Things are out of whack…

We’re talking about DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats, service standards, and the tipping situation.

Food delivery app companies do a lousy job at educating consumers about how their business works, so I am going to give you the lowdown…

• What happens with low-paying and no tip orders.

• Why “incentive tipping” gets food to you faster.

• How “tip jacking” by a certain app company drastically reduces your influence and undermines your tipping power, and how you can counteract tip-jacking in order to improve the service you receive.

• What’s fair and unfair for the drivers who are working on your behalf.

• Which of the big 3 food delivery apps is the best one for consumers to use.

• How to communicate that you are a “Fair Deal Delivery” customer in order to set the stage for better delivery performance.

• Plus more, all explained by a seasoned food delivery gig driver.

Here’s the info food delivery app companies apparently don’t want you to have…

The first thing I have an issue with is the lack of care put into this work by many drivers. I feel the app delivery services are littered with workers who don’t have a grasp of what good service really is, because that’s how these services are set-up.

• The training is insufficient.

• There is a lack of equitable treatment for the driver workforce.

• And there is noticeable disregard from app companies for the well-being of their independent delivery workers.

These systemic flaws make the delivery component of their business the weakest link and are probably at the core of why the overall customer experience too often falls short.

I’ve done quite a lot of food deliveries. I care about the customer experience. And I want to do a good job for my customers and for the restaurants. So I always use thermal bags. And I separate hot and cold items into different thermal bags, if the restaurant allows it. Plus I have a separate thermal bag that I keep ice packs in for ice cream and other need-to-be-cold items.

Based upon my extensive experience in the trenches, doing the work day in and day out, it’s easy to see I am one of the very few that uses thermal bags to keep food as fresh as possible while these items are in the driver’s control.

It irks me.

This is not a cheap service. Consumers deserve better.

So I’ve got some ideas on how to fix this, where you can help drive some of the needed changes.

But first, let’s delve into the elaborate nitty-gritty behind app-based third party food delivery so that you have clarity on how these services currently work…

Food delivery app companies run online marketplaces that sell restaurant food and other items.

Merchants pay up to 36% in fees (and sometimes even more) to app companies for the sales they generate. Then the app companies match available drivers with available “delivery opportunities” in order to get the merchants’ products delivered.

This is where things get tricky.

It is nearly impossible for app companies to achieve a perfect balance of ongoing “marketplace liquidity,” where the number of available drivers is in exact equilibrium with the number of available orders.

If there are too many orders and not enough drivers, the app companies MIGHT add incentive pay to inspire the participation of more drivers — so that delivery times will decrease.

On the other hand, if there are too many drivers and not enough orders, generally there is no need for incentive pay. Thanks to the law of supply and demand, app companies can pay less to drivers, and yes — it sure looks to me like they will exploit weak order flow situations for their gain.

Very clever people run these organizations. They know if they recruit an oversupply of drivers, delivery times will improve and their delivery cost per order will go down. For them, it makes business sense to pursue and maintain this condition.

How I see it: It’s a churn and burn situation with the driver workforce.

An abundance of drivers hurts the income of existing drivers. This routinely flushes some of them out of the business, and then they are replaced by inexperienced, uninformed, unsophisticated rookies who will be more likely to accept the low-paying orders that experienced drivers continually refuse.

Somebody said: “Forty years ago in 1983, when minimum wage was $3.35 an hour and gasoline was $1.13 a gallon, a $2 or $3 tip on a pizza delivery was great. But it’s not great anymore. Yet people still tip at that level, or worse, or not at all.”

And they don’t understand how this impacts their food delivery…

An April 9, 2023 New York Times article about several Los Angeles food delivery drivers prompted a large number of comments and went semi-viral.

Many people asked why they should be responsible for paying the driver’s wage. There was anger about how tipping culture has gone berserk in the United States. Some people said if drivers don’t like their income, then they should get “a real job.” And some even called drivers “the bottom of the barrel.”

In the United States, the tipping situation, when it comes to food delivery gig drivers, is simply the market reality — until the robots take over.

If the app companies compensated drivers appropriately, this added cost would be reflected in the price of the service, which almost certainly would negatively impact their revenue generation momentum, and that would not be good for share prices, which is especially important for executives at DoorDash, since they are heavily reliant on stock-based compensation.

Because executives at food delivery app companies in the United States have chosen to pay their drivers poorly, they clearly are relying on consumers to make up the difference when it comes to paying the members of their last mile logistics networks.

If nobody tipped, the logistics networks would fall apart.

Last night I worked 3 hours and 57 minutes and drove 49 miles. I did 9 deliveries, all for Grubhub. It was a good night. I earned $109.54, minus $6.62 in fuel costs. My pay from Grubhub for those nearly 4 hours was just $32.66. My customers tipped me $76.88. Gratuities amounted to slightly more than 70% of my revenue.

If the pay was not enhanced by customer tips, I would have refused to take any of those deliveries. But if I did, my earnings would have been just $26.04 after fuel costs. On an hourly basis I would have earned $6.59. (And I have other costs besides fuel.)

I have accelerated wear and tear on my car (tires, brakes, etc). That means much more frequent oil changes, pesky flat tire issues, and unfortunately engine issues have happened.

• So… would you work for $6.59 an hour?

• Would you wear your car down for that kind of money?

• Would you like to spend hours and hours driving among inconsiderate, poorly skilled, and sometimes extremely reckless drivers that put yourself and your car at risk on an on-going basis, for that kind of money?

• Would you like to be at increased risk for getting mugged, car-jacked, maybe even shot at for that kind of money?

I’m sure your answer is no.

And by the way, within the past few days, as I am writing this, a 22 year old DoorDash driver in Akron, Ohio got shot to death while making a delivery. Apparently the driver had an altercation with somebody else. That person followed him to his delivery location, then killed him.

