DoorDash Confidential with Charlie (another PennSilverTaco thread)!

UPDATE (December 9th, 2020): Updated to include my experience with Wag! Walker and my experience as a delivery driver for a pizzeria...

I signed up for Uber Eats and Doordash around the same time (December 2018). I wanted to do UberX, but while I had a good enough driving record to pass the background check and my Tacoma was new enough, the Taco did not meet the guidelines because it is a regular cab. Next best thing? Uber Eats!

1. Clean criminal record/driving record? -Yes!
2. Any DUIs in the last ten years? -No DUIs ever!
3. Vehicle 1998 or newer? -2010 new enough for you?

I would also like to point out that I’d taken another part-time job detailing cars at a dealership in September 2018, and from the beginning of December 2018 to the end of January 2019, I was barbacking, detailing cars, and driving for Uber simultaneously, in addition to making extra money walking my boss’s dog. The money was not bad at all!

When the bar closed, that left me with just the detail shop and Uber Eats. This was a pretty decent arrangement, once you got past the fact that the we were paid flat rate at the detail shop and the hours totally sucked...

A friend told me about Wag! Walker right around the time I put in my two weeks at the detail shop, and that I should sign up because I love dogs and it’s a good way to make money. I had lost a 1-year old puppy to a rare congenital kidney disease just weeks prior, and I was going through serious dog withdrawal. Unlike with Uber Eats and Doordash, I actually had to pay money to sign up for Wag! This included a background check, and some Wag! merchandise. So you’re not only making me pay for my own background check, but I have to pay to advertise for you as well?!?! That’s strike one!

I got approved, but one thing I immediately noticed was that all of the walks were quite a good distance from my house.

I started doing DoorDash in July 2019 and found that I like it better than Uber Eats; As of March 2021, I'm pretty sure I've done Uber Eats less than ten times since the summer of 2019!

 

I have many good stories from my time as a pizza delivery driver in the summer of 2015.

First of all, I'd like to say that being a person who is OCD about routine vehicle maintenance, and whose daily driver is a Toyota Tacoma, really came back to bite me in the ass. It still does.

In my opinion, Toyota Tacomas tend to last and last and last even if they are not well-maintained, but that's besides the point.

I regularly got called in at the last minute, often when it was supposed to be my day off, because whoever was supposed to be working that day was having car trouble!

The straw that broke the camel's back is when I got hit by the drunk guy minutes after my shift ended, and I came to the conclusion that $5 an hour under the table plus tips was not worth my truck getting damaged. Within a week of my Tacoma getting hit, I pretty much quit the job at the pizza place without giving the customary two weeks notice...

My biggest complaints were the lack of private, off-street parking, and employees who took advantage of me and tried to make do their work when the owner wasn't around!

This is one of my favorite stories: On a particularly busy night, a patient/resident of a nursing home called the pizzeria and placed an order. Because we were slammed, and there was one other driver working that night at most, it took a while. If I had to guess I'd say it was a little over an hour, and it ended up being my last delivery of the night. It was a Friday or Saturday, which meant the pizzeria would be open until 3am, but deliveries always stopped at like 8pm or 9pm.

I drove to this nursing home/rehab center, parked my Tacoma in a loading/unloading zone, turned on the hazards, and went inside. The woman at front desk on the first floor did not order a pizza, had no idea who did, and sent me upstairs. It is worth noting that at at this point I thought this small personal pizza was for a nurse or other staffer.

Upstairs, it was initially the same old song and dance with the staff, but then one of the nurses suddenly remembered that a resident had ordered food from another place a while ago. She told me to follow her, and she took me to a lounge area where she produced a bag with the name of another restaurant on it, asking if the place I was from had been there earlier. I told the nurse that this was not the case. All I knew was that the customer was a woman, and when I punched the address on the receipt into my GPS, the directions had ended here.

She apologized and told me to wait a couple minutes while she talked with the aforementioned resident. I was not allowed to go into this woman's room, and the nurse closed the door, though I did still hear bits and pieces of the conversation. After a few minutes, the nurse came back out and told me the following:

That this resident had more than likely called in an order at my pizza place, but either got impatient waiting for the food to come or totally forgot making the order in the first place, and called another restaurant that delivered. This food showed up in a satisfactory amount of time, and she ate it and retired to her room, where she was by the time I showed up...

The nurse said that this was a regular occurrence with this particular woman, and continued to apologize to me for what she saw as a waste of my time.

I said it was no big deal, mentioned that my Grandmother who'd just passed away in January 2015 had suffered from dementia and general confusion in the last year or so of her life, and basically said that I totally understood if this elderly patient had "Alzheimer's or dementia or something."

That's when the nurse told me that this woman was only like 40 and had mental problems (She went into some detail but this was almost 2 years ago so I don't remember the specifics). She then said that this woman would be much more closely monitored when ordering food and would probably be restricted it from doing it if she did something like this again.

I explained to the owner what happened on the phone before leaving, and when I got back to the pizzeria, he and his wife just let me keep the crazy lady's mini pizza on the house. I said goodbye, drove over to Puck, and polished off the pizza in a matter of minutes...

