He Accepted Every DoorDash Order for 12 Hours. He Made $215 Before Gas.
Spencer Joyce turned on DoorDash at 8 a.m., accepted every single order the app sent him, and didn’t stop until 9:15 that night. Total: $215, before gas, taxes, insurance, or the tune-up his 2009 Subaru Forester needed by the end of it.
Complex reposted his breakdown last month and it has now been watched 16.2 million times. The comments did the hourly math, and the hourly math is bleak.
@complex $215 before gas and taxes…. He accepted every DoorDash order for 12 hours and broke down what he earned before vehicle [🎥: @spencerjoycesworld] #doordash #work #money #hustle
The Complex repost has 16.2 million views, 591,000 likes, and 8,400 comments.
The numbers
Joyce, who posts as @spencerjoycesworld, ran the experiment in Virginia Beach. He took two half-hour breaks, so his active delivery time came to just under 10 hours. He drove 221 miles.
His biggest tip of the day was $14.25 on a Food Lion grocery run. His smallest was $3 on a Starbucks order. Everything in between added up to $215.
“I’m tired as hell,” he said in the video, adding that his car needed a tune-up badly by the end.
He was clear that this isn’t how he normally dashes. His usual rule is to decline anything under $6 or anything paying less than a dollar a mile, and he runs Instacart at the same time. Accepting everything was the point of the experiment, and the experiment showed what the app pays when you let it decide.
The part that didn’t make the repost
Joyce originally posted the video in July 2025. At the time he was living in his car and using DoorDash and Instacart as, in his words, a lifeline while he waited to start a trucking job. He started that job in August.
Complex clipped the breakdown in August of this year without that context, which is fine, because the numbers are the story. But it’s worth knowing the guy doing 12-hour every-order days was doing it out of necessity, not content.
16 million people did the division
The top comment under the Complex post, from @dora_515, has 116,000 likes:
> “That’s $17.91 an hour. Might as well get a job at a supermarket $15 and not waste gas and tear up your car.” (@dora_515)
Then someone subtracted the gas:
> “You worked for 13 hours and spent about $40 in gas so, $215-$40=$175.00/13=$13.46 an hour. That’s below minimum wage in many states. With no benefits.” (@jonpacific)
> “Yeah that’s not worth it. All it takes is for one tire blowout and that 200 is gone” (@loggedinfornow)
The other side of the comments, with 43,000 likes of its own, is the “it’s a side hustle, not a job” camp:
> “It’s a side hustle not a full time job” (@losangelesmostwanted213)
And a dasher, @callmechristy, said the quiet part: her acceptance rate is terrible because she refuses low-tip orders, and the expenses aren’t worth it otherwise. Which is exactly what Joyce does on a normal day. The experiment only works because he stopped filtering.
What a “side hustle” pays when you treat it like a job
The reason this clip keeps resurfacing is that it settles an argument people have been having since 2020. DoorDash’s pitch is flexibility. The counter has always been that flexibility is worth less when the base pay per order is a couple of dollars and the driver eats the mileage.
Joyce’s day is the cleanest test of that anyone has posted. No cherry-picking, no multi-apping, no declining. Twelve hours, 221 miles, $215 gross. Depending on how you count gas and wear, that’s somewhere between $13 and $18 an hour, with no benefits and a car that needs work.
New York City has a minimum pay rate for app delivery workers that’s above $21 an hour of active time, and Seattle passed something similar. Most of the country, including Virginia, has nothing like it. In those places the number Joyce landed on is roughly what “accept everything” pays.
For a different look at what happens when someone doesn’t get paid for a day of work, a fence crew in Illinois came back and took the whole fence down after the homeowner refused to pay. And a door-to-door worker kept working while a stranger followed her to every house.
Joyce is driving a truck now. The comments are still arguing about whether $17.91 is good money.
For more stories like this, check out our Labor section.
