In my city, if you're a driver, you're not required to accept a double delivery, and if you do accept, you aren't required to follow through. (After accepting, you have the choice to either pickup and confirm receipt or opt out by canceling, in any combination.)
As a driver, doubles are overwhelmingly not worth it in my city. For example, if I get paged for an order it may be for delivery from restaurant A to dropoff C. At any time before I arrive do the pickup, I may get paged to pick up an additional order. There only a narrow set of circumstances where it is worth it to me, the driver, to accept a double. Here's a list of things that would make a double unfavorable for a driver:
- The dropoff for the additional order may be at some point B that more or less lies somewhere along your route from A to C. Uber will route you to B first and then C. You're essentially delivering to B for free; you could have rejected the second order, forgone the double workload, and delivered directly from A to C and get paid the ~same amount.
- The first order, i.e., the one you originally accepted, is ready, but the second is not. The kitchen may or may not lie to you about how much longer it will take. As a driver, you have no insight into the final destination of the orders until you confirm receipt, so you cannot tell whether you're dealing with a a pathological case for B as above, or whether the order will actually be worth your while. Both customers pay the full delivery price AFAIK, so the only party benefiting here is Uber.
- The first order is ready, but the second one is not, the kitchen knows this, and they know that it will be 5-10+ minutes longer for the second order to be ready, but they never communicate this to you to give you the option of opting out of the second order. So the first order sits cold while the second is prepared, with you the driver believing that your choice is actually between waiting for the first thing available from the kitchen or canceling the whole thing altogether, which would mean being unable to recoup anything of your sunk costs for the trip to the restaurant (and possibly back to a "hot zone" if the restaurant is outside the city).
- You cancel one of the orders, and the staff gives you a bad review (unprofessional) as if you've robbed them of something. You haven't. If a driver sits idle for 10 minutes waiting for the order to be completed, the driver pays that cost while the restaurant gains nothing. This is infuriating, and I was strongly reminded of it by front page link to "Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" a couple weeks ago.
There are exactly two scenarios where a double is "worth" it:
- Geographically speaking, the second order is well past the first one that you would have delivered. This means you don't have to bear the costs of waiting for the next request to come in nor the cost of travel for pickup, because you already have work queued up.
- Geographically speaking, the route between A, B, and C are disjoint (i.e., B and C are in opposite directions from the restaurant). Congratulations, you actually end up making more than if you had made the same two deliveries as individual trips. This is fairly rare, not good for the (second) customer, and it still doesn't eliminate the risks above about arriving at the restaurant to find the orders aren't ready.