A loose collection of thoughts and diary entries about working for the average rentseeker
Doordash is a failure at a conceptual level, a failure in its implementation, and I would call it devastating in its spiritual and social implications. The app is pure rentseeking, a complete accountability abyss and, sadly, it's easily one of the better jobs I've worked. How did things get this bad? Doordash is actually a pretty useful product to look at in the sense that it's such an incredibly bare bones "job" that it's a useful template for understanding how work is developing in the US. Every bitter hack has taken a stab at the gig economy, so it's as good a place to start as any for me too. Let's take it from the top, how does Doordash make its money?
Skimming from Businesses
Taken down for re-write
Skimming from Drivers
Taken down for re-write
Deflecting All Liability
Taken down for re-write
Thank God not all jobs work like this. We have been seeing more and more arrangements like this, but it's not like it's going to hit your job.
Actually, you're fucked too
The gig economy model that's being described above is an intoxicating deal to the people you work for. Imagine, all the work, half the cost, and none of the liability. You had better believe that whatever bloodless suit you work for is going to try and make fetch happen. It likely isn't going to happen overnight, and it probably won't happen completely, but here are things to watch out for.
Also taken down for re-write sorry to any early access folks
Diary and Misc Notes
Dashing notes April 18th to 23rd
Doordash is designed to make your rush restaurant workers. If the meal isn't ready when you get there, you have to wait, and that time spent waiting is time you could have been delivering other orders and being paid. If you felt like torturing yourself, you could calculate how much money you are losing every time you encounter a particularly long red light, or an especially slow restaurant. It's designed to make you the worst person to work with because your pay is directly tied to how much you can rush someone making minimum wage to make your order. This likely has an effect on the quality of meals, as restaurant workers are incentivized to rush food out as quickly as possible. This is compounded by the fact that door dash drivers are incentivized to take multiple orders at a time. If the second order isn't coming out quickly enough, you are both making the first customer wait twice as long for food, and their food is getting cold. Drivers who deliver cold, late food are less likely to be getting good tips, so the incentive from the driver is to push the restaurant workers to move as quickly as possible. Door dash in particular adds another layer to this with their "peak pay" system, in which dashers get extra pay for each delivery made at the heaviest times. If a restaurant is "making you wait", you are missing out on getting additional orders during this peak time. This all comes together into a system designed to siphon aggression away from a poorly designed food delivery system, and direct that anger at other minimum wage workers.
Dashing notes 4/23 - 4/30
Dashing has immediately had a profound psychological effect on me. Every hour that I'm not doing anything has been recontextualized in dollar amounts and missed opportunities. I typically drive down to see my parents on Sundays, the whole process takes 3 hours, plus gas and wear on the car. Because I have been tracking the gas cost and mileage cost of delivering food, it has become increasingly difficult not to apply that same logic to anything else that requires me to drive.
3 hours, that's on average 45 dollars worth of work. The temptation has been to ask for more virtual visits so I can use that mileage and gas on making money. I'm not even in a bad situation for money, I'm doing fine but not better than fine, it feeds into the fantasy of doing better if you just worked a little harder. The temptation to cut back a little on those unimportant things like friends and family visits, you can miss out on them just this once.
Going out to eat tastes like ash in my mouth. My friend and I went to a lovely restaurant outside of Boston and I couldn't taste the food, I could taste the hours it would take to recoup that. 2 hours for the whole meal, 3 if I want to tip. I live and die off tips so it doesn't feel right leaving someone else out in the cold.
4/24
I'm being advertised to constantly. I feel myself being absolutely bombarded by the smells and descriptions of the food items I'm delivering. Sometimes it's enticing and sometimes it's nauseating. I've been trying to eat before doing any deliveries for this reason, but there is an amount of sensory overload to the experience. It's not usually something I'm especially sensitive to but I'm noticing it.
4/28
Dashers get a base 2-3 dollars from deliveries. This means if you don't include a tip, your driver is getting a notification that says "will you drive 6 miles for $2.16? Saying no will go on your acceptance rate record."
I want a little delivery outfit. Courier cap, postman in shorts type beat, all that. Might commit me to the bit a little too much.
