Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) $300 per week payments ended September 4. People will order less, and more may turn to deliver for apps like Doordash, Uber Eats, Grubhub and others, further saturating the market with drivers.
At the same time, these apps seem to be racing to see who can pay us less. What do we do when it's harder to make a profit? Is it time to hang it up and move on to more profitable things?
We discuss a strategy that might help keep profitability up. Or even increase it.
Multi-apping.
And I don't mean just switching between the three main apps. Start looking at other types of platforms. We look at a few of them:
You can find the dedicated page for this episode here on our website.
What do you think? What delivery platforms do you have in your market? What's your experience with them? I'd love to hear what options are out there, as I want to build a directory, so please email your comments
More about the EntreCourier
Visit Entrecourier.com
Our Podcast page is at DeliverOnYourBusiness.com
Follow us on Facebook
Folow us on Twitter
Connect with us on Linkedin
Follow us on Instagram
Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) $300 per week payments ended September 4. People will order less, and more may turn to deliver for apps like Doordash, Uber Eats, Grubhub and others, further saturating the market with drivers.
At the same time, these apps seem to be racing to see who can pay us less. What do we do when it's harder to make a profit? Is it time to hang it up and move on to more profitable things?
We discuss a strategy that might help keep profitability up. Or even increase it.
Multi-apping.
And I don't mean just switching between the three main apps. Start looking at other types of platforms. We look at a few of them:
You can find the dedicated page for this episode here on our website.
What do you think? What delivery platforms do you have in your market? What's your experience with them? I'd love to hear what options are out there, as I want to build a directory, so please email your comments
More about the EntreCourier
Visit Entrecourier.com
Our Podcast page is at DeliverOnYourBusiness.com
Follow us on Facebook
Folow us on Twitter
Connect with us on Linkedin
Follow us on Instagram
So does it feel like it is getting harder and harder to make the kind of money that you're wanting to make or that you're used to making in the gig economy? And if it is, does that mean it's time to hang it up or what do we do about that? Well, hello, Courier Nation, welcome to the Deliver on your business podcast, where you are the boss. We are all about encouraging you and equipping you to take control of your business as an independent contractor in the gig economy. When you're working with apps like DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats, Instacart, Uber, Lyft and all of these other real guys. It's all about helping you to be the boss. Well, hey, my friends, welcome back. It's good to have you back here again this week and it's good to be back, and especially after taking a weekend off last week as we got into the holiday weekend and as we were just kind of wrapping up a lot of different things going on. So it's good to be back again. And today I want to just talk about this whole thing about what do you do when it's harder to make the kind of money that you want to make? You know, it seems like especially in the delivery space, and I'm hearing it from a lot of people that it's just like me and things seem to have slowed down so much. You just can't get as much money. It's harder to get those good orders. And what do you do about that when that happens? And I think there's a lot of things going on that are playing into this whole situation that, you know, I think one of the things that we start out with is the fact that on September 4th, that was the end of the pua, the pandemic unemployment assistance. And you know, all of that extra, that extra $300 a week that a lot of people were getting. I don't remember how many millions of people were getting that money every week as their unemployment. And all of a sudden now that has ended as run out. And you've got a lot of people that were able to, you know, maybe be out. They were able to stay on unemployment longer than what they normally would have been, and it helped to have that extra $300 a week. But now that that's over with what happens, what happens when you've got a lot of people that they're getting $1200 a month less? And and that's, you know, for some, I think it was probably they kind of felt like it was disposable income that they could afford to order delivery a little bit more. And when that money's gone, is that going to slow down the amount of deliveries? And with this whole, you know, the whole thing with delivery is a lot of it is when it gets seems to get really busy, it's or when there's a lot of offers out there. It's a supply and demand thing. You know, the demand gets higher if there's a lot more orders. And then there's the whole thing about the supply of drivers and this, you know, how much of this change with the unemployment is going to impact us now when it comes to. Getting a lot more drivers out there, you know, how many people that were on unemployment are all of a sudden going to go out and either go back out and deliver again because they've already been on with Grubhub or DoorDash or Uber Eats or, you know, Uber or Lyft, any of them? You know, how many of them are going to go back to that because that's one way that they can make some money now that that unemployment money isn't coming in, how many people are going to be signing up? I'm expecting that there's going to be a huge increase in in sign ups for all of these different gigs. And so with that being more drivers and and possibly fewer orders, what is that going to mean for us and what's that going to do? And I think there's a lot of things already going on that, you know, we've already got a situation where I think we've got a lot more saturation of drivers, I think, than what we had. You know, back when I started three and a half years ago, three and a half years ago, I could go out and I could jump onto UberEats and stay busy all day and get good orders all day. Or I could do that with DoorDash. Not as much with them, at least where I was, you know, that was before they got to be really big. But Grubhub, definitely. I could just I could just do nothing but Grubhub and make some pretty good money. And over time, we're seeing that change. I am just noticing that it is harder and harder to rely on just one delivery platform. