DoorDash: Gear Check No. 2

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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.

DoorDash: Gear Check No. 1

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Even before I started delivering for DoorDash, I was already thinking about gear. Four deliveries into my app-based delivery career, now I’m thinking a lot harder about it.

“Hot bag”

After your first DoorDash delivery, they promise to send you a free “hot bag.” I have no idea what this object is or will look like, but it certainly would be nice to have a sealed, waterproof bag to carry deliveries around in, since I’m currently using cloth tote bags.

Bike lock

The entire foundation of my app-based delivery experiment is my free access to micromobility services like scooters and ebikes. But as I found out on my very first delivery, freedom isn’t free: when I parked my ebike to wait for an order to arrive, someone reserved it literally out from under me, leaving me scrambling for a backup scooter.

What I need is an additional bike lock, so I can keep access to ebikes even when I head into restaurants for pickups or apartment buildings for deliveries.

Bike gloves

This is another object I simply hadn’t expect to need: it turns out holding onto handlebars for an hour or two a day really takes a toll on your palms and fingers! I’ve got a few solid blisters already coming in, which hopefully a decent pair of bike gloves will keep to a minimum going forward.

Drink holders

Of the four deliveries I’ve completed so far, only one customer has had the fierce urgency to order a fountain drink, and to my credit, I got her fountain drink to her intact, but it was a close-run thing.

I expected “odd-shaped” food items (pizzas, legs of lamb, things of that nature) to be the biggest delivery problem, but I quickly realized finding a way to keep beverages upright is going to be a much more immediate priority. Until my “hot bag” gets here I’ll plan to bring homemade cardboard dividers with me, but I’m going to need to find a permanent solution soon if people are going to keep asking me to haul around gallons of soda every day.

Conclusion

App-based delivery workers who use cars obviously have more flexibility in terms of the kinds of equipment they can carry around: coolers for cold drinks, insulated bags for hot food, pizza bags for flat food, etc. But when you’re operating exclusively with bikes and scooters, you don’t have all those options, so I’m going to need to build out a set of equipment that will meet all my needs, without taking up any more space that absolutely necessary — even (or especially) if that means missing out on a pizza delivery every now and then.