The contributors to my best month delivering

One strange thing about the app-based delivery platforms is that while they presumably claim to their investors that they’re mining a vast trove of worker and customer data to maximize the efficiency of their operations, they make it as difficult as possible for workers to get access to the same data.

For example, there’s no way for workers to export even basic information about their order history in order to search for patterns that might help them pick more lucrative delivery windows or restaurants with higher-tipping customers.

Back in September, I noticed as the month went on that it was going to be easily my most profitable month yet. By the end of the month, I’d earned $2,465.47 across DoorDash and Uber Eats. In the absence of a statistically precise method of breaking it down, I want to instead share what I think the main contributors were and how they will influence my strategy going forward.

More availability

Throughout the year I’ve been traveling almost constantly for personal reasons and, while I’ve experimented with delivering in other areas, traveling almost invariably means being off the clock. September was the first time I was home for the whole month, so I had a lot more opportunities to work than I previously had.

According to DoorDash, I worked for a total of 123.67 hours in September, or about 4 hours per day on average. In my two highest-earning weeks, I worked a total of 70.28 hours (with 52.33 hours of active time, or about 74%)

This is a good time to point out that being home the whole month had two slightly different advantages: more time to work and more flexibility about when to work. Whether your goal is to make a certain amount of money, to work a certain amount of time, or simply to make as much money as possible, then the more flexibility you have the better off you’ll be, since you can target the time blocks where you will earn the most money for each hour you work.

Moderate dual-wielding

I wrote back in September about my experiments dual-wielding both DoorDash and Uber Eats. When done skillfully, using two delivery platforms simultaneously can increase the share of each shift you spend delivering and being paid for. In September I did some moderate dual-wielding, using Uber Eats for a total of 14.41 hours. Since I was always using DoorDash at the same time as Uber Eats, I’m still using the total DoorDash working time of 123.67 for the week.

In September, I earned a total of $351.03 on Uber Eats. Since I pause DoorDash when I take an Uber Eats order, I do not believe and don’t want to imply that entire amount is increased income from dual-wielding. If I left DoorDash unpaused for the same amount of time, I may have received an order that may have paid more than the Uber Eats order I ultimately delivered in the same time. Still, my gut tells me there’s some net increased income effect from dual-wielding during slow stretches on your main platform.

Bonus pay

When I first started delivering for DoorDash I pooh-poohed the “bonus pay” gimmick. My logic was simple: if you’re having trouble getting enough orders as it is, then the last thing you want is to work when DoorDash is paying to get more workers online, since the glut of workers will make it even harder to get those orders, even if they’re higher paying.

I still think that logic is overall sound, and my practical advice at the time was to ignore bonus pay, not to actively avoid it, but over time I’ve come around on bonus pay and now I do actively monitor when bonus pay is available and try to work those shifts, if possible.

I have DoorDash well-trained enough (or vice versa) that I now consistently get 2-5 orders per hour that I work on the platform. The great majority of my orders have “about” $3 in base pay and “about” $3 in tip, which means during a $3 bonus pay period I earn about 50% more than during non-bonused time.

That’s what I mean when I say that increased availability over the course of the month makes you better off whether you’re targeting a certain number of hours per month or a certain level of monthly income.

DoorDash: Timing, pay, and tip transparency

A long-time reader pointed me towards an article in the New York Times the other day which included a lot of interesting details about app-based delivery companies, including the answer to a question a number of people have asked me.

“Active time” versus “Dash time”

DoorDash records two different measures for how much time you are working on the app. Your “active time” refers to all the time you are picking up or delivering an order, while your “dash time” refers to all the time you are logged into the app and eligible to receive and accept orders.

I assume this function grew out of the battle in California over the treatment of app-based delivery workers, since the apps fought to ensure that only “active time” would count towards eligibility for certain benefits.

To DoorDash’s credit, this information isn’t buried in the app like some other functions, so it’s possible to easily calculate your hourly wage based on both metrics. Here are the results from the six full weeks I’ve been working for DoorDash:

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As you can see, the wage you earn on DoorDash depends critically on which time metric you use. According to the Times article, “Uber says its drivers average $30 an hour. The delivery service DoorDash says its drivers make at least $25,” and that lines up with my experience, if you use the metric of active time. If you use dash time, my hourly rate fell to $9.16 per hour.

