Yeah I’ve been doing DoorDash deliveries in SF for close to two years now it’s pretty clear to me that these companies having an adversarial relationship with their drivers is very much so not working. They have an incentive to pay the drivers as little as possible, but the drivers congregate around the most busy spots and so… they talk. Little cabals of people working together form to figure out how to game the system as much as possible, then the platforms adjust strategies to close those holes. Additionally the platforms use every dark pattern and psychological trick in the book to get you to work for less. People quit in response. Theirs no stable group of people doing this work. It shows up in the quality of what the platforms can provide.

If you run the numbers it’s clear that DoorDash targets 18 an hour to pay folks, but pushes it up to time and a half when it’s busy, so 27 during the holidays. Thing is, you can force them to pay a little more than double when it’s really busy and get 40 an hour from them. People work really hard to hit those numbers regardless of the quality of service they provide in the end.

For instance, I can randomly be 20 minutes late to an order one day and the next that’s a contract violation, three of those and they might fire you, depending on how many drivers they have available at the time. But if you can be twenty minutes late to an order you can do Uber Eats at the same time, you do that for an hour and by law in California the minimum you can make is 46 bucks in SF.

Alright that was all really anecdotal evidence to say that most experienced drivers are probably making more than 20 an hour, the shit service you receive is also directly incentivized by the platforms adversarial relationship with the drivers.

The whole thing just really doesn’t work. They must really banking on the autonomous delivery robots to work out.