Quick Answer: Damon Day — the debt advisor I recommend more than anyone else, and the guy I started The Penny Stupid Project with back in 2022 — switched his Walmart Spark delivery zone for the first time ever on Day 5 of his $500-a-week gig-work challenge. He was killing time in Mesa, Arizona while his son was at a card show, noticed a Walmart lot next to the Tesla charger, and flipped his zone on a whim. He landed a rare four-stop order worth $36.01. That’s a good outcome, but it’s a sample size of one — and I want to walk through why one lucky order in an unfamiliar zone doesn’t actually answer the question the video’s title asks.
Debt is math wrapped in emotion — and so is deciding that one good result means you found something better. One order isn’t a trend. It’s one order.
If you’ve read my write-ups of Damon’s earlier videos this month — Day 1 of this $500 challenge, Day 2’s ghost order and the hour it cost him, or Day 4’s rate-floor discipline while multi-apping — you already know the backstory. If this is the first one you’ve landed on: Damon and I started something called The Penny Stupid Project together in 2022, a public, no-BS test of side hustles where neither of us sold anything. My half was retail arbitrage and Amazon FBA. Damon’s half was gig delivery. He’s run with it since, and his channel is still called The Penny Stupid Project on YouTube — its own description links first to his site, damonday.com. I tell you I helped start it every time I feature his videos, and I receive no payment for featuring them or for recommending him to you. There was also a Day 3 video I haven’t written up between Day 2 and Day 4 — if you want the full week, that one’s on his channel directly.
His newest video, posted August 12, 2026 and titled “I Changed My Walmart Spark Zone—Did I Make More Money? (Day 5),” starts with Damon parked in Mesa, Arizona — a town he’d never done gig delivery in. His son’s car was in the shop, so Damon drove him to a trading-card show, plugged the Tesla in at a charger, and grabbed a coffee while he waited with nothing to do. He happened to look up and see a Walmart lot right next to the charger. On a whim, he switched his Walmart Spark zone from his usual Scottsdale area to Mesa — something he says he’d never done before — and turned the app back on.
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What Switching Zones Actually Got Him
The app handed him something he says he’d never seen before in his usual zone: a four-stop curbside grocery pickup. His normal zone tops out at three stops on one order; this one had four separate drop-offs bundled into a single 6.7-mile run for $36.01. He took it immediately — he had nothing else to do, and the mileage was low, which is exactly what he looks for in this challenge.
- A first-ever four-stop order. Twenty-three items, twelve items, five items, and twenty-four items, split across four separate addresses — more stops than his home zone has ever offered him on one order.
- He had to hunt for the pickup spot. He’d never been to this particular store. He circled the lot once before finding the curbside pickup area tucked off to the side — time an order in his own zone wouldn’t have cost him.
- One stop flagged for verification. One of the four orders was an alcohol delivery, or at least a customer-verification stop — he wasn’t fully sure which. He paused on it, then decided the order’s overall value justified continuing.
- The pickup itself took about 12 minutes for all four orders’ worth of groceries, loaded into totes in the back of the car — not a fast pickup, but not unreasonable for the size of the stack.
- An unplanned delivery near his son. One of the four drops happened to be close to where his son was waiting, and a neighbor at that stop gave him a long, wary look before he explained he was just delivering groceries next door — the kind of small, funny friction gig work in an unfamiliar neighborhood creates.
- A near-miss on the last drop. He tripped over a brick at the final stop and joked about hoping it wasn’t caught on a doorbell camera.
- All four stops done in 47 minutes, for what he tracked as roughly 7 miles of actual driving.
- The order folded into time he already had. He wasn’t carving a dedicated shift out of his evening — he was already out, waiting on his son, and used dead time productively instead of driving home and back or sitting at the charger doing nothing.
Gross on the Mesa four-stop order — 47 minutes, first time ever switching zones
Combined five-day gross toward the $500 weekly goal — $67.25 to go
Total miles driven across all 5 days, against a 12.2-hour running total
Figures are what Damon logged on this one order, in one unfamiliar zone — not typical pay, an average, or proof the new zone beats his old one.