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that. You're getting more driver saturation. I think that's a big part of it. I think that especially with the pandemic and with the. Extreme demand that all of these delivery companies have had, they've had to realize that most important thing to them is having enough drivers out there to handle the deliveries. And if that means that you've got too many drivers out there to the point that the drivers can't make as much money, that doesn't matter as much. What matters to them is they've got to get those orders fulfilled, so they've got to have enough people on there. And I've noticed that I think with DoorDash, it just seems like it's easier to log into a delivery zone to get on to a dash on the fly. And maybe that's just a market thing in my market, but it's just it seems like it's easier. And yet part of that is I think that they're adding more drivers on and then for the number of deliveries that they've got coming in than what they used to do. You know, I think they used to really try and regulate how many drivers were in a particular zone at any given time so that the drivers that did come on could stay busy enough. But then, you know, trying to play this balancing game also of having enough drivers to handle their demand. And I think over time, they figured out that we've got to get more drivers in there for the unexpected demands and, you know, allow more drivers to schedule themselves at a given time. That's that's a lot cheaper than putting out extra peak pay when things are a little busier than they expect. And the other thing that they've done, too is with the top Dash program that anybody that has that high acceptance rate and that meets those top d'assurer requirements can go out and dash now at any time. They're not restricted by the scheduling and everything, and that's going to add to some saturation. And we're I really saw that I think seemed to happen. A lot was with Grubhub because I remember, you know, I did a series of articles at the beginning of 2020 about I did a my Uber Eats challenge that I decided I was going to go back and give it eats another try. Now that they had changed some things up now that they were showing some more information and it was like, how much could I make do an Uber Eats? At that time, I was doing mostly Grubhub at that time. The only way that you could really get good orders was you had to schedule yourself for a scheduling block. And it was getting harder and harder and harder to get onto a block. Now, I never was one to do the premier or the pro because I was not willing to do an 85 percent or 95 percent acceptance rate to get to that. But I could always get on, you know, I could always at least, you know, if I got on right. When the scheduling opened up for partner drivers,
which was always Saturday at 10:40, you know, as long as I got on sometimes Saturday morning or early Saturday afternoon, I could get most of the blocks that I wanted to get. And that started to get harder and harder to do, and it started to be kind of one of these things
that you had to be online at exactly 10:40 when that thing opened up and then, man, you had to just fly through all the schedule options and grab your blocks because it was just hard to get onto a schedule. And then the pandemic happened and everything kind of changed, it was like they were they were trying to get as many drivers as possible out there, and even then they couldn't get enough to be out there. But then there kind of came to a point where. All of a sudden you were getting five minutes, 10 minutes, sometimes 20 minutes between offers, and I had never, ever run into that with Grubhub because it was like all of a sudden and I think Grubhub lost a lot of a lot of market, you know, during that time. They lost a lot of customers. But it was still easy all of a sudden you could go in, you could go in just about any day and grab all the blocks that you wanted to grab. And I think in the end it was Grubhub trying to make sure they just had enough drivers out there. They didn't care whether or not, you know, they didn't seem to care as much. This was my take. But just just by observing and seeing how it was, they didn't seem to be too careful about trying to regulate the market. They didn't seem to be too worried about not getting too many drivers scheduled. It was like they open things up in a big way. And so you get all of those different things like that that it's like now everybody's got too many drivers out there and they don't care whether or not there's enough business for us individually. All that really matters is they have enough drivers to be able to handle their deliveries and. And then on top of that, you know, everybody's kind of doing this race to zero, you know, with with the delivery. And you know, the big one lately has been DoorDash. DoorDash went and they put out an email that said, Hey, you know, we're going to be changing some things. We're going to give you more money for longer delivery, something that we hadn't been doing before, even though their pay model said that's what they do. Basically, they admitted that they lied about it in their pay model. But you know, we're going to we're going to pay more on these longer deliveries. But the shorter deliveries might pay a little bit less. Now we're going to go from $3 to two dollars and fifty cents. Now what I've noticed is they're not paying any more for those longer deliveries. They lied about that, too. But they are