How Much Can You Make Delivering Food in Australia in a Day?

Hi everyone, welcome to Cold-Knowledge Blind Box. Today we're talking about a story of delivering food in Australia.

"Worst case, I'll just go deliver food." You've definitely heard that one before.

We always assume delivery work has a low barrier to entry, is easy to pick up, and still pays well, so it's everyone's fallback plan. The protagonist of this episode, Hengrui in Australia, didn't buy it. Is there any job in this world that you can do well without any research and that still pays a high income?

He searched online and noticed a strange pattern: the people who had actually done delivery work never wrote about how it really felt, and the people who did write about it had never actually done delivery work.

So he made a decision: worst case, I'll go deliver food for one day.

Before setting off, Hengrui puffed out his chest and promised all his coworkers: "I'll use what I earn delivering food to buy every one of you a bubble tea."

Nobody could have guessed that after this one day, he would realize the industry was nothing like what he had imagined.

II. The Mentor

To keep his first delivery from going badly, a colleague at the company who had spent three years as an executive at a food delivery platform found Hengrui an experienced rider as a mentor.

The mentor arrived right on time at nine in the morning. The first thing Hengrui noticed was his dark, sun-tanned skin and his few words. He looked a bit reserved. But after the mentor said just one thing, Hengrui stopped underestimating him.

Before he went abroad, this mentor had racked up debts worth six figures back home. Over the past two years, delivering food in Australia one order at a time, he had paid every last cent back.

In delivery circles, many riders call him a "master," because he often pulls in more than US$10,000 in a single month.

Hengrui's heart skipped a beat. This ordinary-looking delivery guy had a story he could never have imagined.

But what surprised him even more was that the first thing the mentor did was not teach him how to accept orders. Instead, he started inspecting Hengrui's gear.

III. Lesson One: Your Gear Is Survival

The mentor first checked whether the electric scooter was fully charged, whether the helmet was buckled, whether the headlight worked, and whether the insulated box could be secured. He went through the power bank, the Bluetooth earphones and the water. He even checked whether the navigation app on Hengrui's phone had voice guidance turned on.

Hengrui had prepared well for those. But when the mentor asked, "Where are your gloves, your phone mount, and the big lock for your bike?", he was completely lost.

He hadn't thought of the gloves or the phone mount. But why a big lock? The bike is right under your butt. Who's going to steal it?

The mentor looked at him as if he were an idiot, then said something Hengrui would remember all day:

"You have to remember every single thing I'm telling you right now. Every item I'm checking with you is a hardship I went through in the past."

The phone mount is a must. When you're delivering, you have to watch the road and the traffic lights, keep the best route in your head, and many reroutes come with voice prompts from your phone. You can't ride while staring down at a screen.

Gloves: when you drive a car, you barely notice the weather. But when you're riding an electric scooter through the streets of Melbourne with cold wind hitting both hands, you'll be shivering. And when you instinctively want to shove your hands into your pockets, the chance of falling goes up.

As for why you need a lock, the mentor simply said, "You'll find out soon enough."

That was the first lesson in delivery work, and it was entirely about gear. Over the rest of that day, Hengrui found that every item and every rule the mentor had mentioned played out like a prophecy, each one teaching him a harsh lesson.

When the gear wasn't complete, the mentor went home to fetch the rest. Before leaving, he told Hengrui: "Don't sit around while I'm gone. Start trying to take orders."

As soon as the mentor was gone, Hengrui eagerly opened the delivery app and waited for his first order to show up.

IV. Standing Under the Office Tower, Not One Order

He stood by the curb holding his phone. One minute passed. Nothing happened.

He kept picking up his phone, putting it down, then picking it up again, afraid of missing an app notification. Five more minutes went by, still no order. He began to wonder. He was standing downstairs from his office, in a cluster of office towers, and he could see a few riders riding past. One of them even walked straight into his building.

A thought came to him: it's not that there are no orders, it's that the orders don't want to come to him.

When ten more minutes passed without a single order, Hengrui started to panic. He suspected that because his was a new account, the platform didn't trust him enough to assign orders, so it was deliberately holding them back. He opened the app again and again to check. Every time, his status showed he was accepting orders. So why wasn't a single order being assigned to him?

Just as he was starting to lose faith in everything, the mentor came back with the gear.

When he heard that Hengrui had been waiting for orders downstairs from his own office, the mentor was first stunned, then shook his head. "If you wait here, you might never get an order in your whole life."

Hengrui found this strange. He pointed at the riders who had just passed by. "Clearly there are plenty of riders bringing orders into our building. Why don't I get any?"

