You never forget your first (delivery)

After publishing my first post yesterday, I figured there was no time like the present to knock out my first DoorDash delivery, if for no other reason than the fact that after your first delivery, they mail you a free “hot bag” and “Red Card” which I gather you’re able to use to pay for certain orders in person.

After getting my account set up (there’ll be a full post on that later), I navigated to the main screen of the “Dasher” app, which DoorDash uses to assign deliveries. This app is, and I cannot stress this enough, terrible, and essentially requires you to figure out how it works by yourself.

When you first open the app, you’re staring at generic map of your city, like you’re used to from Google or Apple Maps. The map is then divided into sections, which do not approximate neighborhoods in any meaningful way, and it’s sometimes difficult to fathom how the lines were drawn. For example, in Washington, DC, the Smithsonian National Zoological Park and the surrounding Rock Creek Park conveniently divide the Northwest quadrant into West and East sides. But oddly, DoorDash’s “Upper Northwest” zone extends just slightly East past the Zoo, in many cases by a single block.

Selecting different zones shows you the three things you can do from this home screen:

• you can “Dash Now” in the zone you’re currently located in (if available);

• you can select a different, active zone and “Dash Along the Way;"

• or you can select an inactive zone (including the zone you’re in, if applicable) and “Schedule” a future block of time to pick up orders there.

When I first logged in after setting up my account, my zone was inactive, but the neighborhood on the other side of the Zoo was offering a $2 bonus, so I decided to scoot over there and see what happened.

Activating Dash Now

Once I crossed over to the bonused zone, I opened the app back up and hit “Dash Now.” When activating Dash Now, you’re given the option to select how long you’d like your Dash session to be. This has no function whatsoever as far as I can tell, one of the app’s many useless gimmicks.

Once I was activated, the app switched to a somewhat higher resolution map of the area, broken down into a series of “Hot Spots” centered on individual restaurants. The first Hot Spot was a restaurant called Duke’s Counter, which is indeed a pretty cool, very overpriced brunch place by the Zoo. I parked my bike for 5 or 10 minutes outside, waiting to see what would happen.

Nothing happened.

It seems like Hot Spots are updated every 10 minutes or so, and there’s a helpful timer (Door Dash has a lot of timers, calendars, scheduling functions, etc., all useless) suggesting when the next Hot Spot refresh will be. After patiently waiting until the next refresh without an order, I was sent down the street a few blocks to the center of the next Hot Spot, a place called Fresh Med, which may as well be a “ghost kitchen” since it doesn’t seem to have any presence except on food delivery apps.

I was puttering around lamely for a few more minutes deciding whether to call the day a failure when suddenly my phone burst into action: I had an order!

The artificial urgency of now

One thing I had no reason to expect was how the Door Dash app is designed to generate a completely artificial sense of urgency. For example, once you’re assigned an order, a 30-second clock starts ticking down during which you can decide whether to accept it or not. Why 30 seconds? Why not 29? Why not 31? Who knows, except that it makes for a gripping visualization, as if the fate of the world hinges on an order of pad thai.

On that offer screen, you see basically 4 pieces of information while you’re deciding whether to accept: your location, the location of the restaurant you’re picking up at, the location of the customer, and what Door Dash says you’ll earn on that order. In my case, the restaurant was in the strip mall I was loitering in, the destination was around the corner, and the order would earn $7.75.

I happily accepted. After accepting the order, another window popped up asking whether I’d like it to be my last order of the day. Again, this appears to have no function whatsoever, so I said yes.

Hot Take: tipping on Door Dash is anti-social behavior

Door Dash has a very curious feature which, if you’re not expecting it (I wasn’t) will catch you off guard: tips are included as part of your payment on the app’s “offer” screen. I later learned the $7.75 payment I saw when I accepted the order was broken down into three components:

• $2.75 “Base pay;”

• $2.00 “Peak pay” (this is the $2 I saw listed on the app’s home screen);

• $3.00 “Customer tip.”

And indeed, $7.75 is the exact amount I earned on the delivery. In other words, I wasn’t ripped off, just confused, and I had to figure out what the deal was.

It turns out, “tipping” on Door Dash is a crude way of bidding your order to the front of the delivery queue. You can place an order without a tip attached, but that order will then be shown to anyone looking for orders in the area at “just” the combination of base pay and peak pay. Since tips are shown to workers as part of each delivery’s pay, two identical orders at the same restaurant will appear as $4.75 without a tip and $7.75 with one.

The issue here is that this bidding system functions solely to subsidize Door Dash’s operations. Remember, Door Dash can’t operate if people can’t get food delivered, and people can’t get food delivered if drivers aren’t willing to deliver it, so the pay workers earn is based on the price they’re willing to deliver food at. The question is whether Door Dash should pay that money out of the venture capital it raises and the fees it charges, or whether that money should be paid by customers fighting with each other to get to the front of the delivery queue.

If no one tipped up front, then Door Dash would have to pay the money itself (and if you wanted to tip afterwards of course nobody’s gonna turn it down). But as soon as anyone starts tipping up front, then everyone else is pressed into doing so in order to get their order closer to the front of the queue. Thus, tipping on Door Dash is the definition of an anti-social behavior, like dumping toxic waste or running red lights: it makes you better off by less than it makes everyone else worse off.

Micromobility crisis!

I had ridden a Capital Bikeshare ebike over to my delivery zone, and had parked it while I waited for some action. Our ebikes have a curious feature, that you can park them anywhere, but once you do they instantly become available to anyone else (unlike, for example, Bird scooters which allow you to “lock” a scooter while you pop into a store running errands).

