How’s this for the mother of all understatements: 2020 brought more challenges than most of us wanted to deal with.
As recently as a year ago, few drivers would have considered that giving up rideshare driving for delivery might be worth it.
Then, everything changed.
In this new, post-COVID world, many rideshare drivers are taking a serious look at delivery driving. Also, many who are just getting into the gig economy are asking us whether rideshare or delivery has the most potential to make the average gig driver prosperous and content simply by performing his or her job.
That’s why we’re dedicating this blog post to exploring the rideshare vs. delivery question. We’ll look at these issues to get to the answers:
- Why some drivers are shifting from rideshare to delivery
- Rideshare vs. delivery: what you can earn
- Earnings per hour
- Earnings per mile
- Earnings per trip
- An overview of top rideshare and delivery services
- Smart strategies
- The future of rideshare and delivery
Why some drivers are shifting from rideshare to delivery
Prior to the COVID crisis of 2020, delivery driving wasn’t very appealing to many rideshare drivers. Why?
For one thing, it can be a lot more work. To deliver, a driver must:
- Either verify the order, or in some cases, actually pull over, call the restaurant or other establishment, and place the order;
- Pick up the order, which usually entails parking and leaving the vehicle;
- Deliver (including “schlepping”) the order, thus dealing with another stop and park situation.
By comparison, rideshare is much simpler. A ping for a ride comes in, you pick up the passenger, and you take the passenger to the destination.
You never have to leave your car or worry about getting it towed if you happen to park it somewhere you shouldn’t. Plus, you won’t spill ketchup or queso on your front seat.
Perhaps the biggest reason rideshare drivers like what they do is the money; delivery driving doesn’t always pay as much as rideshare does. We will explore that in more detail in the following section, but first, here’s one advantage of delivering over rideshare driving: You don’t have to deal as closely with people.
This doesn’t mean you never have to deal with the public, though.
There are irritating situations that can only be attributed to less-than-polite (to put it mildly) people. There are, at times, “drunk dialers” who place an order, perhaps inadvertently, and then refuse to accept it when you arrive. You might also encounter abusive customers who are ticked off that the restaurant didn’t include all the extra salad dressing they wanted.
Still, the general feeling is that when you don’t feel like dealing with the kinds of personal interactions that arise with passengers in your vehicle, you can go to delivery and get a break from it. Anyone who’s done extensive rideshare driving will tell you how important that option can be.
Once COVID-19 came onto the scene, and rideshare passengers were few and far between, delivery suddenly acquired even more appeal to drivers who normally did rideshare. All those passengers who were, before the stay-at-home orders, looking for rides to restaurants and bars, were already home, and they needed… delivery!
Many rideshare drivers, back seats empty and apps without pings, answered the call, grateful for the opportunity to continue earning anything, no matter how much extra work it required.
Delivery has grown astronomically since COVID-19. According to an October 2020 article by the technology analytics firm Second Measure, the delivery business has grown 125 percent year-over-year in 2020. The following graph, from the same article, illustrates the clear picture.
Now that we’ve established how important delivery has become for drivers (and the customers who use it), we’ll look at what the numbers tell us about delivery earnings versus rideshare driving dollars.
Rideshare vs. delivery: What you can earn
To see which driving gig pays off more, we’ll analyze earnings figures for rideshare and delivery. All information, except hourly earnings, has been calculated based on figures collected from January 2020 to October 2020. Anonymized data was collected from our network of over 150,000 drivers who use Gridwise to track their earnings and mileage.
First, let’s look at earnings per hour in 2020.
As shown below, rideshare drivers chalked up $18.47 per hour, on average.
During that same period, delivery drivers earned an average of $14.58 per hour. That’s a rather large difference in the hourly wage. In fact, rideshare drivers make almost 27% more per hour than delivery drivers do.
That’s a big difference. When we drill down into the rest of the data, we can eventually find out why there’s such a big discrepancy in hourly pay. It’s just not obvious at the outset. We have to dig a little deeper, so let’s keep going.
The next category is earnings per mile.
Rideshare drivers earned an average of $.84 per mile.
Delivery drivers … wait for it … earned an average of $1.03 per mile.
Are you surprised? Who would have thought delivery drivers would make 22% more per mile than those driving rideshare?
We didn’t really expect to see it, that’s for sure, but when you think it through it starts to make sense.
Most delivery trips cover a small radius because people tend to order from establishments they already know, and that are located in their neighborhoods. Still, this is quite a remarkable difference in earnings per mile, with delivery showing a distinct advantage. But that doesn’t explain why delivery drivers make less per hour, does it?
Let’s look at earnings per trip.
The average rideshare trip, according to our data, yielded $10.83.
Delivery drivers, on a per-trip basis, earned $8.21.
Delivery drivers earn about 32% less per trip than rideshare drivers. This makes a lot of sense, because the delivery driver’s trips to entail time-intensive activities, such as waiting for food to be prepared and finding a place to park.
