Mythical earnings: how metropolitan couriers work in a self-isolation regime

More and more Russians began to resort to home delivery services so as not to violate the regime of self-isolation. Cafes, restaurants and many small shops work only for export. In this regard, the demand for courier services has grown. According to the portal "Work.ru", only in Moscow in early April, more than 1.4 thousand new courier vacancies were opened, and the number of responses to this position increased by a third.

RT correspondent studied the offers in the market of courier services and tried himself in the role of a delivery man. The services Yandex.Lavka and Yandex.Food, Delivery Club, Profi.ru, Deliveryist, Peshkariki, YouDo and Bringo were chosen for the experiment, since they do not need to be employed. However, it turned out that it was not so easy to get to work, and the information about the fabulous earnings of couriers turned out to be a myth.

There are more couriers

So, to start working with the Delivery Club service, you need a medical book. However, it is now virtually impossible to obtain this document officially under conditions of universal self-isolation and medical workload.

The next in the list of services were Peshkariki. But the application on the phone for some reason did not work - it crashed immediately after entering the Profile tab. Neither repeated reinstallations, nor the study of forums, nor reboot of the phone helped. As a result, orders from the Peshkariks could not be obtained.

At Bringo, I managed to quickly register and learn online. But to get started, confirmation of the account from the service was required. Within three days from the date of registration, the company did not receive a call.

With Yandex, the problem arose in another way - the courier application only works on Android phones, which not everyone has, and I was among them. In addition to the phone, the courier still requires a travel, Telegram messenger. The corporate form is issued by the service. Since I myself could not register in the service, I decided to call a courier - order a burger and find out everything about the work firsthand.

The order was delivered by a native of Central Asia. According to him, he used to work at a construction site, but a month and a half ago he lost his job. At Yandex.Food, a young person earns an average of 700 to 1,500 rubles per day. The number of orders can vary greatly and depends on the day of the week, time of day, and on the district of Moscow in which you work.

According to him, the Western and Central districts are considered the most profitable, but he himself lives in the East, so he works in it. Since he does not have a driver’s license, he carries orders on foot, although Yandex can give couriers a moped or a bicycle to couriers. In addition, in Moscow, delivery companies can now use bicycle rental for free.

According to him, since the start of the epidemic, the earnings of colleagues have not increased, except that there are more couriers themselves and everyone is afraid of the coronavirus, so they leave the order at the door and leave, waiting for the client to pick it up (Delivery and Yandex give the couriers protective equipment and hygiene and recommend their use).

Unprofitable orders

However, the story of the courier from Yandex.Food did not interfere with the experiment, and I decided to try my luck at Profi.ru. I installed the application, registered, filled out the questionnaire, but it turned out that there were very few courier offers in the service.

All available requests from customers for one-time deliveries were unprofitable. For example, for a hundred rubles, go to the store for cigarettes at the other end of the city or for an amount up to 800 rubles, take a bag of groceries and take it 100 km to the Moscow region. Some of these orders hung on the list of “offered” for several days, because no one took them.

Another feature of the service was discovered: in order to respond to a customer’s request, a potential courier also needs to pay for it. The average cost of a “click" is 10 rubles. If the customer has not hired you, the money will not be returned. That is, in case of bad luck, you can go "minus".

Another service where I decided to try my luck was YouDo with a similar system of paid responses. But only if in Profi.ru you had to pay 10 rubles or more for a “click” (depending on the value of the order), then in YouDo - already 64 rubles.

Having put 400 rubles in the account, I began to look for orders for automobile deliveries. But it turned out that the competition is very high for good orders - people with hundreds of completed applications, an ideal reputation and dozens of positive reviews are applying for them. At the same time, the site also contains obvious mocking offers, for example, flying to St. Petersburg for two thousand rubles, buying a chocolate bar in Duty Free and returning to Moscow or taking a living python to Magnitogorsk for 2.5 thousand rubles.

With four attempts, I could not accept a single order, even a mocking one.

A thousand rubles for four orders

The only service where it was possible to take up the execution of orders almost immediately was “Deliver”. After filling out the profile, questionnaire and registration confirmation, I was offered to receive a sanitizer and masks (they are given out free of charge at four points in Moscow), and then the work began.

The first order was an application from one of the Spas TV channel journalists who sent a small box to her friends. What was in it, I do not know. It took about half an hour to complete the order, and they paid me 130 rubles for it.

The second order was offered by the service itself - it was necessary to take the bottle with shampoo to Vykhino (drive 20 kilometers). As it turned out, the sender is selling hair care products online. We managed to gain 202 rubles for this order; it took about 40 minutes to complete it, although the roads were empty.

Further, with the search for orders there were difficulties. Delivery offers were, but not in Vykhino. So I had to return closer to the center of Moscow. A suitable order came across Sokolniki metro station. The owner of the flower shop, Ksenia, sent a bouquet to a friend on Preobrazhenskaya Square. With this delivery, I helped out 138 rubles.

The highest paid was the last order. The young woman needed help when moving from Frunzenskaya to Kuzminok. For 600 rubles, I had to take three rather heavy bags to the car from the eighth floor of the house with an idle elevator and deliver them to a new address.

After this order, I decided to pause and calculate the profit. As a result, for 4.5 hours of work, it was possible to complete four deliveries and earn 1070 rubles. Of these, about 300 went to gasoline. Of course, if you learn more, then your work efficiency will increase. But since in reality the cost of deliveries does not exceed an average of 300 rubles, it is hardly possible to earn more than two thousand rubles a day. So the information about the fabulous earnings of Moscow couriers in the era of coronavirus seems to be a myth.