How To Take A Food Break The JustEat and MacDonald's Way (Or Not!)

While Boris' team snack is a bottle of wine and some cheese, when Chesil Radio has a meeting, we like something a little more common.

On Saturday, we had been working hard on the station's future plans and new music tracks, when we realised the time and had, had no lunch. We normally select one of the various apps to use for some food, and when we decided on MacDonald's there was a choice in which app to use. Price wise, JustEat pipped the others, however Nikki had her reservations as she has had meals not arrive in the past.

The first missing food order last year, was tracked on the app for her birthday, although not a team meeting, she was still doing stuff for the station, and ordered herself a MacDonald's meal. She tracked it and was heading in completely the wrong direction, and then all of sudden it marked up lost tracking, it went into a black hole somewhere in the Preston area of Weymouth, never to be seen again. She spent ages on the phone and chat and no one seems to care that she had no food, but they had taken her money, she couldn't afford or trust to purchase it again, so the boss stepped in and bought it for her and this time it did appear. The driver was very apologetic, but it was cold, and within the hour the driver had come back with more food as he knew it was her birthday.

The first order never did appear and she did eventually get a refund, but was left not being happy to use the JustEat app again. She was concerned but the boss insisted he had no problem when he ordered the replacement and previous orders to other addresses. Delivery was scheduled for latest 1415, so hardly the lunchtime rush, we had been working through that timing window. As it reached the delivery time, he tracked the driver to the restaurant and was still there at 1415, but then it looked like it was departing and then flicked straight to delivered. Nikki rushed out to see if it had been left outside somewhere odd, nothing and no vehicles moving off in the whole area.

The station boss called MacDonald's, Jubilee Close Retail Park, in Weymouth, where the MacDonald's was supposed to be coming from. They first, asked for address, and they said instead as they couldn't find it what the order number was. She was very quick to say it had gone and then she said no it's still here. Well that would mean it was cold. She said she would remake it and to call back in 20 minutes. Assuming they were going to rectify the situation their end, we waited 20 minutes and nothing. Called back and felt like the 20 minutes had been to fob us off. She said can't you come and collect it. Well we had paid for delivery, we don't drive and were still having our meeting. The reason we were having our meeting at Nikki's was her health issues were causing her issues, otherwise it would have been something more healthy in Weymouth town.

We never saw the food, and Nikki ended up making sandwiches, hardly the MacDonald's they were expecting.

We contacted MacDonald's press office and at the time of release, we have yet to get any response or statement.

However JustEat did supply this response: "At Just Eat, we always want our customers to have a positive experience when ordering their food online. Whenever a customer is dissatisfied with their order, we will always take steps to address this. We are sorry to hear that in this case the customer's experience fell below the high standards we hope to deliver. We can confirm we have already processed a full refund for the customer."

Well this didn't fill our stomachs with good cheer to use the service again. So when you are choosing which app to use and their options sometimes the cheapest isn't always the best option.

Have you had a similar experience, we would like to know? If we hear from MacDonald's we will share their statement with you in due course.