Side Hustlin: Bird Scooters

So I've talked a little about my new side hustle on @dtube during my dtubedaily videos but here in certain areas of Los Angeles we have electric scooter share programs. Basically its like uber but for scooters.

Bird was the first company and they are based in Santa Monica. Then came Lime and now Jump (owned by uber). Believe it or not, when you open the uber app here, you can choose a car or to locate a scooter you can jump on and ride around town.

Well, with scooters all over town, it makes sense that people need to charge them when they run out of juice. That's where I come in.

I live in an area where the street becomes littered with these damn things and they become a nuicance. They are literally everywhere. People leave them in the sidewalk and yards and people of rather sick of it.

But Bird and Lime will pay you to bring them in the house, charge them and then place them in strategic areas around the city to get them ready for the morning commute. This actually helps clean up the streets because people collect them and then return them neatly to the streets that allow them.

I happen to have a return "nest" on my corner so I can find some scooters in front of my house, charge them and return them to the nest between 4am and 7am. That's the tough part. If I could release them any time I wanted, then I would do it all day but I only do it when I'm willing to be up til 4am and get the job done. I tend to do this on Wed & Fri.

The pay ranges from $5 to $20 depending on how hard the scooter is to find. A lot of people like to take out there anger on these things and throw them in dumpsters, locked parking garages and pools lol. It costs about 10 to 20 cents of electricity to charge them so you can make a few bucks.

The hard part is trying to find them because there a lot of people out there trying to collect them. There is a locator app and believe me, these things are never free to collect for more than a few minutes.

One of the interesting things I've noted is that there are many luxury cars showing up at the geo located spots where the scooters are hiding to try and get them. I've seen cars in the 75K to 110K range chasing down scooters that yield them about $4.80 in profit. I mean I saw a guy jump out of a brand new Porsche SUV to take a scooter out of mud pile and throw it in his truck. It tells me that it is really tough out there right now.

So that's my side hustle, what's yours?