How likely is Uber to ban me if I do a credit-card charge back for food that was never delivered?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So, I ordered some food, UberEats driver never delivers it to me, but I get charged money for it anyway. Numerous sessions of bringing this up with UberEats customer support always gave the same reply, “We are unable to give a refund.”

I’m thinking of doing a credit-card chargeback at my bank to get the money back (it’s not that the money sum was large, but rather, more about the principle of the matter.) But I heard that Uber usually bans customers (from both UberEats, and Uber rides) in retaliation if they do a chargeback for such things. Has anyone here had this experience and can comment?

The Doorman cometh
2

Not completely. I recently ordered from Dunkin and used Grybhub for the first time.
It wasn’t delivered.
My bank refunded my money.
Never had a credit card.
Not sure why you’d want to use Uber again.

3

@SuntanLotion … Any given delivery can go wrong. The idea you’d quit using a worldwide transportation company becsuse one driver one time misdelivered or stole your food out of the literally millions of rides and deliveries done every day makes zero sense.

I have no advice either way for the OP.

4

What? What kind of crap attitude is that (on their part)?! :thinking: Were you able to try to escalate to a manager at all?

Does the UberEats app not have proof of delivery…?

If their customer service really is that bad, maybe consider switching to Doordash & Lyft instead? Both those companies have handled 100% of my complaints (4-6 over the years) to my satisfaction, each and every time.

In particular, Doordash has always over-refunded order issues (misdeliveries, missing items, etc.) on the first try, with minimal verification. I’ve gotten more than a few free meals, and quite a number of free items in meals, from various complaints. Sometimes it was because the driver went to the wrong place, sometimes it was due to restaurant fuck-ups, sometimes it was just due to a missing add-on for an item or whatever. They always took care of me easily & immediately, like a partial refund for small orders, or a complete refund + additional future credit for bigger mistakes. I just asked directly and nicely and they were always happy to comply.

It’s hard to believe UberEats would be that much worse, to the point of refusing to help even after several attempts. How would they have stayed competitive through these years…?

If that happened to me, I’d definitely charge it back and then ban Uber and UberEats from my spending. Fuck 'em if that’s their attitude.

But if you travel internationally and can’t use Lyft (they don’t have a global presence like Uber does), that might be harder. If it was a small order, I’d just suck it up and switch to Doordash for food going forward. If it was a bigger order, I might try even harder to push for a proper refund (and then still switch to Doordash afterward).

Some companies do ban customers for doing chargebacks. There are many anecdotes online about Uber doing the same.

But I’m really surprised that they don’t just refund you. A single order refund is nothing compared to making you a habitual repeat customer.

5

On first reading the story, I assumed the idea of possibly abandoning Uber was not due to the original problem, but to the piss-poor response to the customer about that problem. That’s still my reaction.

6

One additional tactic you could try is to see if your state has some sort of consumer protection bureau. File a claim with them and have them investigate the company. Sometimes this lights a fire under the butts of otherwise unresponsive companies.

Uber might still retaliate, but maybe less automatically (and your state might have laws against that)? That’s a much less common (but sometimes more effective) approach than a simple chargeback, which they routinely see and presumably have a standard ban policy for.

7

Yeah, exactly. Any reasonable double-sided service like that (where they have to both service customers and their delivery contractors) would have this sort of thing figured out.

In Doordash, for example, drivers must take and upload a pic of successful deliveries. On top of that, as a customer, I can optionally require that a PIN (like the last 4 of my phone number) be provided to the driver to prove that the delivery happened.

Mistakes and thefts happen from time to time — it’s inevitable with millions of orders and thousands of restaurants and drivers. It’d be no big deal if they simply took care of you for those rare fuck-ups.

I’m really surprised that UberEats doesn’t do that. Especially since it’s their official policy to provide refunds for missing deliveries: Managing refunds for missing or incorrect orders | Merchants & Restaurants | Uber Help

There’s even a specific form for it (OP, did you try this when it first happened?): Wrong or missing items | Uber Eats | Uber Help

Maybe the OP just had a string of bad luck with several incompetent customer service agents in a row…? I’d imagine it’d be a high turnover job with minimal training and accountability… =/ It certainly isn’t the official corporate policy. I wonder why they refused to follow it… this can’t be their normal way of doing things or they’d have long gone out of business.