Rideshare trips go a little faster, because the pickup and dropoff elements of carrying passengers don’t tend to take as much time. There are those passengers who take 5 minutes and more to come out for their pickups, but that’s an exception.
The description we gave in the first section of this post, listing the differences between the rideshare and delivery does bear out—but there’s a caveat. Rideshare drivers will be able to earn more than delivery drivers, if the rideshare business continues to build, and the economy continues to open post-COVID.
If there is, as feared and predicted, a second wave, and the economy goes back into a more restrictive mode, rideshare passengers may become scarcer, which could make the hourly rate drop substantially. Another factor to consider is the way the companies were piling on the surges and bonuses over the summer and into the first part of the fall. This also served to boost rideshare earnings.
They were trying to woo drivers—who were not only frightened of catching the virus, but also quite comfortable collecting unemployment—back into their cars. Now that the unemployment program for drivers is coming to an end, there will be more drivers on the road, and less incentive for the companies to offer extra incentives.
Fortunately, more safety measures are also being taken. Drivers and passengers are wearing masks, and new devices, such as barriers like these from Driver Bubble™, are very affordable and becoming quite popular.
As drivers continue to get back out there, we’ll have more information to share. We will keep tabs on the income drivers get from both rideshare and delivery, and we’re betting you will too.
But before you decide to drive rideshare only, or simply stick to delivery, you might want to learn more about what the various companies are offering drivers.
An overview of top rideshare and delivery services
There are several rideshare and delivery services, and you’ll have to experiment with each to see what works best for you. Depending on where you live, one service might be more popular than another, and therefore more lucrative.
Here are two articles from the Gridwise blog that you may want to look at to learn more about available opportunities.
This article describes the top rideshare companies. You can get some ideas about what might work for you, talk to other drivers, and then give one or two of them a try.
The other post offers tips for delivery drivers. This will show you how to make the most of your delivery gig, so you can bring in as much income as possible.
Smart strategies
Now that you know more about both rideshare and delivery earnings, you can begin to devise a strategy that helps you make more money than ever. You can do that by creating what we call a “hybrid gig”.
Many Gridwise drivers tell us they’re noticing just how drastically the rideshare and delivery landscape has changed due to COVID-19. People aren’t going out at night so much, and those big catering jobs are not happening as often (if at all) now that people don’t even have large gatherings.
Throwing up your hands in despair because things aren’t the way they used to be won’t help you make money. Instead, take action … combine rideshare and delivery work and get the best of both worlds.
The people who used to go to the bars and then out for pizza are probably ordering it in at about 11 p.m. or midnight. Even the kids whose caretakers you used to drive to their schools will still get hungry after their Zoom classes are done for the day.
If you’re a delivery driver, think about trying rideshare when you’re in the kind of heavy traffic that makes delivery a nightmare in slo-mo. You can still make money while you’re in your car, even in congested areas. Sometimes, you can even make a bonus for driving through a sea of red tail lights, thanks to surge pricing and bonuses.
There’s still plenty of business to be had for drivers who are flexible and enterprising enough to learn about all the opportunities they have at their disposal, and to capitalize on them. We know you’re exactly that kind of driver, but if you’re still holding out for the way things used to be, it might pay to consider where our society is headed.
The future of rideshare and delivery
While it’s pretty obvious that both rideshare and delivery will continue to thrive, it won’t be because things go back to the way they were before 2020 hit us between the eyes. Many companies have employees working from home, and are not making plans for them to return. This article from American City Business Journals will give you a comprehensive view of how many people will no longer be looking for rides to and from the office … or the airport.
Delivery, on the other hand, continues to step up and take an ever more prominent place in the economy of the COVID-19-inspired “new normal.” As more people continue to work from home, they’ll continue to order food, groceries, and other goods to have delivered to their doors … which means there will be more and more work for delivery drivers.
There’s no way of knowing what the world of gig driving will look like in a few more years, especially when considering how much it’s changed in just the last eight months. What we can discern is that there will be a need for both delivery and rideshare drivers, and that you are still very much an essential worker.
Go with Gridwise
If you decide to do both rideshare and delivery, you might be worried about how you’ll keep track of your earnings if, say, you decide to work two delivery companies and a rideshare gig. Well, don’t worry! Gridwise has exactly what you need. As your ultimate rideshare and delivery driver assistant, the Gridwise app tracks mileage and earnings for as many companies as you work for.
Our automatic earnings entry is in the beta testing stages now, and once it’s absolutely flawless and we can roll it out everywhere, all your apps will instantly sync with ours. In the meantime, it’s still pretty easy. All you have to do is enter your earnings for each app, and you’ll get bold, beautiful reports, detailing your income and mileage for each app, like these:
Gridwise also gives you information on weather, airport activity, and local events, plus a Perks tab that delivers deals and discounts for drivers, plus news from the Gridwise blog and the amazing Gridwise YouTube channel.
Remember to also check us out on Facebook and get in on the fun and financial benefits of our great Gridwise gas card giveaways.
Say what? You don’t have this incredible app yet? Well then, download it now!
