Guest Post. Postmates Vs Doordash
11:31
Crowd-sourcing
has become one of the most impactful ways people make money. Do you want to be
the biggest driving service without owning any cars? Ask Uber. Want to be the
biggest property rental service without owning any property? Ask Airbnb. Want
to get paid tens of thousands of dollars to…just make a potato salad? Ask this guy. But this isn’t about any of those;
it’s about burritos. Specifically, people taking other people burritos.
Just like with
Uber and Lyft, crowd-sourcing apps like Postmates, Grubhub, Ubereats and
Doordash- have now created a network of delivery boys and girls, restaurants,
and lots of hungry-ass people. Like many others, I’ve tried to fill some of
those hours of free time with something that is both flexible and profitable.
And I did try Uber and Lyft before, but have since discovered that food never
makes unreasonable requests or pukes in your car, so yes, pizzas make better
passengers.
In order to
optimize my food-taking-time, I decided to compare the different food delivery
apps, both on paper and in practice. Right off the bat, one finds out that the
requirements for starting to deliver vary considerably with the different
companies. You want to deliver for Postmates? Done, here’s your first order,
few questions asked. Ubereats is a little more cautious. They ask that you at
least take your car to get inspected, I guess to make sure you aren’t
delivering the food on a tricycle. Doordash kicks it up a notch- you have to
go, in person (blasphemy!) for an orientation. Depending on where you live, it
might be a bit of a drive to get to the Doordash center, but it’s great to get
to talk to someone who has been with the business for some time and to ask
questions. Not surprisingly, though, ALL companies do a background check, which
makes sense after what happened with the Panda
Express diarrhea terrorist.
That difference
highlighted in the different ways to join Postmates and Doordash (the companies
that will be focused on from now on) reflects the different values that seem to
be in the day to day work within each: Flexibility vs Structure.After making
your profile on the Postmates portal, you could probably make your first
delivery within 30 minutes. You press the “go online” button, and you’re on the
food radar. Fast, easy, anytime- total Flexibility.
Now with
Doordash, the first thing one will notice is that before you can even go
online, you gotta look at the map of your area. Doordash divides cities by
sections and limits the number of drivers that may be active per zone at any
given time. They do this so that no place gets unnecessarily saturated, and
that drivers can be sent to the areas that need them. You can even schedule
working times ahead of time to save your spot. The advantage of the zone system
is twofold: one, you’re more likely to get orders because you aren’t driving
where there’s an eager Dasher on every corner; two, the areas mean that all
your deliveries will be limited to that part of town. That is a crucial
feature- no more driving fifteen mile away from where you want to go just to
make a five-dollar drop-off, and with shorter trips, you get more deliveries
over all. The disadvantage is that, sometimes, you can’t drive where you want,
and driving far from home, just to start driving some more, isn’t very
appealing. When you are in an area that is open, you set a start time and an
end time, and you’re committed to that time. If you log off during that time
for too long, Doordash takes points off your profile and may start giving you
less lasagnas. So, you set your time and place- ready to deliver the goods?
Nope. Now the app is going to ask you, “did you charge your phone?”; “did you
put gas in your car?”; “did you take a shit?” Seriously, the app asks you if
you went to the bathroom before you start driving, and it’s a legitimate
question, who wants cold food because their driver had to stop at a ghetto-ass
gas station bathroom? With all those checked off, you can dash. And before you
even started to drive, you can begin to see the pros and cons of the
flexibility with Postmates and the structure of Doordash.
During the
actual deliveries, the work virtually is identical, but the interactions with
the apps are different. Doordash asks you to update your status more often, of
course: “did you get to the restaurant?”; “did you order?”; “did you pick up
the food?”; “are you on your way?” Sometimes Doordash sends random alerts like,
“hey! you’ve been at the restaurant for a while, what’s going on?” or “Wait!
Did you remember to get napkins? Sauces? Straws? Ok! Just checking” I thought
the reminders made sense and weren’t too bad, because it is easy to forget the
Ranch, but you Never want to forget the Ranch. Postmates seems a little more
chill by comparison; it's not asking you stuff costantly (probably because your
location is updated by gsp anyway) and you can log off at any time between
trips for as long as you want, log back on any time, and you don't have time
limits for every step of the delivery.
With any of the
apps, the job can be quite fun. If you love food, your inner fatty will
rejoice! You drive around your city, often finding new restaurants and cuisines
that beg you to return, like a Philipino restaurant that I felt was torturing
me with the aroma of crispy lechon or the award winning BBQ place that had a
brisket sandwich with mac n’ cheese inside! And if you’re friendly at the
restaurant (and not being a dick trying to make them hurry like I’ve heard some
peeps do) they’ll be awesome, sometimes giving you waters for the road, free
samples, or tell you about the most popular dishes and stuff. I once got to try
every kind of chicken at a Chinese place! Exception to the rule: the Cheesecake
Factory. Every time I’ve been to the CF, they take as long as they want, not
giving a shit at all. The Doordash app gives you timeframes for how long it
should take you to order, to pick up, and to deliver (of course it does) and
the CF is the only restaurant that is late every single time. I thought it was
weird at first, but all became clear. One time I had back-to-back CF runs. I
showed up for the second one saying, “I’m back!”, with some Mexican Jonah Hill-
looking dude responding “unfortunately.” I said, “why unfortunately?” “Because
we don’t get tips, so we don’t make any money off the orders.” I said, “well,
I’m making money.” “Good for you” he replied, before handing me some
over-priced pasta. So, yea, because the staff at the Factory can’t masturbate
you for tips through the app, they get salty and your delivery order will be
late every time. Basically, don’t get delivery from tip-whores.
As far as
customers, you mostly get two kinds of customers- the kind that are excited to
see you (really the burritos) and the kind who are just, “ugh just gimme the
food.” Some even ask you to just drop it off at the door, probably wanting to
imagine that their food appeared magically. The only tricky part with the
customers can be finding them, especially with a massive apartment complex.
What you thought was going to be an eight-minute trip just turned into twenty
minutes because you can’t find the place. Because of course the customer wants
you to take the food right to their door; you dare ask them to…move? I guess it
is Doordash, not Parkinglotdash or Sidewalkdash.
Getting paid with both apps is straight forward, but Doordash is more upfront with how much you’ll make. With Postmates, it gives you the tips at the end of the month. You may be disappointed when you see that thirty-minute, ten pizza delivery order was only worth five bucks, but elated at the end of the month when you find out they gave you a ten-dollar tip too. And let's say the customer cancels the order as you're on your way to drop off. Do you get charged for it? Do you not get paid? Do you have to take the food back? None of the above. You get paid half and you keep the food! Exception: if the order has booze, you gotta give that back, sadly. But there is nothing better than getting paid to eat free food. Overall, my experience with delivering has been awesome, so if you’ve got free time and need a little extra cash, it's a gig I recommend. Now you can choose- Flexibility or Structure.
0 Opiniones