Delivery: food, groceries, and packages

Delivery is the plank most bridge workers start on, because the bar is low: a car in some markets, a bike or scooter in dense ones, no interviews, no passengers rating your conversation. The gross pay is also the lowest on the bridge. Gridwise's 2024 trip data put Uber Eats at $14.96 and DoorDash at $12.23 in average gross hourly earnings. Neither figure includes the costs from "What an hour actually nets," and delivery miles per dollar earned run worse than rideshare, because you are paid to cross town for a $7 burrito run. The work is real and useful anyway. Price it honestly and stack it well.

DoorDash's pay model is documented in its own help pages: base pay per offer, which DoorDash says ranges from $2 to $10 and up depending on time, distance, and desirability, plus promotions, plus 100 percent of customer tips. The base is at the bottom of that range most nights. This is why delivery operators live on tip-bearing orders and decline the rest, and it is why the decline button is your actual pricing tool. DoorDash also offers an hourly mode, a guaranteed rate for active time with tips on top, which trades upside for floor; operators report it shines in steady rain and dies in surge. In 2024, food delivery drivers earned 53.4 percent of their income from tips. You are not a courier with a wage. You are a tipped worker with a scooter.

Uber Eats runs the same shape with different plumbing, and Grubhub trails both in most markets. The operator consensus across the delivery subreddits is to run two apps from the start, the practice the real-week lesson called multi-apping: accept on one, pause the other, decline anything that points away from the zone you are already working. The forums are blunt that stacked routes, two pickups and two drop-offs that roughly align, are where the hourly rate hides.

Instacart is the grocery variant, and here the marketing has gone quiet in a way worth noticing: its shopper page quotes no hourly figure at all, just the components of pay, batch pay, promotions, tips, under the words "Actual earnings may vary." No number means nothing to compare, so the trip data does it: Gridwise's 2025 data across 20,538 tracked shoppers put the median at $12.21 an hour in total trip pay, including tips, with the 75th percentile at $14.98. After gas and maintenance, that analysis put most shoppers nearer $10 to $12 net. The work is also heavier than food delivery, and it ages differently.

Amazon Flex is the package lane, and its marketing line, "most drivers earn up to $18-25* an hour," is the most defensible ad on this page, because Flex pays a flat rate per scheduled block and shows it before you commit. The "up to" is still a ceiling and the asterisk still says actual earnings vary, but the block price itself is a number you can take or leave. The catch is scarcity and structure: blocks are typically two to six hours, you compete against experienced drivers grabbing them the second they drop, and the flat rate assumes you finish the route inside the block. Finish a four-hour block in three hours and your effective rate rises; get a bad route and it sinks. Amazon also deactivates aggressively for missed blocks, so treat a Flex block like a shift, not an option.

The economics lesson hiding in delivery, the one that matters for the far bank: you are doing route logistics. Dense clusters, load sequencing, time windows, vehicle wear, customer tolerance. Junk removal is route logistics with a truck and a dump fee. The graduation map later in this guide makes that connection explicitly, because delivery workers who cross that bank arrive already fluent in the hardest part of the hauling business.

First, the plank where you bring a skill instead of a car.