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Over the past few months, the topic of how much money delivery riders make has come up a number of times.
A student at the National University of Singapore (NUS) shared about her experience as a GrabFood delivery rider on her YouTube channel in July this year.
Nini Jiang's video documented her work throughout the course of one day and showed how much she earned from the deliveries.
Started working one week before Polling Day
Jiang opened the 16-minute vlog, which was taken on Polling Day — Jul. 10 — by explaining that she had just started the job about one week prior.
Photo screenshot from YouTube / 妮妮江ninijiang.
Over the course of the day, she showed herself picking up and dropping off orders on her bicycle, and taking a break during the middle of the day when it looked like it was going to rain.
According to another video posted on Jul. 24, Jiang first became acquainted with the idea of doing food delivery after she interviewed a delivery man for a documentary.
He taught her how to register as a rider and shared some of his work experience.
Faced some difficulties
Jiang also shared some of her difficulties as a relatively new rider.
For example, after delivering two separate orders back-to-back, she explained in Mandarin that she was extremely nervous and a little scrambled because she had never had two orders in a row before.
She also accidentally cancelled an order from KFC, most likely by mistakenly pressing something on her phone.
Later in the afternoon, Jiang received two orders from the same durian shop.
However, when she pressed "complete the job" after delivering the first order, she accidentally also clicked "complete the job" for the second order.
This made it such that once she reached the location of the second delivery, she was unable to see the unit number for the address.
Luckily, she was able complete the delivery after contacting the Grab Help Centre Helpline, who were able to check the unit number for her.
Delivery life realities
Throughout her vlog, she also documented the more mundane aspects of the delivery job.
For example, she said, sometimes the wait time for a food item can be very long.
Photo screenshot from YouTube / 妮妮江ninijiang.
When there are no orders, she explained, there is a corner of benches where the delivery riders will sit and wait.
Photo screenshot from YouTube / 妮妮江ninijiang.
Encounters while doing her deliveries
Throughout her day of deliveries, Jiang also shared snippets of interesting encounters she had.
At one block, a black and white cat parked itself behind her bike for a few minutes, making for a very cute road block.
Photo screenshot from YouTube / 妮妮江ninijiang.
While doing another delivery, she waved goodbye to the toddler and dog in the unit.
Photo screenshot from YouTube / 妮妮江ninijiang.
And at another block, she noted a sweet, hand-drawn "missing cat found" poster.
Photo screenshot from YouTube / 妮妮江ninijiang.
Earned S$48.70 from 10 orders
At the end of the video, Jiang gave a summary of her day.
Altogether, she had picked up 10 orders, and earned S$48.70 from the delivery fees.
According to the time stamps in her video, her day consisted of a little more than four hours of work — from around 10:24am until about 12:35pm, a break, and then from around 5pm until sometime a bit after 7:15pm.
It is not clear if Jiang is still working as a delivery rider, as she has not posted any videos on her YouTube account about doing so since July.
Most of her recent videos are instead about her life as a student at NUS's School of Design and Environment.
You can watch Jiang's full video here:
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Top photos screenshot from YouTube / 妮妮江ninijiang.