The Enshittification of Swiggy

altair21 said:

Normal 1L milk is now costing almost 61-62/litre, if you make cream/cheese from it, you wont even get 100gms (rough idea from my cheese making endeavors) from it, how do you think even more expensive franchises are managing to give milk based ice-cream and not frozen deserts which are made of animal fat/oil churned with sugar? I doubt their prices are lower than 40rs/litre even if they do buy in bulk.

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Milk based ice creams of Nic costs on an avg around 300 for 500ml pack which is around 380g & Nic is at best a mid tier brand. Animal fat is not used in making any ice cream from known established brands unless it is a quality rule violation.

rsaeon said:

Yeah, I don't know how they're making any profit with people who stack discounts like me:

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Delivery person showed me that he earned Rs 118 for the above order because he initially refused to take a Rs 100 tip.

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They earn up to 25% commission on restaurants which have high rate of orders online (with the commission going lower and lower for restaurants with lesser orders) and since you are willing to spend 800rs+ on one single order I assume its one of the popular restaurant so the percentage is on the higher side. Restaurants/food outlets also have to run promotions otherwise they suffer greatly either as their listing being buried or prices not being attractive enough for customers to place order (mentality here being people are more likely to order with promotion applied than not even if the final price is the same). As for the ICICI promo you applied, you are in the minority here as not everyone has a card with promotions running for it.
Brand pack is something I thought to check out initially but didn't bother as I only place low amount orders. I guess its value for money if you are a big spender but they gamble of most customers using it once so they make money on it (plus they convinced you order from their app vs other competitor or direct order).

Im curious though, why did the delivery guy said he earned 118rs when it shows 127rs on the billing? Do they not make 100% of the shown value or what? You also tipped an additional 8rs (or is it 5rs?) so the total should have been 135rs.

That was for McDonald's. I haven't been inside of one in years but I think their delivery prices match the in-store prices.

YeAhx said:

Im curious though, why did the delivery guy said he earned 118rs when it shows 127rs on the billing? Do they not make 100% of the shown value or what? You also tipped an additional 8rs (or is it 5rs?) so the total should have been 135rs.

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Yeah, that didn't make sense to me either. The in-app tip was Rs 5, the other 3 was a donation thing that Zomato has.

His screen showed an earning of 118.6x for this single order, I can't think of any combination of taxes that would've brought 132 down to 118.

rsaeon said:

the other 3 was a donation thing that Zomato has.

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I don't know if you know, but most corporates that offer this kind of "donation" use it to offset their Corporate Social Responsibility which to me personally, is ludicrous.

If you're someone who prefers anonymity when donating, most charities do allow anonymous donations. (The beneficiaries don't know who gave it to them. IT department obviously will know.)

badwhitevision said:

I don't know if you know, but most corporates that offer this kind of "donation" use it to offset their Corporate Social Responsibility which to me personally, is ludicrous.

If you're someone who prefers anonymity when donating, most charities do allow anonymous donations. (The beneficiaries don't know who gave it to them. IT department obviously will know.)

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Yeah!! CSR as an initiative was meant to be spent by the corporates from their profits towards social welfare and not ask the customers.

Clearly, it's a scam, since it takes advantage of those who are naive, thinking that paying ₹3-4 is actually helping to fund their social responsibility, while the beneficiary are mandated to allocate the funds from their books by the law.

n1r0 said:

Their model can't really work because the more fees they slap on, the smaller their customer base becomes. Once people realize for a given bill amount, they can spend on fuel, go to a resto and eat piping hot food and have a better experience overall, they are done.

Heck, instead of paying inflated app prices, they could go to an even better resto.

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Finding a good restaurant with good parking space with good connectivity roads with avg travel speeds of at least 40kmph in metro cities/NCR is more difficult than finding good authentic home food taste meals on zomato/swiggy.

So I got an opposite story here. Instamart, Zepto, Blinkit all had gold coins available but the lowest price was on Instamart at Rs 8150 per 1g a day or two ago. Market rate in my city today is Rs 8250. Local gold dealers knock off 1.5% as their margin if they know you and 2% to 3% if they don't know you.

But with the HDFC card, there's a 10% cashback upto Rs 1500 per billing cycle. That brought the effective purchase price down to Rs 7335 but there's talk on r/creditcardsindia about MCC so I bundled each coin with a small box of camphor or a dairy milk just to be safe and didn't add more than one gold coin per order.

