Grubhub: trying and (mostly) failing to trigger the Grubhub contribution

As I wrote last month, Grubhub has a feature that’s distinct from Uber Eats and DoorDash, in markets where all companies aren’t required to pay their workers the minimum wage: the Grubhub contribution.

You can read that post for a more in-depth explanation, but the rules are essentially as follows: to be paid a Grubhub contribution to your daily earnings, you must:

1. work a scheduled shift;

2. accept 90% or more of your offers during the day of the scheduled shift;

3. and earn less than the grubhub contribution amount for your area, multiplied by the number of scheduled shifts you worked that day.

This is so complicated, and so poorly understood, that the only way to illustrate it properly was to do it myself.

Triggering Grubhub “premium” elite status

The single most important part of this process was getting the ability to schedule shifts at all. If you don’t have elite status in my area, then you are only able to schedule shifts that begin Mondays later than 6:00 am on the preceding Saturday. If you have “Premium” elite status, then you are able to input your availability ahead of time and have Grubhub assign you available slots automatically.

To do this, I scheduled a single hour of work during the week of November 13-19, for Friday the 17th at 5 pm. During my shift, I had two orders, accepted both, and earned $25.55. Since $25.55 is higher than $18, I didn’t receive a Grubhub contribution, but I had a 100% acceptance rate, 100% on-time arrival at merchant, and 100% schedule committment rate, so I achieved all the requirements for Grubhub Premium status during that single hour of work.

However, that status wouldn’t go into effect until the next Monday (November 20) at 10 am, when I was elevated to Premier status, giving me the ability to set my availability when the next set of schedule slots was released, for the Grubhub week from November 27-December 3.

Because I didn’t work for Grubhub in the week of November 20th, my Premier status was renewed on November 27 for another week (remember that Grubhub status is based on a 14-day rolling period), giving me access to preferential scheduling for the next week as well, December 4-10.

My results

Here’s a visual breakdown of my experience over four weeks experimenting with triggering the Grubhub contribtion:

This is organized to illustrate the flow-chart reasoning of the Grubhub contribution: you can fail to trigger the Grubhub contribution by not working a scheduled shift, by having an acceptance rate below 90%, or by earning more than the Grubhub guarantee. On four of the nine days I was running this experiment, I met all the other criteria but failed to trigger the Grubhub contribution purely by earning more than the guarantee amount (a good problem to have!).

On four of the other days, I didn’t get to that point because I declined an order. Once I declined a single order, there was no point in continuing to work for Grubhub that day. You can see that on December 1 I completed 3 orders before declining one (75% acceptance rate), on December 4 I completed one order before declining the next (50% acceptance rate), and on December 7 I completed 5 orders in a row before declining the 6th (83% acceptance rate). On December 5 I declined the first order I received and immediately logged off.

But on November 29, I managed to hit every requirement and Grubhub topped up my earnings at the end of the day.

Grubhub is under no obligation to play fair, and neither are you

One “theory of the firm” is that long-term, stable relationships of trust and dependence make firms so much more profitable that it is worth entering into them even if it reduces the ability of managers to closely monitor the productivity of individual workers, or individual workers to constantly renegotiate their particular contribution to the profit of the firm.

Grubhub isn’t like that. Grubhub is under no obligation to play fair: if you always decline orders from a particular restaurant, and you’re close to triggering a Grubhub contribution, they can simply offer you an order from that restaurant. If you decline, you forfeit your contribution. If you accept, they still get their pizza delivered.

Likewise, you’re under no obligation to play fair. If you can find the exact center of a dead spot in your scheduled area and sit there all day playing Duolingo instead of delivering food, you’ve fulfilled your end of the bargain.

Conclusion

Going into this experiment, I genuinely thought I would fail and this would be a boring post about how the Grubhub contribution is a scam. But that’s not how it worked out: over the course of a few weeks I did manage to trigger it exactly once, and they paid it out exactly according to the rules and regulations they spell out.

The most surprising thing was just how stressful it was to try to plan around the Grubhub schedule. I’ve enjoyed delivering for DoorDash and even Uber Eats so far because it is mainly relaxing. You turn the app on, bike around for a couple hours, head home, job well done.

Trying to work the angles of the Grubhub scheduling ecosystem requires keeping track of an impossible pile of data: when your elite status resets, when new shifts become available, when your next shifts are, and your acceptance rate on each individual day you have scheduled shifts.

While I may dual-wield Grubhub in the future when DoorDash is slow, it’s hard to imagine ever purposefully gaming status in the system again just for the sake of a Grubhub contribution.

Uber Eats: stacking guarantees and quests

Back in the days of 0% interest rates and the blistering (and blisteringly illegal) expansion of app-based logistics companies, I would often read about drivers receiving bonuses in the thousands of dollars after completing a specified number of orders.

However true or common the anecdotes were, those days seem to be long gone. Even bonuses for signing up to deliver using referral links are pitiful. My personal referral link only offers $600 after completing 290 deliveries in 60 days. While that may technically be possible, it would be absolutely grueling to do on a brand new account; I’ve been delivering for about 14 months and have only completed 1,202 total deliveries. It probably took me 6 months or more to get all the way to 290.

Bonuses are still offered, however, although for much smaller amounts and over much shorter time periods, sometimes as short as a few hours. All the bonuses I’ve seen have been one of two types: “guarantees” and “quests” (or what Grubhub calls “missions”). In Uber Eats, you are also occasionally given a choice whether to aim for a higher bonus requiring more deliveries or a smaller bonus requiring fewer.

Guarantees

A guarantee is when a company offers to top up your total earnings if you earn less than a specified amount over a specified number of deliveries. If you earn more than the guarantee, then you are not paid any more, but if you earn less, then the company makes up the difference.

Quests

Quests and missions offer bonus payments on top of your earnings when you complete a certain number of deliveries. These can be one-time bonuses or repeatable payments, and they are sometimes “laddered” so you might receive $5 after completing 5 deliveries, another $10 after completely 10 deliveries, and $20 after completing 20, for a total of $35 after 20 deliveries, or $1.75 in bonus pay per order.

Stacking guarantees and quests

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to play around with a great pair of stackable offers.

First, I was offered a $260 guarantee if I completed 40 orders, or $6.50 per order. On its own, this might get my attention, but it wouldn’t be enough to get me to work for Uber, let alone complete 40 orders, since my average earnings on Doordash are over $8 per order.

Second, I was offered a quest for $25 each time I completed 10 orders, up to four times, or $2.50 per order. Obviously, the first thing I checked was whether that $100 would count against my guaranteed earnings, and fortunately Uber Eats explicitly mentioned in the terms and conditions of the guarantee that “Earnings from your deliveries (after services fees and certain charges are deducted, such as city or local government charges), tips, and incentives (including surge and trip supplements but excluding Quest) are included toward your offer amount” [emphasis mine].

Now, after completing 40 deliveries I was guaranteed to earn $360 total, or at least $9 per order. A $9 order for me is basically always a good order, and there’s no way I would ever get forty $9 orders in a row from Uber Eats. But now, my next 40 orders were all going to be $9 orders, regardless of the base pay or tip. At one point a lady told me she’d leave me a big tip and I almost told her not to bother, since it wouldn’t affect my income at all, but I thought it might hurt her feelings if I did so I let it go.

My only considerations were time and convenience. I wanted the smallest orders, from the most efficient restaurants, traveling the shortest distances. It ended up taking me 4 days to complete all 40 orders, with my shortest delivery being 0.2 miles and the majority falling under a mile.

My total earnings from the 40 trips was $179.17, or just $4.48 per order, so Uber Eats kicked in $80.83 more to meet the $260 guarantee (along with the $100 in quest pay). Note that the guarantee payment was only made an hour after my last delivery, once the tip for the last order was “finalized.” I spent a total of 12.62 hours working, for a total of $28.53 per hour.

Conclusion

Since no one knows how the delivery landscape is going to shake out over the next few years and which, if any, of the existing companies will survive, I am a strong believer in at least staying active enough on each of the platforms to keep your accounts from lapsing. Since the experience of working for each company is so different, it’s natural that you’ll be more or less motivated to work for one platform or another. Since DoorDash is my “main” platform, stackable guarantees and quests are a perfect opportunity for me to spend a few days working on Uber Eats, making plenty of money and keeping the account active for a rainy day.

Additionally, I believe from the wording on the e-mail I received that my guarantee was a direct result of my inactivity on Uber Eats — a nudge to come back to the platform. It did work (money has that effect on me), but if anything that motivates me to let the account go dormant for another month to see if I get another guarantee worth pursuing.

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.

Grubhub: introduction

So far I’ve only written about my experience working for DoorDash and Uber Eats for the simple reason that it took me a surprisingly long time to get approved to work for Grubhub. Since I did finally get hired and begin delivering for Grubhub, this post will give an introduction to that platform and familiarize you with the basics of how it works. I apologize in advance that this is a bit of an information dump, but there’s a lot of ground to cover.

Signing up: the waitlist

When I was writing about signing up for DoorDash and Uber Eats it was a bit hard to find anything memorable to say. You upload some identifying information, a headshot, and your government ID, and you can start working within 15-20 minutes. Grubhub isn’t like that, at least in my area, for the simple reason that in many markets Grubhub puts applicants on a waitlist.

If you have any interest in working for Grubhub, or if you’re even vaguely (or intensely!) curious how these platforms work in the real world, download the “GH Drivers” smartphone app and enter your information right now. It won’t take long and this post will be here when you get back.

All set? Let’s continue.

I initially signed up to the waitlist in February, 2023. Every month after that, I was informed that my application was “about to time out” and to click on a button in the app to “renew” my application.

