Look, Ma, No Fleet!

Copy in abundance Under the Rug License

By saying nothing about gasoline or per-mile reimbursement, Doordash quietly sticks their Dashers with the entire cost of owning and operating a fleet.

Google "Doordash statistics". You will see several similar looking pages about startups, each saying:

Doordash made between $900M and $1B in revenue in 2019, with an average order of $37
Doordash delivered 100 Million orders between 2013 and 2018. There are 200,000 dashers.

Sanity check: $1 billion/$37each = 27M orders. Ok, well, that lines up reasonably with 100M orders from 2013 to 2018, while increasing through the 20M/year mark.

Sanity check #2: 20M/200K = 100. So each dasher gets 100 orders/year, or 2/week? Uh… Okaaaay

Let's consider a 20-million-order year. If it takes 5 miles to deliver an order (one site says Doordash claims 6.8), and the average car gets 40mpg, goes 200,000 miles in its lifetime, and costs $20,000:

20 million times 5 miles each == 100 million miles. 100M miles / 40 mpg = 2.5 million gallons. That times $3.50 per gallon == $8,750,000 in gas.

100,000,000 / 200,000 = 500 new cars reduced to the junkyard. 500 x $20,000 = $10M in new cars.

Consumer reports and AAA tell us it costs $1K on avg to maintain a car for each 15K miles driven.

100,000,000 miles / 15,000 = 6,666.666. Times $1000 == $6,666,666 in maintenance and repairs.

We see that a 100-million-mile year represents around $9M in gas, $10M to purchase, and $6M in repairs, so close to 10+9+6 == $25 million. Therefore, $25M/year must have been funded by the Dashers (or their loving parents haha) for each of the last 7 years, and if the Dashers redid their maths they would find that it is they who are paying Doordash not Doordash paying them. The cost of owning and operating a fleet which Doordash has saved in 7 years is closing on a quarter billion dollars and racing towards a half.

Doordash does an excellent job of running a delivery company without a fleet. One way they accomplish this is by surreptitiously extracting the life out of the car that Mommy and Daddy bought for Sweet16. Hence in their ads for dashers we hear: ”It’s great for students!”

Conclusion: Doordash includes a partial modified Ponzi Scheme. It is partial because it is not the company’s only source of funding. It is modified because in a classic Ponzi Scheme, the investors get fleeced in a revolving door, whereas at Doordash, the dashers get fleeced in a revolving door.

Proof that it is a revolving door: Nobody can afford to stay at a job with a negative rate of pay.

6 May 2023 www.tinyurl.com/dougondoordash rev 1.7