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One Good Order in a New Zone Isn’t Proof of Anything
The video’s own title asks the right question — “did I make more money?” — and I want to be honest that the video doesn’t really answer it, and neither should I pretend it does. Damon switched zones exactly once, got one order, and that order happened to be unusually good: more stops than his home zone typically offers, low miles, and a strong tip percentage. That’s a real result. It is not evidence that Mesa is a better zone than Scottsdale for gig work. It’s evidence that one order, one time, went well.
Here’s the honest version of what actually happened: Damon took a real risk switching to a zone he’d never worked. He didn’t know the store layout, so he lost time circling the lot. He didn’t know the delivery neighborhoods, the traffic patterns, or how the app would treat him as a new driver in that zone. All of that could have gone the other way just as easily — he could have spent 20 minutes lost looking for a pickup counter and ended up with a mediocre single-stop order for his trouble. The fact that it didn’t go that way this time doesn’t tell you what would happen on attempt two, five, or twenty. A new market, a new zone, a new strategy — in gig work or anywhere else — needs more than one outlier before you call it better. I see the identical mistake in debt decisions: someone hears one friend’s success story with a settlement company or a “just consolidate everything” plan and treats a sample size of one as proof it’ll work for them too. One good result is a data point, not a pattern.
Why the Round-Trip Number Still Matters
This is the same lesson from an earlier video in this series, and it showed up again here. The app displayed roughly 6.7 miles for the four-stop delivery route itself. Once Damon counted the drive back to pick up his son, he logged the order as 14 “challenge miles” for tracking purposes — more than double the route distance the app showed him. An order that looks efficient on the app’s own mileage number can look different once you add the miles it actually takes to get you back to where you started. The IRS’s business standard mileage rate is 76 cents a mile as of July 1, 2026 — a figure calculated from what gas, maintenance, tires, insurance, and depreciation actually cost per mile, not an estimate. At that rate, 14 miles costs about $10.64. Subtract that from the $36.01 gross and you’re left with roughly $25.37 before Damon pays a dollar of self-employment or income tax on it. Still a solid outcome for 47 minutes — but the $36.01 on the screen was never the real number.
Turning Wait Time Into Income — With a Caveat
The part of this video I think is genuinely useful, separate from the zone-switching question, is what Damon does with dead time. He was already out of the house, already waiting on his son, and rather than drive home and back or sit idle at a charger, he picked up a delivery that fit inside time he already had. That’s a real, honest way to think about gig work: it’s often most valuable filling gaps you already have rather than carving brand-new hours out of an already-tired evening.
The caveat is that this specific math only works because the time was already “spent” — he wasn’t giving up sleep, family time, or a second job to make it happen. If you’re weighing gig work as a way to close a bill gap, the math is very different when you’re deliberately setting aside dedicated hours versus filling cracks in a schedule you already have. Don’t let one video about painless found money convince you that every hour of gig work costs you nothing beyond gas.
Why I’m Not Giving You a Dollar-Per-Hour Number
I want to be direct about this before you take anything in that video as a plan. The $36.01 from the Mesa order, the $432.75 running total across five days, the $500 weekly target itself — all of it is what happened to one driver, on one Friday night, in one market (Phoenix-area, in what he’s described as 110-degree heat during the slowest month of his year), on whichever offer that zone’s algorithm happened to hand him. It is gross, before a dollar of gas, vehicle wear, or taxes comes out. It is not a typical hourly rate, not an average, and not what you should expect to make. Gig-delivery and gig-shopping pay varies enormously by city, zone, time of day, day of the week, how many other drivers and shoppers are online, and plain luck in what shows up on your screen. Damon said on camera that he expects to hit the full $500 comfortably, in well under his self-imposed 20-hour and 300-mile limits — possibly under 15 hours total. That’s his own stated expectation with two days of the challenge still ahead of him when this video was filmed, not a result to bank on, and not yet a finished outcome.