In June, I was twice informed by text and e-mail that “my market was hiring.” Despite immediately clicking through the provided links, by the time the page loaded the market was already “closed.”

Finally (after “renewing” my application again in July and August, 2023), I managed to make it to the actual application process.

Signing up: the application

Once you’ve managed to get off the waitlist and into the actual employment application, it resembles in many ways that of DoorDash and Uber Eats. Don’t be fooled.

I signed up to work for Grubhub with scooters, bikes, and e-bikes, just as I have with DoorDash and Uber Eats. These vehicles do not require motor vehicle licenses in my jurisdiction (although I do have one). So when I was asked to upload my government ID to the Grubhub app, I uploaded a picture of my US passport.

This was an error.

The same day, I received an e-mail from Grubhub saying:

“Thank you for your interest in delivering with Grubhub! Unfortunately, we are unable to continue with your application, as the document provided does not meet our requirements for car/motorcycle/scooter deliveries.”

That was it. That e-mail address has been permanently, as far as I can tell, burned with Grubhub. I never received any reply to any of my e-mails providing additional evidence of my fitness for work.

Obviously, it was no trouble signing up again with another one of my throwaway e-mail addresses, although I did have to create another Google Voice number since the number I used for my first application could not be used again. A month later, I got another e-mail notifying me it was time to apply again.

This time, understanding how finicky the system is, I uploaded pristine pictures of my drivers license on a perfectly squared black background with plenty of lighting and contrast, and within 24 hours I was deemed eligible to work.

Don’t touch anything: Grubhub is very sensitive

There are four major elements of working for Grubhub you need to know before you touch anything in the app. I tell you this not so you won’t make the mistakes I made, but so that you understand the mistakes you might make faster than I did.

The “STATUS” toggle

What DoorDash calls the “Dash Now” button and Uber Eats calls the “GO” button is called the “Status” toggle in Grubhub. You can slide the toggle from “unavailable” to “available” when you want to receive orders. You can also slide the toggle back to “unavailable” during a delivery if you don’t want to receive any more orders, just like on the other apps.

If you’re already confident multi-wielding, then you could use Grubhub as a second or third tool in your kit and just toggle on and off as orders come in on your various apps.

Frankly, that’s how I plan on using it, if I ever feel inclined to use it at all in the future. However, like the other platforms, Grubhub has a complicated series of incentives designed to influence how you use the app.

Grubhub’s performance metrics

Once your account is set up, you’ll see four icons on the bottom of the screen. The one on the far right is labeled “Account,” where you can click the “View my stats” button and see your current performance metrics: “Offer committment,” “On-time arrival at merchant,” and “Schedule commitment.”

The first big difference here between Grubhub and my other two platforms is that Grubhub measures your performance on a rolling 14-day basis. Every day, the earliest day’s performance rolls out of each metric, whether or not you delivered on either day. This is in contrast to DoorDash and Uber Eats, which use a rolling 100-delivery basis. In other words, while each DoorDash and Uber Eats order is “sticky,” only being eliminated from your average after you complete another 100 deliveries, Grubhub’s are exactly the opposite. If you have a bad day on Grubhub, just put down the app for 2 weeks and all your late deliveries and missed shifts are washed away like tears in the rain.

“Offer commitment” is a combination of two metrics in the other apps, measuring both your acceptance rate and your completion rate. An order only counts towards offer commitment if you both accept it and you complete the delivery. This is a huge problem if you’re trying to game Grubhub’s incentives. In all three apps, you are not told the contents of an order until you accept it. This matters because orders from the same merchant can have totally different requirements. The example that illustrates this best is the pizza places that dot our urban landscapes: there’s no way to know whether any given order is for four extra large pizzas or a chicken parmesan sandwich. One order easily fits on an e-bike, the other doesn’t stand a chance. When I’m working for DoorDash or Uber Eats, I can accept those orders and quickly cancel if the order proves too large, keeping my high acceptance rate and taking only a tiny hit to my completion rate.

“On-time arrival at merchant,” is a black box. When you accept an order, the app gives you an “arrive by” time. According to the app “The closer your arrival time is to the ‘arrive by’ time on your map, the higher this stat will be.” Grubhub does not disclose how that “arrive by” time is calculated or how your actual arrival affects this performance metric. This is obviously another huge problem if you’re trying to game Grubhub’s performance metrics.

Finally, “Schedule commitment” is a completely unique Grubhub metric, since Grubhub relies on scheduling in a totally different way from the other apps, which I’ll explain shortly. This metric is calculated based on the total number of shifts you schedule, and I think is calculated more or less down to the minute, e.g., if you have scheduled one, one-hour shift and are available for 55 minutes of it your “schedule commitment” will be 92%.

Each of the metrics has a different performance threshold you need to meet to acquire Grubhub elite status (about which more below). While Grubhub calculates each performance metric roughly hourly so you can see how you’re doing, the metrics only actually matter once a week, on Mondays at 10:00 am, when Grubhub takes a final snapshot of all your metrics and awards you a status level, which will last until the next Monday.

The Grubhub Contribution

I had to get all that out of the way in order to talk about the main feature that distinguishes Grubhub from DoorDash and Uber Eats: the Grubhub Contribution. Under certain circumstances, Grubhub will top up your income so that you earn a specified amount for each scheduled shift you work.

As you’d expect, the rules around this are extremely complicated, so I’ll try to spell them out as clearly as possible. Here are the three basic principles to keep in mind:

1. The Grubhub Contribution is determined on a daily, not hourly, weekly or monthly basis.

2. To receive the Grubhub Contribution you must work a scheduled shift.

3. And on the day of the scheduled shift you must accept 90% of the offers you receive.

If you accept 90% of your offers on a given day, and work a scheduled shift on that day, then if your total pay for the entire day is less than the specified amount per scheduled hour you worked, Grubhub will make up the difference.

You can find the rate that Grubhub will top up your income to in the app by going to “Account,” “Help,” and “Payments,” or by searching reddit for a datapoint from your area. In my area the amount is $18 per hour, a dollar more than our local minimum wage.

Hacking the Grubhub Contribution

In striking evidence of how much work people will do to avoid working, lots of people have posted about trying to game the Grubhub contribution in order to get paid without having to actually, you know, drive around delivering food to people. It is possible, it is difficult, and it doesn’t cost anything to try.

To understand why it’s so hard to trigger the Grubhub Contribution, let alone game it, we need to dive deeper into each of the requirements.

First, you need to work a scheduled shift. Unlike DoorDash, where scheduling is a way to “reserve” a slot ahead of time in case they cap the number of active workers, Grubhub takes scheduling very seriously. Hour-long shifts, which Grubhub calls “blocks", are made available for scheduling one day a week, depending on your status level. “Premier” workers get access to blocks first and can set their availability in advance so they automatically request their most desired blocks. “Pro” workers get access a day or two after that, and “Partner” workers get access last. I’m being vague because like the Grubhub Contribution, I believe the schedule release dates may also vary by market, but as a Partner worker I get access to the schedule at 10:30 am on Saturdays for shifts beginning at 6:00 am the next Monday.

By the time the schedule opens to Partners, there may not be many shifts remaining. Grubhub does have a 24-hour schedule so if you really want to experiment with scheduling you can find shifts most days around 2 or 3 am.

The next hurdle is the acceptance rate. To be eligible for a Grubhub Contribution on a given day, you have to have a 90% acceptance rate on that day (not just during your scheduled shift). If you get 10 orders during a day, you can only turn down one of them. If you get less than 10 orders during the day, you have to accept them all. Keep in mind that Grubhub is under no obligation to play fair. If you’re in danger of triggering a Grubhub Contribution, they can send you the most ridiculous orders in their system, knowing you only need to decline one to lose the money.

If you manage to schedule a shift, work it, and accept 90% of the orders you receive on that day, then congratulations, you’re eligible for a Grubhub Contribution. I say you’re eligible for it, not that you’re receiving it, because to actually receive a Grubhub Contribution you have to meet the final test: your total income for the day must be less than your market’s minimum for each scheduled shift you worked.

Simply put, the most common way to lose a Grubhub Contribution is to earn too much money that day. Let me give a few examples of how this can happen.

First, you may earn too much during your scheduled shifts. If I schedule and work a one-hour shift, and I earn $20 during that shift, I’m not entitled to a Grubhub Contribution because my total earning for the day exceeded $18 per scheduled shift.

Second, you may lose your Grubhub Contribution by earning too much during unscheduled shifts. If I work a scheduled morning shift and receive no orders, I’m entitled to $18. If I become available for an hour that evening and earn $18, I’m no longer entitled to a Grubhub Contribution because I already earned $18 per scheduled shift.

These examples illustrate the main rule of gaming the Grubhub Contribution: on a day you are trying to trigger a Grubhub Contribution, do not work any unscheduled time until you have already exceeded your market’s minimum. Once you’ve exceeded the minimum, or become ineligible by declining an order, then you can feel free to work as much unscheduled time as you please.

The status casino

Seriously gaming the Grubhub Contribution involves playing a kind of status video poker: if you’re very, very good, you can maximize your odds, but it’s still a game of chance.

In order to get access to the shifts you think have the best odds of triggering the Grubhub Contribution, you need early access to the schedule. To get early access to the schedule, you need Premier status. And to get Premier status, you need a 95% offer commitment rate, 80% on-time arrival at merchant rate, and 95% schedule committment rate.

Offer commitment is the metric most in your control, since you can simply accept and complete one order to achieve a 100% offer commitment rate. On-time arrival at merchant is harder to control since you don’t know how Grubhub will calculate your expected arrival time. If you’re late according to their calculation, you need to accept and complete more orders to have a chance to drag that score back up. The difficulty of schedule commitment depends on how many slots are still available by the time the schedule opens to you.