You can take this with a grain of salt if you like: sometimes I don’t end or pause my dash time when I’m running personal errands or on the phone, but broadly speaking that’s true of any worker juggling the job they’re paid to do and the demands of living, so let’s ignore the details and focus on the broader point: to maximize your earnings from DoorDash, you have to make active time match up with dash time to the maximum extent possible, since you’re only paid for active time, not for dash time.

Busy periods and bonus pay

As the Times article helpfully explains, “Drivers want fewer drivers on the road, giving them less competition for the best-paying orders and more bonuses. But the platforms want the opposite — slightly more drivers than orders, to keep the service reliable and consistent.”

Understanding that tension helps explain one of the most confusing features of working for DoorDash: ignore bonus pay.

As a reminder, bonus pay is one of the 3 components of DoorDash pay, along with base pay and customer tips. Importantly, it’s the only component of pay you know before you even receive an order, because it applies to all the orders received in a specific DoorDash zone during a specific period of time. As you’d expect, DoorDash offers bonus pay to encourage workers to start delivering.

You also might expect that periods of bonus pay are by definition the most lucrative: the same order that might pay $5.75 ($2.75 base pay plus $3 customer tip) during a normal period will pay $8.75 during a $3 bonus period. But as the quote above explains, this is wrong, because DoorDash is always trying to encourage too many people to work at any time.

Why does this matter? Remember that to maximize your earnings, you need to match your active time to your dash time as closely as possible. To the extent that bonus pay successfully attracts more people to start working, it has no effect on that match between active time and dash time, and therefore does not help maximize earnings.

And indeed, this lines up with my experience exactly. The very first time I logged in to work, I headed over to a zone with a $3 bonus pay, on the assumption that there must be an unlimited number of orders to deliver in that zone given the high bonus. But in fact, I waited 30 or 40 minutes for my first order, precisely because the $3 bonus pay had succeeded in attracting too many workers to the area.

To maximize earnings, focus on times you know it’s busy

To give another example of how this works, DoorDash frequently offers some of its highest bonus pay at confusing times of day or, especially, night. For example, there will be no bonus pay from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm, but $3 in bonus pay from 1:30 am to 3:30 am. This seemed bizarre to me at first: surely there are more people ordering delivery during lunch than there are people with the munchies at 2 in the morning?

And it’s true, there are. But there are also already more than enough workers available at lunch, while DoorDash offers bonus pay to secure that cushion of unutilized workers at midnight.

This means to maximize your earnings — to match your active time to your dash time as closely as possible — you want to identify periods when there are enough people working, but only just enough. If there are too few workers, then DoorDash will crank up the bonus pay to attract excess workers and your active time will correspondingly drop.

But remember, since DoorDash guarantees bonus pay for a set period of time, they also don’t use it any more aggressively than they have to, so in periods where there’s a good match between orders and workers, there will often be no bonus pay, even though those are the periods where your earnings are highest since you’ll have the closest match between active time and dash time.

The mystery of the magical tips

A final interesting detail the Times explains is why the final tip amount on an order is sometimes higher than the amount shown when you accept the order. I had assumed this was another one of DoorDash’s psychological tricks, providing intermittent positive reinforcement to encourage people to continue working as long as possible, generating the surplus labor that keeps the circus going.

It turns out, it’s even more nefarious than that. From the Times:

“DoorDash does not show full tip amounts for ‘orders that contain larger tips’ in advance ‘to ensure all Dashers have an equal chance at receiving high-value orders,’ said Rachel Bradford, a spokeswoman. When drivers take only orders with big tips, it ‘harms the experience’ for customers and merchants, she continued.”

Remember, customer tips in DoorDash work as a kind of crude auction mechanism, whereby customers can bid their way to the front of the delivery queue by offering higher tips, increasing the likelihood that their order will be accepted and they’ll get their food faster. What Rachel is saying is that while that mechanism is deliberate, complete tip transparency would allow it to work “too well:” orders with low or no tips would go unfulfilled or suffer long delays, leading both to customer dissatisfaction with cold and late food, and a build-up of orders waiting at merchants who start preparing food when the order is placed, not when a worker actually accepts it.

