Last Sunday Blitz Pricing was active (2.25x) and I picked up a cup of Stumptown coffee for a gentlemen, Jesse. Jesse lives in Northwest Portland. Since it was raining and parking is limited Downtown Portland by Stumptown, I suspected he didn’t want to deal with the hassle.
I made $10.40 for getting Jesse’s coffee. About an hour later, I founded out he had tipped me $10. I practically made $20.40 for about 30 minutes worth of work. I was grateful but also blown away. The cup of coffee costed $4. Who would pay over $20 extra for a cup of coffee? Stumptown coffee is premium quality coffee but still.
Since this delivery, I have been noticing a similar pattern with other jobs on Postmates. A lot of their users have been paying (and tipping) more money than their food or drive would cost.
Just exactly who are these customers? They’re millennials, people who are between 18 and 36 years old. This demographic is also known as Generation Y. In 2013, Joel Stein of TIMES Magazine described them as the “Me Me Me generation”. They’re extremely tech-savvy, educated, and their attitudes toward life is very contrary to Corporate America’s expectations. Millennials have a lot of expectations from brands in this technology age. They expect one hour delivery. Iconic companies like McDonald’s are trying to keep up with the times to provide on-demand services to millennials. Corporate America is trying to figure out how to adapt the work place to millennials and marketers are adapting their strategies to millennials.
When you think about it, it all makes sense because the people creating the technology behind Postmates, Caviar, Doordash, Instacart, and other on-demand platforms are mostly millennials with computer science degrees. Silicon Valley is saturated with these millennial techies, who are coding software as solutions for the things that, to them, are the inefficiencies of the world. Naturally, their customers would be like-minded. George Packer of the New Yorker wrote that “…the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.”
Thinking about who you’re delivering for might not be how you want to spend your free time, but I personally believe that knowing the characteristics of who you’re delivering food for may come in handy when we’re trying to maximize our income. If you know your customers and their expectations, you can provide better customer services and earn more tips.
