In his defense, others have claimed that tipping less than five dollars is absurd.
I wouldn’t go that far, but I understand where that mindset comes from.
If you go to a website like tipthepizzaguy.com, you’re going to find much of the same stuff I said, and drivers insisting on a higher minimum tip than I do.
Which is all fair on them. They can plead for a bigger tip if they want to. I’m using actual math and comparing it to the minimum wage, so I think I have the sounder factual argument.
No, there are plenty of people who order on a regular basis for delivery. It’s actually you occasional folks who, on say certain holidays or sporting events, all order at once… that throws the store off their game because they have their usual 250 customers per day plus another 250…
Not that we mind- the extra business is extra money.
It’s real. And no matter how many times it happens to me, there’s still a part of me that goes… really? You order every week. Every week and you never tip. You don’t ask for the 12 cents back, so you’re aware tipping is customary. But you never actually tip me. And you either thank me profusely, as if that made up for it, or you give me a deathly silent treatment. What kind of sick person are you?
It’s unreal to be in the presence of these people. There are just people in the world who don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves.
You can tell by how they treat their kids. When they are constantly screaming at their kids to move, come, threatening them if they don’t move around like mommy has a remote control, and the whole house is screaming back and forth at each other, and mommy and daddy both roughly handle their kids and threaten to beat them for everything they do “wrong” like coming to the door in the first place “GET BACK OR IMMA WHOOP YOU!”
That’s when you know, for a fact, you’re not getting a tip. No one who is so heartless when it comes to their own children will treat a total stranger any better. And at that point, I just feel bad for the kid, not me anymore.
Absolutely never. We are a big chain, one of the big three. I’ll let you guess which one, should be obvious from the menu items I’ve quoted.
We absolutely cannot serve uncooked food, that’s a lawsuit and because we’re a big franchise under a big corporation, we have money to grab in a lawsuit.
As realistic as humanly possible. But the brass tacks is, the longer the wait, the less accurate it can be. I don’t know what kind of delays my driver will have on THIS run, let alone the second run he takes before he takes yours. If there are no runs up and drivers in the store, the answer is easier- 30 minutes.
30 minute delivery time means anywhere from 20-40 minutes.
40 minute delivery time means anywhere from 25-50 minutes.
45 minute delivery time means anywhere from 30-60 minutes.
60 minute delivery time means 40 minutes to 80 minutes.
The margin of error gets bigger and bigger. Traffic. People who forgot to pay with their card. Mistakes made on the order, it needs to be remade. People who can’t find their wallet. People who pay with the change in their purse. Rabid dogs not on a chain in the front yard. Driver car breakdown during the shift.
We can’t predict well, because there is no way to do so. We just know that you’re 12th in line, and it will be at least another 30 minutes for you to get your order… but we can’t go, well, it will get there between 45 minutes and never. We have to ballpark guess it.
It’s going to be wrong, a lot. I know this isn’t great, happy news, but if you want the unvarnished truth, come talk to me. I’ll tell ya.
It wasn’t “too focused” on black people. I live in a predominantly black area. There are hardly any non-blacks. My experience is that my customers are mostly black, in my area at least, so I have to write about my experience. I’m not talking about like 52% black either. I mean like 90% black.
I honestly don’t care about that. I’ve delivered at two other stores and I can tell you that stupid behavior has no racial preference. I delivered to blockheads there too. I have plenty of good customers, or I couldn’t make a living. I just have a huge portion of not good customers too. Of course I’m going to rip on the silly things the people in my neighborhood do, I write what my experience is. So even though I didn’t mention the race of the folks I was ripping on, you caught on to certain behaviors that are typical of a certain segment. I’m not going to lie and pretend that shit doesn’t happen on a daily basis. But I’m also not going to pretend that’s always true of all black folks either, nor at any point did I blame my issues on black folks. The idiot customers in my area are black, because I live in a black area. When I was living in another area, my idiot customers were white and hispanic. What’s the difference?
Can I move to another town? Yes. Why have I chosen not to?
Because for the longest time, no, I couldn’t move. I was deep in debt due to costs associated with being unemployed for a while. When I finally could move, I was a recently promoted manager, with a clean shot at a second promotion.
I don’t want to move yet. This is the store that can’t keep its people. We lose staff and managers alike. There are big gaps in the company, and my intention is to get promoted and fill those gaps, get the bigger paycheck and the excellent resume, and then, armed with that experience and history, then move to a nicer area with less crime.
True story, guy was murdered in my apartment building last week. Month before that, guy was shot in front of our store, and I was the one that got the ambulance here fast, and pointed them in his direction when he stupidly, against my repeated warnings, began limping off to his apartment on foot while he was bleeding out.
That’s dumb. The ambulance got here, and he would have been treated by doctors, but then they had to find his ass. I don’t know that guy, but he’d be a Darwin award winner right now if not for people like me. I guess I can’t rip on him too bad because he just got shot, so I don’t know what was going through his mind. But still, dumb move.