Tip opacity is therefore a way of constraining the market: customers are allowed to tip as much or as little as they like, but workers will only every see $3 or $4 of the tip, so they can’t hold out for orders with large tips. This means that while I think you should not tip at all, or tip in cash after you receive your order, if you are going to play the tipping auction in order to speed up your delivery, there is no reason to tip more than $3 or $4 in the app. Workers won’t see it and it won’t help you get your food any faster.

DoorDash: Pay

It’s fun to scoot around handing people their lunch for a few hours a day, but obviously the reason most people work for app-based delivery companies is because they’re paid to do so. Needless to say, this will come up constantly as I write about my experience working for app-based delivery companies, but I wanted to introduce the basics from my experience working for DoorDash so far.

Understanding the 3 components of pay

Your pay for each DoorDash delivery you make is composed of three parts:

• “Base pay” is (supposedly) computed by DoorDash based on “estimated time, distance, and desirability of the order.”

• “Peak pay” is (supposedly) based on the volume of orders and availability of drivers within a given DoorDash “starting point.”

• “Customer tip” is chosen by the customer (either though a default tip on every order, or on a per-order basis).

Obviously the only thing that matters to a DoorDash worker is their final pay (the sum of the 3 components), but splitting them is essential to understand the “known” and “unknown” components of any given order’s pay.

Base pay

Your experience is guaranteed to differ from mine, but after 25 DoorDash orders, 100% of them have had “Base pay” between $2.75 and $5.25, overwhelming between $2.75 and $3.75. This is surely because my DoorDash app is configured for “Bicycle,” so if you have a larger or faster vehicle, then you might get larger orders or deliveries over longer distances, which may have a higher base pay, but even DoorDash speculatively puts the highest base pay at $10.

Base pay is concealed from the worker until the delivery is completed.

Peak pay

Peak pay, or what we used to call “surge pricing” in the early days of the app-based workforce, is also paid by DoorDash, but unlike base pay is known in advance: you can check at any time whether the area you’re working in is offering peak pay and the exact amount you’ll receive in peak pay for each order you deliver.

I’ve seen peak pay as low as $1 per order and as high as $5.50 per order, and when DoorDash anticipates high demand and low availability in the future, they’ll allow you to schedule peak pay periods up to a day or so in advance, which is supposed to be a convenience if you’re trying to plan your delivery schedule around other activities.

Customer tip

In 2020 our Attorney General extracted a settlement from DoorDash that (supposedly) ended their long-running criminal enterprise of using customer tips to reduce the amount DoorDash paid out of pocket to its workers. Now, customer tips (supposedly) are paid out on top of the base pay and peak pay discussed above.

Total pay

Now that you know the three components of each order’s payment, you can work backwards from the estimated pay that pops up when you’re offered an order to deliver.

For example, if you’re working during a non-peak period and are offered an order with a $2.75 estimated payment, you can assume you’re being offered the base pay, with no peak pay and no customer tip. If you’re working during a period with $3 in peak pay and are offered a $5.75 delivery, you know you’re being offered the base pay, the peak pay, and no customer tip. And if you’re offered an order for $14.75 (the highest I’ve been paid so far), you can work backwards to guess the customer added a huge tip, $6.50 in that case.

After your delivery is completed, each component is broken out explicitly on the summary page, and twice in my experience my total pay has been higher than my estimated pay. I do not believe this is because I did an exceptionally good job delivering their food (I always do an exceptional job), but rather that DoorDash occasionally conceals the total amount of unusually high tips in order to generate “intermittent positive reinforcement,” which is widely regarded as one of the most effective ways of manipulating test subjects.

Conclusion

This post is focused exclusively on your wage per delivery, not timing or geography, which I’ll cover in future posts, but hopefully it begins to make clear that delivering through DoorDash would make absolutely no sense if you didn’t have access to free transportation between your starting point, the restaurant, and the customer. In fact, over the course of my 25 deliveries so far, there is not a single order that would have paid me more than the cost of renting a scooter to execute that delivery.

Of course, if you do have access to free micromobility services, then the equation changes entirely.