Seamless: Local Food Delivery

Seamless is a great and dependable delivery service, but one aspect of the service that makes me uncomfortable is that the drivers often seem to feel that they need to photograph me holding my food in order to verify that they have made the delivery. I am a woman who lives alone and I am extremely uncomfortable with being photographed without my consent, especially at night, by men I do not know. I believe the app/service should do a stronger job communicating with drivers about what is and is not required, if I am correct in assuming customers are not required to be photographed by drivers in order to receive deliveries. If customers are required to be photographed by drivers, I believe this should be made clear at the beginning of the delivery process, and customers should be given other options to verify they have received their order if they are uncomfortable with being photographed. While not all drivers take photos without permission, many do so and repeatedly which leads me to believe this is a wider issue with the app/service and the way drivers are trained. I would greatly appreciate if this could be addressed as I do not consent to be photographed. I often order food when I am alone at night, and I do not believe being photographed when I am uncomfortable with this practice should be a requirement to receive food orders.

Update: distance sort was fixed. App quality has generally been a mix of forward and backwards steps over the years and I usually just deal with it until the next update fixes it, but breaking distance sort is a non-starter. In a recent change, I couldn’t see an option on the web site for distance at all was it removed, sorting by distance in the app returns horribly broken results, a diner a block away is now preceded by 261 other restaurants, it’s almost like a random bucketed list of restaurants now than anything I can reliably use, of note the default Recommended sort order was never really useful here either. Not having distance work when ordering food in NYC is a horrific decision that completely ignores how this city works, anything greater than 1 mile away means it might as well be 2 hours away if the restaurant even takes the order. Also makes it much harder to support your local neighborhood places when they’re suddenly so far down the list you end up thinking they’ve closed because normally you’d have stopped scrolling ages ago. The delivery people here walk, bike, e-bike, scooter/moped, they’re not driving as that would be insane, distance is just different here. Smaller cities I get it, but broken distance sort in NYC makes me think whoever pushed these changes through has never lived here. This has broken the service.

Uhh, this app is great. I started using it cause I thought DoorDash was too expensive. However, while trying to order Taco Bell I noticed the $4 delivery fee, service fees costing more than taxes, and that big fat tip. I find it quite ridiculous that I’m paying $36 for something that will cost me $17 to go get myself. Why would I pay more in service fees than I’m paying my own country? There should be a service fee flat rate of like $1. I also don’t see why I’m paying a delivery fee that isn’t going to the driver. It’s not like Seamless is paying for my driver’s transportation. My drivers usually come on bikes or little mopeds. I know good and well y’all are not giving them that money. And if y’all aren’t doing the delivery yourself there’s no reason you should be paid for their work. Unless you are using that money specifically for them. That goes for seamless, Taco Bell, or whoever needs to hear it. Sometimes I don’t have it on me to tip. Sometimes I don’t have the money. And the drivers are furious w that. So maybe they should be paid more? Enough so they don’t feel they’re living off of tips. Also, the Taco Bell items on Seamless are more expensive than they are on DoorDash. That’s weird!