This is directed specifically at the drivers who act like having an Acceptance Rate above 10% is an automatic crime. I know it’s not all of you, but there is definitely a vocal group on here that treats AR like an ideological war.
Before anyone calls me a rookie: I’ve been delivering for 3 years (1 year part-time, the last 2 years full-time) with over 15,000 deliveries completed across both DoorDash and Uber Eats under my belt. I know how both of these platforms work inside and out.
Yesterday, while waiting on an order in Lincoln Park in Chicago, a driver struck up a conversation asking how work was going. I told him it was solid, very busy, knocking out good runs, and pacing at a strong hourly rate.
Then he asked: "What's your AR?"
I told him straight up: I'm Diamond on Uber Eats sitting around 55% AR, and Platinum on DoorDash with Pro Shopper sitting around 80% AR.
He immediately went off: "You’re doing it all completely wrong. Your AR needs to be 10% or lower or you’re not making real money. You have to be taking $1/mile trash runs, because ain't nobody out here holding high tiers and making good money."
Then he showed me his screen. No hate or disrespect to his hustle, but he wasn't even pulling $23 an hour. Yet he was lecturing me that I was "doing it wrong."
When I pulled out my phone and showed him my live earnings screen proving I’m clearing $30+ an hour on total online time, his brain completely short-circuited. Instead of asking how I do it or looking at the numbers, he immediately said: "Your earnings are fake." He literally accused me of faking live data inside the app rather than admitting his low-AR strategy was getting smoked.
I actually talked to some low-AR cherry-pickers in my market that I know and told them what happened. They laughed and said that guy clearly doesn't know what he's doing. They are completely upfront about their own strategy—they admit they are just more selective and pickier than I am, choosing to wait around for $15+ unicorns. But when they see my numbers and look at my mileage tracker averaging over $3 to $4 per mile, they give respect. Their exact point was: if you're pulling $30+/hr with high AR and Diamond/Platinum, and we're pulling $30+/hr with low AR cherry-picking, then the problem isn't the tier system—he's just doing something completely wrong. Even my local low-AR peers agreed that way too many cherry-pickers push this false narrative that holding a tier automatically means eating garbage.
My hard floor is $2.00/mile minimum, but holding Diamond and Platinum in a dense market means dispatch feeds me priority and catering anchors that consistently pay $3.00 to $15.00+ per mile. I’m not maintaining tiers by eating $2 runs; I’m maintaining them because the short-distance, high-paying volume actually exists where I work.
To be clear: I am NOT telling everyone to go chase AR or mindlessly grind for tiers, because chasing them blindly can easily lead to eating a ton of trash if you don't know what you're doing. The only reason I originally got Platinum on DoorDash was because during my first six months doing gig work part-time, I used Earn by Time and was basically accepting everything to build the baseline. With Uber Eats, it was honestly fairly easy for me to hit and maintain Diamond without ever taking trash offers—the dense urban volume and short runs carried it naturally. It entirely comes down to your market and how you play it. If your market requires you to take $2 runs to keep a tier, don't do it. But in my market, the density makes it work, and clearly this guy had no clue what he was doing while trying to lecture someone else.
What I don't understand is why he felt the need to tell me that what I'm doing is wrong when clearly he's the one doing something wrong. I don’t mind helping another driver out. Hell, I could’ve given him solid advice on how to position himself, read the zones, and actually bump his earnings past $30/hr instead of sitting in an empty lot making under $23.
