I know this post is a little out of the ordinary, but i thought that it is relevant to all people. Everyone wants to be able to make a little bit more money, especially during the holidays. Almost everyone around had heard about the app based driver service called lyft, uber, and i am sure there are a few more. Recently a friend talked about a courier service called Postmates. If you have never heard of postmates, i am not surprised, i had no idea who there were until a few weeks ago when i signed up for them.
Basically Postmates is a delivery service. Basically its a Pizza boy but for restaurants that don’t have delivery. If you are in the mood for a restaurant that doesn’t have a delivery option, you can just pull up your phone and use the Postmates app. Tell them what you want and they will place the order for you and send on of their couriers to pick up the food and bring it to you. You have to pay a little bit more for food, but now you can get pretty much anything you want right to your door. This is convenient for people who want lunch, but can’t drive all the way out to pick it up, or maybe work a job that makes it hard to go out for a nice lunch.
I am not saying don’t use the postmates app, because it is honestly a good service for people, especially people who maybe can’t drive at all hours of the day or don’t have a car. I am also not telling you that you shouldn’t work for them, but i am merely telling you that the grass is not always greener on the other side.
Lets start with the basic information about being a courier, they tell you that the deliveries are based on who is the closest to the order. a message pops up on your phone (if you are on call that is) and it tells you that there is an order being placed from a certain restaurant. You can either accept or reject that order. Now they tell you that the closest courier gets the delivery so i am not sure how many people before me rejected the order, because i was sent a request for an order, but the restaurant was 16 miles from me. I was under the impression that i would be getting orders for places only 3 or 4 miles.
I decided to take the order because i had rejected two prior. It took me 30 mins to get to the place, luckily the food was ready by the time i got there, i then had to drive half way back to where i live, another 6 miles for the delivery. I made 5 dollars for the Delivery and 1.30 as a tip. Basically i made back enough for my gas money. that took me 1 hour to complete the first delivery for the day. I wasn’t too mad about this one as it was pretty cut and dried. I was hoping that a few more of these would be pretty close and i wouldn’t be driving all over the city in the middle of Lunch hour.
The second delivery is what broke me for wanting to ever deliver again. I had heard that ordering from Chipotle was a hassle, and when i say that i don’t mean that in a bad way. I love Chipotle and the food they make, if you have never had them before i suggest you try them once, unless you don’t like Burritos, then other than that i don’t know what you should do. What i am telling you is ordering from them is a hassle, especially when you have an order of 6 burrito bowls, and they inform you that they have a maximum order of 4. later i found out that apparently there is an online order app you can go through; (why postmates doesn’t use this to make it easier on the delivery driver, i don’t know.)
The problem with this order was they picked the Chipotle in the middle of the city during the holiday season when a handful of the roads are closed. Lets just say there was zero legal parking. i parked in the only place i could because i didn’t want to walk 5 blocks to pick up the food. Needless to say i ended up getting a ticket and i have to wait in line so i could order the last two bowls. You can probably say that i should have just kept driving around until i found a spot, but you are given 1 hour to complete the delivery and when they send you to a place that is 30 mins away, you are on a time crunch. chipotle is super packed during lunch hours, so you are looking at easily 15 minutes of waiting to place your order. that means you have 15 mins to drive all the way across the city to deliver the food, so you are going to risk it.
at the end of the day i made two deliveries in 2.5 hours. i made just about $30 dollars if you include tips, this doesn’t include the fact that when they transfer the money to your bank account, they charge you a fee. Yes you are charged a fee for them to direct deposit your money to you. So at the end of the day i am negative 25 dollars because the ticket i got was for $55. Many of you may still say that i could have avoided the ticket, and you are possibly right, but even without the ticket, i only made $30 so if you take out gas and millage on your car, you are making like $9 an hour.
If you are in need of a job then sure go for it, just don’t be surprised if you live on the outside of the city when all the orders that are placed are coming from the city. I can’t say that i won’t turn the app on from time to time just to see if i get a delivery for something under 5 miles, but i can be sure that i will not be taking any more deliveries from the city. its not worth it. The traffic and the headache is just not worth the extra spending cash for the holidays.
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