that I’d still get paid, right?

I travelled that far, and the drop was actually really close, so most of the distance of that job would have been the collection journey if I did get it done.

It did not get paid.

It was a double drop however. It was worth around £8, and the order I got paid for was worth £3. So while I did get paid something, that £3 only covered the short drop that I was able to make, while the cancelled order, worth £5, was simply unpaid.

So how do we fix that?

Well, if you’re going to send a driver two miles to collect an order, that time should 100% be paid regardless of the later outcome.

The driver has still invested time, travelled the distance, and incurred costs in order to attempt the collection.

That’s real time and resources that Deliveroo are having us waste.

The amount of compensation should reflect how much work the driver has already put into the order.

Once a driver has committed significant time travelling to a collection point, some level of compensation seems reasonable even if the order cannot ultimately be completed.

So my lesson from this was simply: do not go out of your way to collect an order. Period.