Electric Scooter Charging: A New Side Hustle from Bird Pays $30/ Hour
Mike Wisell, 33, a tattoo artist who lives in Santa Monica, started a new gig a few weeks ago. He charges scooters and he makes pretty good money doing it.
Bird is among a handful of companies that rent out electric scooters to get around big cities. The site uses a team of “chargers” to pick up the scooters when they’re running out of juice, bring them home, charge them and return to a “nest.”
Training was simple:
- sign up, (No affiliate relationship)
- take an online video course,
- receive a set of tools in the mail,
- then get to work.
He even picks his own hours.
“The pay is pretty good if you hustle,” he says.
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Wisell represents a new type of independent contractor in the gig economy: a charger for Bird, one of a proliferating number of electric scooter start-ups.
Competitors have scrambled to add scooters to new markets, and the big three companies—Bird, LimeBike, and Spin—have more than $200 million in venture capital funding and aggressive expansion plans.
These companies have expanded in Nashville and Charlotte over the last few months.
These workers, all independent contractors, represent a new facet of the gig economy, and all enjoy the job and the ability to make money with a flexible side hustle.
How It Works:
‘Do you like to make money while you sleep?’
Residents of Venice Beach, California have likely spotted Bird contractors working in their neighborhood.
A pick-up will drive by, with a stack of Bird scooters packed in the truck bed.
Or, a scooter rider may roll by with a rider balancing two or three additional out-of-commission scooters resting perpendicular on the scooter’s deck.
These are the chargers, independent contractors who keep the electric scooters running by charging them at their homes or apartments (a competitor, LimeBike, calls them “Juicers”).
One of the advantages of dockless scooter systems like Bird is decentralization; the vehicles have no fixed docks, and go where riders are.
The contract workers who charge Birds do the same.
Workers sign up online or via the Bird app (the website asks, “Do you like to make money while you sleep?”).
After a phone interview to discuss the job, chargers are mailed a set of charger cords—three to start, according to chargers and more as they prove reliable and develop a good track record.
Where:
- Los Angeles,
- San Francisco,
- San Diego,
- Seattle,
- Chicago,
- Dallas,
- Washington, D.C.,
- New York,
- Austin,
- Miami,
- Denver,
- Atlanta,
- Boston
Requirements: Have a smart phone; working electricity and be available during set hours to find and return Bird scooters.
For that, the site will pay between $5 and $20.
The easy ones –noted in green on the app — pay $5; the ones that are a little harder to find will pay more.
Yellow birds pay $10; Red ones, which are hard to find, pay $20.
“Chargers say the pay varies based on how hard the scooter is to find”
More Tips to make Money Charging Scooters:
Pro tips
To get the most out of the side hustle, insiders offers three tips:
1. Work with a team. There are a lot of moving parts when you’re hunting for scooters: You’re constantly checking the map for the highest-value Birds, navigating to different locations and then trying to spot the scooter, which can be visible or hidden.
That’s why working with at least one other person can be helpful, says Campbell: “One person can be driving, while the other person is looking at the map.”
Plus, “especially in L.A., it’s hard to find a parking spot,” he says. If you’re working as a team, though, the driver can double park and wait in the car while someone else grabs the scooter.
While you’ll have to split your earnings as a team, you’ll also be able to find more scooters more efficiently.
2. Invest in the right gear. A magnetic phone mount for your car is a game changer, says Campbell. It allows you to safely look at your screen while navigating and, when it comes time to scan the QR code and capture the Bird, you can easily detach your phone from the mount.
He also recommends bringing a flashlight to help spot the scooters at night and, if you’re looking to charge a bunch at a time, get a surge protector.
3. Go out at the right time. You can pick up scooters anytime during the day, but the optimal time is between 9 and 10 p.m. That’s when “Bird releases most of the scooters and they become available for capture, so that’s when you want to go out,” says Campbell. “If you go out during the middle of the day it might be a lot tougher.”
The more you charge, the more you’ll get a sense of what areas in your city have the most scooters available to pick up. You’ll also get better at spotting them. On multiple occasions, Campbell was able to see the scooter from his car, while I struggled to find them even after getting out of the passenger seat.
“There’s definitely a learning curve,” he says, adding: “It’s not like rocket science, but if you go out and do it one night [for the first time], you’ll probably be like, ‘Man, this job sucks.’” But, “the more experience you get, the more scooters you can pick up and the more money you can make.”
Ford is buying in:
Ford is buying dockless electric scooter company Spin for $100 million, according to Axios. It had initially been reported that the acquisition cost $40 million, which is roughly what Spin was valued at after its Series A funding last year. Reuters reports that Ford has committed to making a $200 million investment in the startup.
In my opinion, this is a good side hustle. It’s easy to begin and it pays pretty well for now.
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Kelley, a Los Angeles resident, says she figures it costs about 25 cents in electricity to charge each Bird and she can easily pick up two in a 15 to 20 minute time span.
Since there’s no work involved in plugging them in, it’s a low-maintenance gig that can pay a decent return.
Bird allows Chargers to charge up to 20 Birds per day, which could earn you between $100 and $400 (if you found those illusive “red” labeled Birds that pay $20.)
One caveat: As more people find out about this side hustle, the pay could come down. For now, it is still Very Early and New, but down the road, it could happen.
Some estimates have this side hustle averaging about $30 per hour.
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What their Chargers say:
“It’s pretty easy to make $20 a night just picking up a few Birds and plugging them in. But I live in an area (Santa Monica) where there are a lot of them in use, so it’s a short walk to find them.”
Harry Campbell, who runs a website about driving for Uber and Lyft, created a step-by-step guide to becoming a charger. The company caps the numbers of cords per charger at 20, and each requires a $10 deposit.
Once they’re set up, chargers use the app to hunt down scooters, finding Birds low on energy, and bringing them home to power them up.
- Finally, the one thing that the terms say and the Chargers confirm is that you have to drop the Bird’s off to a “nest” by 7 a.m.
- If you’re late, you need to keep the Bird an extra day and it could affect your pay.
- All Birds need to be nested within three days, according to the terms, or you could be charged for keeping the scooter.
- That said, this is one of the few gigs where the terms are tougher than worker experiences.
Venture Capital is buying in;
With Lime valued at about $1 billion and Bird reportedly raising money at twice that valuation, venture capitalists are betting that this fledgling market will grow rapidly as people working downtown and attending college on big campuses recognize a new affordable and efficient way to get around.
“It is actually the closest thing we have today to last-mile autonomous transportation,” said Kyle Lui, a principal at DCM Ventures, which invested in Lime.
“It can get you to a location faster than any other form of transportation.”
But for every promoter of this futuristic view, there’s a dissenting voice saying that the unit economics will never work, and e-scooters will go the way of the Segway, not the skateboard.
Residents of San Francisco, San Diego and Santa Monica have seen so many scooters pop up that the market already feels saturated.
But in the vast majority of U.S. cities — the ones that Uber took years to hit — the idea of residents opening up an app that’s linked to their credit card and flying down sidewalks and bike lanes on a battery-powered scooter for a couple bucks remains a completely foreign concept.
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