How does the app experience impact drivers?

As a food delivery driver your work experience is driven by the app you use. They will determine everything – which restaurant you go to next, how far you’ll drive to get there, and how much money you’ll make. 

Some apps, such as DoorDash, use a separate company credit card to buy the food. As part of the Vice article’s collection of driver testimony, Sophal Yos, who is a delivery driver in Liverpool, Australia, explained that the Red Card, which DoorDash uses, makes using the app and delivering food extremely complex. While the majority of delivery platforms allow customers to order and pay for their food directly on the app, leaving delivery drivers to only pick up and deliver the food, DoorDash uses another system. With DoorDash’s Red Card, drivers sometimes have to contact the restaurant personally, order the food that the customer wants, and then pay for it with the company provided Red Card. Using this method makes delivery drivers waste a lot of time waiting, thus they will earn less money for their shift. 

There are many videos online that document the experience working for food delivery apps, especially the ones popular in the United States, such as DoorDash. This video gives an especially detailed explanation of what the work experience with the app is like:

 

A strategy of some apps is to organize workers into shifts, as if it were a normal business. Menulog uses this strategy, which ensures that the market is not flooded during normal meal times and thus gives drivers the opportunity to make more deliveries and earn more money. Sophal drives for Menulog as well, which allows him to earn $10 per delivery and since he can sometimes complete four deliveries in an hour, he can earn $40 per hour. Foodora and Deliveroo also employ this strategy in Berlin. While Foodora workers are employees and thus paid an hourly rate, they are not allowed to decline shifts. This differs from Deliveroo whose drivers are independent contractors and therefore allowed to cancel shifts that they have booked, show up late, or leave early. This leaves them with much more independence in their time spent working.

Though delivery apps offer a support team for drivers in case something goes wrong during their deliveries, these support teams are usually useless and incompetent. Many drivers complain about the fact that these teams don’t know what they’re doing and only make the job harder for delivery drivers, up to the point where they’re no longer consulted. 

Food delivery apps also experience a large number of informational asymmetries with regards to their workers. Most importantly, drivers on Foodora and Deliveroo don’t know what the address of their order will be until after they pick up the food from the restaurant. Therefore, they can’t estimate how long it will take them to deliver the food, including how profitable the delivery will ultimately be for them. Drivers also experience other informational asymmetries such as not knowing the exact borders of the neighborhood zone they are working in, how many riders work each shift, or how many colleagues share their priority level in choosing shifts. This way drivers really don’t have enough information in order to optimize their work in a way that will get them the maximum amount of profit. Additionally, drivers are left in the dark with regards to the algorithm that assigns orders to them, excluding them from this decision that has a large amount of influence with regards to their profits from certain days of work. 

Due to the connected nature of food delivery apps, a system of total management is able to be used to control workers. The tracking software installed on the app is able to give the companies tons of data on the labor process of workers, providing an almost God-like view of workers, in line with Taylorism and panopticism. Automated messaging systems are also able to influence workers, although in a more indirect manner. This total tracking system gives the app the opportunity to not only encourage the driver to work harder, but also to use monetary incentives to ensure that this actually happens. For example, at Foodora drivers need to complete six weekend shifts a month and average at least 2.2 deliveries an hour in order to qualify for a monthly bonus. The data collected by the apps allows them to decide which drivers to reward with better shifts and which to punish.