Five Things To Know Before You Start Delivering For Uber Eats (2023 Update)

Killing Yourself To Live

Riding for UberEats has been eye-opening and painful. The on-demand food service is not on-demand or food service, it is a fake market where the opportunity to make 3 dollars is presented to you over and over. I worked in New York City on it, a city that had 23,650 restaurants in 2019 and never got offered more than 10 dollars. The UI is confusing and annoying even for me; often offers don’t tell you the distance you'll go, or how big the order actually is, or if the customer tips or anything. Of all of the junk data Uber is trying to make money from you are offered literally none of it to do your job better. Understand that your time on this app may absolutely break you.

1. The pay is not good

Nothing like trekking from Bleecker and Broadway to 49th and 6th with two stops in rush hour traffic for less than 8 dollars. It's enough to leave you absolutely despondent. I understand why people panhandle now.

1. Hourly wage of like 6.50

Rocking behind Patagonia vest Citibikers and old ladies in full kits riding titanium foldies that cost more than you spent on your college shitbox car is endearing when you're not fighting to make 3 dollars.

The other day I biked by the REI and there were two guys protesting. I hopped off my bike and talked to them. REI is punishing the stores that unionize - Starbucks-style. I had a set of Ritchey ergonomic drop handlebars on the way when this happened.

1. Any job is easier than this

Every job I've ever had was easier than this, and paid better. I worked dish at a cafe in the college that did brolic weekends. I worked through two graduations as the only dishwasher and it was easier than this.

1. Makes you want to hurt people

It's unfathomable that mass media spent 20 years doing agitprop purporting that Arab Muslims were going to undermine this country somehow. There's dudes in Guantanamo for emailing their cousins back in Iraq. If there was any truth to that narrative, pushed by a CIA bloodthirsty and ready for a domestic terror bill, New York would have evaporated the second UberEats started here. The second the Fly-E-Bike came out. Because people move here to do this. In the city where dreams are fucking made of they're riding motorcycles in the fucking snow to deliver a Boba tea to someone in the densest city in the Western world. These guys are bringing chicken salad 40 blocks uptown past 238 closer chicken salad options because somebody (who won't tip) likes it special.

1. Every second you clock in my fucking special delivery job tracker app is a minute your labor potential gets flushed down the drain.

You are wasting your time chasing the empty dreams of people you don't even know. You don't want the money. You'd make twice as much at Burger King. Nobody has ever made money on a bike - not even pro racers. You don't like the freedom you get because what's the point of freedom if you can't see demand? The market is fucking opaque app UI and horseshit meant to trick well-meaning men into slavery. When you get a job the job people give you the means to work and then you do the work. And when you start a business you have more information than "Lunch rush in midtown!"

1. Attaching your hitch to a failing, bloated stupid business doesn't make sense at any point on the ladder, let alone the very bottom.

There was a Tiktok going around dotcom-incel-pit viper-sunglasses-profile-picture Twitter of a day in the life of a white lady at the Uber offices in Chicago. She doesn't seem to do any work because why the fuck would you vlog 6 hours of work. Guys who work in the same empty waste of an industry got really mad at it. I think also because she sits down at the end of the day to watch Power on Starz and they really don't like girls that date black guys. It makes them really really angry. Anyway, you have a choice to do anything else but deliver for UberEats. Maybe that lady doesn't understand that Uber will never make any money, that it's propped up by the stupidest living creatures on Earth, venture capitalists, that any sane individual would pursue something at a firm that sells an actual product. Maybe she does. But she has a skillset that pays the bills and she can do what she wants with that. You can, too.