Diego Jenssen Masterseminar

The economics of solitude: an essay on delivery drivers

I. Introduction

As a Literature student, the most noteworthy aspect of this course’s lectures concerns the
writing genres to which the readings belong, or to be more precise, the genres between which
they oscillate. Indeed, writings such as those of Malinowski or Geertz constantly fluctuate
between the individual testimony and the argumentative essay. As such, the line that
separates subjective experiences from the description of the social reality becomes a gray
one: the personal affairs organically merge with the quest for knowledge and is presented to
the reader as a whole.

In this essay, I too want to tread on that dim line. My aim here is to analyze and describe the
social interactions in a very particular yet well known group of people (at least for city
dwellers): delivery drivers. I’ve been serving as one myself since no long ago, and since my
first workday, I’ve been eager to disentangle the imbroglio of contradictory relationships they
are put amidst. Throughout this essay, I will look as closely as possible their daily routine
through the lens of the different authors we’ve read in the course.

Two things are certain in their day-to-day life. On one hand, the drivers are part of an
intricate apparatus of social links that accounts for a highly complex communication network
such as one of an outsourcing company. In point of fact, in order for someone with a
smartphone to receive a package many gears have to coordinately work: clients, app
developers, dispatchers, manufacturers, and, of course, delivery drivers. Paradoxically, on the
other hand, their workday is characterized for its singular loneliness and alienation: in a
normal day, a driver barely utter any words except for some fixed greeting formulas. Most of
the time, a driver speechlessly rides through a city of inattentive pedestrians. But the isolation
doesn’t end there. In a way, joining such an association is much like affiliating oneself to a
faceless society: he or she doesn’t usually know the names of his workmates, bosses or the
internal structure of the company.

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As such, there is a striking asymmetry between the impoverished social stimuli the delivery
driver is exposed to and the plethora of interactions that actually makes that very job position
possible. For app workers in general, income inequality is increasingly coinciding with
disparate access to information and contact. Thus, globalization (or at least the liberal version
of it) has not only failed to guarantee an economically equal development, but also to equally
integrate the different workers within a production system. In other words, the integration of
capital doesn’t necessarily concur with the integration of people.

Throughout this essay, then, I will explore the different angles of this isolationism based on
the point of view of a delivery driver. To guide my analysis, I will follow the following
structure: first, I will describe the relationship between the driver and his or her workmates
(i.e. in this, case, restaurant workers); then, I will analyze the contact between the driver and
the private company he is a part of; and finally, I will devote the last part of this essay to the
description of the relationship of the driver with the product of his or her work.

II. The driver and the workmates

As many other sets of social interactions, the contact between the delivery driver and the
other people he or she has to work with (mainly restaurant employees and clients) is strongly
typified. As I mentioned before, verbal exchanges are basically cordial formulas of greeting
and gratitude once a package is received or delivered. Following Goffman, just as “a guest
entering a party has a right to be greeted by the host” and then departs “with the same kind of
ceremony”, a driver engages many times a day in a ritualistic array of interactions. As such,
these engagements“of an obligatory kind are linked to the world of domestic convivial
occasions.” (101)

However, what’s interesting about this convivial sort of communication is how it starts.
Citing Goffman once again, one of the main features of face engagements is that of
expressing accessibility (104): one’s facial movements denote whether one is ready to engage
or not in a focused interaction. In the case of delivery drivers, this function is relatively
suppressed or, better yet, deprived of importance. Even though it is expected of delivery men

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and women to behave cordially (as it is of any other person), his or her denoted availability is
not actually relevant because of a simple reason: people working in fast food restaurants are
constantly under pressure to keep up with the myriad of orders they have to attend. Thus, a
smiling or a crying delivery driver makes no actual difference if he or she picks up the
package to be delivered. The gears of this particular sector of the food industry are constantly
moving and, as a by-product, impoverishes social interactions by diminishing the relevance
of non-verbal stimuli.

But, if a delivery driver’s face expression is not taken in account, how does he or she actually
engage in a conversation? That is where the uniform comes into the equation. A driver inside
a restaurant is promptly identified by the workers because of his or her work gear (i.e. a big
backpack and the company attire). Once a driver has been noticed, the recognition by the
restaurant workers is usually followed by an expression such as: “The
Uber/Lieferando/Deliveroo is here”. From the perspective of William F. Hanks, between
restaurant workers occur a transformation of the indexical ground (53) delivery drivers are
either being expected or at the restaurant, or, put in other words, they are either out there or
here. As such, the recognition of the uniform triggers the awareness that the context (the
setting, as Goodwin and Duranti would put it) has effectively changed and thus a specific
array of actions must be carried on (greet the driver and give him the package).

III. Acts of symbolization

This kind of approach to the delivery drivers has two major consequences on his or her
identity. First, this type of recognition merges all the drivers into one faceless group of
indistinguishable individuals: one’s personal identity is excluded in this interaction in order to
carry out with the work. Second, that personal identity is replaced by that of the company. It
doesn’t matter who is making the delivery, but rather to what company he or she is a part of.

