We tried it: new food / retail delivery enters Columbus market today
Let’s add another name to the growing list of companies providing food and retail delivery service to Columbus customers.
Postmates makes its entry into the (614) market today. The service offers the opportunity to have lunch, groceries, office supplies or anything else delivered in less than an hour. Users download the app or sign-up through the Postmates website. (A special code available to the first 500 new customers will save each of them $50 on delivery fees: COLVIP
The service is also offering free Chipotle delivery through the end of this month.
Users order their food or items and, once confirmed, are notified on the identity of their driver and can track that person’s progress just like with Uber. After the food has been delivered (pricing on this seems to vary based on distance), customers receive another message asking them to rate the driver and offer them the opportunity to tip. All transactions are done through credit card so no cash changes hands. Another similarity with Uber is an increase in pricing during peak times. (When we used the service for lunch on Friday, we were notified that we were ordering during a period of Blitz Pricing and that the delivery fee would be 1.75 times the normal rate.)
A woman in our office…we’ll call her Shmindsey…ordered lunch from Cap City Diner. Her food was delivered by a driver named Andrew. It arrived in good time with no problems.
After Shmindsey received her food, I ordered my lunch from Press Grill. As I write this, I am now waiting for Andrew to bring my lunch. (Is Andrew the only driver working today?) I ordered through the website and could see that the delivery charge was removed because I had used the special code.
I should note that when ordering…and I did this through the website…users are greeted with a number of featured restaurant options. There is also a search bar so that you can find your favorite if it isn’t listed. The first six places that I searched for returned no results. (That’s not a good thing.) I ended up going with Press Grill and I just received a text saying that my meal will arrive in 13 minutes.
From there, who knows where Andrew will be sent next?
Columbus is one of ten new cities where Postmates is launching today. This makes forty markets now served by the San Francisco-based service. (jj)
*Update: Andrew just arrived with my lunch. Two minutes early.
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