Speaking of Pizza Delivery places keeping tabs on customers...

Factual Questions
21

I never delivered pizza, but I delivered Chinese food for a few years. I’ve gotta tell you, for some reason people tip A LOT more for Chinese food. We were just a few doors down from a Dominos and we would hang out with the drivers there and compare what we made that night. It turned out that us Chinese food delivery drivers consistently made twice as much money in tips + delivery charges while doing half the volume of deliveries. The mileage to our cars was about the same on average since we had a wider area and less simultaneous deliveries.

I also happened to be the driver who would make the most money almost every night. I knew the neighborhood and all the shortcuts like the back of my hand. I knew when to take a right at a red light, I knew when to drive past my left turn and take a u-turn in order to avoid a red left turn signal. I knew that it sometimes paid to go a little out of your way in order to take a faster road.

The cooks at this place were FAST! They would have some orders done in 2-3 minutes and most in about 5. It was not unusual for me to arrive at someone’s door totally unexpectedly and have them be angry until they inspected the food. A lot of people thought that I was giving them pre-made food or somebody else’s order. They couldn’t believe that their food could come from a couple miles away in less than ten minutes. But as soon as they saw the food, they were always happy because it was fresh and piping hot. There was almost a cult following of people who frequently ordered from this place. They loved the food, the prices were reasonable, and it was always delivered FAST.

As a result of all this consistently hgh level of satisfaction, I was usually tipped very well. Damn, I sorta miss my days as a Chinese food delivery driver. The stories I could tell…

22

i hope a hijack is ok…

i wanted to do that, be barely dressed when the pizza guy got to the house and tell him i only had enough money for the pizza, none for a tip, but if he’d like to come inside… but pizza guys are borerline legal. and i’d be afraid i’d get lots of unrequested deliveries :slight_smile:

not for sex. just for, well, if the president says it isn’t sex…

my boyfriend says when he worked deliveries, he’d occasionally get an older woman scantily clad at the door, usually with her husband near by. he figured they went and had some dessert with their pizza. he said it didn’t do much for him cause they were close to his mom’s age. i am not that old, and kinda cute. maybe i’ll try it some day. maybe from a friend’s house :slight_smile:

23

In Australia, most people don’t tip. I used to deliver for Pizza Hut (but gave it up because the wage was terrible and I just didn’t have the time any more), and people even expected you to dig out the five cents change from the $19.95 order that they paid for with a $20.

The deliveries the drivers would fight over (and we were allocated deliveries by which orders were near each other, tipping had absolutely no impact) were the ones to swanky hotels in town… because overseas people stay there, and they often tipped :slight_smile:
The best tip I ever got was from a Canadian guy… I brought him a $27.50 order, and he gave me $40 and said “keep the change”!
I thought it was Christmas.
Otherwise, I got on average one or two tips a week, usually less than $2.

The best way to get a hot fresh pizza is to pick it up yourself- and it will cost you $6 less.

24

That’s probably why you get almost no tips. None of the places I use here (the US) charges anything for delivery, so I regard the tip as the delivery charge.

25

I delivered pizzas full-time while in college, for 5 years. I made more than 50,000 deliveries in that time.

I had three contemporaries who delivered almost as much, and it’s amazing how you can get an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire city and of all the hundreds of customers. When a ticket came over the printer, it wasn’t a matter of knowing where the house was (we all knew every single address so well we never thought about the delivery, we just drove.)

And part of that knowledge was the disposition of the customers.

There were three types of customer:

  • Average customer.
  • Customers who constantly tipped.
  • Assholes.

You better believe that not only do the drivers remember who always tips, it does make a difference. You don’t want it to, but it does. And the amount need not be big - a dollar each time was enough to put someone in the “good” category. Some people tipped about 2-3 dollars each and every time, and they got “premium” service.

It wasn’t just about the pizzas either. We would sometimes do “pre-negotiation”. For example, many times on busy nights we would come back to the store and see “leaning towers of pizzas” in their delivery bags, every one of them already late. For the good customers, we would automatically take $3 or $5 off of the price before we even left the store or they complained. Everyone else had to actually express some serious displeasure before we would do that. Sometimes we would throw in a free 6-pack of pop. Sometimes we would just give it to them free.

It’s amazing how many good-tipping “regulars” there were. I personally must have delivered more than 100 times to one woman, who tipped $5 every time.

