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.