DoorDash: Red Card orders

As I mentioned in my first post on DoorDash tips, one of the 4 types of DoorDash orders is a so-called “Red Card” order, where the worker personally selects items from the shelf and pays with a physical debit card provided by DoorDash. Today I want to explain more about how these orders work — and why I don’t take them anymore.

How do you get a Red Card?

After completing your first DoorDash order, they mail you two objects of power: their iconic red insulated tote bag, and a Red Card. The bags are fairly flimsy (I tore the zipper off mine the very first time I tried to close it) and I strongly doubt the quality of their insulation, but they have the great virtue that carrying one gets you free entry into most concierge apartment buildings.

The Red Card is a debit card that can be linked to your DoorDash account and that allows you to be offered Red Card orders.

Once a Red Card has been linked to an account, it can only be used by that account, and if you disconnect it from your account, it can never be relinked to your or any other account. There is no other way of disabling Red Card orders than disconnecting it from your account permanently, which is one of the many frustrating issues of worker control I will take up in a future post.

How Red Card orders work

Red Card orders are clearly marked when you receive an offer and before you accept it. You’re told you’ll need to do the shopping yourself, and that you’ll need your Red Card with you to pay. From there, it gets much more complicated.

First, when you get to the store, you indicate in the app that you’ve “arrived” as usual. But then, and this is far from intuitive, you need to click another button to indicate you are ready to “start shopping.”

At that point, all of the items the customer ordered appear in a list. You can pick them up in any order, and when you’ve found the item they ordered, you scan the items barcode to ensure it matches up with the item the customer ordered.

If the item is unavailable, there’s a button for that too. Some merchants and some customers indicate acceptable substitutes in advance, so for example a 100-count CVS-brand ibuprofen can be substituted for a 100-count bottle of Advil. If the merchant or customer don’t indicate acceptable substitutes, then the DoorDash app automatically sends a text message asking if they want to substitute the item for something else. Because DoorDash customers are difficult people, they almost never respond to these text messages. Fortunately, there’s also a button to simply “refund” the item.

Once you’ve picked up all the available items and any substitutes, you can press a button saying you’re ready to pay. You then bring the items to the register, ring them up, and scan the barcode shown in the app (this apparently allows customers to earn their own store loyalty points). Finally, you swipe your Red Card and select to pay by credit. Technically the Red Card is only supposed to be authorized to pay the total amount of the order, but in the District of Columbia there’s a $0.05 bag fee, and I’ve never had a payment rejected for adding a plastic bag to the order (so that I’m not just dumping a bunch of medicine on someone’s doorstep).

What could go wrong? Everything

In other cities, different merchants may accept Red Card orders, but here I have only ever been offered them for Walgreens and CVS. The pay for these orders is substantially higher than food delivery orders, so I’ve been tempted into taking 4 or 5 of them. Each has been a disaster.

First of all, unless you also work at Walgreens or CVS, you have no idea where anything is located. Advil Cold & Flu is located in the “Cold & Flu” aisle, while regular Advil is located in the “Pain Relief” aisle.

Second of all, unless you’re a hypochondriac, you have no idea what the minute differences are between different medicine formulations. Is Advil “Multi-Symptom Cold & Flu” a good substitute for Advil “Sinus Congestion & Pain” or Advil “Allergy & Congestion Relief?” Is the store-brand version a good substitute for any of them? The barcode scanning system works fine once you identify the correct item but it doesn’t offer any help finding it in the first place.

Third, nothing is ever in stock. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there are bucolic CVS locations in Brownsburg, IN, where every medication is carefully lined up in alphabetical order in neat rows and you can pop in to grab your precise order in just a few minutes. But in the real world, stuff is scattered all over and most of the shelves are bare, razors are behind barbed wire, and you need a passport to buy pseudoephedrine, increasing the mental intensity and exhaustion of filling these orders.

If all these issues sound like they have something in common, it’s because they do: time. It takes time to find where an item is supposed to be. It takes time to identify which of the 32 possible variants the customer ordered. And it takes time to establish that it’s not in stock, as opposed to tucked out of sight behind some other object.

How DoorDash accommodates this dismal situation

That’s the bad side of Red Card orders, but it’s not the whole story. Since DoorDash wants to continue offering this service, they have made some minor accommodations for workers.

First, as mentioned workers can “refund” an item if there’s no appropriate substitute. That removes it from the shopping list entirely and you don’t need to wait for the customer to approve a substitute.

Second, if none of the items at all are available and the worker refunds them all, the worker is still paid half the pay the offer was “guaranteed.”

Third, the worker is paid the entire guaranteed pay if they are able to deliver even a single item in the order. If you’re wondering why I keep harping on cold and flu medicine, it’s because my most recent (and last!) Red Card order was for three different cold and flu medicines: Advil, Mucinex, and Robitussin. The customer was obviously suffering from some severe sinus pain and congestion so I did my best to fill the order, but neither Mucinex nor Robitussin was in stock. I did find the last box of Advil Cold & Flu, and was able to scan, pay, and deliver it, and I received the full pay guaranteed on the offer.

Don’t hesitate to try; don’t hesitate to stop trying

Besides the different operational quality of stores in different areas, you may find different merchants participate in Red Card orders where you live, so there’s no harm in assigning it your account and waiting to see what kinds of orders you receive. If you do work at Walgreens or CVS and are working for DoorDash in your spare time, you might find it trivially easy to find the precise products customers order and none of the issues I encountered are even relevant to you.

But if you do encounter these horrible issues after you’ve connected a Red Card, the only way to stop receiving Red Card orders is to permanently disconnect it from your account. Otherwise you’ll continue to receive them and have to decline them. This is easy to do, but wastes time when you’re trying to maximize the active share of your dash time.

If you ever decide to start taking Red Card orders again (or want a backup in case you misplace the one they mailed you), you can always order a replacement for free from the DoorDash store.