The mentor explained the core logic of the food delivery platform:

"The order isn't assigned to the rider closest to the customer. It's assigned to the rider closest to the merchant."

Where you're standing is far away from the delivery heat map. To really boost your order efficiency, you have to get into the center of the heat map, and that area is where the merchants are most concentrated. Platforms never care whether you're close to the customer. What they actually care about is whether you're close to the merchant, because every delivery starts the moment you pick up the food. Whoever is closer to the merchant, the platform sees as more efficient.

Hengrui began to understand: the first mistake he had made was already locked in the moment he opened the app. Even if he waited under that office building until the end of time, he might never get his first order.

This seemingly zero-threshold industry had a whole business logic behind it.

V. Milk Tea Street, Not Chinatown

"Hurry up and come with me," the mentor said.

Hengrui put his phone away, got on his scooter, and followed the mentor toward the real battlefield. Riding behind the mentor, he immediately felt his efficiency go up.

On the way to the city center, though, he had a question: "Why did you take me to the milk tea street instead of the area in Chinatown where the restaurants are most concentrated?"

The mentor smiled and said, "Guess."

Only later did Hengrui realize that "Guess" was the mentor's catchphrase. Having trained so many delivery apprentices, he had carved this coaching-style, question-first approach into his bones. And honestly, the method really did help Hengrui quickly grasp how the delivery business works.

He thought about it for a while, then admitted: "Honestly, I don't know."

The mentor looked helpless and stared at him as if to say, "Come on, figure it out." "Think about it. It's an hour and a half before lunch. The restaurants in Chinatown haven't even fired up their kitchens yet, so orders come out slowly. Even if someone places an order right now, you'd have to wait a long time for it."

"But this street is different. It's mostly coffee shops and milk tea shops, plus lots of offices. At this time of day, many office workers have just finished their second or third morning meeting and need a milk tea or a coffee to perk up. So this is peak time for coffee and milk tea."

"It's only when lunchtime comes that you'll see the heat map really shift to the areas around the restaurants."

Hengrui was deeply impressed. Isn't this what everyone in business always says: wherever there's demand, there's a market? The delivery industry had studied market demand to the extreme. The algorithm forces you to understand what kind of product the market needs at different points in the day.

Just as the words left his mouth, ding-dong: he finally received his first order.

Just as the mentor had said, the first order was a coffee. Hengrui almost held his breath as he tapped the screen, afraid his finger would slip and he'd lose the order.

VI. The Science of a Cup of Coffee

While coaching him through taking orders, the mentor reminded him: be careful with the famous coffee shops. Their baristas are short-staffed. They have to handle the customers inside, the delivery counter, and the platform orders all at once. At places like that, a single coffee can take twenty minutes or even half an hour. If the shop is famous, steer clear of it.

After picking up the coffee, the mentor reminded him to check it carefully. Many shops don't put the lids on properly, and some coffee shops with no delivery experience don't provide cup holders. Food can shake a bit without much harm, but if the coffee sloshes around a few times on the road, by the time it reaches the customer it may be only half full.

Hengrui worried: "What if I spill it?"

The mentor calmly replied: "So what if you spill it? Everyone's had that experience. But if you spill it, you might get a complaint, and once you get a bad review, it hurts your rating. If your rating drops, your order efficiency and your future income can both suffer."

VII. Threading Between Steel Beasts

To earn his first delivery fee, Hengrui didn't hesitate and followed the navigation straight to the destination.

As he zipped between buildings on his scooter, a strong feeling rose up in him: delivery looks dangerous from the outside, but in reality it's not safe at all.

What terrified him most was riding through the passages in central Melbourne. He had to stay on the line between the parking lane and the car lane. On one side, you worry that a car in the parking lane will suddenly fling its door open, so you want to stay as far from them as possible. But when you get too far from them, you drift too deep into the car lane.

On one side are cars that could knock you flying if a door swings open. On the other are small cars speeding past. When you're squeezed in the middle, there's no sense of safety at all.

And to keep up your efficiency, you often have to share the road with buses and trams. When a tram or bus rolls past right next to you, it feels like a steel beast. If it turns even slightly, it can pull you under.

But delivery riders need efficiency. To go faster, you have to keep overtaking in the city center. When you're just starting out and don't know the roads yet, you can't stop to look around. Your eyes have to watch the navigation, the traffic lights, the cars and pedestrians, and you still have to keep glancing at the orders on your phone to see whether anything has changed.

Once you lose focus for even a second, an accident can happen at any time.

