…Or at least give my notice. Without having another job lined up.
I have a stupid job working for a restaurant delivery service. The concept is thus: We work with well over 100 restaurants in the metro area. For a fee, a customer calls and places an order; my company places the order with the restaurant and sends the order to me in the form of a text message on a Nextel radio; I go to the restaurant and pick it up, and take it to the customer’s home. I use my own vehicle for this.
I am called an “independent contractor”, so I do not receive an hourly rate; I get paid by the delivery, plus tips. When I first started working there, about four years ago, I got to keep the delivery charge as my payment, which at the time was $6, or $9 if the customer lived far from the restaurant. I averaged seven to nine orders a night (about 5 1/2 hours), so the base pay almost always worked out to be above minimum wage.
Less than a year later, some new state laws went into effect that made the company decide to make the drivers all employees. No problem - the new deal was minimum wage, plus a dollar or two per delivery depending on distance, at the cost of some hours; this actually worked out better, and I was happy with the arrangement.
Then, two years ago, the original owners sold the company to a trio of morons. The first thing they did was make us contractors again, but for some strange reason they kept paying us hourly - I guess they didn’t want to rock the boat too badly (yet). But, new drivers were brought on on a commission basis.
By the beginning of this year, there were only a handful of us left still making hourly, and the Trio finally decided to change us over to commission. The current rate is roughly the delivery charge minus a dollar; the current delivery charges are $4.99 to $9.99 depending on distance. For the low end, I get $4.25, then $5 for a $5.99 fee, etc., up to $8.50 for the $9.99 fee. They also fed us a line of bullshit about how they were going to cut the number of drivers on each shift and quote longer delivery times, so that we would make the same, if not more, money. As they told me this I tried not to laugh in their faces at what I knew was an outright lie.
Of course, it turned out I was correct. They most definitely did not cut the number of drivers (which was, and still is, way too many on each shift), nor did they start quoting longer times. Since now ALL of the drivers are on the commission system, their labor cost is fixed - the company pays the same for labor whether there are ten drivers on or fifty drivers on. So what do they care?
Add to this the slowdown in the economy: for the past six or eight months I’ve been averaging five to seven orders a night (six-hour shift). Eight used to be average; now I’m stoked if I get that many.
The Trio’s next trick came in February or March: they introduced a “special,” where if customers ordered from the closest restaurants, where the delivery fee would normally be $4.99, the fee was reduced to $2.99. To their credit, the company ate the difference and still payed me the $4.25. But then, they replaced this with a “free delivery from certain restaurants” promotion; same deal, I still got my $4.25. The catch, however, is that distance is no longer a factor; if I get one of these orders and take it to a customer 20 miles away, I only get $4.25 (as opposed to the $8.50 I’d normally get). Excuse me? If you want to run a promotion, Trio of Morons, that’s up to you. But I fail to see why I should be punished! I expect to be compensated properly!
The latest, introduced a week ago, is the icing on the cake. They’re now doing both of these promotions, but now I get $2.50. Two-fucking-fifty.
So, now that all of the background is out of the way… 
This past Friday, as we were painfully slow, I started to really analyze the amount of money I’m bringing in, and in doing so I factored in the cost of gas, something I’d not really done before. Just from running some numbers through my head, I seriously started to consider the wisdom in continuing to work for these morons.
I won’t go into all the mathematical detail, but here’s what I recorded:
Friday: 4(!) deliveries, 6 hour shift, burned about $10 in gas, made $57.25 total (tips and commission), which works out to $7.88/hr. This is 52 cents LESS than minimum wage.
Saturday: 6 deliveries, 6 hour shift, $10 in gas, made $100.75, for $15.13/hr.
Sunday: 4 deliveries, 4.25 hour shift, $10 in gas, made $67.50, for $13.53/hr.
Now, fortunately for me, but unfortunately for my little study, I got some phenomenal tips this weekend, which skews these numbers. Friday I got two tips over $10, Saturday I got two over $10 and one over $20, and Sunday I got one over $10 and one over $20. The average tip is usually $5 to $7. So, let’s say all of my tips had been average - let’s say $7, to give my company the benefit of the doubt - then my hourly rates would have worked out to:
Fri: $7.04/hr
Sat: $10.96/hr
Sun: $8.82/hr
The way I see it, my base pay, forgetting tips, should come to minimum wage, plus enough to cover my gas and a bit for wear and tear on the vehicle. However, it is virtually impossible for my pay before tips to exceed minimum wage (let alone cover my gas). Forgetting gas, minimum wage = $8.40 * 6 hours = $50.40 in “commission”:
For 6 orders, this would mean an average of $8.40 per delivery - $8.50 is the maximum possible, for the longest distance from restaurant to customer. Runs like these usually take an hour or so, from start to finish, IF everything goes smoothly; squeezing 6 such orders into a six hour shift would be an amazing feat. GETTING 6 such orders in one shift would be astounding - I would guess maybe 1 in 30 customers orders from a restaurant that far away.
For 7 orders, this would mean an average of $7.20 per delivery. While this is slightly more doable, it is still HIGHLY unlikely.
For 8 orders, this would mean an average of $6.30 per delivery. Even this would require a LARGE amount of luck; almost all “commissions” are $4.25 to $6.00. And I haven’t even considered the new bullshit $2.50 “special”. And again, while the average number of orders for a 6 hour Friday or Saturday shift a year ago was eight to ten, getting eight orders in one shift these days is a rarity.
Looking at the above, it is clear that my hourly rate before tips falls well short of minimum wage. To be fair, only getting 4 orders on a shift is uncommon (used to be VERY, VERY rare); I’d say it happens once or twice a month. However, besides it happening twice this weekend, it also happened last Sunday, 7/19.
Bottom line: THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT. Why should I be running my truck into the ground for such shitty pay?
And that’s the rub. I am using my own fucking truck for this - hence my questioning the wisdom of continuing on. If I was making $10 an hour at a job where I drove there, worked, then drove home, there’d be no question - no matter how much I hated it, I would stick it out until I found another job. But, I’m using my own vehicle, putting 75 to 125 miles on it per shift. It’s a '98 Ranger, I’m the original owner, and I’ve taken pretty good care of it, but it’s got 187,000 miles on it. And I need it to last me, at minimum, two more years (until I finish grad school) - three years would be more realistic. I honestly think that if I had never worked this dumbass job, my truck would have 30K or 40K less miles on it.
I haven’t even gotten into how shady this company is aside from all of this - i.e. I’m a contractor, but treated like an employee: told how to dress (which I ignore), told I must wear a logo, ordered about like a peon… while these are not illegal, according to the State of Oregon these actions make me an employee, regardless of anything I may have signed. And it is VERY illegal to not take taxes out of an employee’s paycheck… but, I don’t need to go there.
If you, the reader, have made it this far… should I tell these assholes to fuck off? (Actually, as much as I relish the thought of doing that, I would make myself give notice and be nice, so as not to burn my bridges.) It’s a scary thought, leaving without having another job in this economy…