Delivery Rider Shows How Challenging It is to Deliver Drinks Especially When Merchants Use Normal Cups

With the demand for delivery having increased by multiple times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, delivery riders have been working extra hard to fulfil everyone’s needs while earning money for their own.

It has also led to more struggles that delivery riders face on a daily basis coming to light on social media, with reports of customers harassing riders for getting the wrong orders, or for orders taking too long.

However, the reality is that sometimes it cannot be helped that the food doesn’t always arrive in the most prime condition due to packaging problems, as one rider highlighted.

Drink Spillages Do Happen

Delivery rider Tiffany Ong took to Facebook to share her experience of food and drink spillages happening despite riders’ best efforts to deliver it just as well as the restaurant had packed.

She started off assuring the public that it wasn’t of riders’ intentions to spill food and drinks while delivering them.

However, she had run into a particularly unlucky delivery experience that day, where a lid on one of the drinks she was delivering was not closed properly, resulting in spillage. The aftermath of the spillage led to her bag to be “dripping” wet, as documented in the photos she posted.

As the roads are often bumpy and rough, it is easy for drinks to spill especially as the thin plastic lids can easily get loose.

In order to avoid spillage knowing this, Ong explained that riders ride slowly in this case, yet still face dirty looks and honks from car drivers. Regulations against speeding by the Land Transport Authority also result in them not being able to ride faster.

Special Cups Should Be Used

Ong stated that while it was her fault for not checking the security of the lids properly while in a rush to deliver her stacked orders, she wanted to advise merchants to consider packaging drinks meant for delivery in special cups.

While it is unclear what kind of special cups she meant for merchants to use, most establishments currently use soft plastic cups as such to store their drinks in, which may be flimsy and not the best choice for transporting on the roads. According to Ong, the drinks in question were from Burger King.

Perhaps thicker cups with tighter lids might help alleviate this problem.

“We not seriously causing trouble with y’all, we also trying to work for our living, put food on our plate, please try to understand,” she wrote.

However, Ong explained in the comments that riders do not really get affected by reports of drink spillages, for customer service will just compensate and / or refund the customer while riders still get paid for completing a trip.

Despite this, it’s still definitely a challenge to deliver food and drinks safely while trying to adhere to customers’ expected delivery time, and such incidents only serve to remind us that we should be more understanding towards riders.

Hopefully, after recognising this need in the now delivery-reliant Singapore market, merchants will look into improving their cups. Psst, entrepreneurs, anyone wants to start this business?