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Talk about food delivery inconvenience.

A man residing in Sengkang ordered food from Boon Tong Kee in Compass One at about 6pm on Jan. 15 via foodpanda and eventually received his meal after 8pm -- delivered to the void deck and not his doorstep.

The diner's residence is about 1km from the mall.

According to the estimated arrival time, he should have received his meal by 7pm.

Annoyed by the antics of the food delivery rider, the customer took to Facebook to air his grievances and call out the rider by name.

What happened

The post provided photos of the receipt of the diner's order, which showed that the food collection time was 6:53pm, as well as the diner's text conversation with the food delivery rider.

The post added that the rider had indicated he had picked up the food from the restaurant, but his location on the in-app map was at a different place.

At that time, when the rider indicated he had already picked up the food, the delivery time was estimated to be 3 minutes only.

The diner said he then texted the rider politely to ask about the delivery.

The rider's response was that he had to collect more than one order, and asked the diner to wait.

Monitored rider's location

The diner then continued to monitor the rider's location on the in-app map and found him at the same location 30 minutes later.

Unimpressed by the tardiness, the diner then contacted foodpanda and communicated with five help desk agents who proceeded to offer system-generated auto responses and failed to resolve the issue, the diner alleged.

The diner also messaged the rider and said: "My whole family waiting your delivery. Can help pls? We waited for almost 1 hr already."

Admitted to working for two apps

By about 8pm, the diner texted the rider again, and this time, the rider admitted via texts that he was operating two food delivery apps at one time and was collecting five orders.

"As I’ve been monitoring the rider GPS since around 7:15pm, it’s very clear that the rider collected my food and went to another place to wait and collect food," the diner wrote.

Left food at void deck

To add insult to injury, when the food finally reached the diner's destination, it was not delivered to his doorstep -- and sans any service recovery effort.

The rider texted the diner that the food was left at the void deck, with a message for the diner to go downstairs to pick it up.

The rider texted: “Left at void deck table go take”.

This is understood to be a breach of delivery protocol as the food was not delivered to the stated location and left unattended.

The diner wrote in his post: "I was amazed by such behaviour."

The diner then berated the rider, saying "you are coward enough to leave my food order at my house void deck".

The diner added: "You should deliver to my unit with a smile and I would be gracious enough to smile back at you. I would very much like to meet you in person. Please come to my place, you should have my address in your records."

foodpanda response

In response to Mothership's queries, foodpanda said it is aware of the incident and has given the rider a warning for not following standard delivery protocols, "which is to deliver customers’ orders to the address specified in the app".

foodpanda added that it can only advise delivery partners not to deliver to multiple platforms at the same time to ensure timely deliveries.

"As delivery partners are freelancers, they can deliver for more than one platform should they wish to," foodpanda said.

foodpanda added: "We have also reached out to the customer to resolve the issue, and will continue to work closely with our delivery partners to ensure a consistently pleasant experience for our customers."

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