Any site that shows you a gig-work video and lets you walk away thinking “so switching zones could make me more money” has done you a disservice. The value in Damon’s video isn’t the income figure or the zone he happened to pick. It’s the method: recognizing that a good result from a new approach is a single data point, counting the real round-trip miles instead of the one-way number the app shows you, and finding places gig work can fill time you already have instead of time you’d have to take from somewhere else. That’s math literacy you can use no matter what your local market looks like when you try it.
Is Gig Work a Real Tool When You’re Behind on Bills?
I get some version of this question constantly: should I drive or shop for these apps to catch up on debt? My honest answer is the same one I give about every option on this site — it depends on your specific numbers, and most people never actually run them the way Damon does on camera.
Gig work can be a legitimate way to generate quick cash when you need money now and don’t have savings to draw on. You can often start today and get paid within days. That immediacy is real and valuable if you’re closing a short-term gap — a car payment, a medical bill, a shutoff notice. But before you count on it as ongoing income, run your own version of the math Damon runs in this video:
- Don’t judge a new zone, app, or strategy off one order. Damon’s Mesa order went well once. Give any new approach several honest tries before deciding it’s actually better than what you were doing.
- Count the round trip, not just the one-way miles. The app showed 6.7 miles; the real number, once you count the return drive, was 14. The IRS’s business mileage rate is 76 cents a mile as of July 1, 2026 — apply it to the full trip, not the app’s estimate.
- You owe self-employment tax on top of income tax. Gig platforms pay you as an independent contractor. Nobody withholds anything for you. Set money aside, or the IRS bill next April will wreck the very budget you were trying to fix.
- Filling dead time isn’t the same as carving out new time. Gig work that slots into hours you already have costs you less, in real terms, than gig work that takes hours away from rest, family, or a second job. Know which one you’re actually doing.
“Run your own numbers before you count on it” isn’t a cop-out. It’s the same advice I’d give about any debt option on this site. Gig work is a tool, not a rescue plan, and it works best as one piece of a bigger decision — not the whole strategy.
What He Works Through On Camera
YouTube’s auto-generated captions garble names and numbers badly enough that I won’t put them in quotation marks and call them his words. So what follows is my paraphrase of the beats in the video, not a transcript. Watch it above for what he actually says.
Deciding to switch zones on a whim. He explains that he’d never done gig delivery in this particular town before, and that seeing a Walmart lot right next to where he happened to be charging is the only reason he tried it — not a planned strategy, an opportunity he noticed.
Not knowing what he’s walking into. He talks through, in real time, everything he doesn’t know about the new zone: he doesn’t know if the delivery addresses are apartments or houses, doesn’t know the traffic patterns, and can’t estimate how long a given number of miles will actually take to drive in an area he’s never worked. He names this directly as the real risk of trying a new zone — not whether a good order shows up, but whether you can execute it efficiently once it does.
Weighing the verification stop. He notices one of the four orders is flagged as an alcohol delivery, or at least a customer-verification stop, pauses on it briefly, then decides the order’s overall value and low mileage justify taking it as a whole.
The awkward neighbor moment. Delivering near where his son is waiting, he gets a long, silent, wary stare from someone at the drop-off address before explaining he’s just delivering groceries to their neighbor — a moment he plays for laughs on camera.
Reframing wait time as work time. He points out that he was already out of the house waiting on his son, and that taking this order instead of just sitting around cost him nothing extra in terms of time he’d otherwise have used for something else.
Closing out the day’s math. He totals the order at $36.01 for 47 minutes and about 7 miles of driving, updates his five-day running total, and says he expects to comfortably finish the $500 challenge with days and miles to spare.