I could go on and on about the crime here. There’s not a month that goes by where a major crime doesn’t happen in my vicinity or at me. Whether it’s my car being stolen, getting punked by counterfeit bills, people being shot and killed, or the dumbasses that stash drugs in our bathroom (Which is now closed to the public, so some child doesn’t find the drugs, use them, overdose, and die, thanks drug addicts) I deal with crime on a daily basis. Either by actively preventing it, or suffering for it all around me. I can’t even place and order with you without calling you back and making sure you have a working phone number I can reach you at.
Anyway. Yeah I think this area is a little worse, but I’m not going to blame it on race. I think the prevailing factor is crime and poverty. That creates a shitty area no matter what race lives there.
BLASPHEMER!!! :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:
I prefer to be called a godless heathen, thank you VERY much.
Me too actually. 
I’m… astounded the pizza place even bothers. Surely the opportunity cost of having a driver out of commission for three hours would far, far outweigh the benefit of delivering pizza to that area? I mean, even if someone ordered $100 worth of pizza I just can’t see it being worthwhile from a business point of view.
Tipping is for fools.
Usually there is one one these deliveries each week. The pizzeria takes orders the day before, and half-bakes the crusts the morning of the delivery. In the late afternoon it adds the sauce and toppings, and wraps and boxes the pizzas. The taxi drives an hour and a half to the pizzeria and an hour and a half back to town. Most pizzas are delivered to a common meeting area (the community centre) where folks wait for the pizzas, and then the taxi finishes up with home deliveries for folks who don’t mind waiting a little longer. The happy pizza eaters then warm up their pizzas and om nom nom.
Instead of thinking of it as having a driver out of commission, think of it as having a driver under commission out there earning money for both the pizzeria and the driver.
There is no shortage of drivers. When the taxi is not available, there are kids from either town who take up the slack, for they are quite happy to get paid to drive about making deliveries.
Guess I’d take pains to enjoy it too if I were paying $150 for a pizza. Seems like a hell of an operation.
Is your satellite office in an actual satellite?
Sometimes I wonder. It takes me six hours to get there, which is about the same time it now takes Soyuzto get to the space station. It takes me six hours to return home, whereas Soyuz’s returnonly takes about three and a half hours. 
Although it is a three-hour round trip for the delivery, the delivery cost isn’t that bad (typically about ten bucks per pizza on top of the pizza cost), for it is divided by all the folks buying pizza (usually a couple of dozen or more). If enough orders are not placed, then the pizza run is cancelled – the northern equivalent of “No soup for you!”
You work in a different world than I did. In the mid-1980’s, tipping the pizza girl was highly optional. I would make an average of $0.50 a delivery in tips, on good nights about $1.00 a delivery. A lot of my customers never tipped but were always pleasant and friendly to me, and it made me feel good to deliver to them.
Seriously, I didn’t care that much about being tipped back then. I just wanted a delivery where I didn’t have someone try to pull me into their house to potentially rape me, verbally abuse me, threaten my life, let their fucking dog loose to bite me (“oh, he doesn’t bite…uh oh, sorry!”), rob me, or physically abuse me. All of which happened, some things innumerable times.
I think back then a lot of people honestly didn’t know tipping was recommended. Sometimes I would get someone indignant who although I had given no indication of unhappiness at all, would suddenly say “and I’m not tipping you because I know you get paid to deliver!” Well…yeah, I did. I made $1 a delivery and got above minimum wage.
Still, even at $0.50 average tip, I made a long-term average of more than $11/hour net (after gas and car repairs) for 5 years. I had a record day of 70 deliveries taken within 6 hours, on that night I made more than $20/hr net - in 1990. When some of my peers had full-time white collar jobs and were barely making that. I guess things must be different now.
I’m guessing you just phrased this provocatively, but other than encountering someone’s loose dog (which did happen to me quite a bit), which of these things happened to you “innumerable times”?
I also delivered in the mid 80’s to early 90’s, in a number of different settings from upscale suburbs to low-rent rural and downtown areas, and I worked with a lot of female drivers, and never once was I or any of them “pulled into” someone’s house, had our lives threatened or were physically abused by a customer. I did know someone who was robbed, but it was a friend who worked for a different pizza company. If anything like that ever happened it would’ve been a huge deal and the police would’ve been called.
If anything of that sort happened to you even once, let alone multiple times, it’s hard to imagine that you’d continue to work in such dangerous conditions.
It was still better than working in a coal mine or being a coal miners daughter.
Verbal abuse and the dogs. Verbal abuse…I don’t know, I took more than 50,000 deliveries in my career there. At least 1,000 times?
I was bitten more than 50 or 60 times. Only a couple of times did it break the skin.
Innumerable was Pit hyperbole for the rest.
I worked a tough area. I was pulled into someone’s house, or worse entered and they refused to let me leave, scores of times. Sometimes the man would demand a kiss before I would leave. Sometimes they’d demand a blowjob. Never any witnesses, so what can you do but yell and scream until they let you go. And you go back and tell the manager, the manger calls the customer, the customer denies it and threatens to “sue”, and the manager panics and not only gives them a coupon for 10 free pizzas, but forces YOU to go take it back out to them.