If you’re able to hit all three Premier metrics, then the following week when your status resets, you’ll have access to early scheduling for the following week. You’ll have first dibs on the shifts you think are most likely to generate a Grubhub Contribution. During that week, having to make actual deliveries in the real world will probably cause your stats to tank and your status to drop. But fortunately, two weeks after that all will be forgiven and you can start the cycle over.

Of course, you have the option of using the same tactics to become Premier and then use the platform as intended.

Grubhub is the most job-like delivery service I’ve worked for

I have been talking about how to game Grubhub’s mechanics because that’s how my brain works, but another way of looking at all these mechanics is that they are designed to replicate a normal workplace.

While DoorDash has a pretty meaningless scheduling function and Uber Eats doesn’t have one at all, Grubhub puts the schedule front and center. There’s a reason people like having jobs: they are guaranteed a certain amount of pay for a certain amount of work, and Grubhub provides that. A student scheduling shifts around classes or a parent scheduling around the schoolday could use Grubhub to earn some guaranteed income with the possibility of earning more depending on the orders they receive.

Likewise, if you have Premier status and early access to the schedule, you can make Grubhub a full-time or more-than-full-time job. In my market you could earn around $30,000 a year working 35 hours a week, which might not get you rich but is certainly a nice contribution to a household budget.

The flip side of that is what people hate about jobs: the lack of control. In order to get and keep early access to the schedule, in order to get the shifts you want, you need to pretty much do what Grubhub say, and if you don’t you face escalating consequences, just like in a normal workplace. If you turn down one order, you’re risking your guaranteed pay for the day. If you turn down two orders, you’ve almost certainly lost it. You can turn down 5 orders for every 95 you accept. Turn down a sixth and you’re busted down to Pro status, with less control over your schedule. Turn down 21 orders in 100, and you’re busted all the way back down to Partner, with the corresponding need to reset your stats and start over.

Comply and be rewarded, resist and be replaced.

Conclusion

One thing I’ve been surprised at is how I’ve come to associate each of the three apps I’ve used with a kind of “personality.” Perhaps that’s inevitable: the sheer impersonality of the apps, the repetitive prompts, the cheerful inhumanity almost forces the human imagination to find something relatable underneath.

Uber Eats comes across as a kind of frenzied panic, shoving orders out the door with no rhyme or reason, just praying most of the right food gets to the right place most of the time.

DoorDash treats me with a kind of cool dispassion. They know the restaurants I like to deliver from, they know the distances I like to travel, and they know the pay I need to accept orders. Don’t get me wrong: they try to slip in the occasional Taco Bell or Popeye’s order (I hate fountain drinks), they sometimes try to send me to neighborhoods I hate biking around in, and they sometimes try to lowball me. But overall, we get along just fine.

My experience (in well under 100 orders) is that Grubhub acts like a petty Starbucks manager. All the pressure in the app is to schedule shifts in advance, work all the shifts you schedule, and accept and complete every order you’re given. If you do that, and you get lucky, then maybe you move up the pecking order until the next time you slip up. If you get unlucky the boss gives you an impossible order and you drop straight to the bottom.

These are just vibes, and are therefore mine alone. You’ll surely get different vibes from each of the apps depending on your own personality and the conditions in your market, and those conditions are also certain to change over time, especially if the long-awaited consolidation of the delivery market ever starts to take place.

DoorDash and Uber Eats: dual wielding

If you’ve ever hailed a car from an app-based taxi platform, you have almost certain seen a driver juggling two or more cell phones running both Uber and Lyft. This practice, what I call dual wielding, appears to have the straightforward advantage of allowing drivers to both have more trips offered to them in total (increasing the share of their time on the platform that they’re being paid for) and giving them the ability to pick and choose between offers so they’re earning the most possible during the trips they accept.

In fact, dual wielding is anything but straightforward. I’ve been thinking about a few different strategies lately, which I break down in the following ways.

Mere alternation

I make no secret of the fact that I vastly prefer working for DoorDash than I do for Uber Eats. That being said, I learned my lesson about putting all my eggs in one basket when PayPal shut down the account I was using to manage my blog subscriptions. I had to frantically scramble to get my subscribers to manually sign up on a new payments platform, and lost money from the transition and from a fall-off of readers who decided not to resubscribe.

That’s why even I though I would happily work exclusively for DoorDash, I’m perfectly aware that’s not in my power: DoorDash could shut down (either entirely or in my region), change directions, or become a worse employer at any time. To hedge against that risk, it makes sense to sign up for every platform you can and keep your accounts active enough to avoid being shutdown for inactivity.

Thus, mere alternation might be as simple as setting aside a few hours, days, or weeks to cycle through all your apps to keep your accounts active and ready to earn should you need to rely on them. I call it “mere” alternation since it’s not true dual wielding in the sense of having multiple apps running simultaneously in order to maximize earnings or time working, but rather using multiple apps one at a time.

You might also use mere alternation in order to run experiments: are there neighborhoods where one app is especially dominant over another? Are there Grubhub neighborhoods, DoorDash neighborhoods, and Uber Eats neighborhoods? Do different days of the week offer better conditions on different platforms?

Pause-and-switch

My current approach to dual wielding is what I call pause-and-switch. Uber Eats and DoorDash both allow you to “pause” your shift, which keeps you from receiving new orders for a specified period of time. This is an essential function, for two different reasons.

It is essential on Uber Eats because of the way the app deluges you with orders whenever you’re not paused. This creates an endless cacophony of beeps and chimes, and the only way to silence them is with the pause function. Whenever I accept an Uber Eats order I immediately hit the pause button so I won’t receive any more orders until the first is completed.

On DoorDash the function is important because of the way DoorDash prioritizes workers with high acceptance rates for high-value orders. If you are using that strategy on DoorDash, then you want to decline as few orders as possible. To put it another way, you never want to turn down a DoorDash order you would otherwise accept just because you’re currently working on an Uber Eats delivery.

Pause-and-switch lets me accept the maximum number of DoorDash orders while filling in my downtime by delivering Uber Eats orders. Here’s my usual workflow:

1. Turn both apps on, wait for first good order on either app.

2. Accept first good order. If Uber Eats, immediately hit the pause button so no new orders are added to the first.

3. Switch to the other app and pause new orders.

4. About 1-2 minutes before completing the delivery, unpause your other app so you can begin receiving orders again.

5. Complete first order as usual. Repeat.

I want to be clear about one thing: I highly doubt this strategy makes me more money than working exclusively for DoorDash. That’s because my DoorDash orders tend to be both shorter distances and higher paying (which is why I prefer DoorDash, after all). My pause-and-switch strategy gets me slightly more total orders across both platforms, but whenever I miss a higher-paying DoorDash order because I’m making an Uber Eats delivery that “claws back” some of the higher income I make from spending more of every shift delivering.

Even thought I don’t think I make more money following this strategy, I still plan to keep doing it for two reasons. First is the one mentioned above: I want to maintain a good relationship with Uber Eats in case I need to rely on it some day. But second, even though DoorDash pays much better than Uber Eats, there is a lot of downtime in each DoorDash shift, which has the great drawback of being quite boring. Obviously I use the downtime the best I can, but there are only so many Duolingo lessons you can do before the little bird starts driving you crazy, so picking up the occasional Uber Eats order is a way to feel productive in between DoorDash orders.

True dual wielding

My pause-and-switch technique is a simple upgrade of mere alternation: instead of using one app per shift, I use one app per order. True dual wielding is a totally different paradigm. These are the people who have multiple apps running simultaneously and try to accept orders on all of them.

I’ve tried to do this a few times, with pretty uninspiring results. The main difficulty is it requires quite a complicated set of tradeoffs. If you accept every order on every platform, then you have to plan pickup and dropoff routes over and over again on the fly, and your deliveries are going to be slower and later (how much this matters is up to you). If you only accept orders that are convenient to each other, then you end up declining most orders (again, this may or may not matter to you). And you have to make these tradeoffs under the cognitive load of incoming order notification sound effects.

I think there are two kinds of people who succeed at true dual wielding: people who are very good and people who are very jaded.

If you’re razor sharp, experienced, and well-caffeinated, then I can imagine graduating to dual wielding as a rewarding challenge, stitching together orders across multiple platforms and still doing a good enough job.

On the other hand, if you do not care at all about your performance, I can imagine trying to earn as much money as possible as fast as possible by accepting every order on every platform and just getting food to people whenever it gets there. I don’t mean that as criticism: there are a lot more important things in life than getting food to people hot, and if you have other higher priorities, good for you.

DoorDash: DashRoots

Back in June I received an e-mail from DoorDash introducing something they called “DashRoots.” Allow me to quote the entire description of the concept from that original June e-mail:

“Thank you for all that you do to empower local economies by Dashing!  DoorDash is proud to announce the launch of DashRoots—an advocacy network that empowers local voices across the communities we serve. DashRoots will harness the voices of Dashers, merchants, and consumers to advocate for pragmatic policies that will improve their lives, from protecting and strengthening independent work, to helping local businesses grow, to investing in programs that can end hunger and promote public safety.

Too often, the voices of Dashers are not at the table when policies around app-based work are being debated. For instance, a recent survey showed that 86% of Dashers prefer the flexibility of independent work. Protecting flexible work is key to helping Dashers thrive in the modern economy, and DashRoots will empower these voices to engage lawmakers and have a direct say in the policy-making process.

DashRoots members will have access to resources like policy advocacy workshops, professional development webinars, local community meet ups, and opportunities to give back to their communities. They will also have opportunities to have a direct say in the legislative process.”

As someone with a personal and professional interest in “policies around app-based work,” I naturally signed up right away. A few weeks later I missed a call from someone at DoorDash about the program, but I never called her back and didn’t think any more about it until August.