Earlier in the week a female DoorDash driver got kidnapped and raped at gunpoint in Tampa, Florida.

Last week a DoorDash driver in Houston, Texas got pistol-whipped, robbed of his wallet and carjacked. Then his car got wrecked in a police chase.

Also last week a DoorDash driver had his car stolen in Glassboro, New Jersey while picking up a Pizza Hut order. Unfortunately, the driver left his car running while he went into the restaurant. He said the police told him the same thing happened to another delivery driver the night before.

And on April 20th a DoorDash driver in Oakland, California got violently carjacked by armed gunmen at around 1:00 a.m. while waiting in a drive-through line at a fast food restaurant. Yes, with other people around. They put him and his dog in the hospital. Later his car was found with new damage, a missing catalytic converter and bullet holes, and on top of that the Dasher had over $1000 in towing and impound fees.

Worst of all, here is another incident that just surfaced: an Uber Driver in Florida made a 7:00 p.m. daylight delivery to a house where he got murdered, dismembered, and put into trash bags. He told his wife this would be his last delivery of the day, then he was coming home. I guess the recently released felon from an Indiana prison was in the mood to kill or he just went haywire somehow, and also didn’t realize that Uber Eats would have location information on the driver. (The case appears to be to solved.)

There are bound to be more of these terrible stories…

In considering the risk-reward scenario, probably most food delivery gig drivers would abandon the profession very quickly if customer tipping were to stop, because the pay would be wholly inadequate.

Many people seem to think of tipping as a scourge. I see tipping as a means to influence behavior and also to reward for meeting or exceeding expectations.

In the New York Time comments section, these thoughts from readers caught my attention:

• “Why is it the customer’s responsibility to pay for your wages?”

• “If you don’t like your tips, it’s a shame someone held a gun to your head and forced you to be a delivery driver.”

• “Tipping is charity.”

Out of the hundreds of mostly negative comments I read, not one person really understood the dynamics at play.

Throughout the United States, every local food delivery market is different. In my suburban market, I can assure you that “incentive tipping” is usually needed to quickly attract a driver to your order so that you will receive it with the greatest possible haste instead of the order sitting, waiting for a sucker to accept your “delivery opportunity,” while your stomach grumbles.

Or the low-paying order will sit and wait until it gets paired-up with a better paying order. I had one of those just a couple nights ago… It was 2 gourmet cookie orders from Crumbl Cookies.

• The pay for both was $12.75.

• Total driving distance was around 12 miles.

This was an acceptable order because it was a slow night and I actually didn’t think I would get another order before my intended quit-time.

I had zero wait-time at Crumbl, which was ideal. Traffic was sparse and a lot of easy highway driving was involved. However, this trip was taking me outside of my preferred “zone,” which was not ideal.

When I met with the first customer, she actually tipped me $3 in cash. (Cash tips are rare.) Then I finalized the order in the app and saw that this order paid $8 (which included an up-front tip from the customer). So she double-tipped me. The order paid $11 altogether. That was nice.

My second cookie delivery was 2 miles farther away. This customer did not want to see me, which is typical. It was: “leave it at the door and go away.” And that’s fine. I have no issue with that.

After I finalized the order in the app, I saw the order paid $4.75. There was no tip.

No driver with any intelligence would do a 12 mile delivery for $4.75, unless they had a strategic reason for it. But also, the cookie delivery involving $8 for about 10 miles would be refused by many drivers too because it paid less than a dollar per mile. So in this case, both of those orders were needed to put together an economically viable delivery opportunity to entice me to jump on it.

If piggybacking a low-paying delivery opportunity on to a higher paying order cannot be done, then the app company might relent and bump-up the pay themselves in order to attract a driver. I think this was the case with a salad order I recently delivered…

The order was to be delivered 9 or 10 miles away, in an area probably considered undesirable by many drivers, but it was paying $14. I went for it.

After the drop-off and I finalized the order in the app, I saw the base pay was $10! That’s around the highest base pay I’ve seen. My guess is the original offer was $6.50 ($4 tip plus $2.50 base pay) and the app company kept pairing it with other orders and bumping the pay up over a long course of time to finally entice a driver to accept it. Good thing it was cold food and not hot food. My guess is the order sat for more than 30 minutes for the base pay to reach $10.

For DoorDash, base pay can be as low as $2 now. Uber Eats will go even lower on base pay. Grubhub has a history of being the fairest player among the 3 big food delivery apps, though there has been noticeable deterioration in the level of pay recently.

So now you know that low paying orders get delivered through:

• uninformed brand new drivers,

• through order “stacking,” which involves pairing a low-paying order with a higher paying order,

• and sometimes through increased “base pay” if the app company cannot succeed in attracting a driver at the lower pay rate.

But there are still other ways that app companies succeed in getting low-paying orders delivered, and these methods involve gamifying and manipulation.

Let’s start with DoorDash, the market leader. They did 620 million orders in the first quarter of 2024. It all started 10 years earlier with a small group of guys in Palo Alto, California passing out flyers, announcing a restaurant food delivery service. Their idea worked, and it’s amazing how large and incredibly complex this business has become.

When I was new to DoorDash, I was very loyal to them. I paid a price for that as I slowly uncovered the truth about their business.

Their technology platform is truly amazing. I delivered pizzas many years ago using paper maps, and back then there were no mobile phones. Food delivery is so much more efficient now.

The DoorDash support people over in Asia are great, in my opinion. And the pay system works like clockwork.

But… the game playing, the manipulation tactics used on the driver workforce, and the injection of systemic random unfairness… it’s simply out of alignment with my values.

I don’t have a boss at DoorDash, which is a good thing.

The extreme schedule flexibility is very attractive to me.

But it doesn’t matter that I’m a nice guy and strive to give my customers a quality experience. It doesn’t matter that I care about the restaurant’s interests. Or that I really try to be professional about all this.

I have no protections. Zero.