According to data cited in the video, in Melbourne alone, there have been more than 917 crashes involving delivery riders over the past seven years. Across Australia, 20 delivery riders have died in recent years. (Note: these figures were cited verbally by the video host and have not been independently verified.)

Even more heartbreaking, because these riders are not employees of the delivery platforms, many accidents go unnoticed. Their families end up receiving only a pitifully small amount in compensation.

Right after the day's deliveries wrapped up, the mentor sent Hengrui a video. In their riders' group chat, someone had posted footage of a rider being knocked down by a car at a traffic light that day. Hengrui watched it and felt a deep sadness.

VIII. Tickets and Thieves

Traffic isn't the only danger. Delivery riders have plenty of enemies.

Take tickets, for example. The mentor warned him again and again: the scooter feels fast, but the moment you reach a traffic light or a pedestrian crossing, you must get off and push it. If the police catch you riding an electric scooter on the footpath, you'll get an A$400 fine. The mentor said that even someone as careful as him had been fined twice.

Besides the police, thieves are a lifelong enemy for many delivery riders. Australia seems like a high-welfare country, so you'd expect very little theft. In reality, though, the thieves who specialize in targeting delivery riders are hard to guard against.

Almost every delivery rider has had an electric scooter stolen. Why? Because many riders take a gamble when they pick up or drop off food. They think, "I'll only be inside for a few dozen seconds, there's no way it'll happen to me." But they don't know there's a thief outside, watching riders exactly like them. The moment you walk in, he rides off with your bike.

Some riders even find their scooter still parked where they left it, only to discover the battery has been pried out, because an electric scooter battery can fetch several hundred Australian dollars. On his delivery route, Hengrui even came across a stripped, half-destroyed bike that had just been stolen.

The most ironic part is that these riders are both victims of the thieves and customers of the thieves. Electric scooters are essential to every delivery rider, so thieves have found that every new scooter they steal and post online can be sold at a high price within a day or two.

IX. First Earnings: A$4.5

After twenty minutes of bumbling along, Hengrui finally earned his first delivery income: A$4.5.

He was overjoyed, because the money had been so hard to earn.

But after delivering that order, he quietly did the math in his head. He had worked for more than an hour and earned only A$4.5. At this rate, he would never earn over US$10,000 a month in his whole life.

So he couldn't help asking the mentor again: "What exactly do I have to do to earn over US$10,000 a month from deliveries, like you?"

The mentor smiled mysteriously and told him: to become a high-income delivery rider, you have to learn to do "stacked orders."

X. Stacked Orders: The MBA of Food Delivery

What are stacked orders? If you've ever ordered food, you've probably had this odd experience: the app says your rider has already picked up your food, but he just won't come, and he dawdles around over there. You might even suspect he's deliberately dragging out your wait.

Hengrui had wondered about this too. Then he saw with his own eyes several riders with two or three orders lined up by their feet, and he finally understood: they weren't dawdling. They were improving efficiency by taking several orders and delivering several orders at once. That's what stacked orders are.

True experts even keep accepting new orders while they're on the road, using each new order to plan their next route.

Soon enough, Hengrui got his own first stacked order. He had just picked up the xiaolongbao a customer had ordered from a restaurant and was about to start the scooter when, ding, a new order popped up on his phone. His heart skipped: What's this? Is it urging me to hurry up and finish this one so I can go grab that one?

The mentor immediately warned him: "Don't even think about it. Accept it right away."

The mentor explained that when a stacked order like this appears, it's because the system already knows where you're headed next. It found an order whose route roughly overlaps with yours, and it pushed that order to you first.

Half-believing, Hengrui tapped the app to accept it. Sure enough, the next pickup point was right on the way to his drop-off. So instead of going straight to deliver the food he was already carrying, he stopped at the next pickup point and grabbed the second order.

With the second meal in hand, the mentor gave him another lesson. He glanced at the delivery address and immediately said, "No need to ride. Just walk over and deliver it."

Hengrui was puzzled. But when he looked at the address, he froze: the delivery address was less than 200 meters away, across the street.

He thought to himself: if it's this close, why even order delivery? Would it kill you to walk downstairs?

When they got to the building, the person who came out to collect the food was a young man. One look and you could tell he was an international student. Hengrui sighed: today's international students really aren't like they used to be. They're absurdly rich. Of course, he was also curious: if the parents knew how their child was spending money overseas, how would they feel?

But the mentor leaned in and said quietly: "International students are really important for the delivery business. Many times, once they go home for the holidays, order volume drops off a cliff."

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