When you start to evaluate how profitable it is to do something or compare this profit in one region with another it is a good idea to check the cost of living in these places. So in this city where I decided to cycle as a delivery engineer (and this sounds very funny when you have been working as a systems engineer for the last 20 years and after that you are promoted to the next level of your career) they have between $1000 and $1500 median salary after tax.

An advertisement in the local media says you will be able to earn $2000 or even $3000 per month. This is true but with certain conditions – you will obtain this if you work with your own vehicle, and pay for gasoline, insurance, driver license, parking and so on yourself. And of course you never have problems like traffic jams, you can park almost anywhere and your clients do everything on time.

Generally speaking, the delivery business is based on e-bike. So if you work on foot or use your car you earn nothing. Or more precisely you have costs for gas or new shoes. If you compare e-bike with bicycles, the first lets you deliver further, faster and a greater volume with less effort. This means e-bike can make 20% more. Why not even more? Because you spent only 30% time on the road and 70% waiting for an order in a restaurant or searching for an apartment that is usually protected by security guards, gates, doors, bells and so on.

Whats the hourly rate? It depends on day of week, time, and district. The maximum profit is on Friday and Saturday between 11.00 am and 8.00 pm. And here we are talking about $4 per hour for a bicycle and $6 for an e-bike (bugger-all isn’t it!). Of course you may have some company bonus or tips these days from $0.5 to $3 per order for some amount of delivery but this is just manipulation. I mean no one wants to work for $6 times 180 hours per month (which regular citizens spend on casual expenses every month on average. $1080 on e-bike exposed to weather on the city streets where it can be +30C or -30C, rain, snow, wind and burning sun. This same salary you can earn in a grocery shop as a cashier which is not an easy job either but compared with cyclists they do not need to push the pedals in rain and snow. By the way, in such environments your equipment like smartphones and e-bike will probably die quite soon.

Today in the city I can see a lot of e-bikers with one, two or even three square boxes hurrying to deliver orders to customers. What lies behind this involves more tragedy than just a regular business. This is an unfair game of delivery men, customers, producers and order aggregators. They try to cheat each other. There are many ways to do something illegal or underhand like deliver drugs, steal something or not pay, or be recorded on the stairs with the business logo on the clothes doing something unsavoury.

I found two very interesting things that I had never before checked closely. The first is when you go to the back door of a luxury restaurant to collect an order and cycle to an apartment with high tech security and a Ferrari parked in a yard. And the second and opposite is when you deliver a $10 order from fastfood to a house with almost 6000 flats.