Let’s get right down to the point: I just experienced a two-year period that you might refer to as “financial armageddon.” I’m not gonna chloroform you with all the details, but I had a really successful career in a couple of different industries all while I was raising three kids on my own as a single father.
And then, POW — out of nowhere, I pretty much lost everything. Divorce, lawsuits, bankruptcy, business problems and even a flood chipped in to wash what was left of my financial position down the drain. But I’m way too young to retire and too proud to jump off a bridge (so far anyway), so I remembered the epic words to wisdom from that classic inspirational film, the timeless, multi-Oscar-winning masterpiece, “Dumb and Dumber”:
“It’s not gonna do us any good to sit here whining about it. So we’re in a hole!…We’re just gonna have-ta DIG OURSELVES OUT!” — Lloyd Christmas
I used to be a delivery driver in college, back in the days when your drive-around music came from a binder full of CDs and calling the customer required stopping at pay phones, which were still a thing. But I assumed that the basics were the same – pick up food, drive food to customer, drive back to restaurant, lather rinse repeat – so I thought I’d give it a shot as a DoorDasher. After a quick background check and a driver’s license scan, I got the green light in about 48 hours.
I became a Gold Dasher in six days, and a Platinum Dasher five days after that. I don’t know any other dashers, but apparently that’s pretty fast, and the reason I’m writing this is to help other dashers do the same. I had no idea that gold and platinum tiers existed until I started working on day 6 and found out I’d hit gold, and when I did, my competitive nature kicked in and I busted my hump to make platinum.Â
There are a handful of benefits to hitting these tiers, but the only one I’ve ever cared about is that they help you make more money. Gold gets you higher-paying offers than regular dashers get. platinum gets you the highest-paying offers, and also access to ginormous catering orders which obviously pay super well. Here’s everything I can tell you about how to get to Platinum quickly and make more money.
Put in a decent number of hours. To be platinum, you need to have 100 deliveries in the last 30 days. I did my first 100 in 11 days, and on four of those days, I didn’t work at all, so having 100 in the last 30 days is pretty easy. I live in Phoenix, the 5th most populous city in the US, so there’s plenty of people ordering DoorDash at all hours, I’ve got that going for me.
When you first start, don’t decline many orders. If you feel unsafe, obviously you need to decline those orders, no matter who you are and where you live and whether you’re new or not. However, on your first 100 orders, I recommend you accept everything DoorDash throws your way, even ones that pay really low. Yes, you’ll have to eat shit a little bit, since even as a platinum dasher, I still get the occasional offer of $2 or $3 from shitty customers who clearly aren’t tipping. You can tell them to piss off later by declining them (as I now do), but for that first 100, you want to get your acceptance rate super high so that, later on, you can start to decline them without dropping below the threshold (for gold and platinum, you must have an acceptance rate of 70% or higher). If you accept just about everything on your first 100 orders, you’ll have plenty of leeway to start declining orders once you make gold/silver. (I’ll talk more about my personal decline reasons below).
Communicate, communicate, communicate. Think for a second about your worst experiences ordering DoorDash food. I bet some of them, if not all, revolve around being in the dark about what the hell is going on with your order, because the Dasher doesn’t communicate with you. Why have they been sitting at the restaurant for so long? Why isn’t their little car icon moving? Why are they driving that way when I live this way? Did they see that I asked for extra hot sauce?
Now, you might be thinking about all the perfectly good answers for all those questions that Dashers know. “I’ve been sitting at the restaurant for this long because Famous Restaurant One (name withheld to protect its identity, but let’s just say it rhymes with PACO HELL) has four employees on shift at midnight on a Saturday with twelve Dashers waiting in the lobby and six customers in the drive through, none of whom will even make eye contact with anyone in the lobby, and a manager who thinks “hey, now’s a great time to stop my cringe flirting with my 17-year-old drive-thru girl and go do some deep cleaning of the machinery in the back rather than hop on the line and help make food so that each customer can wait less than 40 minutes for their order.” (Yep, I’m looking at you, Store 023151 in Surprise, Arizona).