There are no raises, no benefits like sick days, holiday pay, health insurance, 401k, nothing like that.

At any time I could be “deactivated” (fired) for life, even if it’s just because of a computer glitch. And when that happens with DoorDash, there is a real chance DoorDash won’t pay the final week of the driver’s earnings. Drivers have found it difficult to negotiate satisfactory remedies in these situations.

At any time they could switch to giving me nothing but unacceptable offers. It could be great one day, then the next day they will totally screw me over with nothing but garbage offers.

I am a mere speck of a player in a game run by a.i. powered algorithmic programs, overseen by data scientists. I am NOTHING to them. I am an easily detachable and disposable cog in their gigantic system, and so is every other driver in their network.

Loyalty is not rewarded.

Longevity is not rewarded.

I figured out something with DoorDash… It appears they use a “RUIN AND REPLACE” scheme with their driver workforce.

The longer workers stay, the smarter they get about how to do the work. Smart drivers do not take low paying orders, generally. Which is a problem for DoorDash.

Smart drivers can also cause issues.

Example: A smart driver who is not in the DoorDash large order program is probably more prone to unassigning orders.

Maybe the driver gets an order for $7.75 at Chick-fil-A and they accept it because it’s only a 3½ mile delivery. But while they are standing around waiting for the order, which is only seconds away from being handed to them, the driver is notified by the Uber Eats app that an offer at a nearby Panera is paying $14 for a 5 mile trip. At this time of day, through the driver’s extensive delivery experience, this driver knows that wait-time at Panera will probably be 3 minutes or less, which makes the Panera order an overall better play…

So the smart driver accepts the higher-paying Panera order and unassigns (drops) the lower-paying Chick-fil-A order. The driver just made a move to boost-up his or her effective hourly rate by making that adjustment.

But now the Chick-fil-A order is ready and there is no driver. A bottleneck in the delivery of this order has occurred. And a new driver must be enticed into delivering it, quickly. This might involve DoorDash increasing the pay to get this time-sensitive order on its way. Meanwhile the hot food is cooling.

This is one way smart drivers can cost an app company more money and impact customer satisfaction.

So it appears they want to get the smart people out and make room for and replace them with fresh new dumb and uninformed people who will accept all the orders, including the lowest paying orders, and who will also be less likely to unassign orders for their own strategic advantage.

So there is no plan to incentivize longevity, or loyalty. If there was such a plan, it would negatively impact company profit and probably also customer affordability.

When new drivers come onboard, they want to get them comfortable and accustomed to the work. Their initial delivery opportunities will likely be well-paying. After DoorDash has got them hooked into a pattern of regular participation, then it seems they take them on a long journey of diminishing returns and reduced expectations.

Before I figured out the ruse, I did experiments. I’d think:

“Give me a really good order, and then I’ll do one of your low-paying orders.”

And then I moved on to thinking: “Okay, I’ll do one of your charity-pay orders, but then I expect a good one in return.”

And it seemed like that sort of worked. Meanwhile out in Silicon Valley, there are probably teams of data scientists and MBA people running multiple experiments on ME, seeing what works with getting me to behave in ways THEY want.

To them, I really am a mouse in a lab experiment. A completely disposable and easily replaced mouse.

Ten years from now I am guessing there won’t be any food delivery gig drivers. It will all be done with self-driving robotic vehicles. Anybody who is young and thinks they want to make this line of work their career is not seeing where things are headed.

This work is an absolute dead end. The best it is… is a temporary stepping stone for a person’s next thing.

A DoorDash spokesman said the average DoorDash driver makes over $25 an hour “on delivery.”*

This misleading statement makes people think we’re all making over $25 an hour, which I don’t think is the case at all.

“On delivery.” What does that really mean?

My interpretation is when the spokesman added “on delivery” to that statement, drive-time to the restaurant to pick-up an order is not included, and it does not include wait-time when orders are not ready for immediate pick-up, nor does it include dead-time, when we are waiting for viable orders to accept. This same spokesperson also said they want “equitable outcomes” and “meaningful opportunities” for their drivers.*

Baloney!

That statement is not in alignment with what I am seeing.

How could a “guaranteed” $2.00 payout for a 5.3 mile trip lead to an equitable outcome? Was I suppose to accept that order and hope that it would have a hidden tip?

I know the deal.

Greater than 90% chance there is no hidden tip on an offer that low. How in the world would even twice that amount be equitable? Come on…

My DoorDash acceptance rate reflects the quality of delivery opportunities they are sending to my phone.

It’s 28% right now, which is in my normal range.

This means I decline more than 7 out of 10 offers to pick-up and deliver food or whatever the job is, mostly because the pay offered is inadequate. More than 7 out of 10 offers I am getting right now are not “equitable” or “meaningful.”

I’m not in this to do charity work. The idea is to pay the bills.

Yet DoorDash tests me over and over again, day after day, seeing if this time I will work for peanuts or not.

Uber Eats does this too.

Some departments at DoorDash are pushing the message “Dashing is a great opportunity.” Meanwhile other departments are probably working hard at how driver pay can be shaved down further, or they are working on making drivers obsolete through their “DoorDash Labs” division.

I do enjoy the work, and it’s fun when it is going well. Though it irks me a lot when a company uses deception with the public.

So the average DoorDash driver makes over $25 an hour “on delivery,” huh? That deceit is on Youtube forever for everybody to see.

But getting back to the problems of DoorDash…

I really WAS completely loyal to them, to my detriment.

It started out great. Then things began to deteriorate. They’d squeeze me with poor opportunities over and over again. Then finally I’d get a good order, or a string of good orders. And then there would be a random app crash. That happened too often.

But it was the manipulation and lack of fairness that broke my loyalty and drove me to add another app. Grubhub played games too, but not like DoorDash.

