No such thing as a..

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Gob
Posts: 33642
Joined: Tue Apr 06, 2010 8:40 am

No such thing as a..

Post by Gob »

What were they thinking?

That’s what customers, restaurants, and delivery workers want to know after a surprise promotion by food delivery platform Grubhub went badly awry – and proved there’s really no such thing as a free lunch.

Grubhub’s plan was ambitious: to feed everyone in New York City and the surrounding Tri-State area for free, during lunch hours on Tuesday. The platform cited a survey it had conducted that found that 69% of working New Yorkers said they had skipped lunch.

But that’s exactly what the stunt ended up doing, after Grubhub’s platform crashed as New Yorkers rushed to place orders. The fiasco left restaurants overwhelmed, delivery workers frustrated, and many customers with empty stomachs.

Christopher Krautler, a spokesperson for Grubhub, said the platform was averaging up to 6,000 orders a minute, which “absolutely blew away all expectations”. Krautler acknowledged that the demand “initially caused a temporary delay in our system and some users experienced an error message with their code, but that was quickly rectified”, adding the platform fulfilled more than 450,000 lunch orders connected to the promotion.

But many users never saw their food after spending money, with some kept hungry and waiting for hours by the app’s promises that the food would soon arrive.

The app was offering $15 off of any order made in the New York City area between 11am and 2pm. Restaurants across the city were inundated. Fee Bakhtiar, a general manager at Jajaja Mexicana in West Village, called it a “shitshow”. When she opened the restaurant at 11.30am, she was stunned to find 40 orders from Grubhub already waiting in the queue.

“I was like, wait, this can’t be real. And then all of a sudden, it was just kind of like, ‘Oh well, I guess it is real.’”

Bakhtiar said Jajaja West Village, which focuses on takeout, was able to fulfill all of its Grubhub orders – which suddenly disappeared at 2pm. “But it would’ve just been nice if we had a heads up.” She told the Guardian that neither she nor the managers at Jajaja’s other locations in New York received an email or a mobile notification from the platform warning that the promotion would happen.

But many restaurants were unable to cope. Megan Benson, a worker at a fast casual chicken restaurant in Brooklyn, said that the flood of lunch orders created shortages that spilled over into dinnertime, turning the kitchen into a “war zone”.

The restaurant is “typically busy from the moment we open the door, and nobody told us about this this free lunch thing”, she said. “Normally it’s a tight ship in there, but we couldn’t keep up. We had no time to restock anything, so half the stuff was missing or sold out.”

“The phone wouldn’t stop ringing because people were calling mad as hell to tell us that they were missing items, or they just never got their food picked up, so the Grubhub delivery guys would have to keep coming back.

“Eventually my co-workers just just got irate with phones constantly being shoved in their faces. Believe me when I say fights almost broke out.”

Toward the end of the shift, the kitchen was down to just Benson and another co-worker, who struggled to stay afloat.

“It was just too much, and I had to keep reminding myself out loud, ‘I’m just one person,’ because I had to take the orders and make the orders while my co-worker did all the overflowing Grubhub orders. There was nowhere to put them, either.”
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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Long Run
Posts: 6717
Joined: Sat Apr 17, 2010 2:47 pm

Re: No such thing as a..

Post by Long Run »

I'd be happy if they could just figure out how to reliably deliver to our house on a normal day.

Will this be a promotion that is taught in marketing classes under the category "It seemed like a good idea at the time"?

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