But the customer doesn’t know any of that. They’re just getting hangrier by the second — unless you tell them what’s happening. Here’s what I do, which is the easiest way I know. a) On whatever kinda super basic notes or text app you have on your phone, write a generic note to the customer that works in all cases, and all you have to do is swap out their first name. Here’s what mine says:
“Hi there (insert customer’s firstname), this is Joe from DoorDash. I just wanted you to know that I’m sitting at the restaurant waiting for them to finish cooking & packaging your food, after which I’ll be on my way immediately. Just an update. Thanks!” Then copy, paste, send. NOTE: Before you even do this, be sure to immediately hit the “why am I waiting so long” link (I can’t remember the exact text, but it’s the link where you click and tell DoorDash why you’re still at the restaurant, and can choose between Order didn’t start til I got here, order isn’t done yet, couldn’t find employees, etc.), and tell DoorDash why. I don’t know 100% how that system works — it says it’s for DoorDash to manage certain restaurants, but I’m covering my @ss if it turns into some epic wait, that I told DoorDash from the jump that the food wasn’t ready. I actually keep submitting it over and over every five minutes I’ve been waiting. I don’t know if this helps anything or not, but better safe than sorry I guess).
I send this to every single customer where the completed food order isn’t already waiting for me at the restaurant. Whether they say “they’re just bagging that up for you now” or “we’re still working on that” or “umm, it’s gonna be like, a while, because like, we have like, a LOT of orders” (Hey PACO HELL, you still here? Wink-wink.) I send the note to all of them. If I have to stand there for even one minute waiting, I might as well use that one minute to buy some goodwill with the customer and manage their expectations about when I’ll arrive.
AT LEAST half the time, I get a happy and grateful response, just for sending that. Why? Because it’s so out-of-the-ordinary. Usually Dashers will just sit and wait, and let the customer look at the automatic status of the order in their app (“Your Dasher is waiting at the restaurant,” etc.). But don’t forget:
a) Some customers won’t do that, they’ll just sit there getting more annoyed;
b) They still don’t have any idea WHY we’re still waiting at the restaurant, until we tell them. Everyone’s had awful customer service at a restaurant before, so they’ll get it, and they’ll understand whose fault it is, and more importantly, whose fault it isn’t — ours.
c) It connects the customer with the human being behind the “Your Dasher” label. If I send a note — that I totally didn’t have to send, I’m just doing it to keep them in the loop — I established myself as their advocate in that moment. I’m respecting their time by keeping them in the loop. I’m telling they have a few minutes extra to finish that show or play with their kid or clean off the table or whatever. We don’t have to do that, and most of us don’t — which is why they get so happy and grateful when someone actually DOES take 15 seconds to copy and paste a note like mine.
Make your own note. Hell, copy mine if you want. Keep the app on your home screen and keep the note open your whole shift. That shaves more and more seconds off the time it takes you to do it. Here’s some other random stuff to share that I do when it comes to notes.
If the restaurant person says “It’ll be about five more minutes,” I add to my note “they told me it’d be about five more minutes, which in my experience really means about 10.” I told the truth about what the restaurant said, and I also told the truth about what usually happens so that a) they can manage their expectations about when the food will arrive, and b) I gave myself a time cushion. If the restaurant actually does give me the food in five minutes, I’ll look like a superhero showing up earlier than they thought. If they take 10, the customer already knew it was coming. Win-win.
If there’s a customer service apocalypse happening as frequently happens at the unnamed restaurant above (still here, Paco?), and your wait time is just gonna seismically screw up the delivery timeline, I tell the customer everything. “Hey Larry — just wanted to fill you in on the situation here. There are nine DoorDashers sitting in the lobby ahead of me, a bunch of cars in the drive thru, and only four Taco Bell Fast-Food Restaurant That’s Totally Not Taco Bell employees back there working. They have abandoned any attempt to provide decent customer service at this point, and this store is actually infamous for being this way every weekend beyond a certain time at night. I’ll wait as long as it takes, no problem there, but I just wanted to let you know so you could manage your expectations — it’s very likely that I will be sitting here 30 minutes from now and still not have your food. I’m so sorry, this is crazy.”
A message like that is absolutely essential when you have an apocalypse event like that, where the wait is so bad that even the most patient of customers has to be climbing up the walls wondering what the hell is up. And there’s no excuse for us not to have that conversation with the customer — I mean, it’s not like we didn’t have time! You can only look at the Baja Blast soda machine and ask for the bathroom code and count the employees and wonder which one is the manager for so many minutes. If this were a Taco Bell I was talking about, which of course it’s totally, totally not.
