Cross-post: My So-Called Gig Economy

[Dear readers: this is the first and only post from my new blog about the app-based delivery economy you’ll find here on the main Free-quent Flyer Blog feed. You can read or subscribe to that blog at its own home, My So-Called Gig Economy.]

I recently decided, due to a combination of boredom and poverty, to try to break into the gig economy racket before it’s too late, as rising interest rates are set to destroy the ability of the existing delivery companies to continue to finance their operations through endless inflows of venture capital.

Since I think the subject will be interesting to some, but not all, of my existing travel hacker readers, and some people who have no interest in travel hacking, I am breaking my experiences with app-based delivery companies out into a separate blog, which I’ve tentatively titled “My So-Called Gig Economy.” I’m hosting the blog so I reserve the right to change the title at any time, for any reason or no reason at all. Suggestions welcome.

Before I get into my usual way-too-specific specifics, I thought I’d run through some preliminary material first.

Why work?

I’ve been fortunate enough to live a pretty interesting life so far, accumulating degrees and qualifications like a good Millennial all along the way, but after getting fired from my last job in March, 2020, I’d frankly assumed I’d never work for anybody else again. And, judging by the astonishment of my friends and family when I told them I was looking for a job, nobody else did either.

But as my long-time readers know, I have an unfortunate literal tendency and even more unfortunate longing to prove people wrong, so when the pages of our national newspapers were filled, day after day, week after week, with pressing news of the “labor shortage,” I had to find out for myself what all the fuss was about.

So I started applying for jobs, everywhere and anywhere I could think of. I applied at the little grocery store I shop at 3 times a week. I applied at the medical cannabis dispensary down the street. I applied to be a front desk clerk at the Washington Hilton. I applied for every job in the DC government. I almost signed up for the National Guard but had second thoughts just in time.

No takers. Having proven my point, to myself at least, that the problem is an unwillingness by employers to hire, rather than an unwillingness by workers to labor, I was ready to consider my work done. That would have been the end of the story, but for a critical intervening factor.

Why app-based delivery work?

That factor is that I have unlimited free bike and scooter transportation. Once you remove the profit (or, in the case of delivery apps, the loss) taken by the middleman, app-based delivery work has essentially three inputs: social capital, time, and transportation.

This calculation is conducted differently depending on the context. Often, you’ll see people take their total income from a day or week of deliveries and then deduct a blended fuel/depreciation rate for the use of their private vehicle. This allows them to calculate a crude “pre-tax” hourly pay rate.

But that crude calculation makes no sense in my case: I don’t own a private vehicle and don’t pay to operate, store, or fuel one. Likewise, since I don’t have a job, I don’t have any benchmark with which to compare the hourly income from my delivery work. This is not to say my time is “worthless” (I like my time!) just that there’s no monetary rate to usefully compare it to, since no one will hire me to do anything else.

So I decided, once and for all, to figure out what the deal is with the gig economy, specifically the app-based delivery gig economy.

Prospectus

My usual approach is to go all-in on new projects all at once, but it’s remarkably difficult to find useful information about getting started in the app-based delivery economy, so I’m making an exception and am instead going to proceed one app at a time, and hopefully end up creating the kind of objective, unaffiliated, unsponsored resource I myself have been looking for the past few weeks.

I’ve tentatively decided that my first app to experiment with is DoorDash, so if you have a driver referral link, please leave it in the comments or send it to my usual e-mail address: freequentflyer@freequentflyerbook.com (there’s no way I’m creating a new e-mail address for this blog).

In my next post, I hope to cover signing up (with or without a referral link), figuring out what gear I want or need, and hopefully my first delivery.