Reaching a Million Pt. 2

December 25th 2020.

I had the startling realization that I had not bought a single Christmas gift for anyone. Not my mom, step dad, wife or even my 7 month old son. I just couldn’t afford to buy anyone a gift. No one made me feel bad about this, my wife understood and I was young enough to not be obligated to give gifts to my parents yet but I still wanted to.

This was the final straw. The straw that broke the camel's back. The tipping point. The boiling point. Whatever idiom you want to use you can but this pissed me off to an unreasonable point. I didn’t know why I was so mad but there I was sitting in my living room at 3AM (I work nights) fuming with anger because I was not financially well off enough to buy a single Christmas gift. It was time for a change, a big change.

I turned on my computer, that had been bought with credit, and googled “how to make extra money fast” and spent hours searching the web. I signed up for every single service that was recommended. Doordash, Uber-eats, Instacart, Shipt, driving for Uber, driving for Lyft. The list was seemingly endless and I continued signing up for each one of them. My thought was that if I signed up for enough of these that I would be able to spend all of my days off doing something that made me money.

I electronically signed what felt like hundreds of documents giving consent to these companies to look into my uneventful background to ensure I wasn’t going to murder their clients as I delivered their burrito to them. A few days later I had passed every single one of these checks and was onto the next step, waiting for my shopper cards to show up in the mail. I got a T-shirt from Shipt, grocery bags from Instacart, an insulated bag from Doordash, a hat from some other service that I can no longer remember and tens of cards to use when paying for products I didn’t buy.

I had some 25 apps on my phone pestering me for my time all day every day. Little did I know being in a small town meant not much happens and most people don’t use fancy smartphone apps designed for people with expendable income.

I checked Shipt constantly for an order and got exactly zero unless I wanted to drive 20 miles to complete a 10 dollar order.

Doordash fired me after day three because I didn’t complete a delivery since the second a delivery popped up someone else took it and left me dry.

Lyft to this day is still not in my area yet you can sign up to be a driver in this area.

I ubered one guy to a drug house and decided that I was never doing that again.

Nothing was working. I was doing everything in my power to make money yet it seemed like every odd I could think of was stacked against me. Which is when I finally received my Instacart shopper card.

This was a saving grace as it checked all the right boxes. Available in all surrounding townships and the town I live in. Decent pay, easy to use, little to no interaction with people. It sounded too good to be true.

I completed my first order on a morning after a 12 hour shift. It was a medium sized order from my local Krogers. It was easy enough finding everything but when something was out of stock this customer requested that I call them to get an alternative item of their choosing. Kroger was out of canned pears and had no Eggo waffles. So I called the customer three times before they finally answered in a snarky tone. They scolded me for bothering them and told me to just get their groceries and leave them alone and proceeded to hang up on me.

I was still enthusiastic about my job though. I was getting paid a base pay of 7 dollars and whatever the customer wanted to tip me. This particular customer had indicated they were going to tip 15 dollars so I would be making 22 dollars for about 45 minutes of work. This was a good thing I had going here! I made my exchanges and purchased the items. The customer indicated they wanted me to hand the items to them so I waited at the door, and waited and waited for them to answer. They didn’t and the Instacart app prompted me to call them to ensure they were ok with me leaving their items. I pushed the call button and held the phone up to my ear. At this time the woman came crashing through the front doors yelling at me to stop calling her and demanded to know what was so important to call her about.

I explained to her the situation and she told me I was wrong every step of the way. She then took her groceries and slammed the door in my face. I was still happy. I would gladly deal with rude people for roughly 25 dollars an hour.

The next day I went to check my Instacart earnings and then reality hit me again. It said I had 7 dollars pending to be deposited into my bank account.”7 dollars” I thought “what happened to the 15 dollar tip”. Well apparently with Instacart you can change your tip for up to 24 hours after the order has been completed so you can correctly tip the service you received. Meaning every order I did had the possibility of only earning my 7 dollars meaning I was making less than minimum wage working harder than our politicians do.

I lost all motivation to work any of the gigs I had signed up for and just sat at home, watching my bank account become empty every time I got paid and wishing I could go back in time. “This is no way to make a million dollars” I thought but I did nothing to change it.

As a side note, Reddit is my favorite social media platform and the only one I use. There is a subreddit for everything so I decided to look up Instacart on Reddit and sure enough there was a community for it. Posts talking about amazing $150 tips, or people being given $300 grocery orders and more success stories. These are all from people who were in big cities and getting paid almost 50 dollars a delivery. The average payout for my deliveries was $15.

There were also horror stories on the site, talking about the same thing I had experienced. People claiming to tip $50 and then removing the entire tip making the order almost worthless after the money you need to save for taxes. More of these stories than the good ones which discouraged me even further. I scrolled through a little farther till I found a now deleted post that peaked my interest. It was titled “How I became debt free with Instacart”. This post was literally made for me, so naturally I clicked on it and read through the content of it which was uninspiring. Until the end, at the end the person said that their time using Instacart 10% of people were jerks and removed the tips after the order was complete. 89% were honest and gave the tip that was agreed upon when they accepted the order and 1% tipped more after being given good service. Almost 90% of the deliveries were fine and they got paid the predetermined amount. This provided me with some hope and the boost I needed to start taking this grocery delivery thing seriously.

Just to be clear, I am not a financial advisor nor do I recommend you attempt anything I do yourself because I have literally no idea what I’m doing.