Door Dash for More Cash
I was part of the unlucky bunch that graduated at the peak of the Covid pandemic - Summer 2020. I was having a difficult time finding a job as the whole world was in chaos. Rather than sit around and wait for a job offer, I decided to take matters into my own hands. “How can I have a source of income during these times?” I asked myself. And that’s when it came to me - Door Dash! With most of the nation on lockdown, there were plenty out there ordering food to their doorsteps. I decided that in between applying for jobs, I would do delivery drives for some extra cash. By the end of the 3 months, I was earning approximately $30/hour - more than double from when I first started!
So I downloaded the app, signed up to be a driver, and began my quest. Being a very data-driven person, I decided to log my driving sessions so that I could track my performance and earnings. I kept track of the driving start/end time, number of deliveries, earnings (delivery fees and tips), and mileage. When I got home, I would record these values into a spreadsheet and created formulas to calculate the delivery durations, total pay, and hourly rate per session. Over time I developed strategies that would help me become more efficient with my deliveries and resulted in higher pay. The more data I collected, the better I became at understanding what areas/restaurants were best and which orders I should accept or decline depending on the pay and distance. Over the course of 3 months, I completed over 350 deliveries!
On my very first day of driving, I accepted every order that popped up on my screen. Having no scope of what a “good order” was, I mistakenly accepted an order that was 18 miles away for only $3.25 with no tip! After over 40 minutes of driving (for less than half of minimum wage), I decided I was never going to make that mistake again. From there on out I became much more meticulous about the orders I accepted, striving to reach the “golden ratio” of pay to driving distance.
Data Behind the Dashes
Starting out, I was making about $13/hour with my delivery driving. This later increased to around $30/hour. Doing a deeper analysis on my delivery orders, I found that the average order paid about $8 (delivery fee + tip) and took about 17 minutes from order acceptance to delivery. See some more detailed statistics below:
Some interesting things I noticed during my analysis:
Tips make up more of the earnings than the base delivery fee - about 60% of the total pay. Don’t forget to tip your drivers!
The maximum order I received paid $30!
Although not shown here, deliveries during dinner hours paid roughly 20% more than lunch hours
$21.70/hour average for dinner
$17.78/hour average for lunch
Below you will find the top 10 restaurants that I delivered for and the number of orders for each. As you can see, national chains tend to be pretty popular in my area.
Key Learnings
After about a week of only using Door Dash, I decided to give Uber Eats a shot too. I found that using both apps at the same time was one of the best ways to optimize my earnings. I now had two streams of deliveries to chose from and could select the best one that would pop up between them. Learning how to use these to my advantage was crucial.
With some more experience, I also found that driving around the mall area (which also contained the majority of restaurants) resulted in the best offers. I came up with a “rough” formula for the requirements for my orders. It goes something like:
Total Pay ≥ $2 × (Delivery Distance)
with the minimum total pay being about $5 for me to accept an order. For example, if an order required driving 5 miles, I would expect to be paid at least ~$10 in total. The main reason for this is that when I had to drive 5 miles away from the “hotspot” with popular restaurants, I would essentially have to drive 5 miles back to get back to the hotspot with higher paying orders. As one might expect, farther distances result in longer drive time, thereby resulting in lower hourly pay. It’s certainly not an exact science, but it worked out for me over the long run.
Over time, I eventually learned which restaurants to avoid picking up orders from too - as they tended to consistently be running behind which would cause me to wait 10-15 minutes at the restaurant while the food is prepared. This downtime can be frustrating and would eat away from my earnings. In the delivery driver world, the saying “time is money” certainly holds true.