We regular drivers (the “lifers”, which meant we lasted more than 3 months) never dragged our feet or anything for the “assholes”, as that always made things worse. But the less experienced/unscrupulous drivers would do that - you would come back and see and asshole order left behind on purpose by one of the temporary drivers, forcing one of us “lifers” to take the already late pizza and suffer the abuse. Assholes never got an automatic discount, and often ended up with the net result of getting their pizzas late.

Me, I didn’t really care to make anyone’s pizza late, nor did the other lifers.

And it’s not retribution, why people will skip deliveries and make them late for assholes, you have to remember that. You have a bunch of college kids, including gals like me, who go out at night until 1:00 am to dark, creepy houses, where a man wearing nothing but his wifebeater and Fruit of the Looms comes to the door and screams at you, stinking of beer and Old Spice, and there’s a lot of fear involved.

It’s not retribution that made people skip deliveries, it was fear. I posted a few times before on this board on how I had been assaulted while delivering pizzas (and how I almost shot two people…), I’m not going to discuss it again here, but it happens all the time.

26

I’ve been delivering pizzas for over 4 years now, and I will agree with everything Anthracite just posted except for the “And it’s not retribution” bit. I used to work for a small place as the only driver. I delivered probably once a week to this one man, Gordon, for about 2 years. He would always tip $0.46. He didn’t tip me 46 cents out of convenience either. He always ordered the same medium pizza that cost $8.54. He’d give me a 10 and ask for a dolar back. On top of that, he was a rude asshole. Whenever I went on runs with multiple deliveries, his being one of them, I would always take his last unless it would save me some time to take his in between the others.

On the other hand, the good tippers I delivered to regularly usually got their pizzas first.

Now that I work for Pizza Hut though, there are way too many different people to keep tabs of every one of them. If somone doesn’t tip me once, I’ll always remember but not until I walk up to the doorstep the next time. If somone doesn’t tip me a few times, I may remember the adress, but there really isn’t anything I can do about it. The deliveries we take are assigned by a dispatcher who just assigns them based on area.

I noticed a lot of you saying that certain areas just take longer to deliver to. I don’t think that’s the case. There is seldom more than a 10 minutes difference in delivery times to different locations. If it takes longer than that, a delivery to that area is probably supposed to be delivered by a neighboring Pizza Hut. We’ll give them the number of the Pizza Hut in who’s jurisdiction the customer is.

27

The little independently-owned place a few blocks away started sucking started sucking a year ago or so. It had awesome pizza, and was really reasonably priced – not cheap, but comparable with the chains and better pizza. Then they started buying crappy ingredients and hence crappy pizza (chains may not be the best, but they’re consistent and you always know what you’re getting). Their POS system disappeard, and now their handbills are postcard size two-color instead of four-color printing. Of course I’m making it worse for them financially by no longer buying there. Oh well.

Oh, yeah, the point was we started ordering delivery from a local chain (i.e., not a national chain). We’re good tippers, and their delivery people seem to stick around a little bit more. We’re on the outer limit of their delivery area, and we seem to always get our pizza in 20 minutes – not bad since deep-dish takes a good amount of cooking time. I’m positive that their POS system doesn’t track good tippers, because the order-takers seem to always tell us 30 to 45 minutes. But the delivery guys know. One time, in fact, the order taker tried telling us we were outside their delivery area! I convinced her to look at my order history and see that we’d gotten deliveries before. Still got the pizza super fast.

FWIW back in the military I supplemented my income (beer money) for a while by delivering pizzas. While not out for deliveries, we drivers took orders, but never put tip information into the POS. Like posters above, though, we’d put in notes such as not accepting checks from certain people and so on. We just knew who good tippers were, and they’d get free “wacky bread” with their orders (good for the driver and good for the business). Our area for delivery was huge, encompassing much of Killeen and almost all of Fort Hood and if a new guy screwed up and took an order out of the delivery area we’d go there, too.

There was a lot of competition in town, but this place really had the best pizza in town. It always amazed me when potential new customers would call asking how the pizza was. Of course I’d tell them it was the best in town, to which they’d reply, “Well, you work there, you have to say that.” I don’t know what they gained by calling.

28

I’m reminded of the Onion story, “Everyone involved in pizza’s manufacture, delivery, and consumption stoned”

29

Different folks, I guess. I don’t recall ever making a pizza late on purpose out of retribution.

However, giving top priority to frequent customers (and those who tipped every time, even if it was only $0.50), I saw in the same manner as paying for “first class” service.

There were several cutomers that the drivers were afraid of. They knew I wasn’t afraid of anyone, so they would send me there, or one of the other 3 “lifers”.

Actually, as an interesting coincidence, three of the four “lifers” at any one time would be carrying an handgun in their car. So that likely helped.

I did have to draw my 9mm from my car on one delivery, where a 6’4" near-naked man who outweighed me by about 200 pounds chased me around my car, screaming how he was going to “kill (me)” because the order taker had put Pepsi instead of Diet Pepsi on his order. He was serious too. Amazing how a tiny gal like me holding a 9mm takes all the piss and vinegar out of the “big men” that think they can use their mass and strength to bully their way through the world by violence and intimidation. :rolleyes:

I disagree with your note on the delivery times. It depends greatly on the city where you work - mine was a suburban sity which by default was expected to cover an enormous rural area, which did actually have several customers in it. Sometimes there would be a half-hour round trip to deliver a single pizza. Those times sucked. :frowning:

30

I delivered for a few years back in my early 20’s for Godfathers. The competition between drivers wasn’t really there, since there were at the most 2 drivers on at any time (usually only 1).
I do recall only a few good and bad tippers–but for some reason the bad tippers seem to stand out a bit more (maybe I’m somewhat of a pessimist). There was one house in perticular that ordered every Friday night, 2 pizzas with pop and other crap–for a grand total of $20-$25. Every time I dragged their 4 boxes of food and flimsy pop containers to their doorstep, I was greeted with a cold stare and a check for the exact amount of the bill. After going throught the same thing week after week with these chumps, their orders somehow started arriving later and later. If that address was slapped onto a pizza box and the food was bagged and ready to go–too f’n bad. I would wait for other orders to be made, cooked and bagged before I headed out the door. Sure, I could have delivered their order and arrived back at the store just in time to go on other deliveries, but I somehow lost my zest for making these people sated from Godfather’s Pizza without a nice 45-60 minute wait.
Back to the topic…I remembered a few of the good and bad tippers and that often dictated what kind of service they would receive–but nobody at the store had a written “log” of each and every delivery and who tipped what. Actually, if the people were nice and greeted me with a smile, but tipped small–I would remember that as a positive place to deliver. Writing me a check for the exact amount of the tab and acting like I ran over your dog in the driveway–that will buy your pizza a little cooling off time.

31

I used to work at Pizza Hut as a waitress but I was usually the one bagging the pizza for our drivers when it wasn’t busy.
Maybe No Disguise’s district is alot bigger and I pretty much know for a fact that it is, but all of our drivers know the regular’s addresses, phone numbers, tips, change, pizzas ordered, all off by heart. As for the customers who didn’t tip, they somehow came up with ways and bullshit stories to get them to give them something, and 90% of the time it works.
It could be our drivers are a little more obsessed, who knows…

32

I’ve delivered pizzas for five years.

It does get noticed who tips well, but as has been mentioned, rules about the order deleveries get taken in pretty much mean that you’re getting your pizza just as soon as everyone else.

Does this mean you shouldn’t tip?

Imagine it’s the middle of winter. Your car breaks down. You have to go to work tomorrow. Your job, although it pays quite well, doesn’t pay for you to take your car to a mechanic, not that you could take off a week while they work on it anyway. So you go out in the cold snow and wind and take your car apart. After sitting on the cold pavement for three hours you don’t even notice your behind is cold anymore. Once inside you realize why. It’s as cold as an ice cube, and takes a good hour to warm back up again. Then you go back out and finish up.

It’s not a great job. Broken cars, supid drivers, asshole customers. You could not tip well, but then the drivers would take other jobs that pay just the same and then you’d be picking up your own pizza.

It may not seem fair to give someone $5 to deliver your food, but if you don’t make up for everyone else who gives them 10 cents, the job just wouldn’t be worth it.

A somewhat unrealted note: People seem to think that you’ll get good tips in the rain, but it’s not the case. As best I can figure, everyone who’s kind enough to tip good is also kind enough to not order when it’s raining. Hence, every delivery you make in the rain you get almost no tip. Hey, that’s another shitty part of the job those good tips have to make up for. I wouldn’t work on rainy days if it wern’t for the tips I make on the other days, I’d just find a new job.