If I achieve or surpass a 70% order acceptance rate at the close of the month, DoorDash said I would be a “top dasher” and get access to the best paying orders and I would be able to work any time I wanted for the following month. And if it was the end of the month and I was at 65%, do you think they would give me any good orders, or do you think they will hit me with a string of low paying orders?

Of course, it was like I had to PAY to achieve that top status by accepting orders that are a waste of my time. And yes, I did succumb to those tactics… and still failed to reach top dasher status! (They stacked the deck against me with strange math that didn’t add up.)

Then, through a new program, I would have access to “higher paying” orders if I kept my order acceptance rate above 50%. And yes, I gave in to that too in efforts to keep that status.

By striving to make it into (or stay) in those higher program levels, I compromised my safety, accepting orders that took me into neighborhoods I did not feel safe in. That was a mistake, especially when I did those sorts of deliveries at night. And this phenomenon of drivers taking risks they wouldn’t ordinarily take is happening on a large scale.

I used to think it made sense to take crap orders once in a while, but not anymore.

UPDATE July 27, 2024: DoorDash is often tweaking things. They have introduced the “Dasher Rewards Program.”

On their website an overview of the program describes it this way:

###

”We created Dasher Rewards to give Dashers like you the recognition you deserve for high quality deliveries on the road, along with more flexibility and opportunities to earn.”

###

With the implementation of this new program, they screwed drivers like me.

I had special status. I was in the by-invitation-only large order program. I was trusted to handle high value orders (that paid more). But they took that program away when they rolled out “Dasher Rewards,” also known as “the tier program.”

Now, for me to be presented with these high paying orders, I must have a much higher order acceptance rate. And I will never have a high acceptance rate because I live close to a high crime city that I refuse to go to.

DoorDash is constantly and unceasingly attempting to draw me into this city. I decline all, or nearly all of those delivery opportunities… because I don’t have an armor-plated Humvee or a bulletproof vest.

It’s an elevated risk situation. So my DoorDash order acceptance rate is typically below 30%. I now need to be at a 70% order acceptance rate to have top priority for high paying orders. It will never happen.

This change has absolutely degraded my earning ability through DoorDash.

But others are taking those higher risk orders and accepting low paying orders for the chance to get priority status for higher paying orders. I won’t be manipulated that way.

And here is the trickiest manipulation of all:

Tip Jacking

DoorDash isn’t stealing tips, but they do sometimes hijack the latent power of customer tips to serve their own aims and purposes. In the process, DoorDash undermines the influence customers seek to exert with their tips to inspire better service from their drivers.

Let me back up…

I was a valet driver at a 5 star hotel. I moved over 10,000 cars.

Guests who understood how to use the power of the tip would give the bulk of the tip up-front, to influence how their car was about to be treated. And as a courtesy, if their car came back to them in the same condition, they would give another tip.

In these situations, when a generous tip was received up front, I would park that car in a primo spot where the car had a lower chance of getting dinged and scraped in our very tight garage. Because the customer deserved that parking spot.

There were many times though when a customer did not tip upfront. And for those that tipped generously upon getting their car back — it was a wasted tip.

That ten or twenty dollar bill they gave me at send-off did NOTHING to influence how their car was treated up until that point. Had we known they were going to be generous tippers, maybe there would not have been any monkey business going on with their car?

I mean, most of the valet team workers were young men under the age of 25 whose naturally immature brains are all genetically wired to take chances and pursue pleasure. I wasn’t taking liberties with peoples’ cars, but some of the young men were monkeying around, even going full throttle. (Really.)

The point is, tips absolutely have power. Tips can make good things happen. They can inspire the best service.

It’s important for you to know…

With DoorDash, they don’t always show drivers the full compensation.

Here’s an example:

Back when I was still in the large order program, I accepted a delivery opportunity that said the pay was $9.75. After I delivered the order and finalized it while heading back to my car, I saw the actual pay was nearly $47. This is a rare extreme, but this sort of “hidden tip” thing does happen. In this case, the customer tipped me more than $40. I had no idea that much money was on the line. If the opportunity presented itself, I probably would have accepted another order and delayed customer #1’s delivery, because I didn’t know I was dealing with a big tipper. DoorDash hid that from me.

Why?

They do this to increase the odds that we will accept lower paying orders.

Here’s another example:

One day I got a $3 order that required a catering bag (large order). I hesitated to accept this order because the offer was extremely low. However, this order was for a very nice restaurant. I thought to myself:

“What are the odds they would really screw me over like that?”

• “Catering bag requirement.”

• “Fancy restaurant.”

• “I’m probably going to be okay.”

So I accepted the order and drove to the restaurant. Good news: It was a Sunday and I didn’t have to feed a parking meter.

As I waited for the order, I saw in the app that the value of this order was more than $100. (UPDATE: The app no longer shows the order value.)

So I was feeling confident that I would not be a loser with this order.

Finally, after standing around a while, the order was handed over to me. Then I drove to a quiet street in a fairly nice neighborhood where a pool party was underway. I was expecting a minimum of $20 for this delivery, based upon my experience with similar-sized orders.

But you guessed it… My compensation really was just $3. I got conned into accepting that order thanks to the tip jacking practices of DoorDash.

They conditioned me and groomed me for that order over a long course of time.

It was very unfair. They punked me. The organization I am doing all this hard work for punked me. We don’t deserve to be treated like that. But this happens.

Generous tippers unknowingly enable DoorDash to systemically manipulate their drivers.

It’s like we’re pulling the handle on a slot machine with a lot of these orders.

Not only do we gamble on whether the order will pay enough, we also gamble on whether a restaurant will be on-the-ball with having the order ready for pick-up when we arrive.

Here’s another tip-jacking example involving a Door Dash delivery…

It was 6:06 p.m. on a Thursday night. The order was paying $12.75 for around 4 miles of driving. I knew this restaurant was likely to have no wait-time. Parking was going to be an issue, but I still considered this to be a good offer, so I agreed to it. Then I slowly began to discover this trip was much more involved than I expected.

