UberEats fail: Chef furious over $300 cancelled order

A customer cancelled $300 worth of food as soon as the chef finished making it. Photo / Reddit

A chef took a customer's mammoth order online, only for them to cancel it after it was all made, packed and ready to go.

A furious chef has taken to Reddit to share a photo of the wasted food he was left with after a customer placed a huge $300 UberEats order – only to cancel it just after he finished making it.

The image shows 13 takeaway containers of ramen, fried chicken, pork dumplings, pork buns and beef curry, sitting on a restaurant bench waiting to be picked up.

Only problem is, that never happened.

"Customer ordered all this food on UberEats and cancelled the order the moment I finished making everything," the caption read.

The chef, who goes by the name of Ryuu Arargi on Reddit, generated hundreds of comments from equally outraged users demanding the customer be banned from making another purchase.

"That's f***ed up, can you refuse service on this customer next time they order?" one person asked.

"I hope that a**wipe that cancelled gets banned from UberEats," another said.

"That is a s**tty thing to do to a food establishment – particularly at the moment when things are so damn tough within the industry," a third person commented, referring to the affect the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the industry.

Luckily, the restaurant worker wasn't out of pocket, with the chef later revealing that they were "compensated for the charge".

But he was still furious with the situation, saying: "Imagine making almost $300 worth of food and then riiiiight when you finish the order, the customer cancels on you and you have $300 of food that's just gone to waste."

A customer cancelled $300 worth of food as soon as the chef finished making it. Photo / Reddit

In this case, it didn't go to waste with the chef opting to give it out for free.

"I just gave the ramen away to people who came in asking for some gloves haha."

In Australia, you can cancel an order through the app anytime after receiving confirmation that the order was placed, but before the restaurant has accepted your order.

"If you would like to cancel an order AFTER an order has been accepted by a restaurant, you will need to call our support team. They will confirm that the restaurant is OK with the cancellation," it states on the UberEats site.

However, if the restaurant has already started preparing the food, "we can still cancel your order, but we will be unable to issue a refund".

According to Nine News, the policy has since changed from June 8, 2020, where customers were previously able to cancel an order "up until your delivery partner is dispatched to the restaurant".

News.com.au has contacted UberEats about why it has been altered.

Meanwhile, the chef's experience prompted others to share similar stories, with a former restaurant manager saying someone had called in with a large pick-up order for $200 worth of pizza – except he ended up banning the customer after he was a no-show.

"When the guy failed to show up 15 minutes after his pick-up time, we attempted to call him and he didn't answer," the man said.

"Then, another location in the franchise called us about 10 minutes later to ask us if we had an order for John Doe, and said that he meant to place his order at that location and that we needed to cancel his order, which had already been waiting for almost 30 minutes."

After becoming furious with the situation, he told the man on the other end of the phone to tell the customer he was banned from ordering from their location.

"The other location was only about 10 minutes away, yet he couldn't be bothered just to pick it up at ours," he said.

"On a positive note, my staff got a ton of free pizza."