u/Big_Concentrate_7260

When I first started this gig it paid well. It was only supposed to keep me alive until Spring. But my Spring job fell through so this is all I have aside from DoorDash and Shipt. With a beater car I was making good money. But now offers have tanked, and someone totaled my car, forcing me to drive my second vehicle (a large pickup). Then gas prices skyrocketed. I went from averaging $24/hour PROFIT to $16/hour profit. I have worked every day for two months. This sucks. I'm tired. Insurance takes forever to pay me. Sorry for the rant. This gig isn't good anymore.

This is insanity. It was going to a tiny town of maybe 100 people 64 miles away. New drivers see a big dollar amount and don't even think about it. That's $15-20 of gas and three hours of work, plus wear and tear on your car. I'm sick of this. We can't get good paying offers if morons keep accepting these.

It was a guy from Florida. He saw my light brown hair, blue eyes, heard my strong accent and asked me "Are you a European?" Nope. I was born and raised in northern Minnesota. Basically all of my ancestry goes back to Norway pre-1880 though, and the rest came from Sweden and Germany. Lingonberry jam on rye bread is a regular breakfast for me too. The Nordic blood runs strong in my veins.

Forgive me if this post is oft-asked, but I have not found a good discussion on the topic. While I despise taxes, there has got to be a better system for healthcare than what we currently have. I self-medicate (not in the bad sense) rather than going to the doctor because I am self-employed and simply cannot afford health insurance, which rarely even covers the entire medical bill. Meanwhile we have billions of dollars in fraud, which I dare say could cover the majprity of healthcare from the fraud in California alone. I have specifically seen Scottish patients thankful for the "free" and excellent surgeries that would cost us tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket. How do we fix this system?

It was a guy from Florida. He saw my light brown hair, blue eyes, heard my strong accent and asked me "Are you a European?" Nope. I was born and raised in northern Minnesota. Basically all of my ancestry goes back to Norway pre-1880 though, and the rest came from Sweden and Germany. Lingonberry jam on rye bread is a regular breakfast for me too. The Nordic blood runs strong in my veins.

I accepted a GMD plus groceries order that was too good to pass up ($43/16 miles/1.25 hours/10 deliveries; it's slow here lately). Three of them were grocery orders. The GMDs were set alongside the groceries, because ehere else could they go? A bunch of them were in plastic grocery bags. One lady had two packages, one in actual packaging and the other in a baggie. On the way around town they got a bit shuffled together and I ended up delivering a GMD baggie with a grocery delivery, so I had to return the other package to the store. I should have been more careful, but with the Walmart bags for packaging and mixing GMDs with groceries, it is bound to happen.

It's everyone, and all kinds of vehicles; old, young and middle aged; cars, pickups, motorcycles and semi-trucks. Everyone insists on driving the wrong way on one-way lanes in the parking lot, and normally these lanes are narrow, so only one car can pass at a time. As a Spark driver I see it happen everyday. And even if you're taking up the entire lane near the front of the stire, someone will INSIST on turning into the lane, barely squeaking by.

I took a break from Spark to do a Shipt order the other day. After completing the shopping, I processes the order. Immediately, a second or two later, the customer asked me to cancel a substitution. Just like with Spark, once the order is processed it cannot be cancelled or added to. However, customer ratings are much stricter on Shipt, and they will complain about the tiniest inconvenience. I can legitimately be deactivated due to a disgruntled customer who gives me zero stars for everything. So I asked support to cancel the order. They said it can't be done after processing. I was sick of it and I only occassionally do Shipt orders, so I flat out told support that I wasn't completing the delivery. I didn't care if they deactivated me, it wasn't worth the headache. The support agent started yelling at me for leaving the store (I did speak to a Target employee about the situation) and escalated the situation. I told them to refund the customer, it was that simple. Their supervisor eventually figured it out for me, and it turns out the first agent should have instructed me to just go to the customer service counter for the return. I did receive good pay for the hulabaloo, but at least with Spark the ratings don't matter as much and you can cancel the order from the app if you deem the situation "unsafe" due to customer harassment.

When I bought my 2015 F350 (6.7 Powerstroke) in 2020 it did not have the lower valance on it. Most likely, it had been ripped off when the previous owner hit a snow drift. At the time I thought nothing of it, so for the six years I have owned it I have not messed with it. But then I heard that it could affect fuel economy quite a bit, so yesterday I installed a new one. Holy smokes. It raised my MPG from 14 to nearly 16, and the cab is a whole lot quieter. It used to be that if I played podcasts on my phone while driving (no bluetooth or AUX connected) I could barely hear it. Now I can listen no problem while driving. When diesel is over $5/gallon you better keep the valance on, plus it reduces headaches.

I haven't found a recent post on this topic. How strict are the timeframes for GMD deliveries? Say for instance that I pick up the packages but then run some errands for an hour or two while in town, and then start the deliveries, will I be marked as late? Last night I had a GMD return while 35 miles away from the store (I took it back toward home, I live halfway between the two towns) and support said that I could complete the return tomorrow (today as I write this) as long as it is within 24 hours of the original pickup time. Is it also a 24 hour delivery window?

It would seem far more efficient than being at the back of a line of cars, only to see the light turn red by the time the car in front if you has moved an inch.

I picked up a single item GMD, planning to place it in the back seat. There was a gas station hotdog bun in my passenger seat (it was a bit dry so I was going to throw it away). The dispenser came up to my passenger door, opened it up (I told him to, I have crank windows...it's a base model) and flopped the bag directly on top of the ketchup-covered hotdog bun. Gee, thanks for taking care of the customer's items. Just because I can't roll the window down from the driver's seat doesn't give you license to trash the customer's items.

For context, I often take a GMD route at the end of the day that brings me back home (it's a town a few miles beyond my tiny town, but basically it turns into a $50/20 mile route since I'm headed that way anyway). I don't live terribly far from the store (about fifteen miles) but it takes 25-30 minutes to get there. Tonight a customer left instructions saying essentially "Just give me my sh*t, you drivers are idiots. Screw you, and do your dam* JOB." So I messaged them nicely but sternly explaining that we are independent contractors and that Walmart does not dispatch the same driver(s) every time, so this hostile rhetoric is unfair, unneeded, and grounds for returning the items to the store. Honestly, I wanted to return it purely out of principle, but it made better financial sense to complete the delivery. So many customers treat delivery drivers like scum. It's tiring.