Let’s discuss gig apps: Shipt, Doordash, Wonolo, Papa, to name a few. There’s an app for everything now. Some apps can be good “side hustles” if you are absolutely desperate for money. I think they’re more trouble than they’re worth.
Some apps allow you to contract at existing stores.
Imagine a store where if you walked in with $10,000 you can walk out with a fully functional restaurant. I was assigned some easy warehouse work. When a company outsources to an app allowing contracted labor, it’s a bit of an SOS, Either they can’t stay staffed, or their current staff is pathetic. I can attest to the best workers at the restaurant supply warehouse were my fellow app users.
One guy was there because he wanted to spoil his kid. The man owned a house, had an ex wife, a current wife, kids, step-kids, a fully established dude. Perhaps buying his kid a PS5 was going to cut into his cigar fund.
The assistant manager went to prison for armed robbery. When he got out, he became a life coach and motivational speaker. The manager was Mike from Brooklyn. That dude was not fucking playing around. Similar story to the other guy, he wasn’t locked up, but he was gang affiliated. He had the tattoos, scars and the attitude to back that up. He also had pictures of him in Abu Dhabi and other places around the world on his phone. One day he calls us peons into a huddle and delivered a Grant Cardone level Ted talk Brooklyn style. Highlights include, “…if all you fucking see at this job is Ragu, that’s as far as you’re going to get.” (He was trying to motivate the people to realize that busting their ass here won’t go unnoticed). He said, “Go out to the most expensive restaurant in town and buy yourself the most expensive thing on the menu. Get everything you want. Remember what that feels like, and work for that.”
He had some other really good points, but it was the delivery that stuck with me. He sounded like a cut off of a Wu-Tang record it was unreal. There was another dude who worked there, despite being out of shape, enjoyed the physical workout. He liked to fuck with me and repeatedly threw me 20 pound bags of flour to stack as fast we could do it. It wasn’t a bad job.
One time I couldn’t show up to a gig, and despite my best efforts to communicate it counted as a no-call no show. I had to take a training to re-enter the good graces of the app only to move to a town where the app doesn’t exist.
I remember doing two grocery deliveries: One of them, was a late night shop where every single item the person wanted was not in stock. The person and I were texting back and forth for an hour about what they wanted as a substitution, but they took it really well. We both had fun with the conversation. I went to deliver the stuff, and the customer was a really cute girl and she lets me into her apartment and she had a guitar in there but I was too nervous to initiate anything. She used the bathroom while I was putting the groceries in, and generally most people aren’t comfortable enough to let you into their house like that. I was just too young and shy to know what to do in that situation. Sucks, because that could have been a cool story, but I can’t win them all.
The other delivery: I had to buy ten containers of Greek yogurt and one tube of preparation H.
There is an app where the user signs up to be a pseudo grandkid for old people. A typical gig involved taking an old person to their doctors’ appointments. I was signed up in a southern city notorious for crime. The people I went to pick up were deep in the hood, and I had to drop them off in random places that were not the place I picked them up. It was fun the first two times, but the third time was sketchy. After time number three, the old people didn’t even show up so I stopped doing it. There was apparently a lawsuit against the company at some point over the recent years.
I subsided off of Doordash for close to a year. The drawbacks were: spilling peoples’ drinks all over my car, getting the smell of different foods in and out of my car, and the mileage. The pay was probably the highest of all of the gig apps I’ve ever worked. The app helped me familiarize myself with an area when I was traveling.
The noteworthy story involves a delivery to an unincorporated mountain community. I dropped the order off to this trailer in the middle of nowhere, and these dudes make me shotgun a Michelob ultra with them. They give me two beers for the road plus a tip, and naturally, I cracked one open. I’m driving down these one lane twisty roads, and this old cop car peaks its lights right behind me. I was following the GPS, so I was able to tell the cop was following me. The GPS screamed at me to turn left, When I did the cop hit his brakes really hard, and next thing I knew I was on the main highway and got away scot-free. I quit because I hit a point where I was stealing peoples’ fries. Not the whole order, but one or two here and there. And yes, I can hear you asking, “Don’t they have a seal on the bag to prevent that?”
If a sticker will stop you from stealing food then you are not hungry enough.
One guy I met took it to an even more extreme and would cut extremely long thin slices from pizzas and shove the two halves back together.
But this is not a competition. I won’t be proud if I’m placed in the race for the world’s sleaziest dirtbag. Perhaps I’ve earned my participation trophy, but I can’t let myself make the list.
Need Job Will Travel 
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