paying less on those short deliveries and you're seeing more $2 50 cent deliveries than you ever saw before. And and I wrote about this, I think about a week ago or so about their pay model that, you know, they never really change the pay model. The pay model is always been two to $10, depending on distance, duration and desirability. And really, there is no pay model. It's just whatever Grubhub or I'm sorry, whatever DoorDash wants to pay you. There's no formula for it. And. But the thing is, is like, you know, so they went and did this. Back at the end of 2019, Uber Eats began changing a lot of things, but one of the things they did, they used to have the most generous pay package as far as like the base pay or their delivery pay. And they started to change that up a reduced the amount that you're paid on those things. But in return, they put more information out. They started showing you where you're going to go and they started. You know, just giving, you know, and eventually started telling you how much you're going to get paid to the point where they give you as much or more information than DoorDash nowadays. But one of the things that they added, they went with a lower pay. But they added a thing called a trip supplement, and basically what that trip supplement would do for the most part was if a delivery, if the base pay was going to be less than three dollars, that trip supplement kind of rounded it up to that. Well, lately I've seen a lot of offers with Uber Eats that are closer to like $2 and Grubhub. Grubhub is paying less. Now I'm part of it that I don't know that they're really paying less than what they were before the pandemic, before the pandemic. The minimum pay was $3, and you saw a lot of $3 offers during the pandemic. They started kind of bumping that up to a minimum of $9. And basically, it was it was Grubhub doing the same thing as the old DoorDash Pay model. You know, it was if the customer didn't tip enough. Then Grubhub would make up that difference to bring it up to $9. And there are a lot of people that thought that that's just the way Grubhub always paid and when all of a sudden Grubhub started, you know, making that dropping that to seven or six or $5 and people are freaking out. Likewise, Grubhub paying less and it's like they're just going back to where they were before. But it still seems like, you know, they're. They're getting to a point where they don't have to pay so much extra now to get drivers because there are so many drivers out, there is one of the reasons they want so many drivers, but they're paying less and less. And and it's making it less attractive. You know, it's like you're getting a little bit less every time you do a delivery now. There are a lot of cases where they don't seem to be encouraging the customers to tip as much, because if you go with, let's say, a default tip amount, it just makes that total order look like it's that much more. And to be competitive, you know, I think they're kind of trying to maybe. Encourage people to tip a little bit less or not, not really like encouraging them to and tip to tip less as much as just not suggesting as big of a tip. Because when you suggest a big tip, All that people know when they're placing the order as, wow, that was a lot of money that I had to pay. And they're just looking at a final number. So if they can suggest a little bit lower tip, that makes that final number seem a little bit lower. You see what I'm saying with that. So there's a lot of stuff like that going into play. But what it comes down to is drivers are making less per delivery on the average offer out there. Sometimes there's not as many offers out there, and for a lot of people, it's kind of like, Oh, you know what? I can't make that money that I used to make. And so what do you do with that? Is it time to wrap it up? Is it time to kind of move on? And I, for some folks, it may be. And the thing I think I've noticed is there's still a lot of good offers out there, but I think that there's a few things. One of the biggest things that I think you can do to keep from being hurt by either the lower pay or the greater driver saturation, and that is to multiapp, that is to work multiple platforms. You know, and I've I've talked about this a lot where, you know, I talked about this with DoorDash and their lower pay and even some with their hiding tips and stuff like that that it's like, you know, I've said this a lot of times that the thing you got to remember is these these gig companies are our customers. We're contracting for them as a business, and that means they are our customers and it's just natural for the customer to try and get away with paying as little as they can possibly pay. That's just part of the nature of running a business, and that's part of what you signed up for when you agreed that you're going to do this as a business. But one thing about that is is that if your customer isn't going to pay you enough, your next course of action is, is there another customer that will? And that's why I am. I've always been a big proponent of working multiple applications, and that's getting a little harder to do. You know, you used to have basically five companies that were what I would say is mostly national. Caviar was not in all of the markets. They they were never here in Denver. But, you know, they got swallowed up by DoorDash. And then you had Postmates and they got swallowed up by Uber Eats. And so all of a sudden, now we're down to really three national players. And I still find that I can do okay. Working between those that generally, if DoorDash isn't paying enough and Grubhub is sending me too far, that probably, you know, Uber Eats is going to pop up with something good between the three of them. Somebody is going to offer a pretty decent delivery. And so I really encourage people, you know, first start with that, make sure that you are on with all three, you know, if at all possible, get on with all three, maybe one of those people that got deactivated for no reason from one of those