Thursday, February 15, 2018

Old City Market & Oven Now Delivers

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That is they are now partnering with various delivery services. It's a bit of an experiment to to see which arrangement(s) work(s) best for customers. As Old City Market and Oven (522 K Street NE) put it in a blog post "[s]ome may have higher delivery fees (fees that are charged both to you and to us), and others may have less responsive drivers." One of those delivery companies is Chow Now, which charges a higher fee than some others, but also allows you to order beer and wine with your food. The other two companies currently listed on OCMAO's website are Postmates and Door Dash, but they are apparently also working with GrubHub and UberEats. Because the market is still shopping around, they are asking customers who test drive the delivery to let them know what did or didn't work well.

8 comments:

Annoyingmous said...

Door Dash is a nightmare. GrubHub is almost as bad. I haven't used any of the other services, but UberEats is affiliated with Uber, which means it's evil. So that leaves ChowNow and Postmates.

inked said...

I’ve had generally decent luck with GrubHub, which is the only one of those services I’ve tried. I miss H Delivers.

Annoyingmous said...

In the past I had good luck with GrubHub. I've used them frequently when I've been sick or working from home and unable to leave the house.

But in the last year, I've tried to use them five times, and three of those times they abruptly cancelled my order after it was over an hour later than the originally forecast delivery time. The last time, when I'd ordered from Ben's Upstairs, they cancelled the order after it was very late. When I called them, they claimed that Ben's Upstairs had refused to make the order and they'd been on the phone with them for a long time trying to convince them to do so. I called Ben's Upstairs, who said "that's a flat-out lie. We never refused to make any order; our equipment was broken and we never received the order. We told them that a while ago; they should have had us as 'unavailable'. I don't know why they took so long to tell you the order couldn't be fulfilled, and I don't know why they lied to you about why it happened." I called GrubHub again, and they looked into it, and came back and told me "mea culpa, our telephone rep lied to you." Their attempt to make things right was to give me $10 credit on a future order. Given that three of my past five orders hadn't been delivered, and given their horrible customer service, why in the hell would I ever make another order on which to use that credit? And by that time, it was too late to do much of anything except heat up a can of Campbell's Chunky soup.

inked said...

Annoyingmous,

That's pretty damn terrible. It also reminds me of why I really miss Eli Carryout, which was basically a life-safer on occasions like the ones you describe where I was basically too sick to cook anything or go anywhere but could stumble down the block or order delivery if truly necessary.

Anonymous said...

Is it me being paranoid that I don't trust strangers bringing me food? There is no stopping them from poisoning my food.

Annoyingmous said...

Anon 10:40 -- In what circumstance is that *not* true? Unless you grow/raise all your own food, and possibly even then.

Tom said...

UberEATS is fantastic and I enjoy supporting the many people who work for them.

Annoyingmous said...

The problem with UberEATS is that they're associated with Uber, who's trying to compete with Monsanto for the title of most unethical corporation.