DoorDash Confidential with Charlie (another PennSilverTaco thread)!

I also picked up a meal at a Five Guys in Warminster and ended up having to take it into Philly. Again, I turn down all orders going into Philly. Unfortunately, I never know where the food is going until after I initiate the delivery. Uber does not like it when drivers cancel deliveries so far into the process, so occasionally my ratings with Uber take a hit.

 

Uber is trying to force all of its drivers in this area to these two parts of Philly...

 

This is surprisingly interesting and appreciate you sharing your experiences. I always ask my drivers if its worth it. I live in/near Austin TX, so I am sure there is money to be made here but imagine a similar problem to you in regards to driving into dt philly.

 

Surely somewhere someone has put together a spreadsheet on the cost/benefit on uber driving? I'd think that with each of the available services there would be a pretty well defined cutoff of profitability with regards to operating costs. I've seen ads for a service that specifically caters to people with pickup trucks using the bed to deliver items, but they require a full size.

When I was in europe I saw many people on bicycles doing Deliveroo deliveries. If riding a bicycle on roads in the states wasn't such a shit show, I'd be all over that.


PS. My other truck is a DCLB Frontier with a 6 speed manual. I do love it so, but parking...oooh parking. It's like parking an aircraft carrier.

 

Again, same lousy two areas of Philly...

See how it says 2am-4am? Like I said, Uber uses the same algorithm for its rideshare drivers as it does its delivery drivers. Bars in Pennsylvania are required to close at 2am, so patrons are ready to go home. Nobody ordering food at this time.

 

My dad and I rented a DCSB Frontier during a trip Oklahoma City, and that thing definitely had a Nimitz Class turning circle!

 

My biggest gripes about Philly are...

• The lack of parking
  
  
• The lack of restaurants with public restrooms
  
  
• People who live and/or work in Philly are nastier than people in the suburbs

 

One of my more recent Doordash encounters occurred at a place in Doylestown called PA Soup and Seafood.

I will happily go there again as a customer, but not as a Dasher. Why? The owner has a dispute with Doordash involving the use of an incorrect menu, and took it out on me the last time I made a pickup from his restaurant. Apparently, PA Soup and Seafood changes its menu every six months. Doordash was apparently not keeping up with this.

A customer ordered something through Doordash from an outdated menu, and the restaurant sent the customer the closest thing to what they had requested. Thinking the restaurant had blatantly gotten their order wrong, this customer nuked them on Yelp.

The owner of the restaurant took this personally and tried to correct it but Doordash was less than helpful.

The owner of PA Soup and Seafood decided that taking out his frustrations on the next Dasher who came to his restaurant would somehow solve his problem. Newsflash, dude; Us Dashers are just independent contractors who are paid to deliver the food from A to B!

The owner actually had the nerve to say “I’m not trying to shoot the messenger”...

Really dude? That’s exactly what you’re doing!

NOTICE TO ALL RESTAURANTS: I HATE DEALING WITH DOORDASH SUPPORT AS MUCH AS YOU DO! I AM JUST A DRIVER AND HAVE NO CONTROL OVER THE WAY DOORDASH DOES BUSINESS.

The owner started ranting to me Doordash was stealing business from his paid delivery driver (why in the hell did you sign up with them then?!?!), and saying how he would cut ties with Doordash if something like this happened again.

I honestly could care less if he stops working with Doordash, because I’ll never pick up food from there again!

Again, this is not a jab at the restaurant or it’s food!

 

Don’t even get me started on hotels and certain apartment buildings...

Some of the places I deliver to are so hard to get into that boarding a commercial flight seems like a Hawaiian vacation.

In 2015, when I took a second job delivering pizzas to make some extra money, a bored Doylestown cop followed me for over a block and tailed me into the parking lot of the apartment complex I was delivering too. This had started when I stopped at stop sign at a 4-way intersection, saw the cop at a stop sign to my left, zoned out, thinking I was at a red light. I waited at that stop sign entirely too long, and the cop got suspicious. It was probably 8pm or so, and my best guess is that he thought I was drunk. After seeing me get out of my truck with a stack of fresh pizzas, he just kept driving.

 

That said, indoor/high-rise apartment buildings suck because they typically have some sort of key pad that doesn’t work properly. I have not encountered many of these with Uber seats or Doordash, but we routinely got orders from this ex-nursing home turned into co-op apartments. The place seriously would look more at home in Philly than in Doylestown. This is the place where the BSC (Bored Suburban Cop) followed me the one night thinking I was drunk.

 

One of the more recent Doordash incidents took place at a Merrill Lynch office in Doylestown. The pickup and delivery itself actually went pretty well. The order was at this independent restaurant on West Oakland Avenue in Doylestown Borough, a place called Lovebird. The staff there are very friendly and it’s one of my favorite places to pick up orders. The order was huge, so huge that it wouldn’t fit in my warming bag.

