With the recent onset of winter in Atlanta, the delivery game has picked up. Nothing says, “making money,” like a person’s mouth, but in this case, that mouth is a blustery, frigid day. It’s hell of windy in the midtown and downtown areas of this city, and nobody wants to get out in it to walk to a restaurant. The people who do are crazy, so they’re probably not ordering food to be delivered anyway. They’re the ones standing on the street corners begging for change or cigarettes. Or walking to a restaurant to pick up lunch or dinner for someone who can’t be bothered to get out into the brisk.
Winter is a real game-changer when it comes to delivering food. Days go from hoping to make $100 in 10 hours to hoping to make $200 in the same amount of time. Let me tell you, that extra $100 goes a long way when most of your bills sit at right about that much. And with the additional car payment, increased insurance premium on the new car, and required health care premium – THANKS, OBAMA! – that extra $100 in a day is pretty danged well necessary, so winter couldn’t have come at a better time.
We’ve been hit with some setbacks in the past few months. September was amazing! October was much less so. They mandated that we use a new courier app, and that app was inherently broken. The payouts dropped because they no longer calculated actual mileage but instead mileage based on a straight line from the driver to the restaurant and the restaurant to the customer. In a city where straight-line travel for more than 2 miles is literally impossible because the roads don’t work like that, it was a significant pay decrease. Significant to a blue-collar worker, anyway.
Later, they decided to make Atlanta a test market for tipping. You see, our payouts had been based on nothing but mileage, but then they dropped out mileage pay by about half and decided to let the customer’s altruism rule the day. Since customers are rarely altruistic – as most people are rarely altruistic – the payouts stayed much lower than they had been in the past. The money is still there if the runs are there, but the days of making $22 in mileage pay for a single run that takes a little less than an hour disappeared.
The other setback, and this was pretty huge, was a series of courier and vendor app crashes combined with a few server crashes right at the start of the dinner rush that made people gun shy about using our service. The market in this city used to be dominated by one company, but when others came into town, they came in droves. The downside was that when people couldn’t properly use our service, they had other options. As options go, people will tend to pick one and stick with it until it stops working when they need it. And while the others are not as good, they didn’t crash when ours did, and it hampered business for several months. By the time things started picking back up, the holidays had rolled around, and that meant that people were saving money and traveling, so we didn’t have much work.
The beginning of the year was supposed to be huge. The first week or so is never busy in this game, and it doesn’t matter who you work for. It was supposed to be either cold or rainy or both, but it was neither for quite a while. This one, I blame on El Niño, and that’s a pretty valid complaint, but it’s the weather, so there’s nothing a lowly courier can do about it. Almost the entire month of January, when it was supposed to be cold, the weather was mostly dry, and the temperatures were having in the 70º range. Also not very good for business when people are taking advantage of the sunny days to take their kids to the park after school or to go out to dinner at their favorite spots.
Flash forward to the present. It’s currently about 37º outside, and that’s great! I wear fingerless gloves, so my fingertips are a little chilly, but that’s alright. I’m still having enough time to write, so that’s good, too, but I’m currently just waiting out the calm before the storm that is the dinner rush. Wednesdays are hit or miss, but today already hit hard, so I’m very excited about hitting another $200 day. It happened throughout September, so why not February? That’s basically just the winter version of September, right? If the weather stays dry or snowy but hell of cold, it’s completely reasonable to have these days for the rest of the month. It also helps that I’m one of the most trusted and highest paid couriers in the organization, but that’s mostly politics and skill. So, I’ve had a couple of good days, and I’m hoping those days continue until May, as I’ve predicted. The cold will always help, and so will the on-coming storms of the spring.
Funding is fickle in this line of work, but with bad weather comes good money, so I’m hoping this trend continues. As a proponent of positive thinking, it’s good to stay hyped, but it’s hard for me. So many disappointments in life have made it difficult to maintain a solid level of motivation. Working through any laziness and plowing through the slow times writing and sipping on hot coffee will definitely help. As of this second, the year looks bright, and that’s what it’ll take to not only survive but to also flourish, so please stay upbeat with me, and together we can destroy this year like we did the fourth quarter of 2015.