I lurk in a couple of driver groups. Not for tips — for the same reason I read the comments on anything, which is that the comments are where people accidentally tell the truth.

The groups argue constantly about which app pays better, and the arguments are always about the top-line number. Somebody posts a screenshot of a good day. Somebody else posts a better one. Nobody, in the two years I have been reading them, has ever posted their mileage next to it.

The Screenshot Argument That Made Me Get Out a Calculator

The specific post that got me was a guy comparing two apps by their per-order average. His conclusion was that one of them clearly paid more. His evidence was that its average order paid more, which is true and which tells you almost nothing.

Because the app with the bigger average was also, in my own experience, the one that sends you across town. A larger number attached to a longer drive is not obviously a better number, and whether it is depends entirely on a figure nobody in that thread had.

I am not smarter than those guys. I just happen to do arithmetic for a living and I had ninety-one miles written in a notebook from the previous Saturday, so I had the one input the argument was missing.

Running the Same Two Apps Against Distance Instead of Dollars

I did not run a rigorous study. I want to be upfront that this is a guy with a notebook, not a research paper. But I tracked both apps for a couple of weeks with the same two columns — what it paid, how far it took me — and the ranking flipped.

The app with the smaller average orders was keeping me inside a tight radius. Short hops, dense enough that a slow order was still a nearby order. The app with the better-looking numbers was paying more per order and spending that difference, and then some, on getting me to the other side of town at an hour when the drive back was empty.

The empty drive back is the thing. Nobody counts it. Every mile you drive with nothing in the car is a mile you paid for and were not paid for, and a long-distance order is at minimum a fifty percent empty trip by design.

Once I started counting both directions, the app everybody in the group had decided was worse was better for me, in Montgomery, in that car. That last clause matters and the groups never include it.

What the Wrong Answer Had Been Costing Me

I had been taking the long orders for about a year and a half because the number on them was bigger. I do not have a precise figure for what that cost me and I am not going to invent one. What I can say is that a year and a half of preferring the wrong orders put a lot of avoidable miles on a car I am trying to keep alive, and every one of those miles felt, at the time, like the smart choice.

The annoying part is that the information was available the entire time. My own odometer. Free. I did not look at it because looking at it would have complicated a decision I enjoyed making, which is the actual reason most people don't measure things.

"Man, you're overthinking a food app," John said when I explained this to him, and honestly, fair. I was in month two of a spreadsheet about tacos.

He was also wrong, but only barely, and I have decided to let him have it.

The One Column I Add to Everything Now

Every time I look at anything on this site now, there is a column for what it costs to get to the money, not just what the money is. Miles for delivery. Hours for the tools. Weekends for the Roblox thing.

It is not a system. It is one column, and the only discipline it requires is filling it in on the days you would rather not, which is most days. The single most useful thing I have learned doing any of this is that the number people quote you is almost always the gross, and the gross is the least interesting number in the whole conversation.

I still lurk in the groups. I have never posted the mileage thing. Partly because I do not want the argument, and partly because I suspect I would find out I'd made an error somewhere in month two and I am enjoying being right.

So that's the gas math: count the drive back. That's it. That's the whole insight, and it took me a year and a half and an odometer I already owned.

Note: Everyday Hustle Jeff is the written side of a digital series. These accounts are composite and dramatized. Any figures are what they were on the day, for one person, and are not a projection, a track record, or advice.