platforms. That makes it a little harder. But what I wanted to look at was today is what are some of the other options out there? And. You know, the thing is, is there's there's a lot of I mean, there's a ton of really small delivery options out there. And and then of course, there's still there's here and I've never gotten into rideshare myself, and I keep thinking maybe at some point I need to do that. That means I've got to clean up my car a lot, but to really, you know, make sure that I can keep some pretty decent ratings if I'm doing that and and I'm not sure, I don't know. I'm not sure I want to deal with passengers in my car and all those things. And but that is an option. That is something you've got to have a little newer car and you've got to have it in pretty good condition to do well with rideshare. And so that's one of those things that you got to think about. Maybe that's an option. But there are also, I think, a lot of different types of delivery option. And so I think that's what I want to do is just kind of talk about some of those options that are out there. And I really kind of break them up into about five different categories. And so I'm just going to kind of do a quick overview of some of the things that are available out there, and maybe it gives you some ideas. And you know, the things that I talk about aren't going to be they're not going to answer all the questions or answer all the options, and a lot of them aren't going to be available for you. Most of these are not in every market. There are some of these that are in very, very, very limited markets, and I know there's a lot of them that I've not found yet. Now here's something I want to ask you real quick. If you know of any delivery companies of any type you know that are independent contractor type delivery options that you know seem like they're at least somewhat feasible. Then let me know about those, because I want to start building a directory. I want to start building a directory of all the different options that are out there, what type of stuff, what type of things that they do and what markets they're in. And so I'd love to hear from people, you know, if you've got any other options, some of the lesser known players out there that you're doing any deliveries for. I'd love to hear from you on those. And so let's talk about some of these different types of options for delivery contractors. So the first option we're going to look at is, you know, other restaurant type food delivery options and think, you know, doing deliveries that are similar to at least the bread and butter part of Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash. You know who else is out there? And that's a hard one to find. I got to tell you, I have spent so much time looking through trying to find out, you know, probably one of the things that I've been trying to find is, is there a rising star out there? Is there somebody that's going to come along that could knock these guys off? And so far, I'm not seeing anything that looks like, you know, that, OK? There's a real good chance that somebody can come in and and kind of take over some space that because they're not that many that are in that many markets and that seem to be getting any momentum. But maybe there is somebody and I just don't know about it. You know, long time ago, not a long time ago, it was it was late last year that I had on a guy from. It was called Trip Delivers. And this was something that, OK. You know, they had kind of an intriguing pay model, but there were a lot of things that you looked at. It was like, OK, this is too good to be true. They're paying the drivers more. They're charging the customers less. They're charging the restaurants less. How are they going to make it, you know? And ultimately, I don't know. You know, it's just, you know, you started looking at it and it was really it was it was like an Amway type. It was a multi-level marketing type approach. They were charging drivers to get on, but they never really launched. And I think supposedly they were launching in a couple of places in Florida and they were supposedly up and running out in Nashville. But I've never really heard anything as far as how they actually did. As far as their deliveries in Nashville and yeah, I think after just kind of looking at that and first thinking, Oh man, that'd be great if somebody like that could come along and knock these big guys off. And I think it's just kind of this realization that, man, there's not that much out there that is nationwide, but there are a lot of little guys out there. There's a lot of regional places out there. And so I want to talk about, you know, I'm just going to go through kind of a list of some of the people that I know that are out there. There are probably the biggest ones out there outside of the big three now are, I want to say, probably bite squad and waiter. And those two are owned by the same company. I believe it was bite squad bought or waiter bought out by squatter. It was the other way around. And all of those are owned by a Tilman Fertitta, who is he runs a he owns a bunch of restaurants and then he bought up these delivery things as well. And. But they tend to be mostly, I think, down in the South and, you know, Texas and going east. And so, you know, they're not going to be in a lot of markets. And so and none of these are going to be in a lot of markets, some maybe a little bit more than others. Maybe the next biggest one that I've seen out there is delivery.om. I see them in a lot of major markets. Unfortunately, they're not here in Denver. I don't know much at all about what they're like to deliver for. There's there's a company called Chow Bus. In some markets, there's there's one that I found called Traiilo I have no idea how to pronounce that. They kind of started out in Brooklyn. There's one that's always intrigued me. A little bit is called cluster truck. I have to make sure that I pronounce that as clearly as possible. Somebody might think I'm saying something different there, but. And they're