My wife and I have been trying to do our bit to support local restaurants during the pandemic by ordering delivery. Before all this, we hardly ever had food delivered (unless you count HelloFresh, via UPS). We mostly ate stuff made at home, but we would occasionally go out to eat at a sit-down restaurant, and then sometimes if we were on the go we might grab something at the Starbucks or Panera drive-thru.
Now that we have shifted into this home delivery mode, I’m finding it quite frustrating. We live in the type of apartment complex that is incredibly ubiquitous in our metro (and probably a lot of places): a long, three-story building with entrances at each end, next to a series of low, long buildings with tenants’ garages in them. Under “delivery instructions”, I generally put something like: “Enter the EAST door, punch *5327 on the keypad to get through the inner buzzer door, then come upstairs and leave the food in front of Apt. 215 and text or call me to let me know it’s there.”
They often struggle to find the building at all, but once they do, they *always *go to the west door, and the code doesn’t work there. :smack: Then they call or text, and I try to explain it to them but it just doesn’t get through. Often this is an actual language barrier (I’m all for immigration, but if you have to interact with customers, you need to be conversant with the language most of them speak!), but one guy was clearly a native English speaker and just kind of old and out of it. I’m tipping ten bucks an order, which is a lot more than I almost ever get driving for Uber. But then I am giving them the tip before they even bring the food, due to the whole no-contact thing, so maybe that doesn’t help.
This has been my experience with several different places, and if this is just the routine experience of delivery food in America, I’m surprised people order it very much, at least in apartments (I can imagine if you have a detached home, the whole process is much easier). Especially since IMO the food doesn’t arrive in all that great a condition (probably aggravated by the delivery people’s struggles to get it to me in a timely manner). I remember ordering pizza in college and finding that held up better than the kinds of ethnic foods we are ordering now, but we don’t do pizza for health reasons.
Contact the restaurant and make a formal complaint.
It shouldn’t be that hard to follow simple instructions.
If the delivery person is not doing his job correctly his/her employer should know.
A lot of people don’t know which way is east and which way is west. Telling people to use the east door is going to be meaningless for an awful lot of people. Is there anything distinctive about the east entrance, such as a red awning the west entrance doesn’t have, or is there only one way in, and is it the first entrance you pass?
If you can add some other information so that they have something else besides “east” to go on, it would probably be very helpful.
I think that part of your problem may be the layout of your complex- I can’t get a good picture of it in my head, so I don’t think the style you are talking about is common here. Let me see if I’ve got it straight. There are two entrances to your building that a delivery driver might end up at ( by which I mean that one isn’t the exit from the basement around the back of the building and invisible to the delivery driver). Both entrances have the same street address, and it seems that some apartments are accessible only through the east entrance and others through the west entrance and/or the east and west entrances have different codes. Nope, don’t know of any apartments like that around here. Either all apartments can * be accessed by all public entrances ( with the exception of first floor spaces in some buildings that have a separate entrance) or each entrance has a different address.
Entrance A may be more convenient than entrance B for apartment 215 - but you can get to 215 from any entrance.
I live in an enormous apartment building (440 units) in Brooklyn, NY.
There are three entrances to the building, but they all feed into a central lobby, where a delivery person must go to the concierge desk and explain their delivery. The concierge will call up to the apartment, verify the delivery, and send the delivery person up.
It works pretty smoothly, although sometimes delivery people get a bit lost after getting off the elevator. The halls all look exactly the same and there are no windows in the hallways, so it’s hard to get one’s bearings.
Delivery here (and pretty much anywhere in NYC) is pretty smooth, though. NYC addresses are pretty simple, and there are very few hidden or confusing streets (this is a bit less true in the far reaches of Brooklyn and Queens, where people don’t live in huge apartment buildings, but are quite likely to live in houses, and the street layout can get a bit quirky.
But for the most part, delivery people don’t get lost, and deliveries arrive pretty smoothly.
That’s my thought as well. I can figure out which way my own house faces if I need to, by thinking about which way shadows face at certain times of day; but within a few hours I’ll forget. And I’ve lived here for nearly two decades. It’d be really hard for me to figure it out at a new location. My brain just doesn’t do well with cardinal directions.
Too many instructions. Like it your not, the delivery guy may not understand enough English to make sense of this (as you know by now).
