“For a car driver, it’s always difficult to find a parking spot near city centre (especially in Espoo it might take almost 15 mins to find parking place on peak hours in Iso Omena area). That will make order/hour deviation negative. And cyclists have higher average driving time to customer as compared to car. But the system evaluates cyclists and car drivers with same stats. So this whole evaluation process is not fair.”

“Once I had sent a swap request for my shift before 24 hours ( as per company rule) and it should have been removed automatically by the system. But my shift was not removed and marked as no show in my profile. As a result my ranking has been dropped to batch 3 from 1. I had emailed several times about this error but it was never addressed.

When I joined the company, I was told if my shift is ending soon ( less than 15 mins) I can decline upcoming order if I choose not to do overtime. But some dispatchers are so rude and say I must accept order even at last minute, forcing me to do overtime.”

“We don’t get compensated for cancelled deliveries (deliveries that were given to us, then taken away). This means we might end up first cycling to restaurant, waiting 15 min, picking up, and then having to return food (worst case scenario). Usually it’s just having to cycle to the restaurant and then it gets cancelled.”

“Due to the changes in contract many car drivers in Tampere will quit and so cyclists will have to cover even larger areas, and the areas are expanding even more as new restaurants far from center are added. There are no “zones” in Tampere. So as they make changes in Germany they don’t realize the effects here. For example winter conditions are far worse and it’s just stupid concerning the customer as well if the delivery of like 6kms -or longer-comes by bike. ”

“It came as a surprise that we have to pay for the phone calls to customers. The customer will also see our personal phone number as the application directs the calls to your phone. I wasn’t aware of this when I started working for Foodora. I think it’s a serious privacy and security risk for both the courier and the customer.”

“Technically you should be able to refuse tasks, but if you do you will get “bad reputation” and this may affect on your batch and also your contract. I’ve heard that you shouldn’t ask the dispatchers to give tasks to another courier (eg if you are a cyclist and the delivery distance would be ridiculously long) either because this would also give you bad rep. Anyways the system is not transparent and if you have to guess and be on your toes it’s certainly unfair for the worker.”