actually more like they're a ghost kitchen that does their own deliveries. And they were here in Denver, but there were never any openings when I tried to get on with them and they had to close up in Denver. They were one place. It was actually that was one place where the pandemic, I think, actually hurt them because most of their business was downtown and most of their business was a lunchtime delivery. And the deliveries were going, of course, to the people at their business offices. And so when the shutdown happened and people quit going into the office, all of a sudden, you know, their market pretty much dried up. And so they ended up closing up here in Denver. I've heard him say on Twitter that maybe they're coming back soon. I'd love that. But yeah, they're in. I think Indianapolis is their main market is where they started out. And, you know, I've heard that there are a lot of things that a lot of people like about them. So there's a few others that are out there that are like, you know, there's there's a little local one that is in northern Colorado. I think it's like Fort Collins and Loveland and everything like that that it was a, you know, it was a it was actually started by some folks that I think it was kind of like some restaurant people trying to do it just to have an alternative. It was called Noko Noche. And I've always thought it'd be fun. Maybe I should head up there. It's a little bit of a drive, but maybe try and get on and try out some deliveries with those guys. Unfortunately, I don't know the area out there. I'd probably get lost, but that's what GPS is for, I guess. But Favre is another one that they're in Texas. They're in a lot of Texas markets, especially Orange Crate Hunger HQ, and are a few others. But, you know, and the other part of it is it's a little hard to find because you do some searches and then you'll see stuff that say some places are, you know, some of the best competitors to DoorDash and all the others. And then as you look into them, you find out, Oh, all they do is they do the online ordering and then they use DoorDash to do their deliveries and stuff like that. So sometimes it's a little hard to find those people. But you know what? I guess the best thing that I could tell you to do is if you're looking for places like that, you know, pay attention when you are out on deliveries and when you're picking up from restaurants. And maybe sometimes just strike up a conversation with some of the folks like, you know, if you're delivering for DoorDash or Grubhub and say, Are you guys using anybody else or is anybody else approached you? And that's a way you can find out who is available in your market. But that's one way you can do things. So a second option out there and in some ways are kind of originally was going to kind of group them in with those other food deliveries because it is food delivery, it is restaurant delivery, but maybe more like catering type delivery. Now on with some places, DoorDash, I think even Grubhub, Grubhub is kind of scaled back on what they're doing with that, but DoorDash has their drive orders. And you know, those are basically the large orders. Those are the catering orders. And sometimes there's a little bit more involved with doing that. And I've done some deliveries with that deliver that who does catering and one of their big clients is Easy Cater, which is one of the bigger ones also for DoorDash. But you know, the nice thing is like, you know, deliver that you don't have to jump through all the hoops that you got to, you know, with DoorDash, you got to have your acceptance rate and do all these things to get invited to do those orders. But you know, you can jump on with that, deliver that. And they're in a lot of markets and and you can do your catering orders with things like that. And I'm sure that there are some others that are out there. They're doing the same type of thing. The nice thing with those catering deliveries, they pay more. You know, there's you generally, you're looking at $20 plus per delivery and which is great in a lot of ways, but you can also be looking at more time. You got kind of a time element to where you can't stay busy right up to the pickup time because what happens if you pick up a an Uber Eats delivery that takes you so far away that you can't get to your scheduled catering delivery in time, you know? So you have dead time before your delivery begins. And sometimes I think the amount of time that you got to take and where that can take, you can end up being. What I'm finding is that the pay has been pretty good on the deliver that deliveries, but it's not really more than what I make during lunch hour. You know, just doing normal deliveries. It's more guaranteed, but it's maybe a little bit less. And on average, you know where I might be making between 25 and 30 during the lunch hour when I'm closer to 30 and 35 during lunch hour, just just doing on demand stuff, you know? So but those those are some things that you can do and in some markets that can be really good. And if you're having a hard time getting some of those, you know, getting paid well enough during the lunch hour, then you can grab one of these, you know, catering deals or something like that. So that's an option. And I think we're going to we're working on trying to get somebody from deliver that on next week. And so we can talk a little bit more about that type of an option. There's another style of delivery that can be very different and could be a good option for the slower periods, especially if you're wanting to maybe, you know, look at doing something closer to full time. You know, make a full time business out of all of this. What you could look at is last mile delivery. And what last mile delivery usually entails. Is you going to pick up from a warehouse and you're going to pick up from more of a central location And in a lot of cases, it's going to be like, you're going to run a route, you know, so you're not picking up delivery at a time. But what happens is they'll group up a whole bunch