DoorDash has been hit with a $1 billion class action lawsuit by a customer who alleges the delivery company charges customers on iPhones more than those on Androids.
The lawsuit filed by Kameron Masters in Northern District of California on Wednesday said DoorDash disproportionately charges iPhone users more often than Android users for extra “expanded range delivery” charges for orders “outside of normal delivery area.”
“DoorDash charges the expanded range fee on iPhone users more often than Android users and charges iPhone users more for “delivering” (likely because studies reveal iPhone users earn more),” the suit read. “These tactics are simply money grabs.”
According to the suit, seen by Newsweek, DoorDash’s “express delivery” fee could not result in orders arriving sooner, and that other “city” or regulatory response fees were “creating the illusion for consumers that local governments impose these fees.”
The lawsuit alleges that DoorDash’s pricing structure and app’s algorithms result in consumers being given different fees that they are not given a clear explanation for.
A similar class-action suit was filed in the U.S. District Court of Maryland on May 5.
DoorDash has denied any wrong doing. It called the new lawsuit a baseless “copy-and-paste job.”
The new suit seeks to serve anyone who paid any delivery fee, any hidden marketing fee or hidden commission. Masters wants the civil case to be heard in front of a jury.
“In the end, DoorDash dupes naive consumers into paying more for using its platform and paying for services they never receive,” the suit said. DoorDash’s pricing practices also “deprives consumers of millions, if not billions, of dollars annually,” it added.
“Imagine walking into a grocery store and seeing the price of eggs change each time a different person examines them,” the documents said. “Or perhaps the worst, imagine if the grocery store clerk charged you more for those eggs because you had an iPhone or looked like you could pay more.”
DoorDash paid $2.5 million payment to settle a 2019 lawsuit that accused the company of misleading customers about how it allocated tips to drivers between 2017 to 2019.
In November 2020, Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine announced a settlement from a lawsuit alleging that the firm reallocated millions of dollars in tips paid by customers to instead go toward drivers’ base pay.
Racine called the model “deceptive” because it meant that those payments didn’t always go directly to the drivers, and many customers were not aware of how the model worked.
Masters’ legal battle “seeks to end DoorDash’s massive fraud on consumers,” the document states. “Plaintiff, for herself and a nationwide and statewide class of individuals, now sue DoorDash for its predatory pricing practices[…]In doing so, Plaintiff seeks declaratory and injunctive relief and monetary damages of no less than $1,000,000,000.00 (One Billion Dollars) for all consumers who fell prey to DoorDash’s illegal pricing scheme over the past four years.”
But a DoorDash spokesperson told Newsweek in a statement on Thursday: “This is a copy-and-paste job riddled with the same false and misleading claims as another baseless lawsuit. We cannot be clearer – DoorDash does not charge more based on the type of phone you use. Any allegation that we deliberately charge iPhone users more than Android users is blatantly false and frankly ridiculous.”