Is there more to the story, maybe…?

8

I have a negative view to complaining to a government consumer protection bureau: these have limited staff and you should not be taking up that limited staff time while others suffer from massively greater problems.

9

What? Isn’t that their whole reason for existing? You pay taxes so that agency can protect you against fraudulent merchants. That’s their whole point.

If they’re overloaded, they can triage and respond accordingly. Worst case, they can delay or deny handling your request. But it doesn’t hurt to ask. And a pattern of such complaints might invite further regulatory action even if a single missed order doesn’t.

Certainly I don’t expect them to expend the same amount of resources on a $50 complaint vs a $5000 one. But $50 shouldn’t be altogether ignored either.

Big companies spend gazillions of dollars manipulating governments against the public and consumer interest. The consumer bureaus, in the states where they’re actually empowered, are one of the very few ways for an average household to fight back in some small and meaningful way.

10

This doesn’t answer the OPs question but I would definitely complain to the restaurant. If they get enough complaints about Uber, they will stop working with them. That is the sort of thing that gets Uber’s attention.

11

Even if (in this case) it wasn’t the restaurant’s fault at all? They have no control over which driver picks up an order, and whether it gets stolen. They don’t even have a direct financial relationship with the customer in a situation like this; they’re just kinda a “sub-contractor” of UberEats.

I guess if a lot of customers of that restaurant complained, they might de-list themselves… but it’d take quite the statistical anomaly for a single restaurant in a particular area to get that many UberEats driver complaints…

12

From what I get (YouTube) the delivery persons are ass-y!!Asses if they don’t get a nice tip from your order,

Are you tipping?

13

Yes, I am tipping. But wouldn’t the driver not know the tip amount until or after they’ve delivered the food?

14

Quitting because one delivery went wrong makes no sense. But quitting because one delivery went wrong and then the company refused to make any effort to make it right makes plenty of sense. If people don’t take action like that, then the company has no incentive to ever do legitimate business.

15

Yes, they refused numerous times.

16

In my neck o’ the woods, Uber Eats requires a PIN at delivery.

17

I don’t use doordash. But I do get packages delivered by Amazon, UPS, FedEx, and several no-name equivalents. Many of which do the upload pic of delivery thing.

But if they deliver to the wrong place, take a pic of that wrong place, and upload it, when I call to complain I didn’t get my package the answer is “We see the pix of your delivery. It was delivered. Tough.”

The delivery services do not assume responsibility to actually get the correct thing to the correct place.

Really annoying.

18

Capitalism in this country has become, “get away with as much as you can so you can make as much money as possible any way that you can”. This is one example of that. Consumers as a conglomerate have a tremendous amount of power if they choose to use it. Unfortunately, and much like energy, “potential” means nothing unless it is transformed into “kinetic”.

If people in general simply stopped using “Uber Eats” because of that unfair policy, that unfair policy would change out of economic necessity. I would never use them again but, in truth, I would never use any 3rd party delivery service.

19

Yeah I used Ubereats to get food and it never got delivered, and when I demanded a refund they gave the same excuse saying they can’t refund me. I called my bank and refuted the charge, now I can’t use UberEats or plain Uber until I pay what they think I owe of $90~. It’s been 4 years and I still cannot use that account.

And for anyone wondering the deliver just went into limbo, I called the store and they said it was still sitting on their counter hours after the app said it was delivered.

20

I also don’t use food delivery services, I would rather get it myself (it arrives still relatively hot, and I always know where it is). But then I’m retired with lots of free time.

I do get a lot of package deliveries, and I must be among the rare lucky breed (thanks cold and uncaring universe) that virtually* never gets it wrong. Also, they don’t sit on the porch for long, and once there they are pretty hidden well from the street, so I don’t believe we’ve ever been the victim of porch pirates. This always makes me wonder whether mis-deliveries and porch piracies are as common as perusal of social media seems to imply. But maybe I really am just dumb lucky.

*”virtually” in this case meaning that I can’t remember it ever happening since we have lived here, which is the span of time during which probably 99% of my package deliveries have happened.