of things together to do that. And so like I've done some for a company here in Denver called Veho there in a few markets, but Veho does mostly like these hello, fresh deliveries, if you're familiar with those. They're kind of like these meal packages that they put all the ingredients together and then they ship it out to you in, you know, in a box has got maybe some dry ice in it or something like that to try and keep things fresh while it's been delivered. And so, you know, with Veho, pick up maybe 25 different boxes and have a route. And so you grabbing a route and dropping off things in order, you know, Amazon Flex Gopuff are a couple of those that will do that. And the nice thing with some of those is you get a guaranteed amount of money. You know, there's there's not the big question mark that sometimes happens with some of the other things. I think like this last mile delivery stuff can work real good if you're able to find a way to balance that with the on demand delivery things because you know, you could be your real busy periods between, let's say, 11 and two. And then if you could pick up some of these on demand things that maybe they're paying a few dollars less per hour, but maybe better than what you would normally make trying to do DoorDash between, you know, two and five or between, you know, eight and 11 or something like that. And so those can be good. You know, one of the things that I see on some of those is that sometimes, though, it's hard to really get those to line up like the Gopuff or, I'm sorry, the veho deliveries that I did. Where I'm running, probably. You know, usually you have a certain time that you have to pick that up. And so by the time you pick it up and the by the time you get through kind of their warehouse, there's a lot of wasted time, a lot of wasted time, I think sometimes with that warehouse type thing. But then, you know, you pick it up and then you run your route. And now all of a sudden it's like one o'clock. And I've, you know, lost out on that, you know, lunchtime opportunity. And so those are some things. But you know, here's the thing. When you're running a business, you learn how to balance some of those types of things. You know, another one that I want to talk about is one that. It's. I'm not sure what you call it, actually. I think some still call these guys last mile delivery, but they tend to not be like where you go to a particular warehouse. As much as it's it's more like it's not food related delivery. You know, it is more like. It's a package delivery type of thing. You know, so in a lot of ways, they can be on demand. You know, it's kind of more like offers pop up and everything like that, but that you're not necessarily going to the same location every time. But like you know, some of the examples are roti, I think is one that is. And I've never tried Roti, but as I understand, I mean, you can pick up from a lot of different places and then go deliver it to whatever the location is. And again, some of those can pay really well. And another one that is out there now that is kind of picking up some steam. And I think trying to grow a little bit is a company called Curri. I think it's just see you try. And Steve Johnson Rideshare Rodeo Podcast He was a guest on the podcast here a little while ago and and they've been sponsoring him. And so he's been pushing them. I've signed up for them. I haven't done any deliveries for them yet. They're probably who I'm looking at next after I get done kind of doing a review of deliver that. But with curry, I think there's is more like it's like construction equipment. And so you go pick up your equipment, you know, your construction stuff on site and then you take it out to job sites and different things like that. And a lot of times, you know, some of their deliveries are going to entail you're better off with a bigger vehicle, a pickup or a sprinter. I think there's a lot of things that you can do with your car. Some other options that I've heard of that are out there are one that's called Dolly, and that's really kind of more like hiring yourself out to go, help do some moving another one called Spark. But some of these places where you're maybe just you're using your own vehicle to do some deliveries, but it's not food delivery or something like that. So that's that's kind of our fourth option. And the fifth one that you could look at is shopping. Instacart shipped saucy, I think, is a shopping, as I understand, was saucy. It's alcohol delivery, but you have to go in and do the shopping for the for the alcohol and things like that. So you got to go in, you've got to you got to go, you know, find all the items, you've got to actually do the shopping checkout and then deliver the food. And a lot of those can pay a lot more. I, you know, I and I said I was on Gig Tube podcast just this last week, and we talked about that a little bit. I'll play the clip from it here because with Chad, from there, you know, he's, you know, he talked about how he had done Instacart. And I said, you know, I've never really tried it. And part of it for me was I didn't want to spend the time running around inside the store. And his experience was that, you know, a lot of times, you know, you spend some extra time, but you get really good at it, you get really efficient at it, and it pays well enough sometimes to offset some of that. So here's here's kind of what we talked about on that podcast. And I'll probably bite the bullet and try out some Instacart's. And I do not like shopping, so that's probably the reason I haven't done Instacart. Yeah, you should. You sound like DoorDash, dad. That's what he was saying. Like, he doesn't like shop. And I'm like, Yes. I don't know. Don't let it don't. It's not a girl job. Like, I think it's oh, no, no, it's not that at all. It's like a scavenger hunt and like, you're getting exercise walking around. And sure. I mean, as much as it sucks, like here in Orlando in July having and which especially when a hurricane is coming through, everybody starts buying