I just can't use uber eats. It just feels weird. Like, I am fully capable of getting food myself, I know uber eats, doordash etc, pays shit, delivery folks have to wait at the restaurant if its not ready and then fix it if its not. Get my drink from the fountain if I ordered one. And then, drive all the way to my place. I then receive a cold, tossed meal. It's just depressing all around. I don't get it.

I'll pay for delivery of pizza or even something like jimmy johns who have delivery drivers, but having a third party involved just feels wrong.

I've never delivered for Uber Eats specifically, but I don't know how they managed less than $2 an hour without doing obviously impractical things like trying to deliver at off hours, or in a poor area for it. I average about $27/hour. This is however, with GrubHub that has a wait list for drivers and they deliberately don't overcrowd regions. Area really has a lot to do with it. I can imagine that if Uber doesn't cap the amount of drivers in an area, a full on city is probably the worst example of a place to try it. I know that DoorDash is the same way in Atlanta, and the few times I have tried there, it wasn't worth the trip. One thing you learn very fast through observations is that the "hot zones" mentioned in the article don't matter. All they mean is that someone ordered from a place there before the map refreshed.

I guess my point here, is that the pay isn't necessarily shit. You have to put in some leg work and learn the best areas around you as well as the times to work.

I do have a lot to say about doing this line of work with over 1k deliveries done across 3 apps, but it is kind of out of the scope of this comment unless someone asks.

Editing to add because people asked:

To address some comments here; I already had an LLC, and insured my car through that which made it cheaper. No, the driver doesn't get basically nothing if you don't tip. It's around $1/mile driven with an order (sorry, but I'm not up to doing the approximate .625 km/mile conversions here). I hate to say it, but if you are doing this even as a side job, you need to find overly gentrified suburbs, or a town that has almost nothing as far as restaurants go. I happen to be in a sweet spot between the two. My "assigned area" is Woodstock, GA but that still covers all the way up to Jasper. Woodstock is the overly gentrified suburb, and Jasper has almost nothing.

A discussion of the apps I've delivered for

• DoorDash: Extremely low barrier to entry. Good to start with. However, if you don't do 100 deliveries in your first month it falls apart (trust me, that's more than you realize). You will need to schedule everything and it is extremely competitive and low pay since DoorDash focuses more on fast food.
• InstaCart: You're entering waiting list territory here. My wait time was 3 months. It seems fantastic at first until you have to do an order that the customer will pick up. Do not accept these orders, because you will not only have to shop for potentially 40+ items, you will also have to do a large bagging job.... for maybe $15 that takes you an hour. The key with InstaCart is to do the smallest (in terms of distance) delivery orders.
• GrubHub: This is what I currently do. I had to wait 7 months. Because of marketing stuff, it focuses on sit down restaurant orders. This means the pay for the driver is much higher (not only tips, the orders tend to be high cost by themselves, also the $1/mile driven with an order thing still applies). The giant benefit for driving for GrubHub is that it is unique in that as a driver it is almost like being a taxi driver. You can turn on the meter whenever. You are, however, limited to an area (and that is, as I stated earlier, the most important thing).

Is it worth it?

Many have noted the operational costs. With the mileage deduction of ¢60 per mile for tax purposes, it adds up a lot. Remember that you make roughly $1/mile driven with an order. I net around $19/hour with expenses, including tax. For me, that very much makes it worth the time. There are roughly 7 hours a day for my area that are worth driving for. 11 AM-1 PM, and 5-9 PM. Expenses included, I can make around $500 on weekends. I do, however, own a compact car with very good mileage. That's an extra $2000/mo. So, yes, if you really do the leg work it is worth it. You can not, as shown in this article, show up with a bike in a major city and every hope to make money. Bare minimum, you'd need a car.

Tips Vs. Bids

I've seen comments here saying that your tip is not a tip, but a bid. This is partially true. I do need to reiterate that I've not done much of this work in a full fledged city (Atlanta being the only one I've covered). Your tip is not a bid. What happens is that your order (if just plain unprofitable) gets bounced from driver to driver. Your "tip" never has to escalate. What happens is that the pay from whatever service escalates. Say, someone makes an order and the total the potential driver might make is $10. If one driver declines, it gets passed to the next "best driver" - so on an so forth. Each time the pay from the company initially providing the service increases. There is no increased cost to the customer. This is why there is no reason, as a driver, one should never accept a low offer. That's how the bids work. It isn't from customer tips. There tends to be, however, a charge that will get you priority as a customer. Usually, drivers will have more than one order. You can pay to not get the meme of "lol took 20 mins over time, cold, and thrown around."

The Ways You Can Stick It To A Bad Delivery Person

• Rate them low. Seriously. It's based on an average. 1 ⭐ out of 5 can very easily get them fired. Most services require at least a 4.2 average, or they will be terminated. You need to be willing to do that, though. That's it. You can fire people almost on the spot for slow, cold, incorrect, or undelivered food. And, honestly - you should. There are those of us that give a shit.

For drivers, the results are unpredictable and too often unfair. Data obtained by the Star shows Uber Eats’ platform can offer two food couriers different wages for the exact same trip.

Labour advocates charge that the app collects data on driver behaviour and can use it to decide who it can pay at a lower rate, allowing the company to pocket the difference and boost its revenue. This concept is widely referred to as algorithmic wage discrimination.

