Spark Driver 4+

One thing that could change is when you get a batch, we could decide which order to deliver first. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense the order of the deliveries/Also I’ve noticed the same drivers always get the shop and deliveries and never take the curbsides pickups. They just sit in the parking lot waiting for them. The store doesn’t want us sitting in there parking lot. I feel if you’re within a 2 mile radius of the store the orders should be passed out evenly amongst the drivers. Another thing is when you assign orders from stores that I’m so far away from. It would cost me money to take those offers. So it ruins my acceptance rating. Maybe send those orders out unassigned. Example: you send me an order from a store that’s 9 miles away and the offer is for $8.00 for 7.8 miles. So I reject it and it ruins my acceptance rating. One more thing it’s not fair for the customer to take away the tip. We work so hard especially in this heat of 100 plus degrees and we do everything right and they take it away. It’s called tip baiting. They add a large tip so the driver will accept it and then they take it away. That’s one of the biggest thing we drivers do not like. Thank you for listening

Firstly let talk about the tips, I think our driver right is violated by the customers and the app itself I mean Walmart. The contract is an agreed upon price prior to the completion of the orders. Some customer I strongly believe inflate the tips knowing that when they get their order their will remove it to nothing. I call this manipulation and unethical behavior. Next thing is the location. We suggest that the trip to the store be at least fairly covered. Gas is expensive. Some customers have 3 to 4 cars yet they are expecting driver to deliver them without receiving a fair tip. If the delivery is to be free, it should not be covered at the driver’s expenses. We take our job more seriously than a 9 to 5. I personally work up to 15 hours a day sometimes even more. The other thing is the distance and may be the amount of items. Free shipping does not mean workout session for delivery drivers. Some customers exaggerate in the amount of items they order and worse those customers leave in apartments. They do not usually like coming to help carry their own orders when you are doing the back and forth move to satisfy them. On top of that they will discreetly remove the tip your thought you might receive and after all that you get more frustrated. The last updates mess up the order dispatching. We literally do not receive orders at the same rate as when we started. Something need to be done.

App is pretty user friendly, and you can actually make some pretty decent money being a Spark Driver. However, one major downside that I’ve noticed pertains to the time frame drivers are given from the moment an offer is accepted and when they check into a pick up spot. Particularly when it comes to EXPRESS/ASAP Delivery orders and the time limit you have to start the trip once you’ve accepted the order before you get a notification saying that your trip is at risk of being delivered late, and if you don’t start soon it may be reassigned.

I live about a mile from Walmart so it only takes 5 minutes to get there, and in that amount of time I’ll have already been sent 2 of those notifications…I mean, the time frame is so small that by the time I pull into a designated pick-up spot, the offer has been reassigned to another driver…or put back into the “Open Offers” queue. This small time frame is particularly unfair when you consider the fact that, even if you make it to Walmart before your offer is reassigned, the ASAP delivery isn’t even finished being shopped for so it’s usually a 30 minute wait for the order to be ready - and even after it’s been marked as “Ready” most delivery drivers get stuck waiting even longer (like 1-2 hours) before their order is brought out, or they bite the loss and just cancel the order…which means your Metrics take a negative hit but at least you might still have a shot at catching new offers and actually earning money.