Uber Eats glitch leaves Berwyn shop owner scrambling to fill $8,000 order
BERWYN, Ill. (CBS) – An expensive glitch had one suburban shop owner confused and concerned. The flower shop owner said strange transaction appeared on her Uber Eats app, racking up thousands of dollars in roses, teddy bears and other merchandise.
Lauren Victory had the story you'll only see on CBS 2.
It's not uncommon to order multiple arrangements at the flower shop on Ogden Avenue. What wasn't normal: that someone ordered eight pink boxes with two dozen roses in each.
All week, Lucy Rodriguez Yzquierdo creates presents of all sorts at Y.A.Z. Flowers and Balloons.
"We offer a lot of things," Rodriguez Yzquierdo said. "We are a one-stop shop."
The shop grew to rely on delivery services like Uber Eats during the pandemic.
"It's something that has helped out, especially the days that it's super cold," she said.
But even the most frigid mornings, it's unusual to see multiple Uber Eats purchases.
"It's ding, ding, ding, ding and we're like 'What's going on?'" Rodriguez Yzquierdo said.
Among the requests were four acrylic heart boxes with flowers and another 196 roses in a bunch of pink boxes.
The purchases were for $875 here, $500 there, and the list went on.
"All within the same order and at the end, it said $8,000 and something," she said. "And I'm like, 'That's not right.'"
Rodriguez Yzquierdo's intuition told her to call competitors.
Quasthoff Flowers in River Grove and Crystal Flower Shop in Chicago also reported strangely high Uber Eats orders that same day.
"My concern was that maybe Uber got hacked," Rodriguez Yzquierdo said.
Uber Eats investigated and said it wasn't a security breach, but a tech bug that affected accounts across Chicago. The company explained in a statement:
"On October 21st there was a brief outage of payment processing for a number of Uber Eats accounts across Chicago, which was quickly exploited by enterprising consumers looking to score a deal. When this was discovered, we worked to cancel orders by bad actors and processed refunds for any perishable orders that had been prepared. We apologize for a confusing merchant experience, and are glad to have fixed the underlying issue."
The issue was fixed, but it was a stressful time for the cheery shop.
Victory: "Are you still going to use the app?"
Rodriguez Yzquierdo: "So yes, because we do depend on it."
Business owners with perishable items are usually reimbursed if they process an order and it gets canceled. Yzquierdo said she wasn't getting anywhere with Uber Eats.
Then, CBS 2 reached out and she was promised her multi-thousand dollar refund.
