A DoorDash delivery man was caught taking a sip of a milkshake before delivering it to a 14-year-old boy in Stockton, California.
The boy’s family found out the man had sampled the treat after they reviewed their security camera footage. Upon ringing the doorbell, the man is seen sipping up some of the milkshake through the straw. The door opens and Rishab Malhotra looks happy to receive the treat, in footage obtained by Fox 40.
The next day, Rishab’s father told him to review the security camera footage from the previous night.
Rishab had a visceral reaction to what he saw.
“Then my dad told me to check out the video from last night and once I checked it out I [watched] five, six times,” Rishab told Fox 40. “I felt really disgusted about what had happened.”
Rishab’s father was shocked, too.
“I looked at it, ‘Hey, the guy who delivered the food was sipping out of my son’s Cold Stone,'” said Rajesh Malhotra, via Fox 40. “[I thought], ‘Whoa, that’s crazy.’ I mean, how can someone jeopardize the product like that, especially the food?”
Rajesh doesn’t know how he feels about ordering food to his home again.
“We have trust between the company and the drivers,” Rajesh Malhotra added. “Once that trust is broken, we can’t go back.”
He said he contacted DoorDash two weeks ago and sent them a copy of the video, but he has yet to hear back from the company. He wants an apology and a promise that the company will ensure that the food for future customers will not get the same treatment.
Fox 40 also reached out to the company and has not heard back.
DoorDash Responds?
We’re disappointed to see a recent incident that fell short of the customer experience we strive for. We reached out to this customer immediately after being notified and have deactivated the Dasher from our platform for failing to maintain our standards of food safety.
— DoorDash Help (@DoorDash_Help) March 30, 2019
The Twitter account of DoorDash Help recently tweeted a message that seems to refer to the milkshake incident.
“We’re disappointed to see a recent incident that fell short of the customer experience we strive for. We reached out to this customer immediately after being notified and have deactivated the Dasher from our platform for failing to maintain our standards of food safety,” it read.
That dasher made the rest of us look bad. Not good for the company.
— Kaboom Social Media (@kb54927) March 30, 2019
No. 2 Food Delivery Service
San Francisco based startup DoorDash is the No. 2 food delivery service company in the United States. Its market share has risen while No. 1 service Grubhub has declined. DoorDash only recently overtook Uber Eats for the No. 2 position, Quartz reported. Grubhub runs both Seamless and Eat24.
DoorDash spokeswoman Becky Sosnov told Quartz that DoorDash’s success is due to its subscription food order service, its expansion from 600 cities to 3,000 cities in 2018, and its partnering with more restaurants.
DoorDash Pay Controversy
DoorDash is among a bunch of tech companies getting bad publicity due to their employee pay policies. DoorDash was criticized for its system of using customer tips to subsidize an employee’s base pay. The practice led to employees filing a class-action lawsuit, Recode reported.
DoorDash has argued that the pay system benefits employees by giving them an accurate prediction of pay before a delivery and not lowering pay if the tip is low.
“DoorDash is taking the tip and basically offsetting their own cost with that tip,” said Jim McDonough, a lawyer in the class-action lawsuit, via Recode.
Some DoorDash workers complained the company’s app does not clearly allow them to see how much they were tipped.
San Francisco’s Office of Labor Standards Enforcement (OLSE) is investigating DoorDash for the company’s pay practices, after city supervisor Aaron Peskin filed a complaint. It is the first time the city has launched such an investigation against a gig-based tech company.
The controversy has not stopped the company from getting funding. The latest round of funding has DoorDash valued at $7.1 billion, about five times more than what the company was valued at around a year ago.
