I’ve had to look for extra sources of income, due to being a victim of catfishing. (That’s another subject.) I took time off of my regular job to get started on it, and decided to first try delivering for UberEats. I started three days ago, worked 24 hours total, drove over 300 miles, made over 70 deliveries, made $540, and was deactivated today. I admit to being a bit upset about it at first, until I realized how awful it was to work for them. I want to point out some things to anyone who might try them so that they have fair warning and don’t make the mistakes I did (like, signing up for them).
End of rant.
- First, the Uber Driver app flat out sucks. It uses their own GPS to track you instead of the built-in one for iPhone/Android. Uber uses this to track you milage, so if you stray even a little bit your dinged. So, if the app tells you to drive around three miles out of the way, you’d better do it. And, it pays no attention to traffic. All the while, giving you directions in an annoying foid voice that you cannot change.
- The app sucks up your battery, to the point that it drains your phone even with it plugged in to charge. Energy=heat, so it also gets very warm, almost hot, to the touch.
- The app loves to send deliveries constantly, based on where you are at (this will be important later). These messages pop up on top of whatever you’re doing, such as trying to follow their GPS to where you are to make a delivery.
- The app issues orders from restaurants not based on where the customer is from, but from where you are at. I’ve had orders from national chains for customers 10-20 miles away instead of from the local franchise that is closest to them. Let me repeat that: UberEats will place orders based on where you are at, not your customer, and expects you to make the delivery promptly nonetheless. This sets you up to fail, such as when it takes you 90 minutes to deliver a Chipotle order to a customer, even though they live right next to one, but the app placed the order to the restaurant closest to you.
- This is the best part of the app: you are not shown your customer’s address until you are nearby. You are given a general intersection to go to, and only shown the full address later. Imagine what happens when you are in a poor cell area, or the app decides to interrupt your delivery with another request? You loose the location of your delivery.
- This is the second best part of the app: when the app deletes a delivery you are in the middle of, you have no way of getting it back. No history, no reloading, its gone. You are stuck with an order with no idea where to deliver it.
- This is the third best part of the app: the customer can monitor you the entire time, and will report you as a thief or worse should you fail to deliver the order you just lost.
- You will be deactivated if your reviews are below a certain percentage, no matter how many of them there’ve been, or how long you’ve been working. In my case, I made over 70 orders, had five total reviews, and two were bad (orders that disappeared because of the above 5-7). Hence, I was deactivated because I was accused of stealing food for orders the app had deleted before I had a chance to finish.
- Customer service is, well, lets just say I can’t even talk to Uber. I have to sign in to my account, but my account is deactivated so I can’t talk to anyone, but I have to talk to someone to activate my account, but I can't activate my account until I talk to someone, but I can't talk to someone because my account is deactivated...
End of rant.
