One of adaher’s links in the SRIOTD thread in the BBQ pit centered around businesses refusing service to certain addresses or neighborhoods, or in the extreme example, cab drivers just refusing to pick up black persons at all.
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/07/25/news_pf/Neighborhoodtimes/Crime_turns_pizzamake.shtml
Here’s one of those links.
I can add my perspective on the matter. Not only have I been a driver, but also a manager, in situations where we deem it too dangerous to deliver.
Sometimes people move into the neighborhood and order pizza just to be told nope, your address is in our no-delivery zone. But you just got there, you never did anything wrong, and you’re already banned.
It’s gotta suck, right? Especially if you’re in an area like mine where there aren’t that many options for delivery.
The business is interested in making money, so are the drivers. When we opened up shop, every address on the map was deliverable. We didn’t just ignore whole swaths of town just because.
Over time, what happens? A certain specific house or address does one too many cancellations for no reason, prank calls, or there’s a robbery attempt. That house gets banned, and for every other house on that street, we do call backs to ensure that the person is giving us a working phone number and they’re recorded giving us the address.
Soon, the entire map is calling back. We always call back new customers now. You don’t answer, we don’t deliver.
But, things get worse. An apartment complex is built, and the buildings are designed such that there’s apartments on the interior of the building, where the driver cannot be seen from the street, and there’s only one or two exits in any given corridor. Enough robberies there, and we ban that entire apartment complex.
“But I live right across the street from a police station!”
Doesn’t matter. There aren’t any cops in patrol cars near there, and the robbery has already happened and the driver is beaten, shot, or stabbed already. Does me no good to call the cops after I’m already dying. There’s literally an apartment complex we don’t go to that is literally next door to a police station. Robberies happened there all the time. *All *the time.
This happens in several apartment complexes. You just moved in, you assume the place is safe. Maybe it is, maybe it has been for a while. New owners, you say. New security features, you say. Oh look, there’s a security guard and a gate now.
None of that stuff matters. The guy at the gate doesn’t do squat for me if I get robbed inside the complex. The guy who robbed me lives somewhere in the complex, just not at the address I got robbed at. There’s maybe one whole security guard on patrol, but they can’t see the entire complex at once from where they’re standing. And by the way, people get inside gated communities all the time. I wait five minutes, I tail someone else in. That’s how most of my customers get their pizza because they won’t pick up the phone when I call, and they provide an no workingt gate code. Doesn’t stop anyone who is determined enough to be patient for a few minutes. And like I said, the guard at the gate, if there is one, doesn’t leave the gate, and does nothing to protect me against a robbery from inside the gate, and does nothing to protect me if the robber got inside the gated community simply by tagging along in someone else’s ride, or if they live there, or if they know how to scale a fence.
All that stuff is an illusion. And no one comes running when you call for help. No one gets involved. Even if there were people in view of the robbery, nothing would happen. People may or may not even call the police if they hear a robbery taking place. There is no security.
Truth is, the robbery can happen anywhere, anytime. But, rather than simply ban deliveries to entire neighborhoods and lose all that money, we ban addresses in a reactionary manner. One at a time, for each and every costly robbery or prank we endure, until large swaths of the map are undeliverable.
So you go “Well, can’t I just meet you somewhere public?”
No, because that’s a setup for a robbery. That’s not your address, and you’ve got a perfect getaway route, because you’re not in the middle of a windy twisty neighborhood.
It’s after hours. The lobby isn’t open anymore, we’re just doing a few more deliveries while we clean up shop.
Can’t we just “deliver” it to our own parking lot?
No. The lobby is closed at this hour because it’s too dark and too dangerous in this neighborhood for us to have the lobby open to the public. There’s not enough crew members inside to successfully call the police if one of us gets jumped or held at gunpoint.
Opening the doors which keep us relatively safe from thugs to step into an empty parking lot at night is a massive security risk. We only go out there to do the delivery if you’re NOT in our parking lot at that time.
These things didn’t happen because we don’t want to serve the public. Each and every one of those “we can’t serve you” situations happened because of something a criminal did to us. The sheer fact that a huge swath of the neighborhood is undeliverable should tell you something about the danger of being a pizza delivery driver at night in certain neighborhoods. It’s worse in some cities than others.
It’s never one incident, and then we go welp, we can’t deliver to the entire southwest corner of the map now.
It takes many, many incidents at an apartment complex for us to not go there anymore. You know how much revenue those things represent? They’re a gold mine to the company, less so to the drivers who rely on tips, but the company DOES NOT WANT to ban any apartment complex, ever.
It’s too much money.
When they decide to ban a whole apartment complex, you’d better believe someone got shot. You’d better believe they’ve lost thousands of dollars in bogus orders or robbery setups or scam attempts.
It’s only when the company hurts that badly, do they say no more.
If your specific house has been banned, it’s because:
- Someone there ordered a bunch of times and cancelled for no reason
- Someone there ordered a bunch of times and couldn’t pay
- Someone there ordered a bunch of times and weren’t home
- We got robbed there
It’s that simple.
And by the way, my neighborhood is about 90% african american. We deliver to about 95% of the addresses on the map.
It’s not because you’re black. There are a lot of very safe neighborhoods that are basically 100 percent black. We deliver there no problem.
It’s the fact that in some areas, people screw with us more than in other areas.
That’s all. Nothing personal, it’s just business.
I don’t want to get shot. And if a city passes a law forcing us to go to certain addresses again, it’s very simple. I’ll quit.
You can’t make me go there, pure and simple.