Check how your building is situated on the street grid. If the east entrance is on or near one street and the west entrance is on or near another street, maybe you can better pinpoint the location for delivery by giving the cross street. I get food delivered to my apartment in NYC all the time and after giving my address, phone, and apartment # the one detail the place asks for, if anything, is the cross streets.
So if the address of your building is 100 Straight Dope Avenue and the east door is at 1st street and the west door is at 2nd street then say “please use door at 1st street”.
Also, isn’t there a way for you to buzz the delivery guys in? Give enough people the code for your complex and it might get into the wrong hands.
Do they have to drop it in front of the door to your individual unit? I live in a building with a secured elevator (requires a fob) and 24-hour concierge; they normally call up to the apartment to verify the visitor and then let them up. Now they’ve stopped doing that to protect themselves; we have to come down to the lobby to let our delivery people in. It’s not that big a deal. And I agree with everyone who says you’re making things needlessly difficult by calling it the “east” entrance. Just say “your left/right as you’re facing the building.”
I’ve lived and visited friends in some pretty crazy buildings. One building I was in was a merger between two buildings, so there was an apartment 147 and an apartment 147S (for south). Naturally people mixed them up all the time. I suggested just renumbering the south annex and adding a 1 to each apartment, making mine 1147 for example.
To help with your situation, see if the manager can buy two signs, one to mark East and the other West. Shouldn’t be expensive and it’ll help not only deliveries but also guests.
Yes, it has gotten worse. A restaurant that has their own driver(s) and has a limited delivery range men’s that the drivers quickly learn the quirks of each building and they’ve probably learned the gate codes. With grubhub and Uber eats, the driver may be covering the entire city.
These days most delivery is contracted out to services like GrubHub, Doordash, etc. The only places I ever see with dedicated delivery staff are pizza places and occasionally chinese restaurants.
I agree with these guys. There is a problem either with the instructions or with the layout of your complex. Couldn’t you just say to call you and you’ll come down for it?
That’s better than me, I need to call up a mental map of the city and imagine things in relation to the spot where streets change from X Road North to X Road South and Y Street East to Y Street West.
Left and Right are also an issue for me, but I can handle that by raising my hands, so it’s more generally useful. Desctriptions, names, numbers, and landmarks are all way better.
Part of that is from living in Asheville. It’s just not laid out in way conducive to keeping directions straight.
I live west of Denver on an almost perfect rectilinear grid with the added bonus of consistently having mountain visible to the west. I’ve found that pretty much everyone here has pretty good idea of the compass directions all the time including my wife who never had any idea which way was which when we lived in Chapel Hill, NC.
I will echo this as well. This is where most of the problem arises. My apartment complex has only one entrance, so it’s generally easier. But even then some delivery people just miss the gate code box (it’s a little farther back than usual so can kind of see it).
Once in, they basically can handle it since I put on the info line “2nd building on the left, 1st breezeway, 2nd floor”.
But in speaking to delivery drivers, delivering to apartment complexes has always been a royal pain (a lot of apt complexes don’t label their buildings all that great). So the hassle goes both ways.
So, I have a few thoughts as one who has driven for Uber Eats. None of this general stuff may fit your situation, but here is what I’ve noticed:
In the entire city of San Antonio, there may be five (5) apartment complexes who have decent building number signs which can be seen at night. The number of signs hidden behind trees, placed in odd locations, completely unlit, and printed with dark lettering is vast. Wanna help? Tell me where to find the “5” on building 5. Is it on one side and not the other? Is it near the entranceway? Is it black? Orange?
EWNS directions I don’t have a problem with (I mean, for God’s sake, we are carrying a map!), it’s ‘right/left’ which I can’t stand. ‘Hey, lady, your fucking building is surrounded by the parking lot, so which fuckin’ left?’
The door thing is likely because that’s the first door the driveway takes them to. My hunch.
It’s been busy as fuck since all this started, and it is paying far better than the driving ever did. Wow!
We’re in a condo complex with a security gate. I’d say 95% of all our deliveries go fine. But every once in a while a delivery guy/gal will go in a different gate than I specified. We have signage on the street side of the buildings, but didn’t have signage inside the complex. More than once someone tried to give us somebody else’s food because they came to our unit number, but it was for a different building address. Finally, they’ve added some interior signage. Though if the food smelled especially good I was sometimes tempted to just grab it.
But a good part of the time, I’ve been told how good my instructions are. Oh, and I never use cardinal directions.
