‘You have no idea how difficult you’ve made my life’: the brutal reality of being a food delivery rider

“People are ordering it for breakfast.” Julia Zemiro, interviewed on morning radio, is cheerfully spurning Uber Eats. Wolfing oatmeal, I’m nodding on the inside, wondering why so few seem to share the aversion to having meals delivered. “It would never occur to me,” she’s saying, “when you can just throw a few ingredients in a pan.”

On the way to work, I see a man leave a ground-floor flat and accept a big bag of breakfast goodies from a rider. Maybe the man has just done 10 hours’ nightshift in a hospital: a righteously famished civilian personifying the best in us. Or maybe he’s a shiftless slob who plays endless video games, leaves the toilet seat up and refuses to throw a few things in a pan.

One thing is plain. Online food delivery riders are a near-defining feature of urban life now. But they can seem featureless, even anonymous, under armour.

At a busy intersection where I’m waiting for a tram, one pedals by, defiantly laid-back, with a face like a ravaged River Phoenix. The unusual expression – hard-bitten but self-effacing – piques my curiosity. The next is bespectacled, resting in a phone booth, staring at his iPhone like a demoted, updated Clark Kent. But it’s the next that spurs me to investigate. Coated in rain and pollen, this rider wedges a tyre in a tram track, slides, keels to bitumen like a dumped surfer, climbs aboard again without murmur, and glides away before anybody can ask if he’s hurt.

Responses vary when I ask riders in Melbourne about safety. In inner-urban St Kilda, a softly spoken Frenchman with a wispy ginger beard tells me he never feels very safe on our roads. Ashur is waiting for an order outside a fish and chip shop. Slouched, beanpole, with a sunburnt nose and pensive eyes, he likes Australia’s culture, but gets annoyed when drivers cut him off. He’s also annoyed when perfectly healthy people expect him to bring groceries up elevators or stairs. Tattooed on two fingers is the number of the Paris apartment where he was born: 13. He may as well have “Lonesome Traveller” tattooed, so seamlessly does he fit the image. Later, around dusk, I spot him hunched, hugging a hectic corner, wary as a wolf.

Riders who feel more confident tend to have bigger bikes and have been doing the job longer. Anton, also French, is waiting outside a hamburger shop in South Melbourne. Strapping and handsome, in a Stormtrooper-white helmet with visor raised, he looks like an astronaut. He agrees it can be dangerous on Australian roads but feels perfectly secure 90 per cent of the time. When Uber offers “quests” (bonuses for making extra deliveries in busy times), he notices himself riding more assertively. “It doesn’t make you a monster or anything, but you will ride a bit more firm.” He gets good tips from construction sites and from houses where more than one person orders. Flashing his wedding band – he’s just married an Australian – he could be the poster boy for the gig.

Others are having a rougher run. On a humid afternoon, two riders from Bangladesh are resting beside Balaclava train station, on a bench beneath the overpass. Their placid camaraderie would be easy to miss, but up closer it’s palpable. One had two bikes stolen in 2025. Each was his own property. Each time, he had to ask family for help. His friend tells me that a classmate of theirs, also from Bangladesh, was doored by a driver earlier in the year and didn’t work for six weeks. Before coming here, they considered Canada, but didn’t like the idea of riding icy roads. They chose Australia mainly due to our reputation for fairness and safety. Largely, he says, that’s proved true – stolen bikes and all. The other tolerates the remark; just now he looks like he’d rather eat his own face than make another delivery.

Most riders rent a standard e-bike for about $90 a week. One told me he rents his out in turn to another rider in his business course. Another from Delhi inherited hers from her older sister, the day the sister’s permanent residency crystallised.

Up close, the e-bikes have a clunky, oddly proportioned, perfunctory look. Dan from Thailand shows me how he’s refitted his. Duct tape and exposed bright blue and yellow cables festoon the frame – somehow he’s upped the kinetic oomph – and the leather seat feels more like a sofa. Casually, he informs me my story will not be good unless I take a ride on his bike. I tell him neither I nor the bike would recover. Eventually, he takes a closer look at both and believes me.

Comparatively powerful Japanese bikes are also on  the job, usually owned outright, often with a Frenchman astride. And there’s a Scandinavian-looking girl on a pushbike getting around Bayside. Twice one windy afternoon I see her. Twice I cross in pursuit, like a lepidopterist lumbering after a feted, too-fleet specimen.