Other personalizations of my note:
“Hey Howard, it’s Charlie from DoorDash. Panda Express just ran out of orange chicken so they’re cooking you up a new batch right quick, that’s adding about 4-5 minutes (don’t say a few — be specific, and err on the high side. Always always always err on the high side) to your delivery. So it’ll be a few extra minutes, but it’ll be hotter and fresher than usual!”
“Hey Zelda, it’s Fabiola from DoorDash. I’m sitting here at Chili’s waiting for your order and I just wanted to let you know this: I’m picking up your order and that of another DoorDash customer as well, and I’ve been routed to deliver to the other customer first. So as soon as they give me both orders I’ll be on the road, and I’ll be at your place ASAP after I drop off the first one. Just an update. Thanks!”
“Hey Giancarlo, it’s Barbara from DoorDash. I’m at the 7-11 picking up your beer and just FYI, they’ve got this poor girl running the entire store by herself, and there’s a backed-up line of customers. I don’t think it’ll be too long, but I feel like this will probably set me back about five minutes. Just wanted to let you know. Thanks!”
I have considered adding a line to my note, such as “Are there any extras I can grab for you? Condiments, straws, napkins, plasticware, anything?” I’ll be testing that soon; I resisted doing it because I thought too many people might say yes and thus slow down my pace, but I think the “above and beyond” ratings I get would more than make up for it.
I always call customers sir and ma’am (unless I can’t tell by the name if they’re a sir or a ma’am). There are two kinds of people who appreciate this: a) people who get called sir and ma’am all the time in their regular lives, and b) people who never get called sir and ma’am in their regular lives. Restaurant employees love it — they’re busting their humps at the bottom of the seniority ladder for hours at a time, so authentically calling them sir or ma’am is a note of respect they don’t often get at work. They’re the linchpin of making a good DoorDash shift — we need them to recognize us and get us our orders quicklike if we’re gonna have good deliveries. And remember: if you’re like me, you’re probably going back to the same 50-60 restaurants most of the time, which means the people who work there will know who you are. Now, which do you think will help YOU the most and make YOUR life easier — if they’re like “Oh Christ, here comes that bitchy doordash chump who’s always got a stick up his crank about something and acts like we should drop everything just for him” or “oh that’s one of the doordash guys, he’s a super good dude.”
(Note: It’s true that some younger women aren’t super fond of being called ma’am in general because they believe you’re implying that they’re old instead of just respectful, but they’re rare enough that I wouldn’t worry about it)
DRIVING/CAR TIPS (Like, tips about the actual driving part)
So I know some of this stuff sounds like I go overboard with the minute level of detail that I try to optimize my movements and such, but believe me, it doesn’t take a lot of thinking or concentration after a while. And the more seconds I can shave off my processes is perhaps an extra 4-5 orders I can take before I call it quits for the day, which is about $50 extra, which is $1500 per month if you’re working every day. Here are a few about driving and the car in general.
a) If you can, leave your car key in your pocket. I drive a Prius, and it automatically unlocks my driver door when I get close to it. I also don’t need to insert it anywhere to start my car. Those two things are actually huge for me — it takes me from having to pull out my car keys and put them back 40 or 50 times a night, to having to do it zero times, ever. That’s a lot of time (and brain space) saved. I park, push the button to turn off my car while my other hand grabs my phone, and bam, launch out of the car toward the restaurant. No jacking around for 30 seconds every time the car stops to situate — well, whatever it is people do when they park and then inexplicably take a long-ass time to get out. If I beat you to the counter, I’ll get the restaurant’s attention first (which, as you know, can be a serious challenge at some places) and I’ll be out of the parking lot already before you get yours.
b) Fill up before you start dashing. This seems obvious, but — you don’t want to be caught in the middle of a busy time and have to pause your orders because you’re about to run out of gas. And obviously, if you run out of gas on the side of the road while dashing…well, I can’t imagine that’ll end well for you.
Be polite AF to the restaurant folks.
(I’m continuously updating this article, so while this is it for now, keep checking back for updates, and please ask me anything you want in the comments section! I’ll always answer any question you have (maybe not instantly, but as fast as I can).
