This blog was published on February 9, 2025 by abc
Meal delivery is often done by inexperienced people or by students who cannot do other work (students outside the EU, for example, who work as freelancers). Therefore, it is often thought that delivery is easy or something like that.
Plus: there is no job interview for delivery work. Anyone can become a delivery person and there is always a shortage of delivery people.
Other work that is similar to this is, for example, work in a factory or in horticulture or something like that (inexperienced, no interview, low-paid, physically demanding).
But still, delivery is harder than those other jobs.
There is a big difference between beginner delivery people and experienced delivery people. Beginner delivery people deliver a maximum of 1-2 orders per hour. Experienced delivery people deliver more than 2 per hour.
Meal delivery is highly dependent on how much demand there is for food during lunch and dinner hours, bad weather, weekends, and holidays.
Therefore, there are huge delivery peaks at certain times of the day. With experienced high-performance delivery people, companies like Thuisbezorgd and UberEATS can better handle those peaks.
Therefore, experienced high-performance delivery people are highly valued in delivery work. And that is why delivery people receive performance bonuses during busy periods, which almost doubles the hourly wage. In other (side) jobs, you do not have this performance dynamic.
Experienced delivery people take into account an incredible number of complex things to deliver as many orders as possible, which makes delivery incredibly difficult, but also for beginner delivery people who deliver 1-2 orders per hour, this work is difficult.
Delivery people buy and maintain their own means of transport, equipment, and clothing. The reason for this is because it cannot be otherwise. Every delivery person has a different preference for how they ride and on what.
This brings a great responsibility. You have to maintain your bike, e-bike, or scooter yourself, or have it maintained. You have to plan the costs for this yourself.
In winter, you wear different clothes than in summer.
But also for picking up the food and for correctly delivering the meals and groceries, you are solely responsible.
There is little supervision in delivery work because it is impossible for a manager to oversee everything. Fortunately, customers can of course give feedback, but delivery people are mainly responsible for how they do their work.
I think even Buddha would lose it working as a delivery person.
You have to deal with varying orders while you want to deliver as many orders as possible. Some restaurant staff are unclear about the order. Sometimes customers are unreachable or poorly reachable. Sometimes customers give wrong addresses. The list of stressful situations is endless. A lot can go wrong.
To deal with these inevitable situations in a good healthy way, you will quickly learn as a delivery person that it is best to have patience.
Another quality a delivery person must have is friendliness. Restaurant staff are more reasonable if you are friendly and remain friendly. And with customers, it is especially important that you deliver the food friendly with a thank you, you're welcome, and enjoy your meal.
Without these social skills, you will get into arguments with restaurant staff, customers, and car drivers. Your orders will be unnecessarily delayed, traffic will become more dangerous for you, and customers will give you low feedback scores.
In other comparable (side) jobs, social skills are not as important as in delivery.
If you talk to experienced delivery people (+2 years), you will quickly find out that they know an incredible amount of details about the city in which they deliver.
Which traffic lights work well and which do not. Which intersections are dangerous. Which restaurants have many orders. Which streets order a lot of food. Which times are the most profitable. How the bonuses work. What the weather does. What the best means of transport is. What the best clothing is. This list is endless.
As a delivery person, you keep learning almost endlessly, which makes you better at your job (for the bonuses).
As a delivery person, you are mostly on the road from a restaurant to a customer. So you are mostly in traffic between cars and other traffic and often in bad weather.
Bad weather conditions are precisely periods when there are more orders. Busy traffic also causes people to order more.
Precisely at times when it becomes more dangerous outside in traffic, the number of orders increases. Therefore, delivery is dangerous.
You must always stay sharp on the danger and know how to ride safely. That is much harder than it seems. Some streets are more dangerous than others, and those are things you can only learn through experience.
Only by becoming aware of the danger can you learn to ride more safely so that you take less risk.