cases of water and you have to every once in a while like there's apartment complexes everywhere and it's three stories or less. There's not usually an elevator. And I can't tell you how many times it's and it's always the people that live on the third floor that order four or five cases of water. We have to jump up, you know, multiple flights of stairs. I mean, I I work out. So I mean, it's not for me. It's just like a bonus exercise, but for a lot of people, it's like that's more work than they're willing to do. And I think I could see sometimes I could see myself. If I took that on kind of getting into that a little bit more for the challenge. You know, how quickly can I get this done, because that's that's I think helped make delivery more enjoyable is just challenging myself like that. So, you know, if you get in and start, you start figuring out that, OK, if I can get in and out of this, you know, grocery store this quickly or you know, how much can I make per hour or different things like that that makes it a little bit easier or something like that if you just kind of, I guess, gamify it or something like that? Yeah, just having fun with it. Yeah, there's definitely because like Instacart Corner Shop Ship, there's definitely a lot more mental challenging to it than with DoorDash and Grubhub and Uber Eats, and especially with rideshare, because it's just like there's hardly any thinking at all. The apps do everything for you. So I don't know, you know, personally, for me, I'm not that big about shopping. And, you know, even though, I mean, I am kind of like, there are times I enjoy going to micro center, which is big, you know, electronics place here. You know, you can get all the geek stuff, you know, between the computers and the components and all the little parts. And and, you know, just about anything you want to find. It's anything electronic related. It seems like you get that there. And sometimes I have fun there, but it's usually only if I'm looking for something in particular. And if I were going there to look for somebody else's stuff, I'm not sure I'd enjoy it as much. The part that I hate you, I'll tell you, I'll tell you the part that I hate about doing shopping. And it's it's something that happened to me the other day. And maybe it's it's just this store that I buy our new place that I've seen this happen a couple of times. So. I'd buy a few things and I go up and I'm about ready to check out and it's like nobody in mine anywhere I can walk through any of the lines or do the self-checkout or whatever. And then I realized, Oh, I forgot something. And so to go back, find whatever it was didn't take that long, but maybe a little bit of time. And I come back and all the lines are packed, and it's just like everybody was waiting for me to go back or to leave to all of a sudden just flood the fled the lines all at once. And I've seen this a couple of times at this store. That's the kind of stuff that I hate. I hate waiting in line. And so for me, I'm not sure I could really. I should try it, though I honestly should try it just so that I can kind of give some perspective and and hopefully give a fair perspective. Maybe that's part of the reason I'm not jumping on, you know, the option there, something like that. But you know, it's just for me. I mean, and here's the thing with all of these, you know, there are different things about them and. And I think that that's even when you start to talk about ride share. I've got things about ride share that I just don't think I would really enjoy. And yet at the same time, I drove a taxi, you know, way back in the day I spent about 30 years ago. That's really way back in the day. And I'm aging myself right now, aren't I? But the thing about it is, is it's just like. You know, there are some things that I don't think I would enjoy, and yet I talked to other guys and they just love the heck out of it. So. I can't sit there and tell you which option is better for you. I can't tell you that any of these options are great options for you. And I can't tell you that any of them are terrible options for you. You know, some people love the heck out of doing things like Instacart and shipped. They love doing the shopping. You know they love that. Yeah, sometimes maybe it's just the challenge they love, you know, and wouldn't win a, you know, you heard the part that Chad and I were talking about. I thought, Yes, I think there's something that I could enjoy as far as maybe trying to gamify it and trying to see how quickly could I get all that done? But you know, the thing is is everybody's got different preferences. The thing that I love, though, about having so many different types of options that are out there is that. I've got a feeling that the mainstream food delivery stuff is going to continue to become less and less attractive. I think it's just is following the trajectory of ride share. You know, there was a time when rideshare was just a fantastic way to do things, and then they started kind of this race to zero and what they're paying and they started doing, you know, things to try and maybe control the drivers a little bit more and just different things like that. And it became less and less profitable for a lot of people. And I kind of see the same thing happening with delivery that that could happen and especially with the restaurant delivery. And at the same time, you see these companies also trying to branch into other types of delivery, the non-food delivery, the catering delivery and and now they're starting to get into the grocery shopping. They're trying to kind of horn in on, you know, Instacart and ship territory. And so all of those different types of things like that there are like. Maybe they can stay profitable, maybe they won't be as profitable, but it doesn't necessarily have to mean it's the end for you or for what you do. I think where I'm going with that is, you know, I think it's actually kind of a fantastic opportunity to really test yourself. And what I mean by that is, you know, how well can you