Snag drivers are hard to miss. Whizzing by on electric scooters with bright red cooler backpacks in tow, these food delivery drivers pride themselves on their ability to efficiently serve one of Athens’ major demographics: the hungry college student.
According to the Snag website, “Snag emerged as a direct response to the exorbitant fees and long wait times that plagued the existing delivery services.” The company employs college students like Theodore Van Sweringen, a sophomore studying international business, to deliver items stocked in the Snag store on Stimson Avenue.
“I always thought of Snag as just alcohol delivery, but I’ve delivered everything,” Van Sweringen said.
Although the Snag store certainly contains countless units of alcohol, the store’s interior is bigger than it appears externally and can thus hold as many groceries and goodies as the collegiate heart desires. Although ordering from Snag is not exclusively reserved for college students, Snag stores only exist on college campuses, and the college student demographic makes up a majority of the service's customer base.
“A lot of freshmen will order … but I’d say the majority of it is frats and sororities,” said Skylar Peterson, a senior studying communication studies.
With his experience driving for multiple services, Peterson attested to the differences between Snag and its competing delivery services. Aside from only offering deliveries from a set list of inventory (as opposed to a service that picks up orders from restaurants), Snag also differs from other courier services in their pay.
“I really did not like DoorDash,” Peterson said. “It’s a lot of unnecessary stress driving around … because you can’t actually see how much you’re going to earn … with Snag I’m making a base salary alone, so that’s a lot better than coming home and sometimes only having 90 bucks for the week.”
According to Snag driver Kaiden Artman, a sophomore studying accounting and finance, Snag is a step ahead of its competitors for the customer as well as the employee.
“I’ve ordered from Gopuff before but they don’t really know their way around campus,” Artman said. “I feel like since we’re all students we all know typically what every street name is … we all know the whereabouts.”
Similarly to Peterson, Artman usually finds himself delivering to students, but he delivers to the ones living in off-campus housing as opposed to dorms. Although Peterson has found Snag driving to be a favorite among the jobs he has held, he has also experienced the negative aspect of the work.
“A lot happens to everybody here, everybody has their one event that’s happened,” he said before recounting a situation of verbal assault while making a delivery a few months ago.
Artman has run into trouble with inclement weather, which only causes the store to close at the discretion of individual managers.
“There was one winter storm that was really bad,” he said. “We were open, I was taking orders but I just couldn’t see anything.”
After about a year of driving for Snag, Artman has come to find Snag to be “not a bad job.”
“It’s pretty fun,” he said. “The hours aren’t bad, it’s short little four hour shifts … you get to be outside in the elements and people love you.”
Van Sweringen agrees with Artman’s sentiment, establishing that if someone is considering becoming a Snag driver, “there’s no reason not to.”
