Tip Your Door Dasher

In the past year, after losing my job, and not able to find one but still needing to pay the rent, I took gig work as a Door Dasher. I’d seen my daughter do it one summer and it seemed relatively easy—choose your own hours, decent money, make your own hours, pretty low stress, so I downloaded the app and got started.

I’m 55, not a teenager, but dove in and learned that dashers range in age— people across all spectrums need quick money so there’s no real demographic. In the year that I spent dashing, I met every type of person. Early on, I studied YouTube channels of creators who teach you skills of how to optimize time, maximize tips and driving routes, where to wait to make the most money, how to choose between available “per hour” versus “per offer” options and more nuances. The research paid off and I worked my way to “Platinum Dasher” status which earned me higher-paying gigs.

I delivered every imaginable order, from a single McDonald’s hamburger to a poor neighborhood where there was no car to pick up food to two-mile lavish $200 Indian food orders with $40 tips. After dashing different “zones” in the area of Maryland where I live, I learned which were more profitable than others, which is a function of the geographic size of the zone— if it’s huge and you have to drive far and waste time driving back, you make less money—and how many eating establishments are centrally located in a zone? Generally you’re measuring how much per mile you’re making because you want to calculate gas expenditures not to mention wear and tear on your vehicle. Some days you choose a closer zone to make a few bucks versus driving further to a zone where you make more. For me it was almost always worth it to drive to Annapolis where there don’t seem to be as many dashers per square mile of restaurant-filled area as on the Eastern Shore where I live and there are less restaurants.

I like the grocery store shopping orders best. It’s like a scavenger hunt. People order what we don’t normally get for our own households, so it’s oddly fun. I like the “race against the clock” idea that’s mostly imaginary but does affect how much you’re making per hour. It feels like a Price is Right segment.

My favorite Door Dash interaction was a mother who was trying to buy a toy for her little girl, home sick from school. The item she wanted from Target was out of stock but I found a similar one so messaged her and she was grateful but I couldn’t get the DD app to accept the alternative item because it was new and not in the inventory. I called DD and tried to make the substitution but the customer service agent, though helpful, couldn’t find a workaround and told me to cancel the order. No way was I telling a mother she couldn’t have this toy for her sick kid so I paid for it myself. The mother reimbursed me and I delivered it. The little girl had painted me the most adorable little picture when I got there; she came running out of the house with a kitten and said it was an extra one that I could have. Nine times out of 10 we have contactless delivery—we pick up the food from a shelf at Panera or Chipotle and we leave it at a doorstep (outside where the door swings!). It was nice, for that one rare time, to make a delivery that was meaningful.

Since I’m moving back in with my family in two weeks and won’t need to worry about paying rent separately on the island anymore, I don’t know that I’ll continue dashing. I don’t really mind. Listening to documentaries or podcasts, choosing when to work, making an average of around $25/hour and not really having to talk to anyone is a pretty good gig. I do wish people understood that delivery drivers don’t have control over our routes (we often get double- or triple-dashed with multiple orders) or what food’s in the bag, that’s the restaurant’s responsibility if something’s missing; tip your dasher, we’re paying for our own gas!

It can be physically demanding— many more people live on the third or fourth floor than the first floor of apartment buildings with no stairs order—but it’s not bad for the cardio. If you’re the kind of person who gets concerned about “bad neighborhoods” (I’m not because I grew up in what people would call one), it’s probably not for you. In theory you could set your account to “per offer” versus hourly and pick and choose the “neighborhoods” (or simply zones) where you deliver but you have to keep your “acceptance rate” high to be a gold or platinum dasher in order to get higher paying orders. I didn’t mind the mystery of which restaurant or store or apartment or house I’d be going to next, it’s fun to have gate codes to see some elegant mansion and I’m not a judgmental person even when I deliver a bag full of Monster drinks and candy and a pregnancy test with no tip to the college during finals. I figure some kids are just high and extremely stressed for a good reason.