/ck/ - Food & Cooking

I work for Uber. More specifically I manage and evaluate datasets to explain trends that my team finds, to the talking heads. Most of my work is in relation to food delivery. No, I won't tell you which city I work in or how long I've been working there.

How many of you purchase food through our platform more than 5x a week? I know there's some of you. High ratio customers actually form a significant percentage of our food delivery sales. Recently we've been experimenting on some high ratio users to see how they respond if we remove their value deals. Free delivery if you spend more than $20? Gone. Free bagel if you buy four other bagels? Gone. We've found that the behavior of these users is BARELY if at all changed by better or worse value. Our initial assumption about these users was that they were wealthy. For some this is definitely the case. However, for >30% and <60% of the high ratio users, they are attempting to use our service and having their payment DECLINED at least every two weeks. Not only this, but when we take the data of these declined transactions, the vast majority of them fall in one part of a bi-weekly or weekly period.

The reason I raise all of this is because I know /ck/ loves food, but this obviously isn't healthy consumption of our service or food. What should be done about this? Psychology and marketing people here are suggesting we should try to passively hand extra costs on to these users since on the face of it their spending is not influenced by price. Eg, very slight increases in prices across the board for purchases, less free delivery offers, perhaps even artificially adding a sold out feature on cheaper food alternatives so that the customer purchases a $2 cookie instead of a $1 cookie. Artificially removing cheaper restaurants regardless of geographic location. In my eyes this is unethical and immoral. One psychologist raised the issue of food dependency being a form of addiction. He no longer works at the company.