At the beginning of August I received an invitation to the inaugural DashRoots event in Washington DC. It was going to be hosted at one of celebrity chef Jose Andres’s mid-tier restaurants, so I naturally RSVP’d right away, thinking I’d get a decent meal out of it if nothing else. The event turned out to be something quite unexpected.

Advocacy of what to whom?

To explain my surprise at the event, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at how different players view each other in the DoorDash ecosystem.

• Workers’ and customers’ primary relationship is with DoorDash. Delivery offers are made by DoorDash at some upfront fee to customers (plus optional tips) for some guaranteed pay amount (plus the possibility of “hidden” tips). Workers and customers have only glancing relationships with each other (whose data is only visible in the brief window between picking up an order and delivering it) and with restaurants (where orders constitute an anonymous stream for both restaurant and delivery workers). That’s not to say that customers, workers, and restaurants are undifferentiated: on the contrary, there are obviously customers and workers who are better and worse at giving and following delivery instructions, and restaurants that are better and worse at processing orders. But they do not constitute an ongoing relationship in the same way a worker is employed by DoorDash or a customer places orders with DoorDash.

• Restaurants’ primary relationship is also with DoorDash. Restaurants can’t decide who is assigned to pick up orders and, to the best of my knowledge, can’t blackball specific customers or workers either. DoorDash sends them orders and workers, then pays them whatever is left after taking their cut of the order amount.

• DoorDash is in a different position. It imposes conditions on its workers and restaurants, but in turn has conditions imposed on it by a range of federal, state, and local governments.

Looking at this structure, you can see how ambiguous the concept of an “advocacy network” is.

As a worker, I have a range of issues I would like to advocate for to DoorDash, my employer. For example, I would like DoorDash to have restaurants categorize their menu items by size, and then only offer me orders that fit in the bags I have so that I don’t get offers to deliver extra large pizzas (or the bizarre oblong pizzas sold by one of our local pizza chains). Right now I simply decline most orders from pizza restaurants, which hurts my acceptance rate. If those orders were filtered out, then I would be offered more orders I’m capable of fulfilling.

A customer who often received hot deliveries that had cooled down en route likewise might want to advocate to DoorDash to add an option to pay more for a “priority” order that would be assigned to a worker as their only order, so that it would arrive hot and fresh, instead of at the end of a long string of orders all over town.

A restaurant that often received complaints about spilled food or damaged orders might want to advocate for a similar option to have only experienced workers deliver their orders. Fancy restaurants might happily pay a higher fee to DoorDash in order to ensure the quality of the food that reaches their customers.

DoorDash has something entirely different in mind.

DashRoots lobbies the government, not DoorDash

I went the inaugural DashRoots event with a list of grievances and annoyances, some petty, some serious, expecting it to be a listening session between workers and DoorDash representatives. I didn’t take seriously the possibility of changing anything, but I figured the world is run by the people who show up, so I showed up.

Instead of listening to their workers, the DashRoots event was in fact a lecture at us. The centerpiece of the event was a slide presentation with three bullet points that had been through the PR machine so many times as to be almost inscrutable. I didn’t jot down the exact wording, but they were roughly:

• “Preserve worker flexibility.”

• “Give restaurants options.”

• And “deliverable and nondeliverable goods.”

These koans are not, in fact, empty signifiers. Each of them is very specific DoorDash policy priority, passed through the intestinal tract of an expensive public relations firm.

“Preserve worker flexibility,” is the easiest one. As you’ve probably guessed, this has nothing to do with preserving worker flexibility and instead refers to DoorDash being allowed to continue misclassifying their delivery workers as independent contractors. DoorDash’s desire to continue their current employment model is inverted into a preference of their employees for “flexibility.”

“Give restaurants options” is trickier because it could refer to almost anything. Give restaurants options over what? Even at the DashRoots event the speaker didn’t come right out and say what the policy question was, instead referring to the three tiers of pricing DoorDash charges restaurants. It sounds like at each price point, the restaurant gets a different delivery distance and perhaps other benefits like higher ranking in the DoorDash search engine. All this is relevant because during the pandemic, DC capped food delivery commissions at 15%. That cap has since expired and DoorDash has raised their commissions accordingly. They want to keep it that way.

“Deliverable and nondeliverable goods” is the most cryptic of the three, and again refers to a very specific local policy grievance. The District of Columbia and Virginia allow the delivery of alcoholic beverages; Maryland does not. DoorDash wants Maryland to legalize alcohol delivery, turning a “nondeliverable" into a “deliverable.”

Astroturfing and ventriloquism

The game DoorDash is playing here is simple. While restaurants and delivery workers have grievances with DoorDash, DoorDash has no reason to listen to or address those grievances because DoorDash imposes the conditions restaurants and workers have to operate under.

With reference to the government, on the other hand, DoorDash is the one in the position of having conditions imposed on it. Their two options are to comply with the law or to change it. Compliance being out of the question, their plan is to change it. To change it, they are using the twin weapons of astroturfing and ventriloquism.

Astroturfing is the time-honored tradition of generating an artificial perception that there is a widespread sentiment in favor or against some policy. In DoorDash’s case, they literally brought sheets of paper, envelopes, and stamps to this DashRoots event, apparently in the hope that they’d walk out with a stack of envelopes addressed to Congress insisting workers like being misclassified, or workers are desperate to deliver alcohol in Maryland. They walked out empty-handed, obviously.

In the case of astroturfing, the letters really would be written by delivery drivers, albeit ones who are told exactly what to write. Ventriloquism is when DoorDash insists on describing its own preferred policies as the preferred policies of its workers or restaurants. DoorDash wants to be able to charge 25% commissions, but it is restaurants that are desperate for options. DoorDash wants to misclassify workers, but it is workers who are desperate for flexibility.

Of course, if anyone wanted to know what delivery workers actually think about misclassification, or restaurants actually think about delivery commissions, or Marylanders think about alcohol delivery, all anyone has to do is hire a polling firm to ask them. Nobody needs to have their voice channeled through DoorDash to be heard. The fact that DoorDash insists that it is the true voice of its workers and its restaurants is just a way of making sure DoorDash’s own policy preferences are the ones that get heard loudest.

Uber Eats: introduction

So far I’ve been writing about my experiences working for DoorDash, for the simple reason that my old phone didn’t support the Uber Driver app. That phone finally reached the end of its useful lifespan, and I finally replaced it, which meant I was ready to start experimenting with Uber Eats. Today I’ll share my overall impressions, and go into more detail about individual features in future posts.

Signing up

Just as with DoorDash, signing up to work for Uber was so simple I didn’t bother taking screenshots. Since I was only signing up to deliver using bikes and scooters, the only part of the process that took any time at all was the background check, which came through in a few minutes.

I suspect the process can be more time-consuming if you are signing up to deliver using a car or to deliver people instead of food, since I assume they check your license, registration, and insurance coverage as well. If they find anything on your background check you may have more difficulty getting on the platform as well, but I don’t know how strict Uber is about that kind of thing.

The Uber Driver interface is baffling, but you don’t use it for anything

I’ve always found that the customer-facing Uber app works pretty well, or at least the way you would expect it to work: you enter your origin and your destination and it gives you some prices and options, you click one, then you pay with a card you have on file.

The Uber Driver app isn’t like that at all. In fact, it’s almost ludicrously primitive. There are basically only three buttons that do anything: a button that says “GO,” a button that says “STOP,” and a little icon in the shape of a coffee cup which lets you pause orders.

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There are a few more things you can can do buried in the app’s menus, like set up your direct deposit, but not much. Frankly, as a driver I was expecting a bit more of a peak behind the curtain, but that’s about it.

Uber hides tips

Here I owe an apology to Kellen Browning, the author of the New York Times story I referenced in May. I genuinely did not realize just how weird Uber is about the tip portion of their workers’ pay.

Like DoorDash, Uber will show you an upfront amount including what they call an “expected” tip. This is manifestly absurd. The tip has already been included in the order, it’s already been processed by the credit card company, there is nothing “expected” about the tip — it has already been paid in the past by the time you see an order.

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What Uber actually means is they will not tell you how much you have actually earned on an order until “roughly” an hour after the order has been completed. Here’s what that looks like in the app, when you complete an order and after the tip is revealed:

The thing to pay attention to here is not the “estimated” trip amount (a fiction), but the timestamps. I did not know how much this order would actually pay until 100 minutes after I had already dropped off the food — the order was delivered at 12:43 pm and the pay wasn’t finalized until 2:23 pm!

Uber gets a lot of orders

Working for DoorDash has a lot of periodic frustrations (like customers), but if there’s one word I would use to describe the experience, it would be “leisurely.” During a typical lunch shift, I can get about 3 or 4 orders per hour, each of which takes “about” 15 minutes and pays “somewhere between” $6 and $12. These are just convenient round numbers I tell friends and family, obviously the actual amounts vary daily, more or less at random. I usually work for DoorDash when I’m running other errands, and when an attractive order comes in, I can take it and then get back to my own stuff until I get another order.

Uber, in my experience, is nothing like that. From the second I press the app’s “GO” button, a firehose of orders starts streaming out. It is frankly impossible to do anything or even think about anything else while the app sends push notifications, sound effects, and every other kind of nightmare our devices are capable of producing.

If that sounds like a feature (and for some people I assume it is), the problem is the orders make no sense.

Uber forces you to be a lot pickier than DoorDash

Virtually every DoorDash order I get makes instant sense: it’s usually a merchant relatively close to my current location and a customer 5-10 minutes away at 10 miles per hour. Since DoorDash shows you how much the order will pay, including tips (up to a certain amount), it’s easy to apply a simple rule like needing $5 per mile in order to accept an order.

