Are more people and companies going stupid, or am I just running into more of them?
So, obviously I’m cursed in the food delivery department, I’ve kind of grown to accept that.
The other night we wanted to try something new, rather than asian or pizza. So, I set about finding somewhere that would deliver to our house. I thought that would be pretty easy, seattle is a pretty together and online town, there should be a place where you can put in your address and it’ll tell you what places are closest for food, etc.
Oh boy was I wrong.
I started out pretty generic, hoping google would be my friend. Since I’m somewhat near Northgate, I figured I’d start out using that, hopefully some bigger places would have glommed onto northgate.
But no. The first link on there is to the PI’s restaurant list, which is human edited so you’d think it’d be at least decent. But no, it’s got Arby’s and Auntie Anne’s Pretzels listed, along with other similar garbage. Thanks!
So then I start thinking that maybe google’s supposedly oh-so-good contextual ads will help me.
The first one is a link to citysearch. There is a special place in hell for whoever designed that site. You pick what you want to sort on first (say delivery), and then try to pick another thing to sort on (type of food for example) and it forgets what you sorted on the first time. The scroll bars are some sort of ajax buggery that doesn’t work right, and it never actually gives you any decent information, except that there actually is an eatery called the “Rusty Pelican”. I’m not sure why someone would name their restraurant that, nor why anyone would ever eat food made in a place so named.
The next link is to dexonline, the 3000th iteration of the phone book online. Ah-ha, they should have this stuff down, they’ve been doing it forever! Well, take a look at the lovely search results that I get to see. They pay for those keywords? If you dig down enough, you can just go through the categories and find Carry out and Delivery Food”, which as far as I know should encompass like 90% of restaurants, but this one has 17. And one of them is a person. I think. I dunno if I should call Michael.
Then over in the ads on the right there’s a mapquest link — AH, the *other* people who should be able to get it right. Good work guys! Greyhound was just what I wanted. Then on that page, there’s google ads again. I feel like I’m trapped in a maze.
Then I remember there’s an Indian place not too far from here, Masala of India. I go to their page, and they have a delivery option! Hurrah! It’s through some 3rd party delivery service, which jacks up the price, but oh well. I spend like half an hour going through the menu, picking stuff, and finally I have it all ready, and order. It’s going to be $50 for the two of us, but whatever, I was going to be getting some food! About 15 minutes later I got a call from the idiot at inourish.com saying “I was in the office and happened to notice that you placed an order.” “Ok…” “We don’t deliver on Saturdays, but I could bring this out to you on Monday if you’d like” . “Uh, no thanks, that wouldn’t help me.” So I go back to the site, and sure enough they’ve now disabled ordering for that site because of summer hours. I called Masala of India to see if they were delivering that night (in case they had an alternate service or something), and they didn’t. Could it be *THAT* hard to have a teenager that brings food around? That’s two businesses I’ll never use (inourish.com and masala of india), I should have been scared away from both by the 1997 web design.
I finally remembered that there had been something in the mail from some italian place that we had tried before (and hadn’t been particularly impressed with, but not horrified by), so I tried calling them. $23 for a ton of food and a 6 pack of coke, and was here in 45 minutes. Same as before — not great food, but they didn’t screw it up, and it was about what you’d expect. The driver got a $7 tip, and everyone was happy.
