$388 in sushi and a $20 tip: Uber Eats has brutal math
LOS ANGELES — Brantley Bush couldn’t shake the fear that he was about to be ripped off.
It was a chilly Saturday evening, and Bush, a delivery driver for Uber Eats, was waiting in an alley next to a dumpster in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood — a decidedly unpretentious spot in the middle of an affluent enclave near Santa Monica.
He had just snagged an order from a nearby highend sushi restaurant, for three separate deliveries, giving him a chance for a hefty tip.
The first delivery was to a two-story house with a manicured lawn and a large magnolia tree. The second was handed to a teacher at a late-night music class in an office complex.
The third was the big item, the reason Bush had accepted this delivery: a bulging paper bag filled with $388 of sushi and miso soup. If he was lucky — and if the customer was generous — Bush could hope for a $50 or $70 tip, which would make his night worthwhile.
He drove his 2000 Subaru toward Brentwood, past multimilliondollar homes decorated with fountains and neatly trimmed bonsais. A man emerged from a house and exchanged a few pleasantries with Bush before accepting the order over a picket fence.
Then he had to wait. An hour later, the tip would appear, and the man’s generosity would determine whether Bush’s night was a success.
Food delivery soared in popularity during the height of the pandemic, when delivery drivers were called heroes who risked getting sick so others could stay home. But the novelty has faded, and drivers say they’re being taken for granted.
Some restaurants have ended their delivery options. And customers, conditioned during the pandemic to prefer “contactless” deliveries that drivers say now feel dehumanizing, seem less inclined to generously tip someone with whom they’ve barely interacted.
“For a little while,” Bush said, delivery drivers were “essential.”
“People were almost applauded,” he added. “Now we’re just the bottom of the barrel.”
When customers place an order through DoorDash or Uber Eats, they pay through the app and decide in advance of the delivery how much to tip. Drivers often cannot see the full tip until after they have dropped off the food, so they must cross their fingers and hope for at least a 10% tip. (Uber and DoorDash pay drivers only a few dollars per trip, so most workers’ income comes from tips.)
Bush, 56, is among the veteran food delivery drivers who employ a particular strategy: Go big or don’t bother.
Their premise is simple. The profit margin on run-of-the-mill delivery orders, such as a pizza or a burrito, is quite low, especially factoring in gas prices. So those drivers focus on affluent areas, such as Beverly Hills and the Pacific Palisades, rejecting scores of low-value orders while waiting for hours for a big get from a high-end restaurant.
At about 8 p.m. on that Saturday, Bush was back in the Pacific Palisades alley that drivers in the area have determined is the best spot for their phones to receive delivery requests from nearby restaurants. It is often a crowded spot, with several drivers vying for a prime location while holding their phones aloft. Nearby, couples ate sushi and sipped wine on heated patios.
The tips flashed across his screen.
The first house had tipped $10.
The music teacher left him nothing.
And the Brentwood homeowner, with that $388 order, gave just $20 — about 5%.
HIGH HIGHS, LOW LOWS
Bush, from Mobile, Alabama, moved to Los Angeles in 1991 for a job with the United Artists Theater Group, a movie chain operator. Then he started working in theatrical distribution with New Line Cinema, a film studio, and was “hooked on what it would be like to be in front of the camera.”
He could probably land a full-time job, but he has found being a gig worker gives him the flexibility to take acting classes and go to lastminute auditions.
In the meantime, he spends about 40 hours a week ferrying steak, pasta and sushi around the west side of Los Angeles. Charismatic and gregarious, Bush, bundled in a red puffy jacket and with his gray hair tucked under a beanie, chats with restaurant staff as he waits to pick up his orders.
There are moments of jubilation, such as when he received a $130 tip from Doc Rivers, a former Los Angeles Clippers coach who is now coaching in Philadelphia. During the Academy Awards last month, he made nearly $200 from just two deliveries to parties.
“It’s like gambling,” Bush said, and the big tips are “very exciting.”
Drivers say DoorDash, Uber and Postmates — a delivery service Uber purchased in 2020 — are mostly unhelpful, and they live in fear of being barred from the platforms for making an error or receiving a complaint. Some drivers also recently discovered that Uber was blocking tips of $100 or more unless the customer verified the amount.
Uber and DoorDash said a vast majority of their drivers worked only part time, to earn a supplemental income, so the experiences of full-time delivery drivers were not representative.
Some drivers say they are close to a breaking point, especially after three years of contactless delivery.
Ric, a driver who declined to share his last name because he worried about being deactivated from the delivery apps, was working around Beverly Hills on a recent evening and snared a $354 order from a high-end Chinese restaurant.
He said he had taken the strategy of accepting quality orders over quantity to an extreme and would rather go home with nothing than accept an order with a demeaning tip.
“If they’re going to take me for a cheap, glorified butler — that’s not what I am,” said Ric, a Latino man in his 30s. He said customers and the delivery apps “see us as flesh on wheels.”
COMPETITION AFTER SUNSET
As the sun dipped toward the horizon, a line of cars started to form behind the dumpster in the Pacific Palisades alley to await the dinner rush.
Stanley Huang and his wife, Jennifer, pressed their phones up against the wall of a building on one side of the alley — one of the many tricks they used to increase the number of delivery requests they get from nearby eateries.
Drivers have discovered specific, seemingly arbitrary locations that seem to give their phones the best chance of jumping the queue for the next order. In general, proximity to a restaurant increases the chances of being offered a delivery, but the best spots are often down the block or around the corner in an alley, rather than right out in front.
A former wedding photographer, Huang, 35, moved to Los Angeles from Hunan province in China about four years ago and discovered delivering food was an easy job for someone with limited English skills. Now, he said, he works up to 10 hours a day, seven days a week, and he often makes more than $250 a day before expenses.
Getting a bad tip is frustrating, he said, “but I understand customers don’t want to tip; customers come from different countries that have different cultures.”
Vitalii Kravchenko cracked a rare smile outside a high-end Italian restaurant after getting out of his leased Lexus. He was on his way inside to pick up an order when he ran into Bush, en route to his own delivery. They posed for a quick photo in the Santa Monica dusk.
“The only time we’ll be friends,” Kravchenko said.
“We both got an order, so it’s OK,” Bush agreed.