Photo: Getty Images / Modified composite by MUNCHIES Staff
On Friday, I had a pretty dismal experience with a food delivery app with a name that sounds a lot like “Schmostmates.” I’ll spare you the details, because writing them out is akin to saying “Let me tell you about this dream I had,” but it ended with me struggling to cancel an order after the restaurant said they only made burgers on Mondays, and the head chef calling me an idiot.Yes, it sucked, but it’s nothing compared with what a dude named Leo experienced in south Florida on Sunday night.
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Leo was in Miami for Art Basel and, around 10 PM, he decided to use Uber Eats to score some dinner from a nearby Japanese restaurant. The order was placed, his meal arrived, and then things got weird. "I grabbed the food and right when I got the food [the delivery driver] took off running and I was like, 'That was kind of odd,'" he told WPLG.Leo shrugged it off, took his shrimp fried rice and spicy dumplings back to his room, and opened the plastic carrier bag that the driver had handed him. He says that he reached inside and pulled out a large piece of white fabric. “I thought this, when I was pulling it out, this sure is a fancy napkin," he said, before he noticed that it wasn’t a napkin, but a pair of thigh-length underwear that were stained with what appeared to be human feces.Leo called the restaurant and the Bal Harbour Police Department, and tried to get in touch with Uber Eats itself. He said that all of the agencies expressed appropriate amounts of shock and disgust, but all of them said that there was really nothing they could do about it.“Disgusting, unhealthful, it's potentially deadly," Leo said of his unwanted side dish. "What do you do if you find this in your food?!" (My recommendation would be to push those things into the farthest corner, brick up your hotel room with the heaviest available building materials, and resign yourself to a life of somehow preparing and eating your own food without ever touching it with your now-forever-tainted hands.)
Uber Eats got in touch with Leo and gave him a full refund for the order. An Uber spokesperson confirmed to MUNCHIES that the driver had no previous safety reports; she also said that the company had Community Guidelines which “outline behavior expected” on the app.“What's been reported is very concerning,” Uber told MUNCHIES. “We are reviewing this order and reaching out to all parties involved to help understand what may have occurred. The courier has been removed from the app pending investigation.”Huh. So maybe that “We only cook burgers on Mondays” thing doesn’t seem so bad, after all.