Uber will happily send me to a McDonalds 3 miles across town, then backtrack past 3 other McDonalds to a customer on the other side of town. If you’re not paying attention, you can accept an order like that and spend an hour ferrying around a cold $9 cheeseburger. If the pay were high enough, that might still be an order worth taking. The problem is, since Uber conceals tips, there’s no way of knowing whether the pay is high enough.

Uber has a trust problem

I think if you loaded an Uber engineer up on sodium pentothal and asked why the app issues these bizarre orders, they would tell you something like this:

“Since Uber has access to the history of every order placed on the platform in every conceivable set of conditions, we are uniquely capable of optimally distributing every order — including orders that have not yet been placed! — across the entire pool of drivers so that customer satisfaction is maximized and driver pay is as fair as possible. However, since Uber can only assign orders that have already been placed, we can’t tell you to go to a specific restaurant where we expect a future order to be placed. Instead, we use orders that have been placed to move drivers into position for those future, more reasonable orders. All you have to do is trust us.”

Besides having absolutely no faith that Uber engineers are capable of executing this task, there is an additional problem: for the system to work as described, drivers have to trust not just in the talent and ingenuity of Uber’s engineers, but also that Uber is acting in their best interests. In fact, of course, nobody trusts Uber because Uber does not behave in a trustworthy way.

On the contrary, from its very inception and at every junction since, Uber has behaved like a sociopath. It operated or operates illegally in virtually every market it enters. When its lawbreaking is discovered, it pretends to be the victim. When laws are passed to create regulatory frameworks it disapproves of, it dumps vast amounts of investor money into overturning them. When customers are assaulted, it demands silence when it compensates its victims so the public only learns about a fraction of them (while investors are compensated for the hit to Uber’s share price).

And then they ask workers to “trust” them?

Uber seems totally indifferent to performance

Another interesting difference between working for DoorDash and for Uber is that DoorDash puts a priority on high performance. For example, drivers with a high acceptance rate are given priority for what DoorDash calls “high-paying orders;” virtually all my orders are now classified as “high-paying” (don’t get too excited, that just means $6 instead of $3 most of the time).

Likewise, DoorDash gives you a timeframe they expect you to pick up and deliver orders in. As I’ve mentioned before, these timeframes are extremely generous (I have a 98% on-time rate and I’m literally puttering around on scooters at 10 miles per hour), but they are there, and if DoorDash detects you’re going the wrong direction or not moving towards your destination they can and will cancel the order and assign a different worker. If DoorDash detects you’ve gone offline or your device isn’t responding, they’ll automatically pause your dash (this is actually a feature in my experience since it means your acceptance rate doesn’t crash if you hit a dead spot).

Uber isn’t like that. As far I can tell, Uber basically doesn’t care how you use the platform. There is one nuance, “Uber Eats Pro,” which is trivially easy to qualify for, but it also doesn’t have any real benefits unless you want to take classes through ASU Online, which also requires 2,000 lifetime deliveries before you qualify.

Other than that, Uber just doesn’t seem to care about anything. There’s no incentive for fast delivery other than being able to make more deliveries. There’s no punishment for having a low acceptance rate or even for canceling orders. This is good because the app is so bad that I frequently have to cancel orders when I realize exactly where Uber wants me to go.

This also helps explain the at-first-baffling remark in the Browning article that workers will reject “scores of low-value orders while waiting for hours for a big get from a high-end restaurant.” On DoorDash that strategy will actively reduce your likelihood of receiving a high-paying order, while on Uber it is absolutely essential to reject orders in order to make enough money to leave the house. Consequently, my acceptance rate on DoorDash is currently 74% (I accept also every order I receive) and on Uber it is just 22% (I turn down almost every order I receive).

Uber sells drivers

While DoorDash does sell literally sell stuff to drivers (those red bags aren’t always free!), and has a few marketing offers for things like a debit card to receive instant payouts, Uber is much more aggressive in selling every part of its workers. Of course they sell their workers’ labor power, the social capital that goes along with it, and the value of their vehicle and fuel. But beyond that they also sell access to drivers as customers.

Think of Uber as a giant affiliate marketing engine, like a credit card review website. On a website, readers are attracted by useful, entertaining, or accurate information. Then their attention is sold on to banks, or mattress companies, or food box delivery services.

In Uber’s case, workers are attracted onto the platform with literal money: the payments workers receive for deliveries. Then once Uber has their attention, it’s sold onwards to companies in exactly the same way.

I receive 2-3 e-mails per day with affiliate offers, all from Uber. Since Uber knows workers will worry about any e-mail from their boss, the open rate on those e-mails must be among the highest of any affiliate advertising in history. Within the app there are ads for discounts at restaurants and gas stations, who know they have to pay to be included since they don’t want to be the only ones not listed.

You can call me naive, but after my experience with DoorDash I genuinely was not expecting this level of constant marketing bombardment. Why would a company allow its advertisers to be so aggressive that at the margin it hounds its own workers off the platform? Of course, upon a moment’s reflection, the explanation is obvious. Uber loses money offering services that people want to buy, and it always will. But if you think of the difference between the money Uber receives from retail customers and that it pays out to drivers and restaurants as an audience acquisition cost, then there’s nothing left to explain: the affiliate relationship division is the only floor of the building that makes any money!

Now, will it make enough money to survive sustained 6% interest rates? I doubt it. But without that beacon of revenue the investors would be getting even more impatient at the loud sucking sound coming from the rest of the company.

DoorDash: my first "challenge" and money, the great motivator

When ride-hailing apps first launched and for some time afterwards, they aggressively recruited workers through promotions that would award bonus payments for hitting a specific threshold within a certain number of days. These promotions could be quite lucrative, even outlandishly so: I fooled around with Google’s search settings and found references to Uber signup bonuses of $1,000 after providing 150 rides in 60 days.

The appeal of these enlistment bonuses to the delivery companies was obvious: if someone does meet the bonus threshold, then the bonus is a small price to pay for an experienced, trained-up new driver. Some people will get close to the bonus threshold but not meet it: a 149-ride driver is almost as valuable as a 150-ride driver, but costs Uber nothing extra. And of course people who sign up, provide a few rides, then give up don’t cost the companies anything at all.

Some enterprising souls went so far as to buy burner phones and accept rides from themselves in order to both meet their bonus requirements and get where they were planning to drive anyway.

Those signup bonuses seem to have mostly disappeared, in some cases replaced by “guarantees,” where a company will “top up” your earnings at the end of your initial period if you complete the specified number of rides but earned less than the guarantee.

While I did sign up with a random DoorDash referral link I found online, as far as I know it didn’t have a bonus attached to it, so I didn’t have any experience with bonuses until mid-April, when I received my first DoorDash “challenge.”

My DoorDash challenge roughly doubled my income

On Friday, April 21, I got an e-mail offering me a $75 bonus after completing 15 deliveries between Saturday at 6 am and Sunday at 11:59 pm. The challenge only applied to deliveries in my “home” region, which I know because I was on the other side of the country at the time. However, I flew back Saturday night (on schedule, not to complete the challenge!), and knocked out the deliveries over the course of Sunday morning and afternoon.

For my 15 deliveries, I was working for about 5.5 hours of dash time and had about 4 hours of active time. For the deliveries alone, I earned $58.75 in base pay and $32.20 in customer tips, for a total of $90.95. After triggering the challenge, my total pay for the week was $165.95 (as I say, I was out of town the entire week except Sunday).

Taking the bonus into account, I earned a little over $30 an hour during the 5.5 hours I spent on DoorDash. I also realized that I’d be happy delivering for DoorDash all day if I could keep making $30 an hour doing it.

Money is a remarkable motivator

Since I was pursuing the $75 challenge, for both the money and the content, that Sunday I simply accepted the first 15 orders I was offered. This was a big difference from my usual practice. Indeed, my current order acceptance rate is just 60% — I decline nearly as many orders as I accept. That’s because I try to pick up and deliver within a relatively small area. Outside of my patch, the city is a labyrinth, and it’s boring, time-consuming, and dangerous to constantly be checking my phone for directions while I’m weaving in and out of one-way downtown traffic on a scooter or e-bike.

The reason I was willing to break my self-imposed geographic cordon is that during my challenge, every order I was offered had an embedded $5 bonus in it. A $2.75 order that I would normally reject out of hand was suddenly a $7.75 order. My highest order, for $13.75, was now an $18.75 order, more than worth the hazard of dodging lost tourists.

Identify (and minimize) your real costs

Whether it is worth taking an order, or working for a delivery company at all, doesn’t just depend on your income, it also depends on your expenses. I’m in a somewhat unusual position since I have free access to electric scooters and e-bikes, so when I’m delivering for DoorDash I’m trying to converting my time into money as directly as possible. I think I’ve spent less than $100 total on supplies, which basically consist of a bike helmet and reflective vest.

Most delivery workers have more expenses than I do. In many areas workers rely on private cars, which besides the purchase and financing costs also require repair, maintenance, fuel and insurance.

It’s common to refer to the federal deduction for business mileage, currently 65.5 cents per mile, to approximate those expenses. But the federal mileage allowance is a legal fiction. That does not mean it is not useful — many fictions are useful! — but you cannot pay your rent with things that are not true. Your actual income is what’s left after paying your actual expenses; that’s the amount of money you are being paid for your time.

Since a worker’s actual income is their actual pay minus their actual expenses, and the human brain is a powerful pattern-finding machine, people have come up with some funny ways to maximize the former and minimize the latter.

