We are a bit spoiled here in Vietnam as far as food delivery is concerned because we can get virtually everything delivered to our front door in very little time for very little money.
I have seen some of the Uber Eats or Doordash receipts in the USA and you guys are paying crazy amounts of money for delivery. For us here in Vietnam, the delivery fee is almost zero after you apply a bunch of the discounts that are always in there for everyone.
But there is one downside to this always available service and the main problem is that it is not, in fact, always available.
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It should be pretty obvious, but when it starts to rain, a lot of the Grab and other delivery drivers turn off their availability and there are no drivers and when there are no drivers there is no delivery of food or anything else.
I do know from looking at the app that the system offers the drivers 3-4 times what they would normally get paid if they take on these deliveries when it is raining and I really don't understand why the guys who do this wouldn't just put on their raincoat and get out there and make substantially more than they normally would. I guess I am up in my ivory castle here because I have never had to do this for a living but there is another benefit (for them) when it is raining in that most of the other would-be motorbike drivers are hunkered down waiting for the rain to stop and the roadways are a lot more clear than they normally would be.
I've never been a delivery driver, but I have had a job where certain incentives were offered to people who were willing to volunteer to work the less desirable shifts and sometimes this would be a lot more money. I always took advantage of this and don't understand why these Grab drivers don't do the same. Maybe they do, but not enough of them for me to be able to get my food last night during the storm which at that point had tapered off so much that when I did finally give up and walk to a store to get some dinner without an umbrella, I barely got wet at all.
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The warning here isn't to would-be Grab drivers who probably can't read this language anyway, but to people who visit Vietnam and quickly become attached to the Grab delivery system. When it rains, particularly during a time of year where it isn't raining all the time every day, the default action of Grab food delivery drivers seems to be that they all switch off their availability and you very well might not be able to get anything delivered.
So plan accordingly. I wish I had because my ham, cheese, and dorito sandwich that I ended up having wasn't exactly what I wanted to have last night.
