What DoorDash Drivers Want Our Customers to Know

DoorDash drivers want the same thing you want: to get your food to you ASAP, with the order right and in good condition. We need your help to make that happen. Here’s how you can help. (I compiled these suggestions with input from drivers around the country.)

1. Addresses/HOME: If your address is hard to see from the road, please give us a description to go by, especially if we’re delivering at night: distinctive feature of the house; how far from the corner; what color or kind of car is in the driveway; etc. At night, please leave a light on. If it’s winter, please do your best to make the way from our car to your door safe for us to walk on.
2. Addresses/APARTMENTS: We want to get you your food ASAP. If we spend ten minutes looking for your apartment, your food is getting cold. What floor are you on? If you are in a complex, what is its name, and which building are you in? Is parking nearby? Are there lights in the hallways? Asking drivers to enter a strange building in a darkened hallway is inconsiderate. The better the directions you give us, the faster we can deliver your food.
3. Addresses/WORK: If we are delivering to you at work, please include the name of your business in your instructions. What name is on the building? If it’s a big, sprawling complex, help us find you. If you work in a mall, tell us which entrance is most convenient. Map apps are amazing, but they aren’t perfect.
4. Tips: You have a direct impact on what we get paid for our service, and how quickly your order gets picked up relative to other customers. Drivers have the option to accept or reject deliveries, depending on distance, income, and other factors. A $3 order that asks the driver to drive far away and back will not even pay for our gas, much less our time. Offering a better tip makes it more likely that a driver will pick up your order right away. Your tip is not just a major part of our income; it’s also your expression of respect, appreciation, and gratitude for the service we provide. Is it valuable to you to not have to go to the grocery or restaurant when you’re busy or sick?
5. Shop & Deliver: If we are in a store looking for the items you ordered online, please be available by phone or text in case we have questions about substituting one brand or kind of hair coloring or pickles (for example) for another. You’ll be happier with the result and the time it takes to get it to you if we can communicate while shopping.
6. Leave it at the door/Hand it to me: We can’t do both. If your order says both “leave it” and “hand it to me,” we can’t be held responsible for knocking and waking up your kids, or leaving it on the porch when you have your phone off and don’t remember that you have food arriving. Please make sure your instructions are clear and consistent. Also, responsible drivers won’t want to leave your food at the door in the rain. If we don’t follow your instructions, there may be a reason.
7. Reviews: if your driver did a good job, please give us a good rating. If we went above and beyond in some way, leave us a good review. Like any employee in any company, an employee who does good work may only come to the attention of management if the customer expresses their appreciation.
8. Problems & Complaints: Everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes it’s the restaurant or grocery store, and sometimes – rarely, we hope – it’s your driver. If you let your driver know before we are on to their next customer, we may be able to put things right for you. In some cases, that may not be possible: drivers often get our next delivery as soon as yours is marked completed. Please contact DoorDash customer service or the store or restaurant from which your order came. We want satisfied, happy, repeat customers. And you don’t want to be angry while eating: bad for the digestion. Remember, during the pandemic at least, drivers are not permitted to open your bags to check the contents: we deliver what the restaurant says is your order, in the (often sealed) bags they hand us.

I hope this is helpful. Feel free to comment if you are a driver or a customer, and let’s work together to make this a good working relationship. Thanks!

July 4th Mobilization to Defeat COVID-19

All these people are going to use . . . (photo: Smithsonian)

 

… these, to change the world.

 

Let’s try something. Because who knows?

The world is plagued by the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.  Hardest hit are the poor: developing nations with minimal health infrastructure, and African Americans and Native Americans – who also lack health care. The lead agency pursuing treatments and cures is the WHO, the World Health Organization – from which the president has withheld funding.

The WHO has prevented millions of deaths from HIV, malaria, and other diseases, while supporting child and maternal health, clean water programs, and other lifesaving projects.

Individuals can donate to the WHO’s COVID Response Fund. I’m going to ask you to do so – though the WHO has made that harder with recent confusing advisories. Wear a mask, or don’t? Asymptomatic carriers: contagious, or not? Everyone wants definitive answers now, and the WHO tried to give them before having them.

But I’ve never given to a perfect organization, have you? No? Onward, undaunted, then. Because, like your political party, your church, your school, your favorite nonprofit, they are doing essential work, and they need your and my help to do it.

We could ask America’s 540 billionaires to do this for us. The top 15 of them alone have a combined net worth of $1 trillion.

But we’d have to wait for them to consult with lawyers, accountants, and PR firms. We can do this now, ourselves. The need is urgent: infections are spiking again. Besides, there’s an upside to doing things differently.

We need to provide the funds that are lacking: about $500 million. The average amount of US membership dues and voluntary contributions is usually a little less than that. If only ¾ of those who voted in 2016 donated to the WHO’s work on COVID-19, we’d each only have to give $5.

$5.

Each.

Reverse a bad decision, and rejoin the fight to kick COVID to the curb. For five bucks.

Let’s do it by July 4th.

