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.

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.

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.

View fullsize

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.

View fullsize

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.