Getting food delivered to your house might seem like a luxury, but at midnight, when you have no food in the house, it's supposed to be a back up plan you can fall on. Staying away from home seems like a piece of cake all the way up until you're starving and you remember how (as a kid) you'd be forced to eat dinner on time and how every time you go back home, you're force fed the entire time.

"You've been skipping your meals, haven't you?", say the ones who care about our health.

Well, we try to not skip our meals. We try to remember to feed ourselves after working there entire day. Some days it's hard to get yourself to cook and some days by the time you're back home, you realise that there's nothing to cook and the shops have closed. That's when the back up plan comes to play.

"Let's just order something”

That's exactly what Hari Sankar, Director of Strategy at Kommune and CEO of Beatmap, said to his flatmate on Sunday (8th July). Innocent decision. They decided what to eat. Placed the order. Paid for it online, because India bhi cash free banega. Got charged for delivery and packaging. It was all cool. 

The wait for food is the worst, isn't it? It's like knowing that someone somewhere is delaying your food from coming to you. Every sound outside the door could be the end of that void inside your stomach. Now imagine the joy and relief when your food is at the door. You bring your food, get a spoon and open the box. And then you open the other box. They smell funky. You’ve gotten rotten food then. 

Hari received two boxes of rotten biryani and all zomato had to say was that they didn’t have to “think twice” before giving him a refund for only one of the boxes. Their first response was not to apologise, but to tell him that they did everything right. This happened at 12:45am. Midnight.

We understand that mistakes happen. But why did Hari have to pay for the company's mistake? Why did he have to pay for something that was worth nothing?

He uninstalled the app and after 3 days, on Thursday (12 July), Zomato agreed to give him a full refund with an official letter of apology. Does money make it okay that you made a person feel like he paid for rotten food 3 days ago? Does it make it okay that they failed to do the one thing they were supposed to? “Zomato: Best of Food, Delivered super quick” they say.

Hari went online with his experience, soon there were people messaging him their own Horror Stories courtesy Zomato. One of them was about a woman who received a drink from “Cafe Coffee Day” with flies in it. FLIES were blended into the drink. The drink was from CCD linking road. CCD didn’t pick up the call, Zomato said it wasn’t their fault and that was that. She didn’t get a refund, she didn’t get a replacement, all she got was an apology.

“Zomato: Best of Food, Delivered super quick”