This particular Merrill Lynch office was in one of those massive upscale office parks where you really have to pay attention to the signage. It took a few extra minutes to find the suite, but I found it. When I dropped off the order, there was no hint whatsoever that anyone was annoyed with me. As I was walking out, I checked the expense breakdown on my phone and noticed I had not gotten a tip. As I was getting in the truck, a woman pulls up in a late model Subaru Forester. She gets out of the car and asks if I’m with Doordash. I tell her yes, and I get the sense that she is unhappy about something. I initially just brushed it off and started to back up, but she was staring me down. I put the truck in park, got out (she was on my right and I don’t have power windows), and basically asked why she looked so pissed. She told me the whole story...

Apparently, they’d gotten the same order from Lovebird over an hour earlier, and the Dasher had actually taken it to the wrong building and marked it delivered. For some reason, they’d never gotten their food and decided to order it again. This time, I got the order, but somewhere along the line the woman in the Subaru got impatient decided to drive to Lovebird herself and pick it up.

Somehow, this nitwit got into her mind that I was the only Dasher in Doylestown and was thus the same one who had delivered the first order to the wrong building.

I got quite annoyed and told the woman that I had no idea what the hell she was talking about, and that this was the only order I’d picked up at Lovebird all day. A lightbulb came on in her head and she realized that I was not the same Dasher who’d dropped the ball earlier. She apologized, and it occurred to me right then and there why I hadn’t gotten a tip. I just left, but not before putting that particular Merrill-Lynch on my personal shitlist. I will never deliver there again.

 

I signed up for Uber Eats and Doordash at the same time, and I initially was only going to do Uber Eats because I thought Doordash required new Dashers to attend some stupid orientation. I found out from a friend who also did Doordash that attending an orientation was not required, I’d just left a job I’d absolutely hated, and Uber was proving to be a crock of shit. I continued where I’d left off in terms of signing up, and started driving for Doordash. I did Uber Eats a couple more times, but I haven’t done it in over a month at this point.

 

Today, I picked up a Doordash order at a Dunkin Donuts for the first time ever, and only when I arrived did it occur to me that it might be a dreaded “place it yourself” red card order...

 

The order consisted of four glazed donuts, 25 donut holes, and not one drink, so it literally took 2 minutes to be prepare.

What really amused me was that the whole order amounted to less than $10.50, and I was getting paid $9.45 to deliver it!

The customer was at a local address, albeit a bit out in the boonies, but I’d say it took less than 10 minutes to drive there.

The customer’s house was this huge McMansion on an even bigger piece of land. The customer was a young man maybe a bit older than me, and I immediately suspected that he was high. Yup! The munchies!

When you think about it though, the customer had probably just smoked a bowl or two and didn’t want to risk getting a DUI by driving himself to get donuts.

 

Also, yesterday Doordash tried at least six times to get me to drive all the way out to New Hope, which is a good fifteen minutes away Doylestown under ideal conditions. As a result of me turning down all of these orders, my acceptance rate decreased from 81% to 78%! Please, Doordash, stop sending sending me far away orders and then punishing me for not accepting them!

 

Whoever decided to include New Hope (as well as Lambertville, New Jersey) as part of “Doylestown” is an idiot.

To give you an idea of what Doylestown area Dashers are dealing with, here’s a screenshot.

The addition of New Hope/Lambertville and the road leading to it looks rather phallic in nature...



I am not entirely sure if the area around the phallic extension can order from DoorDash.

 

One time I got an order from a pizzeria with a Doylestown address, and it ended up being for someone in New Hope.

The house was this very expensive place on the Delaware River, in the middle of nowhere and just outside the New Hope delivery radius. The place looked like a miniature compound, and there was a Mercedes G-class SUV in the driveway. These people obviously had money...

The customer came out and told me that they’d ordered the pizza just to see if someone would actually deliver it, because they’d had problems getting both Doordash and Uber Eats to deliver to their relatively remote location. This made me a bit upset. The guy didn’t even give me a decent tip for participating in his little experiment!

Sadly, I do not remember his address, but I no longer pick up from or deliver to anywhere past Buckingham Township.

Up-close of Buckingham Township’s location...




The black circle shows the approximate location of Buckingham Township, right about where the phallic extension begins...

 

New Hope and Lambertville should be their own area. Even worse than being summoned to New Hope or Lambertville is picking up an order in Doylestown and finding out after you’ve already paid for it with the Red Card that it is going to New Hope or Solebury. Thankfully, I’ve never picked up any orders in Pennsylvania that were going to Lambertville (which is in Jersey).

 

My wife and I both do Uber and she also does Uber eats will make decent money he just got a put in the time doing it like anything else. We use her Camry because my Tacoma is also too old.

 

These screenshots show the utter absurdity of how Doordash has laid out “Doylestown”...