DoorDash and Postmates Padded My Pockets — and Taught Me a Life Lesson

Extra money is great, but so is responsibility

Isaiah McCall
LEVEL
Published in
4 min readJun 28, 2020

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Photo: Clay Banks/Unsplash

I won’t lie to you: delivering for DoorDash and Postmates over the past few months has been very good business. Thanks to the extra income, I paid off $1,000 of debt, saved up $2,000, and only had to sacrifice my weekends. I still dedicate my weekdays to writing, but Saturday and Sunday are for dashing (as we call it).

All was going well — until I started to bite off more than I could chew.

When I started reading up on food delivery services, I learned that drivers could make serious bank if kept two or three apps running simultaneously. Pick up one order from McDonald’s for DoorDash, swing over to the P.F. Chang’s for Postmates, and if you’ve got dreams of going pro, squeeze Wendy’s in for Grubhub and the trifecta. If you’ve ordered food and watched your driver deviate from the map and end up in the next state over, this strategy is likely why. (Or, like me, they could have a half-broken GPS.)

I felt like the Mad Hatter, driving from restaurant to restaurant with enough food in my car to feed a nation. I pocketed an extra $100 a day, and my delivery days were jammed…

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