The screen said a catering bag was required. I didn’t believe this since I was going to a bubble tea place involving only 4 items (probably drinks).

Because of scarce parking, I had to park a long block away.

But when I arrived at the restaurant I discovered I needed way more than a catering bag. These were 4 boxes of… I guess it was tea concentrate, and a bag of ice. Since I did not arrive at the restaurant with a hand truck, I had to do 2 trips to my car, which ate up time.

The delivery was going to a college. This can be a problem since it can be difficult to find the right delivery location on a large college campus. And since I was dealing with students, I expected absolutely zero hidden tip money on this order, because I’ve traveled this road many times before.

After arriving at the college, I stood around for 9 minutes while waiting to rendezvous with the other party. Nine minutes! That drove me crazy. And my contact on the phone asked me to help carry the stuff to their building. But I was in a no parking zone, at their direction. And the order was only paying $12.75!

This trip was costing me the best hour of the dinner rush, and I was only pulling in $12.75.

“They (DoorDash) screwed me again,” I thought to myself. “These customers have probably ruined the potential of this whole night. What an idiot I was to accept this order.”

I tried to just chill-out and go with it, but I couldn’t help feeling frustrated, irritated, defeated and annoyed because this whole thing was taking way too much time for the money involved.

Finally, after the hand-off, I completed the order in the app and discovered the actual pay was $29.27!

Do you think that made me happy?

No, it did not.

It sucked.

My irritation at having what I thought was a shitty order might have been sensed by the customers. I would have certainly bumped up the patience and graciousness a few notches if I had known this was a good-paying order. But I had no way of knowing.

I was incensed at the games and how DoorDash impacted my experience as a driver and especially the customer’s experience. That’s what bothers me the most. The customer was cheated out of the influence that tip had.

Tip-jacking is wrong! It is a despicable practice.

One more real life DoorDash example, but at the opposite end of the spectrum:

On a recent Tuesday night at around 8:00 p.m. I accepted a DoorDash delivery opportunity with “guaranteed” pay of $3.50 involving around 5 miles of driving. That is a terribly low offer, but I accepted it because order flow was weak and I wanted to be in the customer’s area — where I thought I would be better positioned to receive more delivery offers.

That customer called me before I walked into the restaurant. She was dismayed and confused that her driver had unassigned himself from the order. I assured her I was on the case now and would take care of it, and I mentioned to her that I hoped her order was packaged and ready to go.

But it wasn’t ready. This order only made sense to me if the order was ready! I could have dropped it like the driver before me. But because I spoke to the customer, I decided to persevere.

Plus, because of the way DoorDash games things, there was the possibility the order could pay more. And since I had a dialog with the customer, I figured there was an increased chance she would have EMPATHY for me and show some class with the giving of an appropriate tip.

Also, if I had dropped that order, my “completion rate” would have gone a notch lower, getting me closer to the 95% threshold, which would threaten my status as being a participant in the DoorDash “large order program.” This status had value to me and was important. Since this wasn’t a peak time, I decided not to waste an “order unassignment.”

Twenty-five minutes later I completed the delivery. My pay really was just $3.50. There was no additional compensation. Since my fuel cost per mile at this time was 14 cents, after fuel expense my actual earnings was $2.80. My effective hourly rate for that order was $6.72/hour.

I could have made more than twice that amount wiping the crumbs off the tables at Chick-fil-A without wearing my car down and facing the necessity to pay costly self employment tax.

There is a real fairness gap that pops up in this work over and over again.

The food should always be ready to go when a driver arrives, but unfortunately there often is wait-time. Drivers receive zero compensation for wait time. So we have to learn our markets and sort out which restaurants are bad partners because:

• they are too slow due to understaffing or their workplace culture,

• or because they simply have complete lack of consideration for our time.

But sometimes even restaurants with good track records will burn us with a long wait. It’s like we’re playing food-delivery-app roulette, or some carnival game of chance.

• Will I get a good paying order?

• Will the food be ready upon arrival?

• Will the drop-off location be easy?

It’s all up to luck, it seems.

Food delivery gig work also reminds me of “musical chairs.” It’s a game designed to produce losers over and over. I first played it in kindergarten.

When the music stops, it seems completely random. But someone is controlling it. A bunch of players will win that round, but somebody will lose. Then the process starts up again, and then there will be another loser after another chair has been removed from the game. In the food delivery gig world, that’s sort of how it is when the supply/demand ratio is not on the driver’s side.

Uber Eats

I have the least experience with Uber Eats, though I have been using it much more often recently. The main advantage to this app is there are no zone restrictions. I am not limited to a certain geographic area. And unlike DoorDash, Uber Eats will always let me in. It doesn’t block me from logging in, even if there is no work.

The main disadvantage is that the offer shown includes the customers tip, which might be lowered or completely withdrawn after the delivery is completed. It takes an hour for me to know if the compensation shown to me when I accepted the offer is the actual pay or not.

In my experience, it is extremely rare that the compensation amount goes backwards, however — I don’t like this wishy-washy pay scheme. Uber Eats also sends me tons of very poor and unfair offers. (The lowest I’ve seen: $1.49)

Grubhub

Grubhub has the best thermal bags. They blow the DoorDash bags away, quality-wise. When Grubhub presents delivery opportunities and what the pay is, there are no games. The pay shown is the actual pay I will receive. And, until recently, it was unusual for Grubhub to present ridiculous offers.

Apparently, Grubhub also makes it easy for customers to give post-delivery bonus tips through their app, because I get those once in a while. Grubhub absolutely treated me with the most fairness compared to the other apps for a long time. But unfortunately this has changed.

Downsides:

In my market, Grubhub has the weakest order volume, and this seems to be the norm across much of the country. Their offers tend to be for longer distances, but not always. The “order decline” button is so close to the “order accept” button that it is too easy to accept an unwanted offer. The unseen order acceptance countdown clock is too short. And I am locked into one zone. I can’t go elsewhere and work.

