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I want to tell you what I’ve learned about my neighbors by delivering their dinners.
But hold on… I have to decline an offer to drive Mary S. her Chinese food 16 miles away in Brighton for a two-dollar tip. And now Randy H. wants Wingstop delivered to Thornton for a dollar.
Welcome to being a DoorDash driver. Here’s what I’ve learned hustling pizza and burgers around metro Denver.
Most people don’t understand the economics of food delivery apps. (Or they’re just really cheap.) Listen, I didn’t get it either. I feel terrible about my delivery app orders pre-driving. I tipped like I would in a restaurant, a percentage of the order total. I had no idea drivers aren’t paid an hourly wage — none — and that they depend almost entirely upon tips. The third-party delivery apps pay us $2 to take an order, and thatap whether it takes 15 minutes or close to an hour.
But they don’t just make money by squeezing the drivers; they make money by charging restaurants access to their own customers, taking commissions of 10 to 30% on all orders. Restaurants may pass these costs on to customers by increasing menu prices on the apps, which is why you might pay more for kung pao chicken ordered via Postmates instead of from the restaurant directly.
Some cities cap commissions or enforce minimum wage laws for delivery drivers. Colorado does neither, meaning DoorDash, Uber Eats and the like can charge one-third of an independent restaurantap total–they don’t have the bargaining power of a McDonald’s, so they’ll get charged the most—and then pay their delivery drivers next to nothing to drop the food.
I kind of hate the apps. But the reason we started driving for them is the same reason so many restaurants sign up for them: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
Last summer, my husband stopped lawyering after almost 30 years. While retirement wasn’t exactly financially viable for us, the impacts of working as an immigration attorney in this Trump era were not great on his mental health. After getting nowhere on the job sites and needing at least some sort of paycheck, it occurred to us that we could start delivering without going through the black hole of application ghosting. And so, with the click of a button on his aging iPhone, we became Dashers.
Yes, we. Itap a two-person job for us, where I, a statistician-turned-freelance-writer, run central command (ie; I run the app, decide which orders to take and get us directions) and he acts as the muscle, driving and running the food. We’re all trying to make the numbers work.
While we didn’t have any illusions about getting rich off of this, we thought we could get minimum wage. Not so much. Our first Dash was a disaster. We made the rookie mistake of taking every crappy order that came our way, which meant we spent 25 minutes driving six miles for two dollars, but even that was better than the nothing we got waiting for orders that never came in a Five Guys parking lot.
My math-minded brain couldn’t leave it alone, though. Surely there had to be a better way than making $10 over two and a half hours. I became obsessed, joining Dasher communities on Facebook and Reddit to learn strategy. Because yes, there’s a strategy to being a DoorDash driver.
Soon I had mantras. “We’re a business, not a charity!” “Nothing under $2 a mile!”
With every order that dings through to us, I do the quick mental math. Five dollars to take Dave’s Hot Chicken 24.1 miles? Absolutely not. A three-dollar tip to bring Japanese food 26.7 miles from Broomfield to Aurora at rush hour? You can see why I decline 91 percent of orders that come our way, putting our acceptance rate at a dismal nine percent. But six dollars to go two and a half miles down the street? Patty K. is getting her Chipotle.
The two dollars a mile is key for us, and itap what I didn’t understand before driving. Proximity between your house and the restaurant is much more likely to find a driver, even for a lower tip, than asking someone to drive 30 minutes one-way to drop your fried chicken.
Eventually, we got brave enough to toggle, which is running two or more delivery apps at the same time. Now we’re always on both DoorDash and Uber Eats, which increases our chances of getting a reasonable delivery. With this strategy — called cherry picking in the community — we can make around $25 an hour on a busy weekend night. Not each, thatap us together as a unit, and that doesn’t account for gas or wear and tear on my 2010 Highlander.
Turns out, we all crave the same things.
I thought I’d discover new-to-me restaurants driving around to so many, but most orders we take are for chains, which I guess shouldn’t be so surprising since they’re in a better position to afford the apps’ commissions. Pretty much every night we’ll take McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Raising Cane’s and Little Caesars (but only once we had invested in our own pizza hot box).
Sometimes the orders are kind of funny, like Saturday night condoms or hangover cures on Sunday morning. I don’t judge. I simply send customers my Taylor Swift meme informing them we’ll be there “Swiftly” and head on over with the goods.
We’ve delivered to apartment complexes, starter homes, trailer parks and McMansions. You might think the orders would look different, but they’re remarkably similar. Apparently, rich, poor and everyone in between eventually decides that hot chicken sounds like a good idea and leaving their couch does not.
Most people are nice – but they don’t want interaction.
What surprised me most is how little people want to see us. We’ve met hundreds of Ring doorbells but maybe 20 actual people. Nearly all of our orders instruct us to “leave at door.” Itap rare for someone to request we hand them their food, which says something about our modern definition of convenience.
Itap no longer just about not having to cook. Itap about not having to interrupt our Netflix show for even a brief interaction with another human being. But I get it. I don’t want to put on pants or explain why I’m ordering Torchy’s at 3:30 p.m. on a Wednesday either.
Whether we meet them in person or not, most everyone is nice. Sometimes there’s a glitch–an order that DoorDash thinks we should have that we do not—or we can’t find an address. We feel horrible when this happens, but our customers are more understanding than I’d probably be when I’m hangry.
I think itap because, for all the technology involved, DoorDash is still just neighbors feeding neighbors.
Tonight I might be the one on this side of the windshield, taking your burrito from Point A to Point B, but if I’ve learned anything from my stint as a Dasher, itap that we’re more alike than we think. We’re all just trying to get fed, one way or another.
