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Comment by bobloblaw45 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>There's just too many drivers I think.

interesting, I'm desperate for more drivers.

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.

My business: https://cravecookie.com/

6 days a week is a lot.

yup, it is. but if a driver needs the money... we don't ask or expect it.

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.

Is that $21/hr in revenue or $21/hr in profit for the driver?

If the mileage cost is the $0.58/mi stated in the article, then the cost of driving ~15-30 miles in that hour is $9-17.

"plus 100% of tips are split at the end of pay period"

Split with who?

the other drivers. so if we received a total of 100 orders and a driver went on 29 orders, then they get 29% of all the tips.

If a baker went on only 2 deliveries then they get 2% of tips. Ends up averaging to "$3/delivery in tips" that i shared above.

Thats just for tips from the checkout form, they keep cash tips.

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.

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.

>Gee, I wonder why nobody wants to work for you?

chill. Starting a company is hard.

drivers make $400-500 per week in tips. you can buy a car for that.

> Why should they work for you when they could work there (Aldi)

Why work for Aldi when they can work for Dangus?

> drivers make $400-500 per week in tips

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.)

> 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.

>> There's just too many drivers I think.

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 ...

oh wait...

Hopefully universal income will kick in before that happens, as most of the dull work gets automated.

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)

It's categories like illegal immigrants, DUIs or otherwise lost drivers license, can't pass the background check, etc.

The person doing the actual driving is likely in the country illegaly or driving with a suspended license/no insurance.

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.

It's grey commerce all the way down!

i stopped using doordash when my 'drivers' started being 12 year olds on bikes

> DoorDash's "innovation" is the black box to obscure the fact.

Classic information asymmetry exploitation, only in this case, they're the ones that created the asymmetry.

It's fascinating that the pay is dismal and yet there are too many drivers.

I'm guessing partly because few understand their expenses and net pay.

And some really do value the ability to work whenever.

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."

If their competitors pay better, why aren't their drivers leaving for the competitors' platforms?

If it’s at all like driving for Uber/Lyft, they likely do both.

Yeah, it’s basically Snow Crash.

taxi medallions were invented to prevent this exact thing.

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.

The black box is one reason I always set my tip amount to $0 on the app and simply tip in cash when my food arrives.

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.

What kind of vehicle did you use, and how did that affect your costs?

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.

Wouldn't this require access to the companies APIs or scraping them somehow? I don't know that they allow for that.

why does it need to be a single app emulator? Why can't the person just run all the apps on their phone in the first place?

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