Also, and I haven’t seen this in a while, but sometimes Grubhub launches temporary incentive programs that, in my view, are deranged and irresponsible. It makes me wonder if they have somebody like “Dr. Evil” in the background, influencing how they run things.

Example: It gets busy. Suddenly Grubhub is offering an extra $3 per order from now (7:02 p.m.) until 8:10 p.m. The first two orders I get easily done within the 68 minute window. I pick-up the third order at 7:58 p.m. Does this mean I have earned an extra $9 during this incentive period? No. I have to deliver it before 8:10 p.m. in order to get the $3 bonus for the third order.

I COULD floor it, zip in and out of traffic, blow stop signs and race through residential neighborhoods to beat Grubhub’s bonus deadline, however I am a mature driver, and I am not going to do that. Though many other drivers probably DO drive inappropriately to secure that extra $3 incentive.

Grubhub’s policy of awarding bonus money only if a deadline is met is flagrantly wrong and endangers lives… because it encourages risk-taking and reckless driving.

The bonuses should be deemed earned when an order is picked up.

Besides this critical fault, I like Grubhub, and the app is stable as far as network reliability goes.

BUT…

In my market, Grubhub does not have the same critical mass that DoorDash has. And this can be a problem on busy nights.

Example: It was a rainy weekend night. I accepted a delivery opportunity to pick-up some pizzas. When I got there, the owner told me the pizzas sat for 1 hour and 45 minutes! And the customer had picked up the food themselves, because they got tired of waiting.

Holy cow!

I got that order no more than 7 minutes earlier. But it took 105 minutes for a driver to arrive at the restaurant.

After dealing with Grubhub’s support people, I promptly got another Grubhub order. For this one, I arrived 6 minutes after closing time. The restaurant was dark. Everybody was gone.

AND… the GPS pin for the restaurant’s location was incorrect. The app was telling me that the restaurant was half a mile down the road. Consequently, the app would not allow me to press the “arrived at store” button in the app, which then would have allowed me to easily notify Grubhub that the restaurant was closed.

So guess what?

I called Grubhub support to get a resolution. While I was on hold and the support agent was calling the restaurant’s manager, the app decided I was too slow to arrive at the restaurant, even though I was right there, mere feet away from the locked front door.

The app automatically unassigned me from the order and my driver rating took a hit. When the support agent got back on the line with me, she said there was nothing she could do about the penalty, even though none of this was my fault.

See how it works?

That’s “the fairness gap” randomly popping up again. The Fairness Gap comes in many different variations in the food delivery gig business.

At that moment on this rainy weekend night it appeared Grubhub had a mountain of problem-orders waiting to be picked-up. The lesson? For my market, Grubhub is good during the early part of a weekend evening rush in bad weather. After a certain point, it’s probably better to switch to DoorDash because they have the most drivers and probably don’t experience such severe lateness problems.

And actually, though I like Grubhub very much, DoorDash probably is the best app to order from because they have the most drivers…

…which leads to a lower probability of you being hit with the misery of a super slow food delivery.

I’ve had comments from a few restaurant workers about how Uber Eats needs more drivers. But I have definitely experienced other Grubhub issues where it was clear the food sat too long before I arrived.

Your market might be different, but I know through monitoring online chatter among drivers that Grubhub simply doesn’t have enough business in many markets, and that status isn’t helpful in attracting an abundance of drivers so that there is maximum delivery efficiency.

It’s a situation where the biggest market share and largest delivery network wins.

Before I get into the matter of effective tipping to improve your outcome, I need to tell you more about “order stacking.”

I mentioned how order stacking is done by the apps to piggyback low paying orders on to better paying orders, so that the low paying order gets a driver.

Often when demand is strong and driver supply is weak, apps will stack two orders together simply out of necessity. Stacked orders can involve two different orders from the same restaurant, or two different orders involving restaurants that are near each other, (or maybe far away).

In these situations, sometimes the food is ready to go at one restaurant, but then the other restaurant is slow and the food isn’t ready. The wait could be 10, 15, 20 minutes or longer. Meanwhile the food from the other restaurant is getting cold.

You must assume that drivers will work in their own best interests.

If your order is paying $7 and the food is ready, but there is a 15 minute wait for the second order, however the second order is paying $20 and the miles are reasonable, guess what? The driver is going to wait for the second order.

But if the situation is reversed and the driver has to wait 15 minutes for a $7 order, they most likely will unassign the $7 order and proceed immediately with picking-up and delivering the $20 order.

But what if the driver doesn’t know the $20 order is a $20 order because of the app’s tip-jacking practices? Maybe the screen shows this order has a “guaranteed” payout of $8.50. Then what?

Waiting 15 minutes for a $7 order at peak time would be a bad choice. An experienced driver will probably unassign the $7 order and proceed with delivering the $8.50 order. But if they are slick they might be running more than one app, and it is possible they will pick-up a second order through another app while they have your order in their possession. And the driver would do this because they are unaware that your order actually has a much higher payout than is shown on their screen.

So how can you circumvent the tip-jacking of your order and improve the chances of a speedier, higher quality delivery effort?

I am calling it:
The Fair Deal Delivery

As I already mentioned, in many cases there needs to be a customer contribution to the driver’s compensation to make the delivery happen.

It’s wonderful when the tip is generous. It can actually turn our whole shift around. But when it comes to DoorDash especially, with their tendency to hide the actual compensation, I think there needs to be a different approach.

If you really want to get your food delivered with the best possible service, here is what I suggest:

First, don’t go minimal with the upfront tip. It needs to be high enough to inspire a driver to jump on the order.

