#DELIVEROO SPAIN SPAIN THEGUARDIAN WINDOWS#

During our shift, the pay-per-drop rate ranged from £1.80 for a “stack order” quick journey, to £5.70 for a six-mile round trip from Westminster to Shepherd’s Bush.Ĭurrently, a delivery rider might earn £60 to £80 for 12 hours’ work – in effect half of the hourly minimum wage, meaning they now need to work between 80 and 110 hours a week.

Deliveroo says it does not pay less than £2.90 for a single delivery, although if two different customers close to each other order from the same or two nearby outlets, it will sometimes offer a rider a “stack order”, in which case the rider will get a top-up fee but not an additional £2.90 minimum fee. Then the system changed: the distribution algorithm could decide which rider was allocated to each order, introducing extra competition among couriers and driving down pay for each delivery.

The pandemic was “heaven” for riders, he says: open roads, no safety concerns, orders galore. He could make £15 an hour, and sometimes up to £4,000 a month – triple what he had earned in his previous job in customer services at Waitrose. Being paid to cycle around the city he grew up in seemed like a dream job. Before 2019, Shaffi was earning £1,000 a week, with one platform offering a £7 hourly wage rate, with an additional £1 for every drop. They don’t drink the water in their country, so they think you can’t drink from the taps here,” Shaffi explains, before rejecting the request. No tip again.Īnother ping: this time it’s for six bottles of water and two litres of milk for a customer at a plush hotel nearby. Deliveroo will take £35-45 of the order, while the restaurant gets £150. This one’s for a young Saudi man: dinner at £192 from the high-end Chinese restaurant Hakkasan, a stone’s throw away. There’s no tip.Īt a palatial penthouse just off Savile Row, we drop off another order to a concierge. We are told the desk meals are chargeable to the company, which is worth billions, and will all be written off against tax. We line up alongside a row of riders as, one by one, a trickle of twentysomethings appear, all in chinos and gilets. The extravagant lunch is for an intern at a large American asset management company on Berkeley Square. Another ping: it’s for six bottles of water and two litres of milk to a plush hotel. After this long in the job, Shaffi no longer needs to use the app navigation he has memorised the road names, the shortcuts, the time it takes for traffic lights to change.

#DELIVEROO SPAIN SPAIN THEGUARDIAN WINDOWS#

With the clock ticking, we cycle through Mayfair, nipping along backroads and side passages past a Ferrari dealership and the glitzy shop windows of Gucci and Louis Vuitton. Stapled to the bag is a receipt for £84: sashimi and crab rolls. There’s some jostling among the 30 or so other riders here to find the optimal position ahead of the lunchtime rush.Īs noon rolls around, Shaffi loads up Deliveroo and UberEats on his phone within seconds, the first order pings in.įiltering, tucking, weaving our way through traffic, we arrive at Nobu, one of London’s top-end Japanese restaurants, to pick up the order. It’s almost midday on a muggy summer day, and we’re sitting on some steps at the northern end of Chinatown, fuelling ourselves with biscuits and crisps before the shift gets going.

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