Chariots aside, most riders’ main concern isn’t theft, or even safety. They’re frustrated about the time they spend waiting for restaurants to have the orders ready. Initially, Uber paid riders what was called “waiting wages” for this. Then it stopped without explanation or justification. When riders are late, customers can be rude or sting them with a poor rating. In the ever-weirder 2020s, some might be unsurprised by that. Others might ask: what sort of drip publishes a complaint because somebody riding a motorbike brings them a meal a bit later than expected?

‘The days go fast here. Just work, study, eat, work, study, eat.’

About half the riders I met have had this experience. One was scolded, 22 floors up, “You have no idea how difficult you’ve made my life tonight, being this late.” Quentin from France told me one woman accepted and paid for her foot-long sandwich without speaking, and two hours later requested a refund, claiming it never arrived. Then she gave him one star. He qualifies the story by emphasising that people here are, on the whole, friendlier and warmer than in France.

None of the riders whines. Most point out that 90  per cent of customers are courteous and thankful. And the riders love being in Australia. In Elsternwick, Haowen from China says we have a healthy attitude to work-life balance, and that ours is a caring society. “If someone has problems, here it is not so indifferent for them.” Several mention our fair medical system and quality infrastructure. One kid ferrying his bike on the train tells me that in the six months he’s lived here, he’s made friends from all over the world: Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians and Malaysians.

The job itself has one universal appeal and nearly every rider mentions it: they choose their hours. Curiously, very few believe the work helps their English much. After a shift, most prefer their own cooking to takeaway. Johiral from Bangladesh lives with two other riders and through the week they take turns cooking batches of soup and rice and curries to share.

Asked what they miss, family is the common thread. Not many mention missing their country’s cuisine, given the array here, but some do. Imtiouj from Bangladesh misses Mum’s hilsa (herring curry made with paprika, turmeric, red chilli, coconut milk, parsley and a dozen other touches). A Frenchman misses affordable, good-quality bread. Vinnie from Delhi misses the way people in India gather and socialise. “The days go fast here. Just work, study, eat, work, study, eat.” He says it’s hard to make a living doing this. “It can be frustrating with so many riders on the road, all looking for deliveries.”

That first Australian rider I meet agrees. He’s on North Brighton’s main drag, straddling his stationary contraption, on a limbo patch of footpath in the wealthy bayside suburb. Moustached, in bottle-green runner’s shorts, with legs like an Olympic rower, he’s in two minds about whether to refer other drivers to Uber. He wants the bonus it nets, but it may result in less work for him in the area. As we chat, an order hits his phone. He texts me his number and says he’s keen to spill a few beans over coffee on Uber’s schemes. Despite my endeavours, this never eventuates.

Lachlan, the other Australian I meet, is shyly, sharply intelligent, early 20s, about to deliver five family-size packs of jasmine rice and two rolls of toilet paper. He tells me the longer you work for Uber, the less it offers incentives. He believes that’s -because Uber deduces that if you keep working for them, you’re probably struggling to find better -employment or to get a better visa, and it knows you’ll keep working for it anyway. (A couple of riders agree, others say it’s news, and a few haven’t been at it long enough to know.) I ask Lachlan if he ever feels like a bit of an outsider in the job, being a local. Looking away, he nods through a discreet smile. Later I wonder if some part of him enjoys that aspect. For some reason, his face stays with me.

Up close, the faces are often disarmingly young. Others look as if they’ve already graduated from the school of hard knocks. In the days immediately after speaking to them, faces and exchanges remembered surface. I picture a Chinese kid who had applied sunscreen to the back of one hand but forgot the other, displaying one pallid, and one baked brown as a leaf. I hear Macedonian Marc who, when I asked what was good about the job, laughed, “I don’t know! Maybe you tell me!″, and the next day waved cheerily, trundling by. I hear a kid whose English was almost as non-existent as my Japanese, bluntly relieved the moment our -bafflingly prolonged, perplexing dialogue terminated. And Miguel from Peru, out to win some kind of -distance-covered challenge Uber are dangling. “Why not me? I am here, yes?”

Hardly any wouldn’t talk to me. Only one accused me of being an Uber spy. It’s my unsentimental impression they are, as a group, unschooled in hubris. They’re striving for autonomy, for better-off lives. They remind me of how warmly eclectic our cities can be.

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