Sometimes people do no-tip orders with the idea of handing over a nice cash tip at delivery. But this isn’t a good strategy at all. Drivers only have a few seconds to decide whether to accept an order or not. If they see the order is paying poorly, they will very quickly decline it.

So my suggestion is to provide enough of an incentive tip to get a driver to commit to the order. Factor in the mileage involved. Keep in mind that base pay from DoorDash can be as little as $2. And if you are using DoorDash, don’t be overly generous, because they sometimes tip-jack.

After a driver commits to your order, I recommend you contact the driver promptly to tell them this is a “Fair Deal Delivery.”

My initial thinking on this was to have some text ready to go, like:

###

This is a FAIR DEAL DELIVERY.

Transport my food in thermal bags. Cold food in one bag. Hot food in another bag.

If at all possible, avoid stacking another order on to mine.

After the delivery, and after you have left, IF I AM COMPLETELY SATISFIED with everything, I will send you a post-delivery bonus tip through the app as a reward for good service.

###

With this approach, you are better able to use the power of the tip to influence the level of service you receive. And if you really are satisfied with the execution of the delivery, then your reward tip goes towards helping somebody to make a living.

(You SHOULD be able to add a post-delivery bonus tip through the app.)

I HAVE A CONCERN THOUGH: I have come to realize this might be way too much wording for a lot of gig drivers. Here is another variation:

###

This is a FAIR DEAL DELIVERY. (If u don’t know, google it.)

After you have left my home, IF I AM COMPLETELY SATISFIED with everything, I will send you a post-delivery bonus tip through the app as a reward for good service.

###

I have seen on the internet how some drivers have shown a lack of class with customers. I do have a concern that a post-delivery bonus tip could be expected with the above wording and that a classless driver could return to confront a customer about their missing post-delivery bonus tip. This is something a driver absolutely could get “deactivated” for (fired) if the customer complains.

If you have concerns about a tip confrontation happening, then you could merely text the driver, upon acceptance of your order, these words:

###

“This is a Fair Deal Delivery. If you don’t know what this is, Google it. But please only research this after you have completed my delivery. And then perhaps next time you will have preparations in place for Fair Deal Deliveries.”

###

Fair Deal Deliveries raise the standards for everybody.

Most importantly, Fair Deal Deliveries encourage the use of thermal bags to keep hot food hot and cold food cold.

From what I see, non-use of thermal bags by food delivery gig drivers is not just common, it is almost universal.

This can impact your enjoyment of the food, and it can hurt merchants when their customers don’t have satisfactory experiences.

Especially since merchants are paying a hefty price to sell through the app marketplaces — as high as 36% — they deserve service that will provide their customers with the best experience.

So by you pushing the Fair Deal Delivery concept, you help to better shape the outcome of future deliveries. And you better harness the power of the tip to motivate performance that will serve your interests at a higher level.

NOTE — You have the power.

Under the April 14, 2023 Independent Contractor Agreement for DoorDash Contractors, section 3.2, it says, among other things:

Contractor agrees to:

• (i) proceed to the applicable Merchant(s),

• (ii) retrieve the Item(s) in a safe and timely fashion,

• (iii) ensure the Delivery Service Opportunity is accurately performed according to the instructions, specifications, or guidelines of the customer, merchant, or any other party requesting the service.

In addition, in one section of the “DoorDash Service Provider Platform Access Policy” the behavior described below is listed as being grounds for immediate deactivation (termination):

Tampering with deliveries, opening packaging, or failing to maintain standards of food safety - Opening, using, consuming, or tampering with a delivery or customer order; failing to use an insulated thermal bag, if applicable, to safely transport deliveries.

AND in the Equipment and Expenses part of the DoorDash Independent Contractor Agreement, in section 9.1, it says:

Contractor represents that they have or will lawfully acquire all equipment, including vehicles and food thermal bags, necessary to perform Contracted Services…

However, this contract also says in section 2.3:

Contractor agrees to fully perform the Contracted Services in a timely, efficient, safe, and lawful manner. DoorDash has no right to, and shall not, control the manner, method, or means Contractor uses to perform the Contracted Services. Instead, Contractor shall be solely responsible for determining the most effective, efficient, and safe manner to perform the Contracted Services, including, as applicable, determining the manner of pickup, shopping, delivery, and route selection.

It also says in section 3.7:

Under no circumstances, however, shall DoorDash be authorized to control the manner or means by which Contractor performs Contracted Services.

So there truly is mixed messaging to the drivers. In addition to this, the contract is enormously complex with multiple attached documents. I am pretty savvy with this stuff, and I still feel like I need a 6 week course to go through everything point by point with debate about what everything means, because some of it is vague. It is an unfair agreement. However, it’s the same situation among all the food delivery app companies. These are very complicated documents that require many hours of study.

What gets me is… drivers are required to use insulated thermal bags, yet there is zero enforcement. Therefore, almost nobody uses them. Probably 99% of drivers are showing-up at restaurants with no thermal bags. That’s what I am seeing with all the food delivery app companies. Restauranteurs mostly just shrug their shoulders, as if there is nothing they can do. I have noticed they tend to be pleased when somebody like me shows up (with bags).

Anyway, while DoorDash is wishy-washy about thermal bag use, YOU HAVE THE POWER (section 3.2) to insist on their use.

Tipping strategy with Grubhub…

As of this writing, Grubhub doesn’t tip-jack. The pay shown to the driver when a delivery opportunity is presented is the pay the driver will receive.

If you tend to tip generously, you might think it is okay to deploy the full-tip up-front in order to inspire better service, since the pay amount offered to the driver will include your full tip.

I think this approach is not as strong as it could be.

Example: I fired up the DoorDash and Grubhub apps at the start of my shift. DoorDash gave me an offer I was about to accept, but then Grubhub presented me with a much better offer: $16.49 for less than a 6 mile trip. I accepted that offer and put the DoorDash app on pause.