kind of measure all of these different things? As far as how they can fit together, how well can you weave all of that together? You know, I think that there's there's there's a skill to. You know, balancing the different food delivery options to begin with, the multi-episode, you know, doing Grubhub and while you're finishing up Grubhub, you've got the app the other apps on so that you can find the best opportunity out of all three of them to go to next. But then when you can kind of figure out which of these other options would fit in and where can they fit in? And are there some options that are better between two and five than just doing food delivery? And which ones do you enjoy doing the most? And so I think that there's a little more opportunity in that type of thing because now you're you're diversifying, you know, you're getting more customers and you're finding more different opportunities and and you could end up being like, I am where? I can go crazy on deliver that catering orders for several days in a row and then hardly ever touch them for a long time. And in. The biggest thing is is it's kind of like, you know, there's a challenge there that I think you can take in, OK, you're running a business and you're diversifying your income, you're doing different income streams and you're figuring out ways to. Weaved together a lot of customers into this tapestry. A good, profitable business. And, you know, I have to think that this is maybe the future of gig economy independent contractor type work where it becomes more and more that they really are different gigs that because when you do this, it really is much more of a true independent contracting type of thing. It really is operating and working together with several different customers. You know, when you when you tend to stick to one platform, it becomes so much closer to an employee type of relationship, and it gives a lot more power to that particular delivery company. Because if that's your No. One source of income and something goes south there, you know, now what do you do? Now you got to scramble. Now you got to go to something completely different, or you got to take the time to start figuring out all these things. You know where if you can start kind of piecing them together one at a time? You know, as you may know, if you listen to me much, I've talked a lot with the guys from Pera. You know, I had David Pickerelle on two different times on the podcast and I've talked a lot on the phone with the guys out there and. And that's one of the things where I know that they're trying to look into is, OK, how can you start to weave in some of these? Other companies, you know, how do you how do you find a lot of these, maybe these up and coming companies, these delivery companies that you never heard of? How do you put together some of these like, you know, last mile deliveries or non package deliveries? And and if somebody could be really good at helping them coordinate things so that, you know, if somebody could. Get in the air of a place like Veho and say, Hey, you know what? You could probably get a lot more drivers if you could schedule your deliveries in such a way that they fit in between the peak areas instead of overlapping into the peak food delivery areas. And then, you know, they've got maybe a better opportunity of getting people that are, you know, willing to do this as something in between the main food delivery areas and stuff like that. So. And I think that that's ultimately something we're parents to go. And I'm curious whether they ever will go that direction, but, you know, to try and weave together a lot of these little companies. And maybe that's one way to kind of combat maybe the heavier control and market presence of the bigger companies? I don't know. But I hope you found that helpful. I hope it gave you some things to think about that that there are more things out there than just Uber. Uber Eats, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub, Instacart. You know, there were a lot of options out there. And you know, in some markets, maybe there's just one or two of them. There are some places that they've got a lot of different options out there, and stuff at Denver seems to be kind of in that in-between. And so. Hopefully, some of that stuff can give you some ideas of ways that you can expand and diversify your business as an independent contractor. With that, we're going to wrap it up. And like I said, hopefully next week we've got as on from deliver that and we can talk about one particular type of delivery a little more in-depth. And that's that some of the catering deliveries that deliver that is in a bunch of markets. And so they've been around for a little while. They've got a little different way of doing things, but you know, they can they can have some good profitable deliveries out there. And in the end, it's I think it's just like any of the others that it really becomes your job to measure all those. So I'm looking forward to next week and seeing what more we can learn about them and maybe looking at maybe some different other options in the weeks to come as well. Thank you guys for tuning in. And you know, here's here's the thing is a wrap it up is that this is like every other aspect of going out there on deliveries is that you are the boss. You are the one that makes the decisions. You decide you know which deliveries you're going to take. You decide when you're going to go out and deliver. And and I think that's your responsibility as a business owner is also to evaluate what are the different options, what are the things that you can do and and not get yourselves so tied and more like in an employee mindset to one particular platform. But how can you? Measure and weigh and evaluate all of these different opportunities and weave them together to make one big package that makes you profitable in your business. And with that. I want to encourage you to do that with everything that you do out there. Make your just business decisions, go out there and be the boss.