I had locked my ebike while I waited, and after accepting my order, I went to unlock the bike, only to find that someone had “reserved” it out from under me! Needless to say, this was a bit panic-inducing: I had already accepted my first delivery and now I didn’t have any wheels!

Fortunately, I don’t rely on just one micromobility solution. I switched over to the Bird app to find my nearest scooter (half a block down), then headed to the restaurant to pick up my first order.

The pickup

Speaking of nervous, I have no idea how much food people normally order from these apps. I brought along two very large National Book Festival tote bags so I wasn’t worried about carrying capacity, per se, but I definitely had balance on my mind, as in, not falling off a bike or scooter.

It turns out, the customer ordered exactly one small serving of chicken pad thai. I did not end up using the tote bags.

Paragon Thai seems to have been converted into an all-delivery operation as well, at least I can’t imagine anyone wanting to sit down and eat there. The place was fairly unpleasant, but professional. I was expecting the food to be waiting on the delivery table, so when I didn’t see it there I texted my customer through the app that I was at the restaurant waiting for it (no response).

After a few minutes of waiting the lady running the restaurant asks me who I’m delivering for, and in a few more minutes brings out this single serving of pad thai. At this point the only function the Door Dash app has is “confirm pickup,” which I tap and head out the door after performing a funny ritual, as follows: according to the lady who helped me, due to “unethical” delivery drivers in the past, Paragon Thai now requires delivery people to press the pickup confirmation button in front of a staff member, presumably so you don’t run off with strangers’ food. I was going to press it anyway, so no skin off my back.

The delivery

Thankfully, the scooter I identified earlier was still available, so I hopped on and scooted about a half mile down the street to one of DC’s swankier apartment buildings. While I’ve been poking fun at various grifts and gimmicks, Door Dash really has a problem in terms of this core functionality: telling workers how to get food to customers. As far as I can tell, on the customer side, you select from one of a few limited options (“leave at door,” for instance) and then can provide additional information the worker may need.

While I’m sure longtime workers get used to it, this function is completely unintuitive to a new worker, and apparently to customers as well. My order was marked “leave at door,” followed by a brief explanation of how to get to the customer’s apartment. I’m sure the explanation made sense to the customer, because she lives in the building, but it made no obvious sense to me, since I’d never been there before. Instead, I just walked into the lobby and asked one of the 3 doormen how to get to the apartment.

After reading the delivery instructions back at Paragon Thai, I had messaged the customer to ask whether they wanted me to ring their doorbell (knowing nothing about the layout of the complex). I never heard back, so when I got to the unit, I rang the doorbell and waited around for a few minutes until the customer came to the door. After I confirmed the delivery in the Door Dash app, another screen popped up, asking me for proof! I’m used to taking pictures of my scooters to prove they’re legally parked, but didn’t realize I was supposed to do that with Door Dash as well. I panicked again, wondering whether I was supposed to take a selfie of myself handing the food to the customer?

Then I noticed at the very bottom of the screen a button for that very purpose: “handed food to customer,” which fortunately bypassed the need to take a picture of the now-empty, pad thai-less hallway.

Afterwards, I kept laughing at the customer deciding the most relevant information I needed to reach her apartment was to take the “South bank of elevators,” like I was going to walk around the building with an order of pad thai and a compass!

Completion

Finally, after closing out that order, yet another window popped up asking whether I’d like to stop or pause delivering. Yet again, an ominous clock appeared, immediately counting down, this time from 35 minutes. I was warned that if I didn’t begin delivering within 35 minutes, then my pause would become permanent!

This is all absurd psychological manipulation, none of these popups and exhortations have any function whatsoever, at least if you’re delivering for money rather than algorithm-generated positive reinforcement.

First day, first delivery, first lessons

Besides the annoyance inherent in learning how to use a new smartphone app when you’re closer to 40 than 30 years old, there are a few concrete lessons to tease out of this story.

First of all, don’t get your hopes up and don’t be in a rush. Based on the $2 bonus pay, I assumed the second I crossed the zone boundary my phone would be blowing up with orders. Nothing of the sort happened. I mostly just chilled out in strip malls for 20 minutes until my first order landed. Now that I know what to expect, I’m going to have a much more relaxed approach to working for Door Dash going forward.

Second, stay focused on transportation. Since I was literally standing on top of my parked ebike, it didn’t occur to me to wonder whether I would be able to fulfill the delivery, so I accepted the order before unlocking the bike, allowing it to be snatched out from under me. Frankly, I’m fortunate it happened on my first delivery, because now it’s never going to happen again.

Third, customer communication is simply not part of the deal. Even though you’re delivering to a real, live, presumably hungry human being, don’t count on them helping you get their food to them. Once you accept that order, you’re on your own.

And finally, ignore every nudge, hint, beg, plaint, and plea from the Door Dash app. All the timers, all the warnings, all the flashing lights. They’re just gimmicks sitting on top of a very primitive delivery platform. The more time you spend focusing on that delivery platform and the less time you spend playing click games with Door Dash, the better off you’ll be. The most offensive one, of course, is the exhortation that you “could” earn more than the amount shown on the offer screen. Put those childish things behind you. Assume, for every order, the amount you see on the offer screen is the amount of money you’ll receive. Take it if you like, decline it if you like, but don’t trick yourself into thinking you’re going to make more money than you are.