What I Learned Trying DoorDash
I was in a position recently where I had to make extra money. The first bad thing about DoorDash is if you have to do it. Hopefully if you are reading this you are only thinking of DoorDash as a side hustle.
The first good thing about DoorDash is I bet I already made more money doing it than I will ever make writing on Medium. I’ve made around $200 over the course of 3 weeks dashing. That’s not dashing full-time. That’s wasting 6 hours dashing and earning $53 and then only dashing around mealtimes and getting out as soon as I could.
DoorDash is at least real money made quick. It’s not good money. The first time you drive 11 miles to earn 7 dollars, only to realize you have to drive 11 miles back into town to get more dashes is the last time you do it.
I became acutely aware of the wear and tear on my vehicle and how much gas I was burning. Things felt like they weren’t going to add up in my favor. Some jobs were for only $2, I kid you not.
Also, you only get 50 dash-whenever-you-want dashes and then you have to set a schedule. Every schedule I ever saw was after midnight. No thanks. As soon as I hit my 50 dashes I think I’m going to retire.
My area must be saturated, or slow because most of the time I had to wait 15–20 minutes between dashes. I usually only got to dash twice an hour. If dashes were back-to-back I think I could have earned 25–30 an hour, but I ended up only making around 10–15 an hour.
Dashing itself was fun. It felt like playing a video game. Go here, pick up this order, go there, drop off. “Be right back, honey, I got to make a drop.”
I got myself a thingie to attach to my air vent to hold my phone. It was extremely difficult to use the first day because all the little parts that stretched to grip your phone were new-product tight. At the end of week two my $8 phone holder broke. The toothless biting part wasn’t keeping its hold and then I tried tightening it with the wingnut-looking screw to get a solid vicegrip and BAM! it broke apart. Why is something that should be so simple so difficult? How come every product is terrible and breaks apart easily. Is it too difficult to make an aluminum version of the product that will grip and not tear itself apart? Yes, yes it is, because it’d sell for $60 and there’s no market for that.
As a side hustle DoorDash is okay. You actually get paid and see what you’re going to make. You can turn down offers, like an offer to make $5 driving 8 miles into the country. There were a few times where I had to make a drop in a sketchy looking neighborhood. One time I was out in the sticks and parked my car at the top of the road and walked down among a batch of the most beat up Appalachian trailers I’ve had the misfortune to see. A burn barrel was lit and I noticed a strange looking person in the distance, but they weren’t where my device was saying to go. I kept walking down a steep narrow path to another batch of, let’s say colorful, looking trailers. Dogs ran around unleashed and I hoped they wouldn’t get curious about me. No person was in sight. I called the customer through DoorDash because I didn’t want to start knocking on doors and rile up the stray dogs. In barely decipherable Southern-accented English I made out that the guy was in a store. The store was across the street. The mark was the cashier but I must have stood like an idiot in the front doorway holding fast food for at least 20 seconds, an eternity in such a situation.
Thankfully, I made it out of there alive and with tires still on my car. The exact GPS location DoorDash kept trying to get me to go to was a literal decrepit couch and chair in among overgrown weeds. It was not beyond me to think a homeless person had ordered DoorDash.
Overall, DoorDash earned me cold hard cash. Now I have to figure out my mileage and pay taxes on all these earnings. It didn’t take me long to realize I was getting ripped off and could never pay bills doing this, but I got there. I hope you won’t have to Dash, but if you do, do it when you have to be out and about anyway. Dashing while running other errands were always the best times. Those times I felt like a genius making money while taking care of something else I had to drive out to town for anyway. It’s also a good way to get a feel for residential areas you would otherwise never travel to.
I lament you can’t make good money Dashing, like 100 an hour. That would be worth it, making your own hours, being your own boss, getting to travel around and explore and read or write in between drops. Sitting in parking lots and looking for shade was a pain. I live in a hot area and there is no shade anywhere, it’s as if America declared war on shade. That would be too comfortable for loafers and bums, you see.