So I was looking at a "free" Rs ~750 per gram for a couple of hours of my time. No one else I knew was interested in this (they're all in the >8LPA club so this was not worth it for them) so I pooled together all the cards I could get and started buying all of the available stock from Instamart.

By the fourth or fifth delivery, I was on a high, easiest money I've made in months, and I got taken advantage of. I gave the OTP for delivery before checking the contents. I did have other measures in place, everything was being recorded by a CCTV camera that I set up outside specifically for this purpose (but I didn't tell the delivery people about this) along with my phone in the my pocket recording with camera facing outward.

One of the deliveries arrived in an unsealed paper bag. The delivery person looked unassuming and there was no way in this life or the next that I would have guessed he would've turned out to be a thief. But he was careful not to let me inspect the contents and instead focussed on taking photos of the bag, the inside of the bag, selfie with me, selfie with me holding the bag, selfie with him holding the bag — strange because no other delivery person did this. Then he said something along the lines of "It's gold so I have to be careful" which was odd because they're not supposed to know what's inside. Anyway, he left and I went through the contents and the gold coin was missing. The packaging for the gold coin was intact but there was nothing inside.

I couldn't help but laugh with how expertly he took advantage of me by simple misdirection.

Anyway, I spent an hour with Swiggy chat, escalated to multiple supervisors but they all wouldn't go beyond advising to email Instamart support, so I did:



Today, I received a full refund. Which was a huge relief, otherwise this loss would've wiped out all the "free" money I made.

Everything hinged on the delivery person tampering with the sealed plastic bag and trying to deliver it in an open paper bag. If he was a little bit more clever and had spare plastic bags, I don't think this would've resolved in my favour without police involvement.

So I don't think I'll be doing this again unless if I'm waiting directly outside the Instamart store. But the thrill was amazing, like back when woot.com was still independent and slickdeals.net was the best place on the internet.

Swiggy wants me to trust that the delivery partner will reach the restaurant, pick my order up, find my house and deliver it, all within 6 minutes.

Must be one of those Marvel/DC superheroes. Should take a selfie when he arrives.

And one more thing, I'm not sure if anyone mentioned it. There's a save Rs. 5 by grouping orders. You can set it as default option. But the thing is the Rs. 5 is not always guaranteed. So it's like you voluntarily want the order later and you don't get any incentive for it.

Sometimes customer support gets clingy and needy and doesn't want me to go:

For the first time in a long while my order didn't show up. The delivery guy had a problem with his bike. I was busy and didn't notice until over an hour went by.

I was surprised they didn't follow up because on occasion i get messages saying delayed and will arrive by x time. Usually it does and here the difference is no longer than 15 minutes delayed. When it crosses half an hour they go silent.

So two hours in I contact them and ask for a refund. I also wanted some coupon for wasting my time.

I got the refund and the coupon was Rs. 25 that I got to use twice as a goodwill gesture by them.

If the distance to the restaurant is too far say >10km there is a chance of this happening. It was the middle of the day in the afternoon with no rain either.

Just unlucky.

Worst part is that its all (probably) deliberate too. If only they put costumers before shareholders, this would never become such a sh*tshow

blr_p said:

For the first time in a long while my order didn't show up. The delivery guy had a problem with his bike. I was busy and didn't notice until over an hour went by.

I was surprised they didn't follow up because on occasion i get messages saying delayed and will arrive by x time. Usually it does and here the difference is no longer than 15 minutes delayed. When it crosses half an hour they go silent.

So two hours in I contact them and ask for a refund. I also wanted some coupon for wasting my time.

I got the refund and the coupon was Rs. 25 that I got to use twice as a goodwill gesture by them.

If the distance to the restaurant is too far say >10km there is a chance of this happening. It was the middle of the day in the afternoon with no rain either.

Just unlucky.

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Don't they have a protocol where if this happens they assign another delivery driver? At least that's what happened in my case, don't remember if it was swiggy or zomato though.

YeAhx said:

Don't they have a protocol where if this happens they assign another delivery driver? At least that's what happened in my case, don't remember if it was swiggy or zomato though.

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Yes that happens but this one instance it did not.

Anyone tried out swiggy's vowel-challenged upgrade for swiggy one?

I'd have taken it if they would increase the delivery range, all the good places are in Call Center Land which is in the outskirts.

Another day with my frenemies:

Of course right after I sign up, express is not available: