So I’m leaving for work the other morning when I see this guy pull up into the driveway and put on his emergency lights. He steps out of his minivan holding something (which I can’t tell since it was kinda dark) and just stares at me as he is walking towards me. I get to my garage and he walks past me. I turn to see what he’s holding and it turns out to be a few rolls of newspapers.
Newspapers? What is he doing with them?
So he walks over to some apartments and throws them a few feet. He kinda shuffles on over back to his minivan and proceeds to take off. Unfortunately he does this before I leave the garage and by the time I get to the street, he is a few dozen yards down the street with his emergency blinkers on again. I pass him as I make my way to work.
When did THIS happen? It just seems odd. I mean, it seems wasteful for a person to drive around delivering papers. Is it really that much cheaper for a few of these guys to deliver papers out of their vans as opposed to those kids who used to deliver papers out of their bikes?
ABout 18 years ago, I delivered papers for a whole 10 days. At that time, you had to go to a central location to get your alotment. I saw no children. Most of the carriers were middle class types.
I know it’s been like that around me since at least the mid 90s. Im sure it started well before that. Ive never seen a real “paperboy” in my life. I thought they went the way of the Milkman - and at about the same time.
Where I live, they deliver the papers about 5 in the morning. I’d never let any (completely) hypothetical children of mine ride around on bicycles in the morning dark, throwing things at people’s houses.
I’ve never seen a paperboy, though I did have friends that did it when I was in high school. They usually piled in the back of a pickup and threw them from there.
Well… considering my step-mom is the person who makes sure all those papers get delivered (she supervises the carriers, any printing problems are NOT her fault)… I could say that yeah they are middle aged people with minivans. Some are moms looking to make a little extra money, some it’s their second job… and of course there are kids who deliver papers… but older kids with their own cars (like my younger brother)
I was a paperboy in my early teens and yes I had to get up at ungodly hours even on school days for a extremely small sum of money (when the cheapskates paid me). Walking the dark streets slinging papers in Baltimore City was not fun.
For the past 20 years or so I haven’t seen a paperboy or girl. Now it’s all done by driveby and sometimes I have to hunt for the paper. Mostly it’s in the hedges.
The first time I noticed it was around the late 80s.
As an ex-paperboy, I can think of a few reasons.
A paperboy on a bike can only carry so many papers. This is especially true with the bigger Sunday editions. Every Sunday I stuffed 20 Boston Globes in my bag and tried to make it to my first house before the pressure of the bag cut off all the blood to my head.
The old paperboy system had a pretty inefficient payroll/billing system. I collected payment from my customers, paid the newspaper company for the papers, and then kept the rest as profit. Some customers left the payment out on a Friday morning, but others didn’t. In this case, I had to bike around to all the houses on Friday and Saturday afternoons to collect from the deadbeats. Sometimes, I had to float a customer out of my own pocket and try to collect two weeks pay the next week.
The newspaper company gets better service with adults in cars. Let’s see. As a kid/paperboy, I was supposed to place ad inserts into each Wednesday paper and then deliver them. That took time; so I threw them all out. I had one customer who was really far off my route. The customer didn’t tip; so I stopped delivering his paper until he quit. Going back to first example, delivering 40 Sunday papers might take me two hours. I’d have to deliver 20; come back home to reload, and deliver another 20. If I started delivering at 7 AM, someone was getting his paper at 9 AM, which might be considered too late by some standards.
I don’t know how many parents would want their kids biking around unsupervised in the early morning hours anymore.
Adults deliver the early morning paper we have to pay for. We also get two “free” papers twice a week, and they’re delivered on Wednesday and Saturday for one, and Thursday and Sunday for the other one. They’re usually delivered in the afternoon, and I sometimes see kids deliver them. I think that’s pretty common nowdays. What kind of weird kid would be willing to get up at (or sometimes before) the crack of dawn to earn a few measley bucks if they’re not really hurting for it.
I guess this weird kid wanted to learn some responsibility. Plus I wanted to buy things that my parents weren’t willing to buy because of cost. Not because they were poor, but because I wanted the $300 Mach I bike, nintendo games, etc… I learned quite a bit, especially a work ethic that comes very rarely by most, and I’m proud of that.
You can do that with pretty much any job ParentalAdvisory… I did that with babysitting and then working for the city… my brother did it by working at a gas station (to pay for the car initially. Delivering papers is his way of helping step-mom out sometimes)
Getting up that early is risky. My Dad was helping one morning and got jumped by some drunk guy… who beat him up, gave him bruises and cuts and nearly choked him till he passed out. If he hadn’t had his cell the guy would have gotten away but he was caught a few blocks away.
Plus you have to deliver by a certain time (6:30-7am latest) and can deliver up to hundreds of papers between 4am and that time.
At least that’s how it works up here. The flyers are a little easier for those who are vehicle challenged.
Ours is done by a family, and it seems to be common. Mom does the driving, and the kids take turns flinging. I must say they’re great; my paper is porched every morning. They can earn some actual money this way, since it’s so much faster than a bike and they can cover more routage.
I had an afternoon paper route, but I wouldn’t have wanted a morning one. DangerDad had a morning one, and still remembers the pain of Sunday mornings.
I’m a paperboy. Except I’m 38 years old and a single mom of four.
Papers here have to be on the doorstep by 6:00 a.m., which pretty much rules out the kid-on-a-bike scenario. All of the carriers I know are adults: a few college students, but mostly folks like me who use this as either a primary or secondary income.
I start at around 3:30 a.m. and am done by 6ish, and I just enjoyed one of my 5 days off per year. Considering that I make pretty decent money at it, I can’t complain. This time last year I was making better money than a lot of full-time workers I knew; this year, I’m down about a hundred papers, which translates to $400 a month less.
It’s a great job, imo. I feel like I get paid $12 an hour to drive around and listen to the radio. I’m actually kind of bummed that I finally had to find a “real” job (because I need health insurance), and I’ll eventually have to give up the paperboy gig.
I’m going to hang onto it as long as I can, though…I like the hours and the security. And the Christmas tips were great!
Erm… what’s with all the flinging in the hedges? Don’t you people have a paper box? People in the places I’ve always lived have a mailbox and a paper box by the street, the paper guy drives down the street the wrong way like the mailman and puts the papers in the boxes. Unless he gets lazy and drops them on the driveway.
When you come in in the latenight/morning and see the paper guy, you know you really overdid it.
We don’t have mail delivery here so there’s no mail box at the road. As far as a paper box goes, I’ve never gave it a thought. I’m just happy to have something delivered.
I left a tip of $20 on Boxing Day morning in an envelope taped to my door (I live in a condo so it was safe) for the paper carrier. Is that an acceptable amount?
I don’t have single customer who has a paper box…I think it depends on the neighborhood. I always carry a few extra papers in case of a paper-eating hedge–I am so not grubbing around in some topiary at four in the morning.
I recently had a college student stop me to ask, “Is that tomorrow’s paper?” It took me a while to figure out that my perception of when “tomorrow” starts is different than someone’s who has been up all night drinking. For a while, I felt like I was in some kind of time warp.
I wish we had a kid on a bike. Could hardly be worse than the guy who ALWAYS throws my paper directly under the middle of the car. An entire front lawn and a driveway 3 cars wide, but he manages to fling the paper into the one place I can’t get it unless I move the car. In which case I might as well keep going and drive to work. Oh, and when I called the paper to complain, he called our home during the day and yelled at my daughter.