 

I also absolutely despised making deliveries at indoor apartment complexes and nursing homes; One such place was an actual nursing home, another one was a high-rise apartment that had formerly been a nursing home/retirement community but had been converted to a co-op of sorts, and the third place was another high-rise apartment building where Section 8 individuals lived.

THE NURSING HOME: Typical one-story nursing home, probably 40-50 years old at the time; I'm pretty sure I only made one or two deliveries here; This was like 7:30-9pm at night, so it was a skeleton crew running the place; Somebody buzzed me when I pressed the button at the front door, but there was nobody at the front desk. I wandered around the maze-like halls of this place for a couple minutes until I found a nurse. I told the nurse who I was looking for and she directed me to the customer's room. The customer was a bedridden old woman on oxygen, but she didn't have dementia or anything, so she was able to take care of herself. She not only paid in cash and gave me a decent tip, but took her food out of the bag and set her place the at the table next to her bed on her own. The same woman called back later that night while I was on another delivery, complaining about some petty little thing with her order, and the owner (my boss) had to drive out there and deliver a new one. However, my boss didn't have as easy of a time getting through the security door.

 

THE FORMER NURSING HOME TURNED CO-OP: It was not uncommon for me to get at least one order per night to come in from this damn place (sometimes twice) while I was working. The other drivers complained about it too. The only reason I didn't blatantly tell my boss that I refused to deliver here is because the customers there tipped good. Anyway, the most annoying thing about this place was the security door at the front entrance. It had a barely-functioning intercom system that supposedly went directly to each apartment in the high-rise (HUNDREDS). Most of time I gave up trying to find the customer on a seemingly endless list of names, and the one time I did find the customer, the damn button didn't work!

Sometimes I'd get a customer who actually cared, and they'd arrange ahead of time to meet me in the lobby or come down as soon as I called them. Other times I had to go to their apartment. If I got lucky it was on the first to third floor, but a couple times it was past the fifth floor, and in one case I had to take the elevator up to like the tenth floor!

And then, there were times when people were in the lobby, and I had to resort to knocking on the front door until they came over. A lot of "mental midgets" just flat out ignored me because it was "against protocol" to let random people in, even if that random person was the pizza guy who obviously legitimately could not find his customer. On at least two occasions, this wheelchair-bound 60-something man opened the door, and he would always bitch at me about how management bitched at residents for doing exactly what he was doing (letting me in).

 

THE SECTION 8 HOUSING COMPLEX: Same issues as the co-op; Security door with pushbutton buzzer, unreliable intercom system, and obnoxiously procedural "Mental Midget" residents and staff who acted like they were committing a federal offense by letting me in.

 

My first walk was all the way out in Washington Crossing, which wasn’t even the biggest problem. The house was across from the Delaware River on a fairly busy road, and not in a subdivision. As per the owner’s instructions, I had to put the dog in my truck and drive him to a park a little over a mile away. The dog was very friendly and well-behaved, so he was not an issue.

The issue started when I unlocked the side door. The instructions said that the upper lock had a tendency to “stick”. I found the key where the owner said it would be, but go figure that they’d locked the door using the “sticky” lock instead of the perfectly good (and more burglar-proof) deadbolt below it. Go figure, the key gets stuck in the damn lock. This house was in the middle of nowhere, so I figured the odds of someone robbing the place while I was gone were pretty slim, and I took the dog for his walk.

After numerous attempts to get the key out when I got back, I attempted to contact the homeowner. Wag! uses randomly chosen numbers from a specific California area code to conceal the identity of both the walker and the client, and the number I’d gotten for the owner was a dud.

I contacted Wag! support and got a woman for whom English was obviously a second language. Even though I was in this house and obviously knew the name of the dog and the address of the house, the foreigner on the other end could not find any record of me. I gave them my full name and phone number, and after 10-15 minutes of bullshitting, I was getting really frustrated. Finally, it is determined that some moron from Wag! typed my phone number in wrong and that’s why they couldn’t find me. Once that was settled, they got in contact with the homeowner, who called me. The homeowner was very nice, and assured me that I could just leave the lock as it was and her neighbor would fix it. I went on my merry way.

I would have loved to walk her dog again, but her house was just so far away from mine.

 

The second walk I accepted was a poodle mix, and here’s one of many issues with the Wag! app; I was in Ivyland when I took the job, and I believe the app was saying this walk was like 6 miles from my location.

When I put the address into my GPS, I found that it was in Bensalem, which is way more than 6 miles from Ivyland. My justification for taking the job was that I wasn’t doing anything that day. So, I made it to the address without incident and found that it was a townhouse in a large neighborhood. This was not a bad neighborhood, but it was still a shithole. However, I was pleased that unlike the dog from Washington Crossing, I would have a legit neighborhood to walk this dog. I let myself into the house and found the dog in his crate. The dog was initially friendly, if not a bit aloof, and let me pet him when I opened the cage.