About a few hundred times. “You little bitch! I’m going to fucking kill you if you don’t give me my pizza for free!” Again, no witnesses.
Punched three times, slapped a few times, kicked a handful of times, shoved against a railing which almost sent me off a third-storey balcony, pushed down a flight of stairs…I really can’t remember everything. I have a handful of yellowed copies of police reports in a file cabinet somewhere where I did prosecute people.
Robbed once, attempted robbery once. Attempted carjacking once.
Because the other option was vying for a $3.35/hour job where you work your fucking ass off washing dishes and which didn’t work around my college scheduled. And you get sort of a laissez-faire attitude too, sort of a “situational insanity” is the word I use to describe it. Example: I remember my friend Mike coming back from a delivery and the conversation was like:
“Hey Mike.”
“Hey Una.”
“What happened to your face?”
“That motherfucker at XXXX West Prairie slammed the door on me before I could get out the door. Pizza was half an hour late.”
“Oh yeah, he tried that with me last time.”
“(rolls eyes) Thanks for warning me.”
“(shrug) Hey, the crossdresser at XXXX East Saxony tried to grab my crotch again.”
“Yeah. But he’s a $3 tip, Una.”
“(sigh) I know.”
To add to my prior answer: I lived in a place where at that time the unemployment rate for college students needing a job to work around school was really freaking high. I had to wait 2 months before I got a “slot” as a delivery driver, and I only got my slot by virtue of one driver wrapping his Dodge around a telephone pole.
And there were good times too. Fun times. The work wasn’t that horrible, it’s just when you work full-time (overtime many weeks) for 5 years, bad shit accumulates.
Yeah, it is an interesting rant. I didn’t get the feeling that your gripes hinged on this stuff happening because people are black, but this is a touchy world where criticizing black people can send the wrong message. I dunno, later I felt like you might be some kind of left-leaning Joe the Plumber who has found the secret formula for criticizing black people without being an asshole about it.
I used to be a pizza driver too, right around the time Civ III was giving way to Civ IV (I definitely preferred Civ IV, these days I apparently must conquer Japan in Shogun II but alas, my gf usually has other ideas…) It was a ridiculously fucked up job where I did it too. The weirdest recurring theme in my experience was the public urinators- pretty much every day we’d get drunks, bums, crackheads, you name it, wandering onto the property to piss on the dumpsters, or on the back wall, or hell on the front wall. I thought that was disgusting since we were, you know, serving food and everything. So I’d go out and yell at them, push them around, throw them off the property, throw water balloons at them, anything I could think of to make them go away. Invariably they’d defend their right to piss on my restaurant. Sometimes they’d throw punches (which is stupid to do to me if you are intoxicated and weigh under 200 lbs), a few pulled knives, maybe three times they’d find a big rock and throw it through the window of my car. One of these guys almost got shot in the head by a cop- I caught him and sat on him until the cops arrived. He would not shut the fuck up or quit fighting even with three cops standing there. So one put his boot on the guy’s back, cocked his gun and put it right up to his ear. Holy shit! Anyway, you probably won’t believe that they found a crack pipe on the guy
Anyway, crime and poverty, not race, sounds about right. There is something else though too- why are there soooo many intoxicated people wandering the streets? Why can’t they piss on a tree? Some of them would piss on our restaurant with their fucking kids, like some kind of outing. I seriously could not believe it. People are beaten down by the system for sure, but it also seems like some people aren’t trying.
Anyway, the best thing I ever did in that business was to get an old Toyota Corolla- those things never break down and as a result my take home went way up. For all the danger and stress, and run-ins with gang members, druggies and various maniacs, it was an interesting job. I remember our boss fucking prostitutes in the office, two at once on one occasion. Har har, one guy and his ex-wife worked there at the same time, this guy was also into prostitutes, eventually started dating one We even had a pizza girl who worked two jobs so she could afford male prostitutes. One time I thought I spotted a urinator, wandered over there to give 'em hell but nope, it was some guy fucking a prostitute behind the dumpster. I got confused and wandered away from that one. How about the smelly co-worker in his 40’s with the gorgeous concert pianist wife in her 20’s who left him when he got caught- again- smoking crack? It was seriously nuts.
I’m just rambling. I’ll have you know my minimum tip for waiters is $4, no matter what the tab. For drivers it is usually $5 or more. Some day you may want to consider working in a higher-end restaurant- last night I took my gf out for what basically amounted to ambrosia, like the line between food and drugs blurs. $150 tab, $30 tip- surely those guys are paying the bills, and not a single person pissed on the premises!
I don’t understand why you wouldn’t try temping with an eye on being hired full time by one of the companies. I suspect temping would pay better than what you’re doing now. It would certainly be safer. It sounds like you’re putting in years of effort for little reward.