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:
work a scheduled shift;
accept 90% or more of your offers during the day of the scheduled shift;
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.
