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:

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:

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.