We have been having comfy UberEats at-home date nights once a week in Porto.

Although originally closer to a night owl, Elizabeth’s tendency to be an early bird has inspired a change within Cristiano — he is more of a hybrid now, and has learned the value of waking up early to praise the sun. We seize the day more often than not. So, a couple of days ago, we wondered why people with similar amounts of free time as ourselves would go out of their way to go out at night, where the lack of contrast induced by the absence of light paints a similar picture no matter where you go. As the ancient saying goes, “When all candles be out, all cats be gray.” Peer pressure? Genetics? Atypical circadian rhythms caused by melatonin deficiency? All of these? The mystery of this abnormal habit has yet to be unraveled. Perhaps we will attempt to unravel it ourselves in a future post.

Inspired by Ashley Rodriguez’s Date Night In, when rain strikes (10x comfy multiplier), or when we simply lack the mental fortitude to cook after a long day, we call upon UberEats to sate our ever gnawing hunger. This time we tried Glovo. Here is how they stack up against each other. Other services with excessive fees need not apply.

After a long bus ride home from a night class and splashing through a few rain puddles on the uneven streets of Porto, our tummies were begging to be fed. Scrolling through the Glovo app for the first time, we were impressed at the thoughtful layout of options and the overall aesthetic. We appreciated that the app was colorful and easily navigable, especially when compared to the UberEats app which can sometimes feel cluttered and industrial-looking. Plus, we were offered a coupon code for free delivery on our first order. Moreover, after looking through some of the restaurants offered, Glovo’s delivery fees were generally lower than UberEats. Unlike UberEats, Glovo’s delivery fees are not flat, nor entirely based on geographical distances as we assumed at first glance. It is dependent on distance and the agreement with the restaurant itself. Glovo was off to an okay start with us.

Cristiano had been having a nagging craving for pizza all week, and our studio’s toaster oven only goes up to 230ºC/446ºF (realistically, 180ºC/356ºF, we measured it), therefore cooking our own was impossible here. So we deviated from our usual UberEats pick of decadent hamburgers, instead looking for a yummy pizza to devour. We found that Glovo had a different selection of restaurants — it seemed more diverse and less fastfood-y. We settled on a place called “Holi Caffe.” With melty cheese and a scrumptious looking, bubbly crust, the pictures of this place’s pizza looked too delicious to pass up in our starving state. Cristiano picked a prawn pizza (that’s basically the same thing as shrimp for all you clueless Americans like Elizabeth. And yes, Elizabeth also thought it was funny — how could someone love prawns so much that they would want them on their pizza? Just ask Cristiano, I guess). Elizabeth went with a more predictable pizza topped with bacon, salami, and chorizo. We entered our free delivery code and picked out a movie to eat with our pizza, which we naturally expected to arrive within about thirty to forty minutes of ordering (How wrong we were!). On that note, there was no indication of the estimated time of arrival (ETA). UberEat’s ETA is usually not that accurate, but it is never off by a lot either.

*TAP*

“Your Glovo is being prepared by the restaurant”

… and we waited… and waited… and waited… Until we decided to contact live support to ask about the status of our pizzas.

We discovered that Glovo’s employees will not check up on your orders. No alarms will go off in their headquarters should your order take 1, 2, or 3 hours to arrive. Unless you get in touch with customer support. In which case, expect them to take about 25 minutes for their “live” (undead?) operators to respond to your query.
Similarly, Glovo’s couriers will not report to HQ. It took the live operator 30 minutes to ascertain the status of their driver, and that is because we were pressuring them, our anger fueled by our growling tummies. We were simply told the driver had run into some issues. Yes, it was only after 1 hour and 15 minutes that we were asked,

“Would you like me to cancel your order free of charge, or do you want your pizza cold?”

Okay, not quite, they did not use the adjective “cold,” but we were asked if we still wanted it to be delivered.

Additional semi-petty criticism:

If you share a credit card with a loved one, forget about being able to take advantage of the referral system, even if you have an extra card but used the other one by accident. Annoyed that our order failed, and upset that they even suggested bringing it to us cold, we tried to order again. This time, Cristiano made an account, using his phone and Elizabeth’s referral code. Typically, this will net you about seven euros, maybe eight if certain conditions are met, and this would have made everything ever so slightly less painful. “Maybe I will rate them 2 out of 5 stars instead of 1 out of 5 if I can at least get a better deal.”

WRONG!

Not only do they invalidate the first free delivery code they give to every new member, “FIRSTDAY,” because you were referred to the service, but they will also outright REMOVE all your coupons, including the referal one, should you attempt to use a credit card that has been used before. We got this message: “This credit card has already been used, so you won’t be able to use your coupons.” “No big deal,” I thought to myself, “I will just use your credit card, Elizabeth.” We typed in the numbers, but the coupons were not being applied. So we checked our available coupons and had none. Zero. Nil. Nada. “Surely if we try to add them back…” NOPE, “This coupon has already been used.”

WHICH BRINGS US TO OUR NEXT TOPIC… but you probably are not interested in security, in which case, scroll through it for the rest of the story/review.

On Glovo’s pitiful “security” measures (everything tastes better when it’s free):

• Credit card matters: if you use the same credit card for different accounts (even if they do not belong to you), not only will you be unable to use any of your coupons, but they will be outright removed from your account.
• There is no email verification, which makes it trivially easy to use Glovo to spam unsuspecting targets.
• Furthermore, you can use MBWAY (or another service that lets you do this) to generate a temporary, prepaid credit card and get the bonus every single time. Had they used email verification AND blacklisted most known temporary email providers, it would have taken more effort.

It is important to note that Sybil attacks are very difficult to foil — one can only mitigate them — but the goal of a proper strategy should always be to ensure that the payoff one would get from exploiting the network is less than the effort expended. Glovo must not have gotten the memo.
Conclusion: Glovo’s Sybil Attack protection is terrible and only affects honest users.

With our plans thwarted, we had no choice but to turn to UberEats once more for, I believe, the fourth time. It felt extremely fatalistic, that we were left with no recourse but to use UberEats and go back to ordering our weekly succulent burger, as it was past 10 and most restaurants were no longer serving food. Long story short, it got here in 10 minutes from the time that we submitted our order. You have got to give it to Uber, they are extremely consistent.

Here is our UberEats code for the Porto region, you will get €10 off your first order: eats-cristianot156ui

Our Glovo code is 177WHGW and will net you a €5 discount.

Disclaimer: should you use our coupon code, know that we will both benefit from the bonus. In the same vein, you are allowed to post your own, plus location, lest ours stops working and we do not update it in time. However, the comment must be valid and not just the code.

Will we be ordering from Glovo again? Maybe. Customer support was awful, driver was unprofessional, you cannot order prescription medicine, and everything about the way they do things seems wrong. However, we would be curious to see if that night was the result of Molochian witchcraft or the norm.

What are your thoughts on Glovo Vs UberEats?

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