Wild

What a sad country, where people have to accept being paid so little.
I've been arguing for decades that EU needs to tax imports from USA, because USA is using social dumping to compete unfairly.
The US minimum wage is not a living wage, and employers can even go below that if they can claim tips are part of the wage. And they don't even provide healthcare for all. This is causing extreme poverty unbecoming of a developed country, and is social dumping.

USA has created a system where employers are not paying the actual cost of labor. By tilting the power balance to vastly favor employers, and fail to regulate against abuse.

Apparently this is in Canada, which surprises me a little, I thought they were better regulated. This gig economy shit should clearly be illegal, and workers should be paid a reasonable living wage.

Had a colleague that did it as a side gig and no matter how many times I told him to do it, he always refused to do the calculation to figure out how much he was making after expenses.

I was going to do it as a side hustle, but then I found out that I would have to change the type of car insurance I have, and my rate would go up. If I didn’t and had an accident while delivering, my insurance company would 100% deny all claims - assuming they found out I guess. I wasn’t willing to risk it , and the higher premium cost made it unprofitable.

Well this is a more or less solved problem in BC:

https://www.moneysense.ca/earn/careers/gig-worker-rights-in-canada/

The gig worker min wage is 20% more than min wage to account for the "non-engaged time".

I hear the smallest violin Everytime I hear about UberEATS executive complain about the company not being profitable.

I know GrubHub is bad too but I typically only pay a small fee of 3$ for their service and a tip of 20% to the driver.

Yet UberEATS usually includes a $10-15 UberEATS fee which the employee sees none of. Yet "oh no UberEATS is not profitable, oh no my 3rd yacht isn't big enough"

The awful part is, even without tipping the driver the food is drastically more expensive. The restaurant takes an extra cut, The delivery service takes an extra cut. This person's delivering your food practically for free and the meal is already sit down restaurant price.

Uber eats is such a scam. When these new VC companies come on the block offering things that are to good to be true I am constantly saying "we shouldn't support this unsustainable vc funded business, once they have market share they will have killed the competition and then they will raise their prices"

So many places used to deliver at reasonable prices but after years of uber delivering at way cheaper rates they stopped. Now uber delivers at $10 more.

Food delivery only made sense as an operating cost of the business, so third party delivery would have only made sense as something that the businesses subsidized. It also only makes sense if it is structured around the busy times of day as well.

I worked in a few businesses in the late 90s that offered delivery. In every case the delivery drivers were basically kitchen staff who went on deliveries OR the business itself was primarily delivery based in the first place and they still had the drivers do some other work around the place during downtime between meals. Both approaches spread the cost of the employees over more than the literal time delivering, because otherwise the cost per hour would be ridiculous. They also delivered food that held up to delivery times, so the food waiting 10-15 minutes before being delivered wasn't an issue.

There was a reason that pizza places and Chinese restaurants frequently had delivery even in smaller towns while things like McDonald's did not. The food held up to delivery and was frequently of a volume that made the restaurant subsidizing the cost of delivery feasible.

I think the trick is you'll never make it just driving for one service, you have to do Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, maybe even Instacart as well if you want to do it for a living.

Just like the people who drive for both Uber and Lyft.

We don't have to use that service. Who's with me?

I will never use uber so long as I shall live.

I was just commenting on a thread about public transportation (there's none where live) and someone commented that they're moving to micro transportation by just buying a $3 Uber every time they need to go somewhere. Even if uber is only taking $1 of that, $2 isn't paying someone to drive you somewhere. Uber drivers should make at least $30/hr.

I think the problem is: what they call a "Tip" is more like a "Bid"/"Offer". People see "Tip" and thus believe its optional, I mean it technically is optional, but the base pay is like $2.50 so its customarily required. I think for even the shortest delivery of a place 10 minutes away with a 2 mile distance is supposed to tip at least $5. and if the delivery is done in 30 minutes, that's an effective wage of $15/hour, that is, if they get orders back-to-back.

Customers don't understand how this works and puts $0 as the "Tip", buts its really a "Bid", effectively making anyone who is willing to accept the order, to work below minimum wage. And also new drivers doesn't understand how this works and acceepts orders without a good enough "Bid", effectively working below minimum wage.

I mean, why even call it a "Tip" if its customarily required, just change the base pay to $7.50 (which I'm sure those companies will charge the customer for it, but anyways...). So for an order that takes 30 minutes, its an effective wage of $15/hour, assuming they get orders back-to-back. Much less confusion amongst both customers and drivers.

This must be that innovation which is making the world a better place that these tech parasites keep gushing about.

“Minimum wage and the idea that hard work should lead to economic security, can be — and are being — destroyed by these A.I. systems.”

How much did the CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, earn last year?

Buddy, I cant use that service in any good concience...

Canadaland had a good discussion about this "$1.74 an hour" math.

I feel like you gotta go out of your way to make so little money doing this. If they actually did it correctly there would be no article to write. Not saying they would get rich but there's no way they did this honestly.

Many of the food couriers I worked alongside were young international students struggling to earn an income while they make their way through school. Others were refugees or undocumented workers, navigating precarious lives.

I honestly wonder if pretty much all of the surge in illegal immigration over the last 5 or 6 years comes down to Uber Eats.

So how many lemmy users are going to stop using food delivery to avoid being complicit? Especially asking if you refused to vote for Kamala Harris because of Gaza - or you can rant about how it's "not the same thing" lol.

Working for uber eats is a a choice.