In S.F., bike messengers in demand again Bike messengers again in demand

Brandon Harrison works for TCB Couriers, which now delivers Three Twins Ice Cream. Brandon Harrison works for TCB Couriers, which now delivers Three Twins Ice Cream. Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close In S.F., bike messengers in demand again 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

Technology was supposed to be the end of bike messengers - until some couriers managed to make it their means.

The number of messengers in San Francisco has plummeted in the last two decades, but the surviving courier companies are getting a boost from tech and the on-demand lifestyle it enables.

As companies including Google, Amazon and eBay rev up their same-day delivery vans, startups are turning to bicycle messengers - though they've had mixed success wooing experienced riders.

For courier companies, it's disrupt or be disrupted. Armed with logistics apps and startup partnerships, some are adapting to a new business environment fueled by a culture of instant gratification.

"I've seen a massive paradigm shift from business-to-business courier service to business-to-consumer," said Chas Christiansen of TCB Courier in San Francisco. "We're really trying to bring back the courier culture and keep it alive by shifting what we deliver from packages to food, wine and flowers."

In the 1990s, back before Dropbox, DocuSign and court e-filings, bike messengers raced through the city by the hundreds, bolstered by dot-com-era companies flush with cash. Estimates vary, but the number of professional San Francisco messengers today is about half of its dot-com peak of more than 500.

Food delivery

By the mid-2000s, the remaining courier companies were fighting over what was left of the demand for business deliveries. So when Christiansen started TCB Courier in 2009, he went where no messenger company wanted to go: food delivery.

Food is tricky cargo. Speed is imperative, temperature matters, and "if I spill burger sauce on these court filings, nobody's gonna be happy," said Brandon Correia, 39, who in 1999 co-founded Godspeed Courier. And some couriers look down on food delivery workers and don't consider them real messengers.

TCB didn't win respect focusing on food, but it had great timing. It began delivering for places like Memphis Minnie's just as startups including GrubHub and Seamless let users order food without getting out of bed.

When tech companies became interested in deliveries - bringing goods "the last mile" from a store to a customer's hands - courier services gained some buzz.

About two years ago, Postmates came knocking, Christiansen said. The delivery startup hoped to use couriers on bikes and in cars for small businesses in a city. TCB consulted for Postmates briefly, but it "wasn't a good fit," Christiansen said.

At a 2011 event to demonstrate Postmates' services, founder Bastian Lehmann called it a "marketplace for professionals," not a "crowdsourced platform." (Lehmann declined to be interviewed because this story's focus was not solely on his company.)

But tech startups have a hard time attracting professional couriers. Postmates and Uber Rush - a bike delivery service started in Manhattan this month by fast-growing ride-sharing company Uber - require worker background checks. As Christiansen put it, "I can't think of a single professional bike messenger in New York that's going to pass a background check."

Plus, riders are constantly busy, as companies' margins aren't big enough to allow much downtime.

Instead, Postmates appears to have pivoted toward recruiting casual riders and drivers interested in making money on the side.

That model worked for Krita Self, a 31-year-old artist and teacher, with little messenger experience when she joined Postmates. She biked for the company for a month and a half and averaged about one delivery - and $10 to $12 - an hour. (Postmates tells prospective workers that experienced couriers can make "up to $30" per hour.)

Only near the end of her Postmates run was she allowed to make two deliveries at a time, Self said, though pro messengers say that handling many deliveries at once is key.

'Messenger efficiency'

"That's the nature of messenger efficiency. That's how you make money," said Peter Funk, 47, who founded Jetset Courier in 1997.

Self said it was a positive experience, one that let her explore the city on her bike while making some extra cash.

Some courier services question the Postmates model, but the company is bolstering their ranks: more than half of the messengers hired by TCB in the last six months were former Postmates, Christiansen said.

Long-standing courier companies that stayed business-to-business have also adapted to change. They've diversified their client base, and as the need for document deliveries dwindled they have started doing more cargo runs between businesses - leading companies like Jetset to switch to using only cars, not bicycles.

As demand shrank, the industry cleaned up its image, Correia said. "People were looking to hire people who would represent their company better," he said. "The quality of customer service had to improve in order for these companies to continue to survive."

Some companies turned to smartphones to keep up. TCB hired an in-house developer to build a custom logistics app to oversee riders in the field and process incoming orders, particularly food orders.

The app lets restaurants and other clients input orders onto a single platform where riders choose among themselves who handles each job. That team strategy, called "free call," is far more efficient than the traditional centralized dispatch system, Funk said.

Logistics handled

Some small businesses see the app as a way to offer delivery without worrying about logistics. TCB's hottest current partner is BloomThat, a Y-Combinator-anointed startup that delivers flowers in and around San Francisco in 90 minutes - powered mostly by TCB riders.

Outsourcing delivery to a courier company let BloomThat grow quickly without pulling the founders' focus away from brand and user experience, said BloomThat's David Bladow. Since TCB riders work all day whether they have flower orders or not, the army of riders can easily absorb fluctuating demand (a real concern around Valentine's Day).

That's the same principle that Christiansen pitches to small restaurants that only have few deliveries a night. In that vein, the company has also started selling a customizable app for businesses that want to offer delivery. Companies can alter its design so it looks like their own product, but the back end allows a TCB rider to process and deliver each order. Three Twins Ice Cream is the first partner.

"The smart companies realize they can't do delivery themselves," Christiansen said. "The ones that aren't that smart think you can just hire someone for minimum wage and they can facilitate delivery across the whole city in an hour."

Even for couriers not willing to tote around food, the current economy has some benefits. The real estate market is so hot that traditional messenger companies still see good business shuttling title work, Correia said. A revived interest in biking also helped buoy messenger culture as riders became celebrated and imitated.

Plus, as TCB rider Doug Cliford said, there's something to be said for bringing someone food or flowers instead of a legal contract.

"People are just excited to see you," he said, "instead of thinking, 'Oh, there's a lot more work I have to do.' "