However, once the dog was out of the vicinity of the crate, that's when the problems began. This poodle mix was not the least bit mean or vicious, but he would not let me come near him at all. Whenever I got close, he would dart to the other side of the house. Even in that tiny townhouse, I couldn’t catch him. I couldn’t find the dog treats at first and attempted to lure the dog with Cinnamon Toast Crunch I found in the pantry. The dog ate the cereal but still didn’t come near me.

I called the owner, and this time the fake number given by Wag! actually worked! She was nice, but stated that her dog was “weird with men”’ and apparently I was the first guy to walk him. Just great...

She told me where the treats were and I found them, but they didn’t work either. I couldn’t even get the dog back into the crate. The woman apologized for the trouble and told me to just leave her dog, saying that she’d have her ex-husband drop by to let him out. Oh the irony...



So, I drove all the way to Bensalem for nothing!

 

I forget whether this was before or after the male-weary poodle mix in Bensalem, but I took a “companionship” job. Problem is that the “dog” in the picture looked like a rabbit...

For some reason, I requested the job and got it, but then I quickly regretted it. For starters, this app is specifically for the sole purpose of caring for and walking dogs. Why was there a rabbit?

I texted the number included with the job description, asking why there was a picture of a rabbit on the “dog’s” profile. The profile even listed the breed as mix/other.

I never got a response, but within literally a couple minutes, I no longer had the job and the “dog” was back on Wag!

A day or so later, the listing was gone.

My guess is that the woman who owned the rabbit thought somebody would be stupid enough to believe the animal in the picture was a black and white Shihtzu. I certainly thought he was at first!

 

Dude, sounds like you need to let this venture go...

 

After one successful walk and one failed walk, I had earned just $22 and threw in the towel despite being $8 in the hole.

I thought I was done with Wag! until I got call from a California number I did not recognize. I let it go to voicemail. The message was from a guy claiming to be with Wag! and he wanted to discuss an incident that had taken place. The tone in his voice suggested it was more serious than it was, and ironically, what made me suspicious was that he spoke perfect English and had no foreign accent. I told my mom and she believed it was a scam.

I had started doing Wag! in early July and did it for maybe a week. It was now early August and I was leaving for Carlisle in a day. I wanted to blow off the call, but curiosity got to me and I called the number back. Turns out it was legit, and it was regarding the “stuck key” incident from my first walk.

I don’t know where along the lines it became an “incident” but I rather gruffly set the support rep straight.

 

Trust me, I stopped after the poodle mix in Bensalem!

 

Also, I was given a “test walk” as an introduction to the app. This job was totally fake, and I thought it was real at first. I had a classic “WTF?” moment when I saw this Golden Retriever was in Alaska! Keep in mind that I live in the Philadelphia suburbs! I quickly realized that this was a tutorial, however.

 

Like Uber Eats and Doordash, Wag! outsources it’s support staff to India.

Doordash tracks your every move and will start blowing up your phone with calls if you are a few minutes late. I still deliver with DoorDash, but I absolutely refuse to answer calls from support because they don’t speak good English, and talking with them on the phone can be quite frustrating.

 

One of my friends does UE and DD as well in his 4Runner. Not sure he actually nets any money in that beast though. Seems to like it well enough.

 

my buddy does uber eats when he's off rotation for shits and giggle says he doesn't really make anything, also has to feed a 5.7 ram though.

 

So Uber Eats started to show its true colors a few weeks after I’d signed up. I preferred to stay in my home area of Central Bucks County (Doylestown, Warminster, Warrington, etc). Certain parts of neighboring Montgomery County are also hot for Uber Eats drivers, especially Montgomeryville/Montgomery Township, and even more specifically North Wales and it’s surrounding area. I once had a woman give me a $10 cash tip on an order from Red Lobster!

I also did not mind doing Upper Bucks (Perkasie, Quakertown, Souderton, Telford).

You would think that the Uber Eats would keep you in the immediate area, but no...

My theory is that Uber applied the same algorithm to Uber Eats that it used for the original ridesharing app, and as a result, people from Philly were able to order from restaurants 40 minutes away in the suburbs. Exacerbating the problem is that Uber Eats drivers don’t get paid nearly as much as the traditional Uber drivers who drive people.

Doordash is superior to Uber Eats in my opinion because it keeps you within a set area (there are some flaws which I will get to later).

 

I gave DoorDash a go in the Tacoma, mostly because I didn't want others riding around in the truck and it was something to do on nice evenings. Long story short, it cost more than it was worth on gas and wear on your vehicle unless you are in a super populated area and don't have to drive far. I did run into a couple of interesting folks throughout the few days I did it though, if that is something you are into.

 

I got picked up by a guy in a Dodge Ram 1500 Ecodiesel once.

 

I have a 2.7L/auto 5-lug and I’m lucky to get 18 MPG around town. I’m a prolific A/C user, and this summer has been brutal on my mileage.

 

Those might be more efficient though haha, I told him he would probably make more driving around people instead of food but his reply was "yeah but if someone puked in my brand new truck ide have to kick the shit out of them"