Desperate people control what they can

All of this was on my mind when I read this curious article in the New York Times. The whole thing is well worth a read, describing a subculture of delivery workers in Los Angeles who camp out near fancy restaurants turning down all the orders they’re offered except the ones they suspect will come with the highest tips. I do not think this is a very common phenomenon, but since they went to the trouble of tricking a journalist into writing about them, let’s humor them.

The logic is simple: if you can identify high-value orders in advance and only accept those, then you minimize expenses, especially fuel but also wear and tear on your vehicle. Indeed, if you keep your expenses low enough, you can end up with more income despite having a lower gross income than a worker that accepts every order.

There are a few glaring errors in the Times piece and a few points where the journalist simply didn’t understand what they were being told, but there are some very sharp observations as well. For example, since (outside of New York City, where it’s legally required to) it’s true that DoorDash will not display large customer tips before accepting an order, it makes perfect sense to “reject any order that shows under $11.50 in upfront pay, because there’s no chance of a ‘hidden’ tip” (DoorDash seems to be in the process of making changes to this practice, which I’ll describe in a future post).

When journalists ask DoorDash for comment on these stories, they invariably provide some version of the quote they gave the Times: “The data show that when Dashers accept more orders, they generally earn more during the course of their dash.”

While they obviously don’t provide their raw data to independent researchers, let along bloggers, I believe this is absolutely true from the perspective of DoorDash.

Remember, DoorDash does not know or care how much it costs for you to make deliveries. But they have crystal clear insight into how much they pay you and can account for every second you are using the app. I suspect all else being equal (starting location, delivery method, internal rating algorithm) there’s basically a linear correlation between the percentage of orders a worker accepts and their gross hourly pay.

But that still doesn’t mean you should accept every order. On the contrary, if your acceptance rate is 100%, your reserve price is almost certainly too low.

Establish a high, realistic reserve price

Economists call the amount of money you have to pay an idle worker to do a job instead of remaining idle that worker’s “reserve” price. It’s a useful concept, as long as you treat it cynically. Most importantly, it’s a completely different concept than what a worker’s time is “worth.”

That’s because in the time between accepting an order and completing a delivery, you’re not going to be offered the same orders as you would be if you were still idle. Since accepting one order excludes other orders, your reserve price should be “somewhat” higher than the actual value you put on your time.

If you value your time at $30 per hour, should you accept every order that pays the equivalent of $30 per hour? Of course not. In fact, doing so will virtually guarantee that your income is less than you consider it worth, accounting for both the time you are idle between orders and the orders you pass up by accepting those marginal ones.

Personally, I find it easiest to quickly evaluate orders by distance, and I put my reserve price at “about” $5 per mile. Unlike drivers, who have to consider things like traffic, weather, and road conditions, I’m virtually always traveling at top speed, which is between roughly 10 and 15 miles per hour, depending on what I’m riding.

That makes it fairly simple to tell how long an order will take to complete: on our dockless e-scooters, a delivery takes 6 minutes per mile, plus pickup time, plus delivery time. If the latter two add up to an average of 6 minutes per order, then a one-mile order will take about 12 minutes, and I can complete about 5 per hour.

As a rule of thumb, it’s flexible: for longer-distance orders I’ll sometimes go a little below $5 per mile, especially if the order is from a restaurant or to a building I know from experience is good at handling them. And there are areas I need a hell of a lot more money to deliver to. Not, needless to say, because I’m scared of the big bad city, but because navigating the warren of alleys that makes up our university, medical, and arms dealer campuses is almost always more trouble than it’s worth.

Does this mean I value my time at $25 per hour or that I earn $25 per hour? Not at all. It means that accepting only orders that pay $5 per mile or more will, across all my orders and all my time working for DoorDash, generate enough income to compensate me for my time, taking into account both time I’m idle and orders that pay much more than $5 per mile.

The right reserve price for you won’t be the same as mine, and it should naturally vary over time. But it should always be high enough to weed out low-value, high-cost orders, and low enough that your idle time doesn’t drown the time DoorDash is actually willing to pay you for.

And you can’t find a reserve price that works for you, then you can get another job!

DoorDash: Gear Check No. 2

The biggest expenses most food delivery workers incur is connected to their vehicle: car payments, fuel, insurance, and maintenance. Since I’m relying on free electric micromobility services for transportation, my situation is totally different: those costs are $0. For me, the only expenses are the personal gear I can use to make deliveries easier or more comfortable, hence this periodic series: Gear Check!

Delivery services sell reasonably priced gear

While it may sound odd, the app-based delivery services have little shops where they sell a variety of delivery gear. They may or may not require you to sign up as a delivery worker, but that’s just a matter of a few clicks anyway. Here are a few of the stores for delivery workers:

• DoorDash

• Uber Eats (Postmates)

• Instacart

• GrubHub

Clicking around these stores you can spot some reasonably priced options, and prices that vary store-by-store. I’m not trying to overstate the case, and the stuff is mostly ugly as sin, but I can illustrate with a few different items that are sold on some or all of the stores.

• Bike helmets: $21.75 (DoorDash), $23.93 (Uber Eats). These aren’t the cheapest bike helmets you’ll ever see, but they seem competitive with entry-level helmets available on Amazon.

• Ice scraping tools: $5 (DoorDash), $10.99 (Grubhub).

• Mobile phone charging equipment: $18.35 (DoorDash), $23.95 (DoorDash), $6.99 (Grubhub)

All the stores also offer different sizes and shapes of insulated and uninsulated bags, which may come in handy when delivering oddly-shaped orders (pizzas are the worst, in my experience).

Now I’m obviously not recommending any or all of the products above. Do your own shopping. I’m just setting the table for one benefit of enrolling as a worker in these programs: discounts.

DoorDash offers periodic discounts on gear

I’ve only been working for DoorDash since late September, 2022, and I’ve already received two offers for discounted gear.

At the beginning of December, 2022, I got an offer for $12 off “winter gear,” with no minimum spend, so I ordered a space blanket and a flashlight and paid a total of $1.60. I could have “bought” either item for free but I wanted to get as close to $12 as possible so ended up going a little over.

Then on February 10, 2023, I got another offer supposedly linked to Valentine’s Day for $14 off, again with no minimum spend. This time I picked out a rechargeable bike light for $13.80, and sure enough the promotion removed the entire cost from the order.

Obviously two datapoints does not a pattern make, but I assume that roughly “every few months” you get a chance to pick out some free crap from the DoorDash store, as long as you’re signed up as a worker.

Discounts at other app-based delivery company stores

I only have experience with DoorDash so far, but I spent a few minutes poking around Reddit looking for examples of discounts offered by the other app-based delivery companies to their workers. Here are a few more discounts that I was able to find references to:

• Grubhub: dashcams, delivery bags

• Instacart: oil changes (Canada)

Conclusion

Some of these products and discounts seem limited, more or less strictly, to workers who complete a certain number of deliveries or at certain times of day. While that’s well worth keeping in mind, it’s also a reason to sign up for as many of them as you’re able to in order to secure as many opportunities for these freebies as possible. After all, nobody’s going to care if you deliver a DoorDash order in a free Grubhub bag.

DoorDash: Earn by Time

Over the winter holidays, I headed out to Oregon as usual to spend some time on the coast and visit family. As I often say, while travel hacking is a way to save money on travel expenses, travel itself is a chance to explore opportunities outside your immediate area.

For example, back in 2015 the California grocery chain Smart & Final was running a promotion for American Express cardholders to save $25 on purchases of $50 or more — and I happened to be in San Diego at the time the promotion was running, letting me rack up hundreds of dollars in statement credits across a slew of authorized user cards that I wouldn’t have been able to do back home. The trip more than paid for itself.

Earn by time lets you be paid like a normal person, but only for “active time”

Since we were in Oregon for so long, I had planned on sneaking off between visits with friends and family to earn some money working for DoorDash. DoorDash has a peculiar feature in that it takes a little while after you arrive in a new area to switch your app’s geography over, but once that happened after a day or two, I was surprised to find a new feature had appeared in my iPhone’s Dasher app: “Earn by Time.”

You can read the linked article yourself, but the basic idea is simple: instead of being paid the sum of base pay, bonus pay, and customer tips for each order you deliver, you’re paid an hourly rate from the time you accept an order to the time the order is delivered, in other words, for “active time,” while still collecting 100% of the tips customers leave on each order.

While I was in Portland, the Earn by Time rate was $14.75, which happens to be the minimum wage within the “urban growth boundary” of Multnomah, Clackamas, and Washington counties.

According to this Reddit thread, other workers have seen Earn by Time rates of $10 per hour in Houston and Tennessee, $15 per hour in Maine, $9.99 in Indiana, and so on. Since these are all over the place, the connection to the minimum wage in Portland seems to be something of a coincidence (Maine’s minimum wage is $13.80, for instance).

Unfortunately, dear reader, I was not, in fact, able to sneak away and complete any Earn by Time orders, so I have nothing to report about how it works in practice. Upon returning to the nation’s capital, the option disappeared, so it will take another trip (or an expansion of the earning option to my area) for me to report from personal experience.

What’s better: Earn by Time or Earn by Order?

Nevertheless, I can provide some suggestive evidence, and a framework for thinking about whether to Earn by Time or Earn by Order based on my earning history. For this purpose I’m only going to use my 4 highest-earning weeks since I started working for DoorDash, as those were the weeks when I most successfully optimized my dash-time-to-active-time ratio, and it roughly approximates a “month” of earnings (28 days).

When looking at this data, it’s absolutely essential to remember that even when you are in Earn by Time mode, you still collect 100% of customer tips. That means we need to identify the breakeven point including only base pay and bonus pay. Let’s take a look.

Over my 4 highest earning weeks I earned a total of $866.70 ($171.02, $195.46, $202.62, and $297.59), across 29.33 hours (5.62, 6.8, 6.78, and 10.13) of “active time,” a total pay rate of $29.55 per hour.

