I took off for Logan for like eight hours yesterday. I was all set to make a bank, wasn’t I? But for one tiny little detail I had missed on the secondary screens of the Uber App. When in Utah, Utah lights up for me, doesn’t it? But when in Utah, I cannot take passengers in the car. I can only take food deliveries. The area around Logan is quite large, and there are lots of places for food pick-ups. So that’s good. But the $37 delivery I did the other day is beyond my understanding at this point. Uber offers on average in Logan about $2.50 per delivery. People tip on average a buck or two with outliers for the ones who do orders from Olive Garden. Most of the rest do not think the driver is worth more than that. So, on average, I pulled just over 16 miles to the gallon tearing my car and tires up and earning about $50 for that whole eight hours. There was an Uber bonus for some reason on that $37 order I took the other day, so that is now sitting at $47 for one order from Wendy’s. Yesterday’s work average me about $7.87 ah hour. Now, consider this. I then added $18 in fuel to my car. Down to $5.63 an hour. Now consider this. I definitely put higher than normal wear on the vehicle for the sake of getting money to feed my family and pay my bills with. The government allows me $0.65 a mile for that. So, using that on the 95 miles I did, that come up to $61.75. So, based on that, what were my earnings? I am giving the time and effort and wear on my assets away for the sake of a little money back into my account each week. For other people to enjoy food that smells up my car or spills in it. Uber is not at all worth taking food deliveries.
If I were driving passengers, that might be a different story. But Uber won’t let me drive them in the close, rich market of Logan, because I live a mile from the Utah state line, and I am not approved to drive people there. I need, desperately, to get approved for Utah to make this at all worth the effort. And even then, unlike food that only spills, this new income source complains, and pitches a fit, and so on. I had one customer last night who moaned about me not finding their door when the GPS sent me to the Ford Dealership over a mile from their house. The exact wording is gone from me, but it was something to the effect of “I give you directions because everybody gets lost. I spect you to follow them.” How nice. Luckily another GPS app was able to locate the correct address, and when I got there, it was first on a street where there were a row of houses, then on that, there was a driveway that sneaked in-between the houses, and beyond the houses was a tiny little row of houses seemingly in the back yard of one of the main road houses. And that’s where the address was. On a named “road” that was no more than a driveway in appearance, just wide enough for only one vehicle. I have done a lot of delivery in my days, and this was surprising as a layout. I ‘spect’ I will be able to find it next time. By the way, the customer communicates through the app, so spelling is also a part of the communications.
Oh, and let’s talk about communications through the app. People order for their food to be left at the door. Hey, there is a nice guilt free way of adding a dollar as a tip and then forgetting about the human who is being robbed to make your food appear from McDonald’s because you are too poor to have a car, too lazy to go get food for yourself, or too busy earning money to buy food you cannot afford. A dollar? I spect I got a dollar, which was nice, but my delay in delivering the McDonald’s to the door of the driveway road house did not make it late, nor was the food any colder than it would have been if I had driven straight there. I resolved the issue with the GPS fast enough that had the customer not got on to start complaining only a couple of minutes after I picked up the food, they would have never known I was stalled up there.
Because I get communications through the app, and I get instructions to “leave it at the door” from almost everybody, I saw one customer last night face to face. The rest were drop and go, and I got almost nothing in tips with most of them, between a dollar and two and a couple of others lowballs, then the two closer to ten. And all that still added up, with my fares, to about $53. Before $18 in fuel. How is this profitable over eight hours, with wear and tear on my car? I last made this kind of money in high school in 1987, when the minimum wage was $3.35 an hour.
So, I don’t know that I will be doing Uber for food deliveries anymore. It is very much not worth it, especially when putting myself at serious risk of an accident in Logan, Utah. Anyone reading this who live there knows how likely I am to end up in an Air Ambulance heading down to Salk Lake City. Logan has serious traffic along its main roads, and it all goes up and down a narrow corridor of development. So when everybody gets off work, most of them are heading up and down that narrow corridor. It is like living in Los Angeles without the freeways. Well, not quite. It’s still loose enough to flow. But it is the speed that makes it worse. When people hit, they hit hard. And to drive among that, is not only very dangerous, but it also means harder starts, stops, and turns with the car. So harder wear.
Also, I expected there would be deliveries among the college housing, what, with a university in town and all. Not one. Deliveries were out in the mid and low-income houses of the regular people, with one on snob hill. That one was one of the two higher tipping deliveries, but not the high one. Past experience tells me that the working man is usually the one who tips fairly. But the masses in Utah are cheap where I worked.
So, what do I do? Drive a little more to transfer the value of my vehicle and my time into the bank account, try to get set up to take people, and then keep an eye open for a “real job.” I don’t know. I am still ambiguous about that. I could never get paid what my time with my family time is worth to me.
It smells like a slight whiff of smoke in here. Missus must be up trying to light the stove with the minimal amount of wood that’s in the house. I suppose I better get up now and get ready to go get her enough firewood to actually heat the place for a few hours.