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:
Turn both apps on, wait for first good order on either app.
Accept first good order. If Uber Eats, immediately hit the pause button so no new orders are added to the first.
Switch to the other app and pause new orders.
About 1-2 minutes before completing the delivery, unpause your other app so you can begin receiving orders again.
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.
