Doordash: Three Big Mistakes to Avoid

Like a little soldier, after driving for Doordash for a few months, I feel it’s time to reflect. In this blog, I confess to three mistakes I’ve made that I wish I hadn’t: 

1. Driving Mistakes

2. Delivery Mistakes

3. Working the System

Of the three, the delivery mistakes and working the system may have cost me money and quality ratings. The driving mistakes might have cost me the gig, but it didn’t. In truth, working the system wasn’t actually an idea I embraced. I just dreamed of working the system, and I don’t work enough hours in a week to turn a Doordash shift into a laboratory experiment.

Oh sure, I occasionally decline an order. As any doordasher knows, some orders are ridiculous. But for the most part, I can’t say, “that’s a mistake I made!” but other people sermonize that you should decline orders all the time. While I don’t believe there is a right answer, this blog asserts that working the system doesn’t work for me, in my zone.  

1. Doordash: Driving Mistakes.

The Doordash app is wired into Google Maps, which tracks Dashers driving in real-time, displaying a birds-eye view of Doordashers “dashing” for dispatchers and customers. The people at Doordash and the customers can watch when a dasher dashes, represented by a blue arrow on a map. The representation on the map doesn’t really mirror actual driving conditions or the surroundings.

for instance, a rural neighborhood is viewed the same as an urban neighborhood even if the Dasher on sight sees nothing but a cornfield. If a dasher does a 360-degree turn in the middle of the road . The little arrow on the map will spin around, and the driver might look crazy.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t real driving mistakes, like steering into the wrong lane, missing turns, and getting into fender benders and near-collisions with other cars. I keep track of such incidents tomyself and work to keep the number low, but mistakes are inevitable.

2. Doordash: Delivery Mistakes. 

You could deliver an order with missing items, an order completely cold, or damaged. This could be as simple as forgetting to deliver a straw or forgetting that the soda pops from the seat of your car are part of an order. Or using the lid of the customer’s soda for an ashtray! Oh, Kitchen Confidential! You’re blushing! 

Driving for Doordash is sort of doing table-waiting work from your car. You want to get the order right at the point of pickup. List the order out loud to the line cooks or wait-people in the restaurant at pickup time. Then the items on order are well known to you, and the line people will likely remember the details, and the delivery will work out.

Suppose you forget two banana cream pies on a customer’s order from a restaurant famous for its pies. In that case, it will look awful to the customer. It doesn’t matter that the restaurant didn’t put the twelve-inch pies up when you picked up the order. You’ll get a negative rating, and in truth, all you had to do was double-check the order details and correct the restaurant’s snafu! 

Carry hot bags. While the hot bag Doordash provides works in most cases, you’ll soon find that a pizza bag and a catering bag would help. Life is much easier with these pieces of equipment. You should want to keep your delivery items at the right temperature.

3. Doordash: Working the System. 

YouTubers’ advice about Doordash is never to take a low-ball order. When someone orders food and puts a zero in the tip line and then expects a Dasher to grab the order. The Doordash app will ask you why you’re declining and even list provisional reasons so you’re answering a multiple-choice question. All you have to do is check one. Everything from “distance is too far” to “I’m taking a bathroom break.”

In fact, they may ask you to take minimum pay for an order ten miles away. That may put you outside your zone, causing you to drive back empty, adding up to maybe twenty miles round trip for a miserable $3.50. By checking off “Too great a distance,” Doordash will send you shorter orders or pay more for driving long distances. Hypothetically, you could check the miles against dollars, refuse all low-paying orders, and accept only high-paying orders. In that way, you’ll reach your daily goals faster.

So that’s how Dashers work the system. Contrarily, plenty of successful Dashers will suggest that you, in fact, take every order, and you will get high-paying orders along with the low-paying orders. If you work with Doordash long enough, will you discover this is true? That was my experience.

Perhaps a better way to work the system is to take every order and qualify for Top Dasher status. Your order acceptance rate is high, and your hard work results in positive ratings. With Top Dasher status, you get preferential treatment when Dasher demand is low, stay busy in quiet zones, and experience pay around $20 to $25/hr after expenses. the Doordash app stacks low-paying orders when they can. After driving for Doordash a year, I take orders that take me out of my zone, and many times the Doordash app finds an order in the zone I landed in, so I don’t drive back empty. 

What is Reality?

The reality is that one common dominator will help Dashers succeed: Hustle. That’s not breaking the speed limit; that would be a driver’s mistake. But it does mean walking at an uptempo pace, backing into parking spots rather than backing out, communicating with your smile, minimal chatting, and focusing on following Google Assistant’s instructions.

While speed limits are posted on the road, I’ve never seen a sign prohibiting quick 0-60 mph acceleration. Read this: I turned the cruise control on my car at 60 mph, then hit the brake and slowed down. Next, I hit the “resume” button. The car accelerated at a rate the manufacturer set it to accelerate at. I must confess, I accelerated at a much slower rate. So, I speeded up my acceleration. That too contributed to my hustle.

Some believe the Doordash employment picture is crowded because of the Great Resignation. Job-quitters are saturating the ranks of Dashers, driving dashers to compete for Top Dasher status to maintain cash flow. Is this really true? The Great Resignation after all is a funnel to the Gig Economy.

It’s really a matter of perception. The truth about Doordash is that the drivers are almost wholly in the dark about what the dispatchers know, a knowledge that they’re not sharing with Dashers.

Dashers make other minor mistakes driving for DoorDash, like not thoroughly exploring the app on their smartphone. For example, did you know you can change the hotspot just by pushing the button of an alternative hotspot? But did you also know that the dispatchers probably have an order waiting at your current hotspot? So why switch, right? Nothing in life is guaranteed!

This article was originally published in spring/2022, and has been slightly edited.

Cover Photo: Samuele Errico Piccarini.Unsplash

If you liked this blog, please sign up below for my newsletter!