I drove for DoorDash for about a month. What killed me was the wait between deliveries. I think it was like 45 minutes on average and when I did get a delivery it was like a tiny $7 delivery. There would be 2 hour stretches of times pretty often.
But then once in awhile I'd get a string of maybe 3 or 4 runs that paid like $12. over 2 or 3 hours.It was too inconsistent. Had no idea if I ever got tips, from my understanding I think the company pocketed it due to how they were paying at the time.
The community talks about gaming the system and denying deliveries less than x dollars but I personally couldn't bring myself to do it. And after waiting an hour I'd be dying to get moving again anyway.
This was before all the pay drama, it sounds like they've gotten much worse. There's just too many drivers I think.
I run a side business that delivers cookies, drivers do just under 30 deliveries a day (about 3-4 every hour) and make minimum wage plus 100% of tips are split at the end of pay period.
it ends up being about $3/delivery in tips, which is an extra $9/hr for a total of $21/hr (minimum wage is $12). A driver could theoretically make over $50k/yr if they worked 6 days a week, but most choose not to (4-5 days a week).
I've put a lot of work into the software to make it as efficient as possible so driver can get more orders and tips.
Unsolicited advice: maybe put the pricing next to or before the quick checkout section, or at least link to the pricing section before the quick checkout form? I’m not going to give you my address before I decide to enter a business relationship with you (which requires pricing info), and it was not at all clear to me pricing info is available before I go through the checkout process until I scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page just in case.
A lot of the Doordash driver complaints center around a few issues that Crave Cookies solves:
* Drivers want consistent volume; a single popular vendor can provide that.
* Drivers prefer ultra efficient transport with what they have. A car in a low-density city like Fresno can work well. But a car in a city like SF is a hassle.
* Pay needs to be transparent.
Doordash / Uber eats appear to be finding that “ride”-share for food order delivery can’t make ends meet with the above. Having more traditional dedicated delivery is probably just a better business. Probably why TK decided to do cloud kitchens.
> I run a side business that delivers cookies, drivers do just under 30 deliveries a day (about 3-4 every hour) and make minimum wage plus 100% of tips are split at the end of pay period.
That sucks (EDIT: that is, the pay you are offering.) Back when I was driving delivery (pizza, but it doesn't matter) with a personal vehicle, we got minimum wage, plus $1/delivery (and this was in the early 1990s), plus kept 100% of tips at the end of the night. The only drivers I knew of not getting a per-delivery reimbursement were driving employer-provided vehicles. If there isn't a per-delivery or mileage reimbursement, you are effectively paying below minimum wage before tips, because cars cost money to operate.
We only have one location so our overhead is too high. Once we add a couple more locations then we could afford that. We're profitable but not enough to raise wages. I'm not even getting paid from my own startup yet.
>poverty wages
This is the California minumum wage, but our location is in fresno which is a lower cost of living than the bay or LA.
At the $3 tip per delivery you cite, that's 133-167 deliveries. It's not improbable that the all-in cost of driving is $1+ per delivery, also tips of more than $20/month are taxed (at the full value of the tips) for both income and payroll tax (unlike, incidentally, mileage reimbursement up to the IRS limit of $0.58/mile which is completely tax free.)
That's fascinating. Seems like the free market really would drive the wage to 0. DoorDash's "innovation" is the black box to obscure the fact. If they paid more fairly like their competitors, they wouldn't be growing as fast.
Seems kindof like a cyberpunk future, with corporations negating regulations through advanced technology. Also in those cyberpunk futures, society breaks down into a lonely free-for-all, where the poor masses escape drudgery by playing with high-tech entertainment fantasies like games and VR and ...
Wages can't drop to zero unless there's an infinite supply of labor. As time has gone by fewer and fewer of the gig economy drivers I see speak English, and fewer of them are the person whose name/face is on the account, so I suspect the pseudo-infinite labor supply is working as intended.
There isn't infinite labor on a global scale but there sure is infinite labor willing to work for what first worlders consider a pittance. This basically highlights why I consider open borders immigration to be worse for everyone overall. The first world gets dragged down the societal ladder while the rest of the world is robbed of everyone with initiative plus the lost productivity they'd glean from uncompromised first world economies.
I’ve always wondered what was going on when the driver didn’t match the person listed in the app. Doesn’t seem like there would be any benefit? (For me it’s often a male driver who is displayed as female in the app)
And then in the cyberpunk dystopian future, the illegals in turn build a nano-market by contracting to children, on top of their micro-market under the GrubHub level consumer market.
And people are desperate - as benmanns put it, it's a "line of credit out against depreciation on your vehicle. Sure you lost money, but you get cash today."
When I used Doordash I always saw they sent the delivery driver to the restaurant immediately. The driver would arrive 2 min after the order was placed. Didn't matter if it was at a nice restaurant that takes a long time to cook orders, they'd send the driver immediately and make them wait. Other services don't seem to have that problem.
I'm not saying that's why wages and prices suck - because it's pretty much the same for all the apps.
Every time I order from one of these apps I'm paying $40 for something I could have paid $20 at the restaurant. For the 10 min car ride that seems like everyone involved should be making a killing so I don't know how people aren't getting paid. If it wasn't 10 degrees outside or I had a car I'd just bike/drive the 3 miles myself. Unfortunately having a car where I live would mean I'd be paying $400 for parking, so might as well order $40 food delivery 10 times a month instead.
There are people making a killing, but in the traditional style, where the very small number of people at the top make a killing and everyone else does not.
Doordash may not be able to do much about that, since meal delivery demand is pretty spiky. As in any restaurant, there's a rush at lunch, another at dinner, and it's pretty quiet the rest of the time.
There is room for Uber-app-in-cloud-emulator multiplexers. As single app endpoint for a variety of delivery apps so you will have more options to choose from when business is slow.
But then once in awhile I'd get a string of maybe 3 or 4 runs that paid like $12. over 2 or 3 hours.It was too inconsistent. Had no idea if I ever got tips, from my understanding I think the company pocketed it due to how they were paying at the time.
The community talks about gaming the system and denying deliveries less than x dollars but I personally couldn't bring myself to do it. And after waiting an hour I'd be dying to get moving again anyway.
This was before all the pay drama, it sounds like they've gotten much worse. There's just too many drivers I think.