On the 30th December I received an email from Uber, whom I'm signed up to for their taxi service, promoting UberEats…

Have your favourite food delivered to your door with UberEATS, the new food delivery app from Uber. Choose a meal from local restaurants and we’ll have it delivered to you at Uber speed. Now that's what we call a tasty evening.

Sounded good. And they provided a link to download the app too, which I did. I use Just Eat and so I thought I'd give this a whirl as well.

It installed and instantly picked up by existing Uber account to pre-fill my details (inc. home address). At this stage we find the first thing that's wrong – they don't deliver in my area. So why target me saying "have your favourite food delivered to your door" if they can't? 

Anyway, they give me a choice to be informed, by email, once they do deliver to my area so I took that and un-installed the UberEats app.

But, turning to my email, I've already received one from them…

Thank you for signing up with UberEATS. Before you start ordering, we'd like to provide you with the latest Terms & Conditions for the country you registered in.

Jeez. I'm having to accept T&Cs for a service I cant' actually use – it would have been good for UberEats to check my location BEFORE getting me to this stage.

But there's another thing here – "for the country you registered in". That first email knew which country I was in because the language and spelling was in UK English (don't think I missed that, Uber). Yet, now, I get a generic email header but with a UK specific T&Cs document added to the bottom. Odd.

And, then, next day I get ANOTHER email from UberEats – "Find your new favourite meal". This is inviting me to visit their site and find my local restaurants. Not surprisingly a search reveals…

Uber Eats isn't available near [you] right now. But we're continuing to expand so check back soon!

They know my address. I've already been added to a list of people who are not in UberEats delivery areas but want to know when I am, so why am I getting this email?

Finally, to add insult to injury, on the same day as that email, I get another, this time from Uber themselves, inviting me to try out UberEats by downloading their app.

A friend offered some reasoning for this…

Cheaper to blanket mail people than pay someone to check. BT used to send me a fibre flyer every week for about a year before I could get fibre.

— Barry Collins (@bazzacollins) December 31, 2017

But I don't buy this. Just as that original email was targeting existing Uber users in the UK, so can they narrow this down further – I've used the software that large organisations such as this use. And it's not down to price – it's not any cheaper to bulk email like this. Indeed, as I'm about to do, you just cause customers to un-subscribe from marketing emails.

Uber – you already have so many issues right now, I'd have thought by now you'd be really concentrating, particularly on the "little things".