DoorDash's delivery robots need a hand.
Some workers in areas where DoorDash is using its Dot delivery robot are receiving offers through the DoorDash app to load them up. While the vehicles can navigate miles to delivery destinations, it's the few feet between a restaurant's pickup counter and the curb outside where delivery workers intervene.
Devena Bybee, a DoorDash gig worker in Mesa, Arizona, said that she received one such offer in early July. The company is using the robots to make deliveries in the Phoenix area.
Bybee drove about two miles to a restaurant, picked up an order, and placed it in the Dot robot as it waited in the parking lot, she said. She took photos of each step to document the process, and the gig took five minutes, she said. DoorDash paid her about $5.
Bybee was surprised that Doordash asked her to complete the task instead of a restaurant worker who was already on-site. "I just don't see how it's efficient," she said.
On Facebook groups for DoorDash workers, some posts show screenshots of similar gig offers over the past month.
"I would never do a five-dollar order, but I was really curious about this and I was super close to the restaurant," reads one July 6 post showing a robot-loading gig at a Burger King in Scottsdale, Arizona. The poster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
"Dashers are essential to our platform and will continue completing the majority of deliveries even as our autonomous technology scales," a DoorDash spokesperson said.
"This limited pilot is designed to support merchants during busy periods, while creating more earning opportunities for Dashers outside of traditional deliveries," the spokesperson added.
A sticking point for automation
The loading gigs are the latest example of DoorDash workers stepping in when autonomous vehicles can't complete a job on their own.
Some workers received offers from DoorDash to close open doors on Waymo's self-driving cars in Atlanta, Business Insider reported in February. Waymo plans to add a self-closing function to its vehicles in the future, the companies said at the time.
Dot, which DoorDash unveiled in September, is roughly the size of a baby stroller and can hold up to 30 pounds of cargo. The robot can navigate both roads and sidewalks to travel between restaurants and customers' homes.
Handing off orders from restaurants to robots is a challenge to the rollout of autonomous deliveries, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said last August, shortly before the company debuted Dot.
While loading an order only takes a few minutes, restaurants that receive lots of robot-delivered orders might have an incentive to outsource the task to DoorDash, said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
DoorDash's gig workers, who are independent contractors, don't receive the same employee benefits and hourly pay rate that most restaurant workers do, Bruno said.
"Multiplied over the course of a year or more, there's probably a real savings," he said.
Bybee, the DoorDash worker in Arizona, said that the loading gig left her more confident that humans are still needed for delivery work.
"There's only so much right now that the robots can do," she said.
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Alex Bitter is a senior retail reporter covering the gig economy, food, and retail. His work focuses major gig delivery and ride-hailing apps, including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Walmart's Spark. He is interested in everything from what it's like to work on the apps to the companies' business strategies.Some of his recent stories feature gig workers who have been deactivated on the apps, DoorDash hiring traditional employees to make deliveries, gig workers' use of bots, and gig work expanding into new professions, such as nursing.Alex has also written about Aldi's US expansion, Starbucks' turnaround efforts, and the fallout from Kraft-Heinz's budget cutting. Convenience store chain Sheetz ended its "smile policy" after his reporting.Before joining Insider in September 2020, he wrote about consumer and retail companies for S&P Global Market Intelligence. He's a graduate of the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and grew up on the Big Island.Alex lives in the Washington, DC, area, where you can find him studying ancient coins or searching for Civil War artifacts with his metal detector in his free time.Got a tip? Reach out at [email protected] or via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (808) 854-4501.
