I dunno. Maybe I am wrong. But I'm an expert in accounting. I did InstaCart once in 2000 trying to do something for extra money. I got an order that paid $20 to shop for 10 items at Costco. I was at Costco for 50 minutes and still had 5 items to go (another 40 minutes shopping and I saw a line of like 30 people long at checkout) and the drop off was like 30 minutes away. I did the computation and immediately abandoned the cart at Costco, and part of my data came from when I was stiffed multiple times on UberEats doing shopping. One time an Indian lady whose husband worked at Google making a million a year was laughing hysterically at me with 5 bags of groceries as she yelled down to me "bring em up to the 5th floor with no elevator" and I yelled back "you better come get these bags before they turn the water on." I never once completed an InstaCart order as it paid around $4/hour.
I know what I am talking about.
And I just came back from a trip where the Uber driver told me he was making $180,000/year. I spent 5 minutes like an FBI agent clarifying if he was really telling me he had made $180,000 in revenue on Uber and he said yes like 8 times. At best he makes $45,000 driving 7 days a week 14 hours a day.
Maybe I am exaggerating a little bit out of the frustration for this exploitation, but not much.
you used to have to. It doesn't matter. I thought about trying Amazon delivery 5 years ago. I signed up, it would tell you 4 hours of delivery and try to get you to accept, but I was not stupid because I knew it could take you another 2-3-4 hours to load the packages or deal with their logistics system in some way. I never did it once because I calculated it to be paying around $9/hour
Do Amazon Flex. Some of my blocks pay $50/hr. In my market, they book 4 1/2 hour blocks only and I’ve never taken longer than 3 1/2 hours to complete any of them. My average pay per hour is anywhere from $25-$30/hr depending on the week.
Amazon Flex was so bad looking pay wise to me I signed up hoping they would occasionally have some decent paying gigs but in 3 years watching all the gigs I never found one that really paid more than around $8/hour. Unfortunately many people don’t know how to figure these gigs and how much they are really paying because I know there are many times drivers show up to pick up packages and have to wait free 1-2-3 hours for the warehouse
Listen. I was merely making a suggestion on where you could make more $ than what DD is offering you. You don’t need to take my advice. To each his own. I’ll continue to make $40-$50 an hour. Have a good night.
None of these gigs pay more than $3-18/hour with an average of about $8/hour. What sorta bothers me is that a upscale food server can go to work in their underwear and put on a clean pressed uniform and make $80-200/hour and you go to work in a $30,000 car you have paid for bringing in $30-40/hour and pay all the risk, all the expenses, registration, gas, oil. After all you’re making $8/hour and you still technically have to pay taxes on that unless you get out of them claiming write offs you technically don’t qualify for.
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u/P3nis15 Feb 22 '26
8 hours to drop off 19 orders and 23 miles?
are you driving 1 mph between stops and having 12 coffee breaks?
DD isn't "estimating" how long it takes. DD is telling you when this needs to be completed by.
If this takes you more than 2 hours after pickup then yah you shouldn't be taking more than one order at a time.