However, that includes base pay, bonus pay, and customer tips. To make a comparison to Earn by Time, we need to first back out customer tips to show only the amount DoorDash paid me to for active time.

Of the $866.70 total pay, only $540.75 was paid by DoorDash — the rest was customer tips. That brings my Earn by Time breakeven rate down to $18.44, assuming Earn by Time workers are equally likely to be assigned orders as Earn by Order workers. That’s an enormous, unjustified assumption that I do not have any reason to believe, but it gives at least one possibly useful frame of reference.

That’s several dollars higher than the minimum wage in the District of Columbia (although it will increase to $16.50 in July, 2023), so you would need an active-time-to-dash-time ratio of about 87% to earn the minimum wage from DoorDash using Earn by Time. That’s much, much higher than even my most successful week on the platform, but it’s not totally unrealistic.

Conclusion: Should you earn by time or order?

As the above makes clear, the obvious answer is: “it depends.” If DoorDash offered me $18.44 per hour or more to Earn by Time, it would be a no-brainer; that’s what I’m earning anyway on my best weeks. If you can earn more using Earn by Time, then use it!

The subtler answer is that if Earn by Time is or becomes available in your area, or if you’re traveling and land in an area where it’s available, you should give it a shot. You can switch out of that mode any time, so I’d certainly consider starting a lunch rush in Earn by Time mode and then finishing it in Earn by Order mode, or try alternating days in each earning mode.

The one thing DoorDash is very good about is earnings transparency, so it should be obvious within a week or two which earning option generates the highest total pay. And if you want to run the experiment again every month or two to see if the dynamic has changed, that’s always an option too.

The most important thing seems to me to simply be staying out of any ruts and avoid forming any habits; when a strategy stops meeting your goals or needs, it’s time to try something else!

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.

DoorDash: sticky prices, menu costs, and discounts

There’s an old joke about economists encountering the operation of the real world: “sure, it works in practice, but how does it work in theory?” A classic example is the question of “sticky” prices. Why don’t businesses adjust the price of their goods minute-by-minute to calibrate the amount they have in stock with the price they’re able to sell the last unit at? Why do employers agree on a wage when hiring employees, rather than deciding on a day-by-day basis how much they’re willing to pay for one day’s labor? In other words, what makes prices and wages “sticky?”

If these questions sound insane to you, congratulations: you’ve never met an economist. One theory economists came up with to explain the observed world of sticky prices is that of “menu costs.” The term comes from the extremely literal observation that since it costs money to print new menus, restaurants don’t update their prices until they expect the increased revenue from the updated menu prices exceeds the cost of redesigning and reprinting their menus.

Online ordering platforms have, theoretically, dramatically lowered if not eliminated these menu costs. It’s technically trivial to adjust the price of any menu item by an arbitrary amount an arbitrary number of times; they’re just numbers in a database, not dozens of giant pages of laminated card paper like you find at your local Greek diner.

But this is a misunderstanding brought on by the term itself. “Menu” costs don’t just consist of how much you pay your printer to print new menus. You also have to pay someone to spend time thinking about how much to charge for each item on the new menu. Then you have to pay someone to spend time designing the PDF of the new menu to ship off to the printer. When the menus come in, you have to pay someone to pull the old menus out of their plastic sheaths and replace them with new ones.

Online ordering platforms are great at eliminating the “printing” portion of menu costs, but don’t do anything about the rest of the equation — menu costs are alive and well, and as long as they are, prices are going to be “sticky.”

Prices are higher on app-based ordering platforms

This principle is exposed in an interesting way on app-based ordering platforms. For this post I’ll be using two real-world examples, although you’ll find identical examples at any restaurant in your own area.

In Washington, DC, the London Curry House on U Street NW charges its regular menu prices when ordering pickup in person (obviously), over the phone, or through the Toast online ordering platform. Meanwhile, the exact same items — each item on the entire menu, from garlic naan to ajwaini salmon tikka — costs exactly $1 more when ordering them through DoorDash.

In Portland, Oregon, the Tuk-Tuk Thai restaurant took a slightly more confusing approach. The prices on its regular menu match up to those on its order.online menu, but when ordering mains through DoorDash you’re required to select a “protein” that costs at least $2 extra — including “vegetable” — ingredients that would be free when ordering in person, over the phone, or through their own online ordering system. For appetizers like spring rolls and salad rolls where that isn’t plausible, they simply charge $0.50 more.

Discounts really can, but don’t necessarily, save you money

This is, obviously, fine. There’s no law that says restaurants or anyone else has to charge the same price through every order channel, so if restaurants want to charge more when you order through channels where they get a smaller cut of the revenue, they’re obviously free to do so. The reason it matters is that DoorDash and similar services offer periodic discounts for using them, and knowing that prices vary between ordering channels helps to decide when an offer is worth using.

A typical DoorDash discount is along the lines of “$5 off orders of $30 or more.” As the two example stores above show, whether this is a good deal or not depends on precisely how many dishes you’re ordering: at the London Curry House, you save money compared to ordering through their Toast portal when you order 4 or fewer dishes. At Tuk-Tuk, the discount is lost entirely and you go into the red after ordering 3 main dishes, or 2 mains and 2 sides.

I received another type of DoorDash discount offer “as a thanks for dashing during dinner” (this is just flavor text their marketing team came up with, don’t take it seriously). That offer was for 30% off pickup orders, up to $10. That offer would be maximized on an order of $33, similar to the $30 threshold above, but with a value high enough to easily overcome the higher prices charged through DoorDash compared to other order channels (although nowhere close to $10 in value).

The lesson here is simple: when choosing how to order, check a restaurant’s regular menu prices, the prices charged on their preferred online ordering system, and the prices charged through app-based ordering systems. Coupons and discounts really can save you money off even app-inflated prices, but you won’t know unless you check, and DoorDash is counting on you not checking.

DoorDash: customers, ranked

Last week I wrote about some of the things you need to keep in mind when deciding which restaurants you choose to deliver from: packaging, convenience, and speed being the most important to maximum your earnings while you’re working for DoorDash. Of course, picking up orders is only half the delivery process, and the half you have the most control over.

Deciding where and to whom you should deliver is just as important.

So in this post, I’ll rank the least to most annoying customer affectations, which will hopefully ultimately help you be a less annoying customer and get your orders delivered in a fresher and more timely manner!

Actually mobility-impaired people

It seems like every 3 or 4 months we go through a repetitive cycle of discourse, starting with a customer complaining about their delivery worker’s incompetence, followed up with a snarky response from a worker that “the customer should get their own food,” and concluding with someone with a mobility issue arguing that “a lot of people depend on delivery” because they have trouble getting to the shops and that restaurant delivery is a treat that allows them to live more like people without mobility issues.

This discourse is extremely destructive, for the primary reason that people who actually rely on delivery services are the best at navigating the requirements of the various app-based delivery services. You’ll usually see detailed instructions:

1. use this entry code, apartment number, or apartment ID to enter my building or be buzzed in;

2. bring it up to my floor;

3. leave it outside my apartment door or hand it directly to me.

That may sound like “micromanagement,” but from the delivery worker’s perspective it’s a godsend, because the instructions can be completed rapidly and completely without spending minutes trying to get in touch with the customer in order to figure out what they actually want you to do with the order.

Office workers who can’t leave their desks

Another group of customers I don’t mind delivering for is office and especially reception workers, most of whom are tied to their desks and don’t want to waste their lunch break running out during the rush, waiting in line, and then stuffing their faces before their break ends. They’re usually able to buzz you into buildings themselves, or their coworkers at reception know their names and are happy to take their orders the “last 20 feet” to their office or cubicle. I’ve delivered to realty offices, gyms, spas, and similar situations where customers are incredibly grateful to be able to get their food delivered as quickly and as fresh as possible.

People working from home in concierge buildings

Now we’re edging into the more annoying territory. With a lot of customers working from home, they’re ordering their meals delivered, but have no idea how their own building’s delivery system works. Countless times I’ve had to call a customer and they’ve asked, “oh is there nobody at the desk?” What “desk?” What are you talking about?

Which leads me to…

People who don’t know how entry to their own building works

These are the people who will waste the most amount of your time. People who never bothered to set up their entry phone number, who don’t know the code to their own apartment, and who have no idea how to let you in. Most residential access systems are configured by surname, and most DoorDash orders don’t include the user’s surname, so there’s literally no mechanism you can use to call their apartment to be buzzed in.

This will waste a lot of time, but it pales in comparison to the annoyance of…

People who forgot they ordered delivery

If I ever ordered delivery through a service like DoorDash, it would be literally the only thing I could think about until I had the food in hand. But you would not believe the number of times I’ve had to call a customer in the middle of the day and tell them, “hi, I’m downstairs with your salad,” and the person has said, “oh shoot right, sorry I’m on a call right now, but I’ll be down as soon as I’m free.”

Don’t do that. If you order delivery, your and my only priority until you are plating your salad in your kitchen is getting the salad to you. If you are in a meeting and need me to wait downstairs, I will leave your salad outside your door in the rain, and you are going to have a soggy salad.

If you value my time, I’ll value your lack of interest in leaving your luxury apartment. If you want me to wait 10 minutes downstairs, you’ll end up with a soggy salad.

I don’t make the rules, but I sure as hell enforce them.

DoorDash: restaurants

One of the steepest learning curves when you start working for DoorDash is learning which restaurants are worth delivering from, and which are or could be a waste of time. Unless you happen to work in the exact zone I do, there’s no way to lay out a comprehensive guide to restaurants which offer DoorDash delivery, but there are several general categories you should start thinking about restaurants in as soon as you sign up.