As I was nearing the restaurant, Grubhub presented me with a second delivery opportunity. It was paying $13.58. The second restaurant was only half a block away from the first restaurant, and the delivery area was close to the first drop-off location. I accepted that second offer. To me, that was a great deal.

At the first restaurant, the food was ready. But at the second restaurant I was told the wait would be 10 minutes. I informed Grubhub through their app that there was a 10 to 20 minute delay with the second order. Grubhub didn’t tell me to unassign the second order and proceed with the first delivery. They never do that in these situations, nor does DoorDash. In fact, if I decide on my own to unassign the second order, I will get penalized for it.

###

UPDATE JULY 27, 2024: DoorDash now allows drivers to unassign orders without a penalty after a certain wait period. But they never instruct us to unassign an order. It is merely presented as an option.

###

If the first order was paying $11 for a 6 mile trip and I accepted it, and if I then received a text message alert from the customer which said this was a Fair Deal Delivery, along with brief information about the expectations, guess what? That potential for an unknown amount of backend money absolutely would have gotten my attention, and I would have refrained from accepting any other orders.

But instead, because I knew I had a guaranteed $16.49 coming from order #1, there was no incentive to disregard any add-on offers.

It took 15 minutes for the food at the second restaurant to be handed over to me. So delivery to customer #1 was delayed by 15 minutes.

(Luckily for customer #1, I use terrific thermal bags. But many drivers don’t use them.)

Let’s imagine that first order was paying $25. In this case I would not have accepted any second orders. But greed and/or desperation would absolutely cause a lot of other drivers to proceed with accepting the second order.

I believe it is better to:

1. place an appropriate incentive tip on the order up-front,

2. declare to the driver that this order is a Fair Deal Delivery,

3. and hold back the remainder of the tip until the driver has proven themselves worthy of it.

This is a more effective use of the power of the tip to influence and inspire better service. When you give it all away upfront, you lose substantial leverage.

And if you have a driver who doesn’t use thermal bags, the full deployment of your generous tip upfront really is a wasteful mistake because it fails to shape the outcome in the ways that it could.

Get the full advantage from your generous tip by applying leverage with the Fair Deal Delivery technique. It will likely work better for you.

NOTES: If you put your “fair deal delivery” wording in the delivery instructions, there is a high chance your message will not be seen until the driver arrives at your location. It is better to text message your instructions to the driver after they have accepted your delivery opportunity.

Also, I recommend you not overwhelm the driver with more than one request.

If you write the fair deal delivery wording and then say “And don’t forget to ask for extra cheese sauce,” this could push some drivers into unassigning your order out of concern that you are a problem customer. And the more requests you add, the greater the chance the driver will dump you. This will delay your eventual delivery.

One of my concerns is the unfair exploitation of the Fair Deal Delivery method.

Probably there will be people who inform their driver that they have a fair deal delivery order while having no intention whatsoever of bonus tipping their driver.

This is toxic, unhelpful and damaging behavior.

Abuse like this causes a loss of trust with the driver it impacts, but also news of this sort of abuse will spread through the internet forums that gig drivers hang out in, which there are many of.

And this sort of abuse might be the final straw that causes them to abandon gig work altogether. Why should you care if somebody leaves the business? Because that person will be replaced by a brand new rookie who will be more likely to screw up their deliveries… and this could involve one of your future deliveries.

Please be ethical in using the Fair Deal Delivery method.

Was this information helpful?

If I could just ask one favor of you… could you help to spread the word about my FairDealDelivery.com website so that more people can benefit from it, including drivers and merchants?

And actually there is one more thing…

I still deliver for the app companies and I am not quite ready to walk away from the work. However, I am probably at-risk of retaliation for posting this information.

Would you be interested in knowing if I am hit with retaliatory measures, such as being suddenly deactivated?

I am starting-up an email list that I am calling “Ed’s Army.” Join my list and I will let you know if there are any positive or negative ripple effects.

The leverage of having a large group of people in my corner would be a wonderful gift, and possibly an effective deterrent against potential issues.

Yes, I am not kidding. I really could be at-risk of losing my food delivery gig jobs. According to a January 15, 2023 article in the Denver Post titled: “Colorado’s gig app drivers near a breaking point. And this newly elected lawmaker is one of them…” they reported this:

“Fifteen percent of drivers in the Colorado Jobs with Justice study reported being deactivated at some point. Many said they received no reasoning for the cause and were given little recourse once they were removed from the platform.”

In a May 24, 2024 article by Business Insider titled: “Three gig workers explain how they got deactivated on apps from DoorDash to Walmart’s Spark…” the report begins with these words:

“Work can disappear suddenly if you make deliveries as a gig worker.”

It continues:

“That’s because apps like DoorDash, Instacart, Uber Eats, and Walmart’s Spark frequently deactivate the accounts of their drivers over minor issues — or no obvious issue at all, according to delivery workers who have spoken to Business Insider.”

In another Business Insider article from October 1, 2023 titled: “Delivery drivers who make their living on apps like Instacart, DoorDash, and Grubhub say they’re being booted with little warning or recourse,” one deactivated driver detailed that…

“she made several more attempts to appeal [her deactivation] but has trouble finding a live person to talk to and faced ‘an endless loop of phone calls and emails, which seem either to be ignored or answered by robots.’”

Deactivations can happen for no clear reason, even to gig workers with years of service.

And I think third party app companies understand that the majority of their gig driver workforce are unsophisticated, which makes them unlikely to fight back.

Have I done anything wrong by publishing this website?

I really don’t think so. However, I am aware that sometimes big corporations do stupid things

So I am making preparations, and I would love it if you would join my Ed’s Army list.

I am envisioning a widespread shame campaign. And if that doesn’t work, then I will be going into attack-mode through their arbitration process. Afterwards I will probably write a book about it.

I do have an upcoming book on a different topic. I’ll be glad to give my list members the scoop when it’s ready.

Thank you very much!