The corporation looms over the individuality of the employee. Following Michel De
Certeau’s point of view, one could say that delivery outsourcing corporations (such as many
others) don’t actually abducts the identities of its workers, but rather writes one anew.

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According to Robert Folger, “The writing of one’s life always happens somewhere else, it
never has its own place; it articulates itself in the other of bureaucracy”. (47) When delivery
drivers start working at some courier company, they enter a realm similar to that of the state
bureaucracy: they become just a series of numbers and permutations of letters that become
storable (archivable) and transferable information in order to be identifiable by other parties
of the economic system.

So, from the point of view of the companies, drivers are symbolized as numbers and moving
dots on the city maps. Also, this relationship is not symmetrical: whereas the employers hold
a significant amount of information about the employee (including his or her minute-to-
minute movements), it doesn’t happen the other way around. Quite the contrary: the
knowledge the employee holds regarding the functioning of the company he or she works for
is poor to say the least. As I mentioned before, a driver barely gets to know some of their
workmates and none of the people that work at higher steps in the corporate ladder.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the corporations are intentionally hiding information to
their employees as a method of control. Reality might be more complex and difficult to
explain. There seems to be an ever-growing hiatus between different sectors of the production
system. Anthropologist David Graeber notes that in the last decades there has been a
developing contradiction in our capitalist societies: the appearance of a high amount of
inefficient and rather pointless jobs (4). The causes of this phenomenon escapes the scope of
this essay, but its consequences are directly felt by different types of workers, including those
that work via apps. So, for example, instead of having a typical boss that issues direct
commands to his employees, courier companies might just hire a subcontractor (or a sub-,
sub-, subcontractor) to take care of the dispatches. As such, the internal hierarchy of the
company a driver works for is actually subject to constant change and labor relationships
might not be as clear as in a classical business model. One’s boss might not be working in the
same company or even in the same country, but rather in a subcontracted association
hundreds of kilometers away.

In summary, a delivery driver is an unaware gear in a very complex machinery of modern job
relationships. A driver is, to use Alfred Schütz terminology, a perpetual stranger in his own

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working place: he or she might learn how to do the job correctly, but that doesn’t imply a
broader knowledge regarding the society that shelters him or her.

IV. What’s in the bag?

However, this sort of alienation doesn’t only operate between the driver and his or her
superiors: it’s also present in the relationship in his or her link with the actual delivered
product. At first sight, the relationship between a person and an object might not seem like a
situation of social contact. To be fair, it actually looks like quite the contrary of that. But the
fact that the driver is working with a commodity shouldn’t be ignored. The main issue lies on
what Karl Marx calls the commodity fetishism:

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character

of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product
of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own
labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but
between the products of their labour. (47-48)

Basically, commodities give us the illusion of self sustainability. When we interact with them
(i.e. when we buy them), we may think that we’re establishing contact with an object, but
because of the social conditions that make the existence of that very product possible, we’re
actually engaged in a social relationship with the different groups of people that sustain said
object. In consequence, if someone buys, say, a table, then the exchange of money for the
table covers up the relationship between the buyer and the people that made the product.

Returning to the delivery drivers, the social relationship they are set in becomes relatively
unclear: how is his or her work impressed in the product he or she is delivering? The driver’s
work consists in the delivery service and, as such, is not actually tangible in the carried
object. Of course, the service adds something to the product that makes it cost more to the
client than if he were to go and get it himself, but that something is a rather abstract element
of the commodity, specially because it’s added value is disposable: hamburgers and pizzas

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would still be sold even without delivery services. Once again, the driver’s position inside
this dynamic of economic transactions is an ethereal one.

V. Conclusion

Throughout this essay, I’ve tried to expose the main features of the daily work of a delivery
driver. Summing up, the job they perform exposes them to different levels of dissociation, or
put in different word, distinct types of gaps between him or her and the people in the
surrounding. First, drivers cannot engage with other workers of the same branch because of
the inherent rhythm of the fast food industry; because of that, the delivery driver isn’t capable
of establishing a focused interaction with his colleagues. Second, drivers are alienated within
the company they work for: they are subject to an external written system that defines and
refashions their identity to make it functional to a determined system of power. And third, the
product of the driver’s work sets him or she into an undetermined position inside the
economic circuit, at least regarding other more “traditional” types of work.

All in all, this essay was not written with the intention to demonstrate the cruelty of an
economic system towards the lowest echelon of the working people. The very fact that this
argumentation arises from the personal experience of someone who works as a delivery
driver in a first world country makes such a pretension invalid, at least in this case. My goal
was not to denounce the brutal side of capitalism, but rather its most abstract one.

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Works cited

Certeau, M. (1988). „Ethno-Graphy - Speech, or the Space of the Other: Jean de Léry“. In:
M. Certeau: The Writing of History, New York: Columbia University Press, 209–43.

A. Duranti & C. Goodwin (Eds.), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive

Phenomenon. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press: 1–42.

Goffman, E. (1963). Face Engagements. In: E. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes
on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York, The Free Press: 83–111.

Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit jobs. Simon and Shuster: New York, 2018.

Marx, K. (2015) [1867] Capital: a critique of political economy. Progress Publishers,

Moscow.