Packaging

I put this first because it’s by far the most important issue you’ll encounter when it comes to completing an order. The example I like to use is the difference between McDonald’s and Popeye’s. I didn’t really know anything about Popeye’s until I moved to the mid-Atlantic, but in general I thought of them as a slightly-more-upscale fast food chain, akin to a Chick-fil-A, and I know people love their biscuits (I find them almost too dry to eat, personally).

But as a DoorDash worker, it doesn’t matter how the food tastes. It matters how the food is packaged, and McDonald’s has found a way to package fountain beverages inside the bags they hand you, while Popeye’s hands you a separate cardboard drink holder for fountain beverages. The first time this happened I simply walked the order to the customer, since I wasn’t going to try to juggle it on a bike or scooter. There hasn’t been a second time; I simply decline orders from Popeye’s now.

Even when a merchant has designed specialized packaging, that packaging might not work for you, personally. There’s a DC-based (although now widespread on the Eastern seaboard) chain of pizza parlors that sells oblong pizzas called &pizza. The pizza is pretty good, but because it is oblong, it is packaged in rectangular boxes that don’t fit into a standard hot bag. That means wrestling with a stupidly-shaped object that you’re at least trying to keep warm and intact to its final destination. I don’t deliver for &pizza anymore either.

On the other hand, some restaurants will surprise you. Besides the highly-efficient McDonald’s packaging I mentioned above, many smaller delis and ethnic restaurants (pho is big in my area) have excellent packaging, presumably because they had been packaging takeout orders for decades before the smartphone had been invented.

Pick-up process

Since a lot of restaurants didn’t participate in, and weren’t designed for, delivery programs before the pandemic, each is configured in a different way and handles delivery orders differently. I’ve never had any serious problems eventually collecting an order, but learning the configuration of different stores helps a lot in deciding which orders to take.

One of the most interesting things to note here is that different stores within the same chain will handle delivery orders entirely differently. For example, there are two Sweetgreen locations in DC within a mile of each other. One of them, “due to theft,” requires you to bypass the set of shelves labeled “delivery" and pick up your order from the (newly-overworked) cashier. The other — less than a mile a way — continues to use the delivery shelves.

Likewise, there are two McDonald’s locations, again less than a mile apart, one where orders have to be picked up inside the store from a cashier, and the other with a dedicated window for app-based delivery workers.

Of course most stores aren’t specially configured for delivery at all, so require waiting in line or attracting the attention of employees to ask them where and how to pick up orders.

Wait time

If packaging is the most important consideration when deciding whether you can complete an order, then wait time is the most important when deciding if you should. As I explained last week, the most important input into maximizing your earnings is matching your “active time” to your “dash time.” There is, however, one wrinkle in that equation: time spent after accepting an order, but while waiting for the order to be ready, is treated by DoorDash as active time.

In my experience DoorDash is pretty good about only assigning orders once they expect food to be ready (one reason why your food is never hot when it gets to you — DoorDash didn’t assign the order until it was already sitting on the windowsill cooling), but it’s worth keeping a mental note about restaurants that are particularly slow at different times. A taco shop that might be slammed for lunch and waste 10 minutes of your time waiting may be slow for dinner and have your order waiting when you arrive. But if a restaurant consistently keeps you waiting for orders, just add it to your mental blacklist, since all they’re doing is converting your active time into dash time.

Conclusion

If there’s one key takeaway here, it’s that the experience of delivering food from a restaurant is entirely detached from the experience of being a customer there. I’ve received $10 tips from Taco Bell, but I’ve never received a tip delivering from former Treasury Secretary Mnuchin’s precious Le Diplomate ($2.75 to deliver a $54 rack of lamb? I’d rather eat it myself, and I don’t even like lamb).

So don’t decide whether to accept a delivery based on any kind of judgment on the restaurant’s business itself, but starting with your first delivery, assess each restaurant you’re offered to decide whether they are going to give you the simple, efficient, profitable delivery experience you signed up for. If not, just decline the order and let somebody else deal with it.

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:

View fullsize

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: Tips (1)

I recently received a question on Twitter about what percentage DoorDash customers typically add to their order as tips, which is the third component of each order’s pay (after base pay and peak pay), and is mostly (but not entirely) invisible to workers until after an order has been completed.

This is a question that’s literally impossible to answer on a retrospective basis, for two complicated reasons, so I designed a brief experiment to calculate it in real time, and am happy to share the results today.

Methodology

There are at least 4 different “Types” of DoorDash orders, which I’ll explain in more depth in a future post, but can briefly summarize here:

1. Orders originating with DoorDash. These are “classic” DoorDash orders where you place your order in the DoorDash app, and DoorDash has completely visibility of both menu items and prices.

2. Orders originating with the merchant. I believe these orders are created when you order delivery through a merchant like McDonalds or Sweetgreen and they foist the order off on DoorDash (or one of their other delivery partners). Here, DoorDash does not see or share the contents of the order or the price customers pay the merchant.

3. Red Card orders. These are orders where the worker uses a special debit card to physically pay for an order in-store. The worker sees the items in the order, but uses the Red Card to pay whatever retail price the store charges, and does not see how much the customer is charged for them.

4. Cash on delivery orders. I currently have this feature disabled, but my understanding is it allows workers to pay for orders with their own money at the merchant, then be reimbursed by the customer in cash when the order is delivered.

For the purposes of my study, I used exclusively the “classic” order Type 1, for the simple reason that this is the only order Type which allows you to see, in advance, the contents of an order and the price paid by the customer. Over the course of a few days, I set out to track 10 Type 1 orders, the retail price of the contents, and the final tip left by the customer. I ultimately forgot to sign off and accepted an 11th order, so I decided to include it as well, although you can rerun the calculation excluding that tip ($3 on a $30.56 McDonalds order).

One reason this is frustrating, and why I limited the number of orders I’d study, is that the contents and price information are only visible for the order you are currently delivering, only while you are delivering it, and are buried several menus deep, making it impractical to do this at any scale (at least on a volunteer basis!).

During the study period (Friday, September 30 and Saturday, October 1, 2022) I accepted every order I was offered (which included several Type 2 orders excluded from the study) in order to prevent the sample being biased towards higher-paying, higher-tipped orders.

Data

With that out of the way, here are the results of those 11 Type 1 orders:

View fullsize

As you can see, a majority (6) of my Type 1 customers tipped between $2 and $3.50, with tips of $2, $3, and $5 being equally represented in the sample.

Of the 9 customers who tipped, the average tip was $3.56, and the average tip rate was 13.3%.

Interestingly, there is no correlation between the price of an order and the tip rate, which is strongly suggestive that most customers are not following a customary rule based on order value, but instead tip a fixed amount on every order regardless of the order’s contents. Customers’ tipping decisions may be based on other factors, like ability to pay (customers who can charge tips to their employer or receive monthly credit card statement credits for DoorDash orders may have a higher propensity to tip), perceptions of cost or inconvenience incurred by workers (customers in less convenient and more difficult to access homes and offices may feel an obligation to compensate workers at a higher rate), or a perception that tipping is either pro-social or anti-social behavior. Additionally, if orders placed without tips are regularly refused or delayed, there may be an additional feedback mechanism encouraging workers to gradually increase the amount of the tip they add until their food begins to be delivered more promptly or by more skilled or experienced workers.

Conclusion

I hope this was an interesting, albeit limited, snapshot of the tipping behavior of DoorDash customers in my area. I’m happy to run more experiments like this in the future, so as always feel free to leave any questions, comments, or suggestions for future studies in the comments.

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.

DoorDash: Gear Check No. 1

Even before I started delivering for DoorDash, I was already thinking about gear. Four deliveries into my app-based delivery career, now I’m thinking a lot harder about it.

“Hot bag”

After your first DoorDash delivery, they promise to send you a free “hot bag.” I have no idea what this object is or will look like, but it certainly would be nice to have a sealed, waterproof bag to carry deliveries around in, since I’m currently using cloth tote bags.

Bike lock

The entire foundation of my app-based delivery experiment is my free access to micromobility services like scooters and ebikes. But as I found out on my very first delivery, freedom isn’t free: when I parked my ebike to wait for an order to arrive, someone reserved it literally out from under me, leaving me scrambling for a backup scooter.

What I need is an additional bike lock, so I can keep access to ebikes even when I head into restaurants for pickups or apartment buildings for deliveries.

Bike gloves

This is another object I simply hadn’t expect to need: it turns out holding onto handlebars for an hour or two a day really takes a toll on your palms and fingers! I’ve got a few solid blisters already coming in, which hopefully a decent pair of bike gloves will keep to a minimum going forward.

Drink holders

Of the four deliveries I’ve completed so far, only one customer has had the fierce urgency to order a fountain drink, and to my credit, I got her fountain drink to her intact, but it was a close-run thing.

I expected “odd-shaped” food items (pizzas, legs of lamb, things of that nature) to be the biggest delivery problem, but I quickly realized finding a way to keep beverages upright is going to be a much more immediate priority. Until my “hot bag” gets here I’ll plan to bring homemade cardboard dividers with me, but I’m going to need to find a permanent solution soon if people are going to keep asking me to haul around gallons of soda every day.

Conclusion

App-based delivery workers who use cars obviously have more flexibility in terms of the kinds of equipment they can carry around: coolers for cold drinks, insulated bags for hot food, pizza bags for flat food, etc. But when you’re operating exclusively with bikes and scooters, you don’t have all those options, so I’m going to need to build out a set of equipment that will meet all my needs, without taking up any more space that absolutely necessary — even (or especially) if that means missing out on a pizza delivery every now and then.

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.

Introduction: getting into the delivery racket

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.