#dashpass

The reason I ask you to do this is because I discovered on Sunday that DoorDash went ahead and signed me up for something called #DashPass, apparently a “loyalty program” that has a recurring monthly charge but offers free delivery from certain restaurants for orders over a certain amount. I didn’t ask for it, and I certainly wouldn’t have opted into it: By the time they started charging me for it in August, I hadn’t placed an order with DoorDash for six months or so:

Yes, that’s my complete order history with DoorDash. I’d done business with them several times over the first few months after I’d moved to Denver and found them to be uneven: sometimes the delivery took forever and the food arrived cold. Sometimes the drivers wound up being surly. Once or twice everything was fine. But it always cost more than it should, and usually more than competing food delivery services. And never was there a great selection of restaurants to order from.

So no, I never wanted a loyalty program I had to pay for. I had no motive to sign up for a recurring charge with a service I’d totally stopped using six months earlier because they had nothing to offer me. That didn’t stop them from signing me up for something called #DashPass in August. Or perhaps the free trial that I didn’t opt into silently went into non-free mode in August. It’s hard to say, because they haven’t bothered to answer my questions about how it was that I got signed up for this thing in the first place.

Because I assume they must have some explanation, and if they were decent and honest and competent, they’d have tracked how and when I opted in. It must be stored somewhere with the rest of their customer information about me. They should, in theory, be able to say something like “Oh, you opted in on February 9 by tapping ‘Opt-In’ in a pop-up in the iOS app” or “You clicked a ‘sign up’ link in an e-mail” or “It was bundled with your order from that pizza place.” But what I've got from them instead is a series of chirpy PR verbiage that does nothing but try to reframe their non-consensual appropriation of money from my checking account by way of my Visa debit card as something other than theft that violates Visa’s terms of service: 

Notice how they’re describing their theft of money from my wallet as if my complaint were that, having opted into this service, it turns out not to have been for me. This is all I’ve had from DoorDash in response to the nearly $30 they stole from my wallet: apparently intentional misreadings of my complaint as if it were just the case that I’d signed up for something that didn’t work out.

So I’d like to say it again: I didn’t sign up for this. I’ve got no motivation to sign up for this. I wasn’t using the service. Even when I was trying out the service, it wouldn’t have saved me enough money that it would have been worth signing up for, and (you’ll notice) I never once placed a single order with DoorDash during the time that I was paying for free delivery on certain orders with certain restaurants when the order meets a certain minimum. I certainly wouldn’t have said, “By Christ, yes! I’d love to pay $120 a year for a premium access to a service I haven’t used in six months and have no intention of ever using again!”

But DoorDash won’t tell me how they think I signed up. Or when. What they did do, you’ll notice, is offer me a refund on my “last payment (December 16, 2018).” This is particularly insulting: they’re offering me a refund on a payment of $0, because my December payment bounced, because my checking account was low. (That was how I found out I was signed up for this thing, in fact: DoorDash didn’t send me an email when I signed up for a “free trial.” And they didn’t send me an email when my free trial was converted to a non-free enrollment in something with a recurring monthly charge. But they did send me an email that said, in essence, “That thing that you didn’t know you bought? Our fourth automatic payment that we’ve been charging bounced.”)

It’s worth noting, too, that the reason that they had to unsubscribe me from #DashPass themselves is because the unsubscribe link for the #DashPass is broken. That’s right: you can’t unsubscribe yourself from the thing that they went ahead and signed you up for. Only their technical support team can unsubscribe you. From the recurring charge you never intended to subscribe to in the first place.

After I told them that a refund of $0 for the current month and no refund of the $29.97 they’ve helped themselves to since August, they told me this, via email:

That’s right: whoever is handling their social media and email has handed off my request to return the money to some unspecified other team. Some black-box process will give me a response “soon.” (They have not responded to multiple requests to say what they mean by “soon.”) You will notice that they have once again reframed my claim that they have defrauded me as a “request” that they thank me for “bringing [...] to [their] attention.”

So I would like to say a few things in response to this.

The first is that this is a scummy way to do business. Maybe they’ve got some understanding of the situation that some lawyer has assured them technically crosses all the bars for legality. Maybe permission for this is buried somewhere deep in their terms of service or in something I clicked past when I ordered a pizza and didn’t read and ponder extensively because I was hungry. I don’t know: they haven’t explained their side of it. But signing up inactive users for a recurring charge without being perfectly certain that they understand what’s going on and consent to it is slimy. “We’ve got a rationalization for why we’re helping ourselves to money from your wallet, even though you haven’t done business with us for six months, and our understanding is that technically everything we’re doing is legal” might be, well, legal. But it’s dishonest and scummy and it preys on the vulnerable in order to enrich a group of corporate douchebags.

The second is that I kind of wonder how many other people are finding that DoorDash has just gone ahead and reached into their wallets and fucked them without fully informed, opt-in consent. I’ve already spent enough time writing about this on social media that a full refund will mean I’m getting paid less than minimum wage for the writing I’ve done. Even if you ignore the fact that conflating a refund of money out of which I’ve been defrauded with pay is already weirdly fuzzy thinking. Defrauding a large number of people out of a small amount of money and making sure that takes a lot of effort to get that small amount of money back helps to ensure that some people don’t bother. Which is a net profit for DoorDash, but a slimy way to make that profit.

The third is that they’ve responded poorly. The right way to respond to customer complaints about fraud is to investigate and resolve them immediately. What DoorDash has done instead is reframe a complaint about their theft as if it were just something I’d changed my mind about using, then delegate some other group of people to render a judgment, without communicating with me any further, on some unspecified timeframe. All of this is condescending and offensive. It shows a lot about how DoorDash sees their customers: DoorDash customers are supplicants. When defrauded, customers are expected to patiently wait while DoorDash evaluates a situation in which they themselves have a vested interest.

I also have three asks here.

First, would you look back through your own statements for any cards that you’ve ever used to pay DoorDash, if you didn’t before you read through this post?

Second, would you consider avoiding doing business with DoorDash in the future? There are other food delivery companies out there. There are probably some that don’t try to fuck their customers over in small ways in the hope of keeping some of the money they steal. (On a not-entirely-unrelated note, I’ve realized while reading up on DoorDash lately that they have more complaints about how they treat their employees ... er, “independent contractors” ... than many other food delivery services.) Part of the reason why corporations fuck over individuals is because they can. Insofar as our existing economic system allows “the market” to make decisions, one of the better ways that we can keep from getting fucked is for the individual actors who make up “the market” to avoid doing business with companies that fuck over individuals.

Third, would you consider reblogging this so that other people know how DoorDash is doing business, and so that other people know they should go back over their statements? If you go back through my post history, you will note that I have never once, until now, explicitly asked to be reblogged. I’m asking for it this time, though.