(disclaimer: I work for DoorDash but have minimal exposure to our scheduling platform) > it would have been more efficient to schedule other deliveries in the

(disclaimer: I work for DoorDash but have minimal exposure to our scheduling platform) > it would have been more efficient to schedule other deliveries in the mean time and just come pick up the food when it was ready? There are a lot of factors at play so it's hard to say what exactly happened in this instance, but some considerations: * The wait time at a restaurant is probably not enough time to fit comfortably another delivery. Deliveries take a bit of time. I don't have the exact #'s, but you can imagine 5-20 minutes driving to restaurant (+ parking), 0-5 minutes waiting at a restaurant, 5-20 minutes driving from restaurant to customer, which ends up being around 10-45 minutes with high variance. * We want food to be as fresh as possible for the customer, so on average we may prefer a dasher to wait a little rather than arrive the food is ready. Like the other replies mention, we try to measure how long food prep takes for a restaurant and we may err on the side of caution with restaurants with high variance by sending them to a restaurant assuming the shortest estimated food prep time. * Restaurants don't always provide accurate estimates of how long the food is going to take to make. * In your specific anecdote, we likely predicted the food to be ready much earlier (atleast earlier enough that you wouldn't have you felt they could have done another delivery) but some things may have changed from the original delivery. Eg: The kitchen was especially backed up during this time and we didn't have examples of this in our dataset. Or perhaps we did have examples of this and it didn't happen enough to increase its weight in the food prep calculation. Customer may have made an adjustment to the order, which caused additional wait time after we made the original dasher/delivery assignment. Kitchen may have made a mistake with the order and had to remake it. Our estimate for drive + parking time may have been too high. In other words, some of the time that you saw the dasher in the restaurant could have been time that we estimated for driving/parking instead. There are a ton of other factors at play, but I hope this gives you some sense of complexity of the problem :)