4/29
The kids are in hell at the McDonald's, and I’m not helping with that situation. How are there so many Doordash orders, they can't stop moving for even a second, and talking to each other is a non-option.
Some people respond with an amount of wry solidarity. Like a "hah, that shit sucks too good luck out there", but most food service workers just hate you. You make their lives harder for a quick buck, even if their managers put the store on the app, it's the employees that get slammed for it, and for less money. They have to deal with tips being split between them and the dasher.
Pick up another order and quick. You're given 30 seconds from the order coming in to accept it and they know when you're actively driving from one place to another. It would not surprise me if for undesirable orders they intentionally waited for you to be driving so you couldn't look at an order critically before accepting it.
Doordash can send you on orders that will end up outside of your "working region". They will send you on deliveries that are too far away, and when you start the app back up after making that delivery you will be considered out of bounds and no longer able to accept deliveries. From a wage perspective, this is devastating, it's like you accidentally clocked out early, but it's more like your boss sent you out on an errand and didn't pay you for your time away from your desk.
Dash Notes May 1st
No consideration for how long you're going to make a customer wait if things aren't lined up perfectly across multiple restaurants. You take a penalty for canceling even if, say, the restaurant has locked its lobby and has a line going out to the street, they want you to wait, let the other customers' food go ice cold, and bring both orders late in that situation.
The Doordash phone service is incredibly busted. It tries to filter your call through the door dash app but it just doesn't work. There's no option to pick up calls. I’m always tempted to complain about this to customers, but they really could not give less of a shit and why would they. They wanted to get food delivered not to hear about the day of the delivery person.
I've gotten a couple of deliveries for engineering students at Dartmouth. They do not tip, why would they? The lowly door trash contractor has earned his place in the caste system and it is beneath the notice of the engineers.
Dash Notes May 2nd
SNACK25 to give us back all the money you earned. Up to a 2.50 discount exclusively for Drivers! Go fuck yourself Doordash, digital company town that wears people down to the point where they're both customer and contractor. Sinister shit.
I understand the impulse to bring the gig economy model to more industries, it's addictive for the contractor and basically risk free for the app developer. If we lived in a country where healthcare was not an absolute nightmare I could see this being an appealing model of work. You just need nothing to go wrong. You need the app and app infrastructure (telecom mostly) to remain functional, there's basically no HR infrastructure, no infrastructure for long term damage being done to their drivers. It's not a consideration, once your value has been spent, get out, contractor.
It hits a number of buttons in me that were programmed by other experiences. Route optimizations, gambling, the "number go up" instinct on multiple fronts, I mean I'm getting so many fucking statistics!
Dash Notes June 10th:
Illusory bonus pay: Doordash will show bonus pay in regions where there are no drivers, but what if you’re somewhere without Doordash compatible businesses? In those cases you will see “Busy: $5 bonus pay per order” but there will be no orders available there. $5 per order would be incredible, some quick math puts the hourly rate between 25 and 35 dollars depending on tip, but it’s not real. Just a glitch in the way that regions that don’t have enough dashers are being processed. Traveling 25 miles to get to this region, and then waiting over an hour to find that it’s been marked that way in error was enough to get me to stop delivering, period.
August 10th
I've been out for a few months now and the worst of the impacts have largely fallen away. I don't think of time with people as an irritating distraction from the time I could spend making money. I can smell takeout without feeling nauseous. I'm spending less time vacantly staring at the wall, thinking about the ways I'm being exploited on a daily basis. It's down to twice a week now I'd say. Things are better.
Misc Notes:
Non tangible benefits, I get to interact with cashiers and old people and commiserate about working late
I'm learning about the town and running into other dashers, one of them is driving a lifted Dodge Ram, there's no way that's viable how are you making literally any money like that.
Holy shit bring snacks and drinks. Maybe leave some in the car, smelling everyone else's food makes me want to immediately spend everything I made on take out
The app often breaks during deliveries. Known buzz glitch and the complete lack of QA in the GPS. Driver App has 1.8 stars out of 5 on the Google Play store at time of writing.
Customers are allowed to put in a street address without a number, good luck idiot!