

"I was just dumbfounded," said Chris Payton—but he's not the only victim of food delivery theft.
July 15, 2019, 6:46pm
barbecue babyback ribs
Photo: Getty Images

"Making your life easier is our top priority," food delivery app DoorDash promises on its website. "Five-star service gets you what you need, right when you need it." That's admirable and everything, but it's one thing to put those words in a sans-serif font beside a stock photo of a presumably satisfied customer in her pajamas, and another to actually, you know, put them into practice.

One DoorDash delivery person didn't exactly make Chris Payton's life easier, not when he opened his order and discovered that the driver (or Dasher, to use the DoorDash vocab) had helped herself to a couple of his barbecue ribs, leaving behind a half-empty carton and a set of teeth marks.

According to FOX43, Payton DoorDashed (yeah, it's a verb now) an order of ribs from Dickey's Barbecue Pit in York, Pennsylvania, with the not-unreasonable assumption that it would arrive uneaten. But when he opened the carton, two of the six ribs were gone, and some of the remaining ribs had obviously been bitten.

"I was just dumbfounded. I was really shocked that something like that would happen," he said. “I guess she just pulls over to the side of the road and just decides to have herself a little snack before she delivers."

The station contacted Dickey's Barbecue Pit and, although the employee who took Payton's order wouldn't speak on camera, he or she did say that the restaurant had some previous issues, plural, with the same DoorDash driver. Although Payton received a refund from DoorDash, he hopes that maybe that Dasher will be reprimanded for allegedly reaching into more than one takeout container. (VICE has reached out to DoorDash for comment but, as of this writing, we have not heard back.)

It's not impossible to imagine that a driver might help his or her self to a couple of fries from the order that we were too lazy to go pick up ourselves, but delivery app customers like to believe that won’t happen (or, at the very least, that if it does, it won’t be obvious).

It's not an issue that's limited to DoorDash; in February, a Georgia woman accused an UberEats driver of helping herself to "all of [the] meat" in her order from a restaurant called April's Place. When Vanessa Harrell opened her to-go container, she was disappointed with what she'd received, and she sent a picture of the sad pile of rice to April's. "I called the restaurant [...] and the lady that made my food said, 'the driver ate all of your meat and some of your yams too,'" she wrote on Facebook. "MY TRUST IS GONE FOREVER!!!"

Last October, an UberEats customer in Florida suggested that her driver just kept the entire $60 order that she was waiting for. Angel Diaz told WFLA that she got a text message from Glory Days Grill that her food had been picked up, but her order was then canceled and her dinner never showed. Neither did the driver—and she says it's because he used a loophole that allowed UberEats drivers to keep food if they "tried"—and that's an ultra-sarcastic set of quotes—to deliver the order, but no one came to the door or answered the phone.

"They know how to steal your food,” Diaz said. “And Uber Eats is highly aware of it, and they’re doing nothing about it.” (UberEats' own guidelines warn drivers that they'll be terminated if it's discovered that they're picking up food orders but not delivering them "in full.")

And in January 2018, a Domino's delivery guy in British Columbia, Canada was caught on camera as he helped himself to some of the toppings on the pizza he was carrying. A concierge in the customer's building happened to look at the security monitors when the driver crouched down, opened the pizza box, and picked a couple of toppings off the pie. He immediately notified the resident about what she was about to eat. “Who likes to eat used pizza, right?" he asked.

Who likes to eat any used food? Maybe it's time to learn how to cook. Or at least to give frozen meals another go.