More From the Side Hustle Archive
Damon and I have been writing about this experiment since it started in 2022. A few from the archive that pair well with this video:
- Day 1 of This Challenge — $120 in four hours, and the Walmart trick most drivers never notice
- Day 2: A Ghost Order and the Real Cost of a Bad Night — what happens when the math goes sideways for reasons that have nothing to do with effort
- Day 4: $138 Multi-Apping and the Rate Floor That Made the Math Work — deciding your number before the tempting offers show up
- Quick Cash for Bills: Myth vs Reality — the honest boundaries of using gig income to close a gap
- Making More Money From Home With Online Arbitrage and Amazon — my own half of the original project
- The Original Introduction to The Penny Stupid Project — how this whole experiment started in 2022
Key Takeaway
Damon Day switched his Walmart Spark delivery zone for the first time on Day 5 of his $500 weekly gig-work challenge, on a whim, while killing time near a Tesla charger in an unfamiliar town. The result — a rare four-stop, $36.01 order in 47 minutes — was genuinely good. It’s also a sample size of one, in a zone he’d never worked, and it doesn’t prove the new zone beats his old one. Once the round-trip miles are counted at the IRS mileage rate, that order was really worth about $25.37 before taxes. His five-day running total reached $432.75 toward the $500 goal, with $67.25 left to go. The lesson isn’t “switch zones” — it’s that one good result, anywhere, is a data point, not a decision.
This is what I’ve seen after more than 30 years of helping people with money and debt. This is one video, one driver, one specific evening — take it as input for your thinking, not a directive. Only you know your full financial situation, what your car actually costs you to run, and whether your time is better spent on this or something else. Nobody gets to tell you what to do with your time or your money. Not me, not Damon, not anyone.
If you know someone who’s ready to declare a new strategy “better” off one good result, send them this. One order, one week, one anything — it’s a data point, not proof.
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Common Questions
Who is Damon Day, and why does Steve feature his videos?
Damon Day is a debt advisor I’ve worked with and mentored for years, and the debt advisor I recommend to readers most often, because he builds solutions around a person’s actual situation rather than a one-size-fits-all script. Read the full explanation in Why Do You Recommend Damon Day as a Debt Advisor? His own debt-advice site is damonday.com, listed first in the description of his Penny Stupid Project YouTube channel. I receive no payment for featuring his videos.
Did switching Walmart Spark zones actually make Damon more money?
One order isn’t enough evidence to say. He got a genuinely rare four-stop order worth $36.01 in his new zone, but that’s a single data point from one attempt in one unfamiliar area. It shows a new zone can produce a good order — it doesn’t show the new zone is reliably better than his home zone.
What happened on Day 5 of Damon’s $500 weekly gig-work challenge?
He switched his Walmart Spark delivery zone for the first time, from his usual Scottsdale area to Mesa, Arizona, while waiting for his son at a card show. He landed a first-ever four-stop curbside grocery order worth $36.01, completed in 47 minutes across roughly 7 miles of driving (14 miles once the return drive was counted). His five-day running total reached $432.75 toward the $500 goal, with $67.25 left.
Is $36.01 for one order, or $432.75 across five days, typical gig-work pay?
No. Both are what one gig worker logged on specific days in one specific market, before gas, vehicle wear, or taxes came out. Gig pay varies by city, zone, time of day, platform demand, and plain luck in what offers appear on your screen — don’t treat any single video’s total as a guarantee or an average.
Why does the round-trip mileage matter more than what the app shows?
Delivery apps generally show the miles for the route itself, not the miles it takes to get back to where you started. Damon’s Mesa order showed 6.7 miles on the app but was logged as 14 “challenge miles” once the return drive was counted — more than double. At the IRS’s 76-cents-a-mile business rate, that difference is the gap between an order that looks great and one that’s merely solid once every mile is counted honestly.
What’s the biggest lesson in this video for someone managing debt, not gig work?
One good result from a new approach — a new gig zone, a new budget method, a friend’s settlement success story — is a data point, not proof it’ll work for you. Damon’s one great order in an unfamiliar zone doesn’t prove the new zone is better, the same way one person’s good outcome with a debt company doesn’t prove it’ll work the same way for you. Give any real decision more than one data point before you trust it.
Enjoyed This? If this look at the real math behind gig work was useful, share it with someone weighing a side hustle as part of their debt payoff plan — and check out the rest of the Penny Stupid Project series for the days you missed.