Why July 4th? Because the need is urgent, and we don’t need more time. We won’t be delayed by lawyers, advertising, or creating a website. This just needs to go viral. (Sorry) A deadline will light a fire under us – and give us something to celebrate together. We could use a win.

Can we do it? Without a big donor or a celebrity endorsement? It’s still $500 million.

• We financed World War II with war bonds. 84 million people bought them. (The equivalent of 204 million today.)
• We’re fighting racism with massive, peaceful, diverse protests across the country.
• During the pandemic, people are supporting food banks and local mutual aid groups, donating stimulus checks, sewing masks at home.

Mr. Rogers’ Mom told him to look for the helpers in disasters. Millions of Americans are too busy being helpers to waste time looking for them. The government led and organized the WWII efforts. But we don’t need them to do everything for us. 

Yes, we can do this. Here’s how. We focus on the numbers: not the size of donations, but the number of donors.

Instead of deciding how big a donation to make, think about how many people you can get to donate. Ask friends, coworkers, and social media contacts to make the smallest donation they’ve ever been asked to make: $5 or $10. (They may, of course, choose to give more.) Ask them to ask their friends to do the same. 

The goal, and the point, is a lot of small donations rather than a few big ones.

Raising $500 million from a couple of billionaires is barely a story for a day in the business section. No big deal. 

Raising it from 10 million, 100 million, or 204 million Americans, $5 or $10 at a time – that’s a damn resurrection. It proves we can still unite to lead the world in doing big things, suggests to the president that a lot of us disagree with his decision – and may just kneecap COVID-19.

I’d like to ask you to donate $5, right now, to the WHO’s COVID-19 Response Fund, to get the ball rolling. (See how easy that was?)

Once we do this? Imagine what other big changes will seem possible. Let’s talk about it over burgers, brats, and brew on July 4th. And when we do beat COVID, you can tell everyone that you helped gather the troops to get it done.

~~~~~

EDIT: I just learned that Facebook is matching donations to the WHO’s COVID-19 Response Fund. So you can double your donations by making them there.

American Lazarus

#IBelieveInAnAspirationalAmerica
This is our moment, I think, to either pack it in and give up on really living our better values, or to grow up and do the hard work of admitting past mistakes and setting a course for greater integrity.

I propose Emma Lazarus’s great poem, The New Colossus, as the right lamp to light our way forward. Everyone knows the “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” section. But we should, in this moment, pay close attention to the prescient opening words.

She begins with a negative, a warning: NOT. Reminiscent of the Thou Shalt Nots of the 10 Commandments, the one rule in the Garden of Eden (“Eat from any tree – but not THAT one”), or the “Not this, Not that” of the Taoists, she seemed to anticipate, only 20 years after the end of the Civil War, America’s later rise to power.

 

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land.”

Do not seek empire, she was cautioning. Our strength could be a matter of power and intimidation, as the Greek Colossus of Rhodes proclaimed Greece’s military might. Ironically, the Colossus fell in an earthquake less than 60 years after construction – you can defeat an army, but Mother Nature will eat your lunch, no matter if you’re victor or vanquished. The ruins became a tourist attraction. Power never lasts. Empires always fall. And people love a wreck. 

We, unfortunately, did not heed her advice. We love our power, whether military or economic, and think it is our crowning glory. Lazarus suggested that our strength lay elsewhere. Paradoxically, not with power, but with what might be called “the poor in spirit.” Those looking for old-fashioned Judeo Christian values will find them here. Not the compulsion of power, but the attraction of virtues and values. Represented by

“A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.” 

Not Sun King, Caesar, Pharaoh, Divine Ruler, or Emperor. “Mother.” Of exiles, no less.

And

“From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.”

And then Lazarus makes the contrast explicit. 

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!”

State dinners, Air Force One, all the glamour and glitter aren’t – or, she insists, ought not to be – the point. Lincoln had a nice hat, but who cares? So if the “mighty woman with a torch” refuses pomp, what *does* she want? 

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

To paraphrase, the stones other builders rejected are our cornerstones.

 

The difference, simply put, is between the power a Colossus represents, and the light the Statue of Liberty, the Mother of Exiles, treading on broken chains, represents.

Power passes. You have it for a while, and then someone else takes it. But light is something you offer to those who need it.

I hope that, in this time of upheaval and uncertainty, we will rediscover the most important thing about America: not its power, but the universal appeal of our aspirational values. Even the founders who wrote and defined them did not live up to them. But they made room in our constitution for growth. And Emma Lazarus – another mighty woman with a torch – has lit forever the fork in our road, the choice we will always face, that maybe every nation faces at one time or another. We’ve been so focused on power, that we’ve let the lamp that lights our way grow dim.

People gravitate naturally to the warmth of light. Light is eternal, its appeal universal. Let’s set aside the adolescent fascination with our muscles, and instead set about the humble work of providing shelter for the homeless, food for the hungry, and offering a welcome to the cast aside. #LetAmericaBeAmericaAgain