I’ve never delivered, but somewhere out there in this world there is a guy who braved the scary tree lined dark driveway that is my inlaws, rang the doorbell and was greeted at the door by someone wearing a black bear run over their head to surprise them.
If you are reading this, Mr. Pizza Guy, we still laugh at the memory of your face.
And if we drunken buffoons stiffed you, I profusely apologize.
My husband had some cash from Christmas, and bought us a pizza out of it. We went with the local Italian place that we’re semi-regular customers of; we’ve always tipped well and received good service. When the guy showed up with the pizza, my husband grabbed the money from his Christmas cash, with enough for a ~20% tip, and handed it over telling the delivery guy to keep the change. A minute later, the doorbell rang. The delivery guy was there and said, “I know you guys normally tip well, but I don’t think you meant to give me this $50.” We were so pleased that we gave him another $5, and then I called the restaurant to tell them what happened, giving our location so they could confirm which driver it was, and asking the person on the phone to let the manager know.
Back when I was a lower lifeform scraping at the bottom of the American Dream as a morally dubious Pac-10 dorm-dweller; I never had money, and I knew the people who had all the good drugs, and, well, I liked drugs a lot. So whenever the crew all hung out I would buy pizza for everyone and everyone else would bring drugs. We were usually half past Mars by the time the pizza came, and several times we tried to get the pizza guy high or drunk, but they’d never do it. How the on campus Domino’s found such a scrupulous bunch of delivery folk is still beyond me. I don’t think Domino’s drug-tests, but I may be wrong.
Do we have any active Pizza Guy on the boards?
In college, a group of guys I used to hang with must have spooked more than one poor delivery boy. We’d all be as high as kites and get the brainwave that we wanted pizza, and then dump all of our pocket change on the floor. Ah! Just enough!
So when the lad shows up, all he knows is that he’s pulled up to a crumbling townhouse, there’s a pentagram spraypainted onto the front walk, Megadeath is blasting down the hall, and there’s about 8 longhaired freaks who stink of weed all apologizing at once about how they forgot his tip and would he like a bong hit instead and shoving $12 in quarters and dimes into his hand …
I delivered pizza for a year about a year ago. It really shocks me that somebody said that they could never find a pizza guy to accept drugs - getting smoked out was always one of the best parts of being a delivery driver. I used to smoke with my managers in the walk-in freezer, and also on deliveries all the time. The only time I would turn down if someone offered me a hit off their bong was if I was already getting a little too stoned to work.
This is how I understand it, based on many a visit to Santa Cruz while my friends were at UCSC.
Yeah, it always shocked us too. I couldn’t figure it. I mean, I would figure that would be the main reason you’d work for a pizza delivery company on a fricking Pac-10 campus! This one in particular, too, since it’s tough to find a good smoking spot in the area. They would always give me lame excuses like “I have to drive back to work.” Pretty silly–everyone I know with half a driver’s license drives more carefully if they’re stoned (up to a certain amount of stonyness, at which point you don’t want to drive anywhere), and anyway I’d wager decent money that the vast majority of their deliveries were within walking distance, given that the Domino’s was smack in the middle of the not-that-big campus.
I spent about 8 years delivering pizza…the first 4 years of that was full time.
I can agree with everything on that tipthepizzaguy.com website.
I worked for an upscale Italian restaurant that did pizza, pasta, sandwiches and salads. The prices were high and the tips were really good. Towards the end, the economy here was suffering, gas prices were going up and tips were declining. That’s why I ended up quitting.
House numbering & porch lights:
There should be a law that every house have contrasting house numbers of a certain size…probably 3 or 4 inches and visible from in front of the house. Trying to find house numbers was difficult most of the time. And people never seem to turn on their porch light. In one of the areas I delivered in, the house numbers ranged from 2 to 8 apart with no discernable pattern…in other words, you couldn’t just start at the beginning of the block and count 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016 and know that 2016 was the fifth house from the corner. The addresses were more like 2000, 2008, 2010, 2016, 2026.
We had no set policies on no approaching an unlighted house, but if I found a number and the house was unlit, I’d position my car with the high-beams shining on the front door before I’d approach. If that was impossible, I had a 4D maglite and a pistol. I never had to use the pistol, but I did beat the shit out of someone hiding in the bushes with the maglite.
Wages & tipping:
When I started, I was making $4.25 an hour. Gas was about $1.20 a gallon. I could easily burn $2.00 worth of gas an hour. Add to that a new set of tires at least once a year, monthly oil change and lube, rougly one headlight or taillight bulb a month (that always seemed excessive, but one truck I had did that on a regular basis). Wiper blades were necessary every couple of months…it sucks trying to find addresses in the rain and bad wiper blades don’t help.
When you add all of this up, it leaves under $2.00 per hour. That’s about $80 a week on a good week. You can hardly feed a dog for $80 a week. This is assuming the pizza man is driving a $400 beater from the Salvation Army, which is unlikely because that would probably be a very unreliable car. If the driver has a financed vehicle, the other $2.00/hr is out the window.
This leaves tips for the driver to live on.
And the driver who works the hardest…doesn’t waste a lot of time, knows the delivery area well enough to get the orders out fast, etc…will make good money, as long as the customers tip.
The driver probably doesn’t want to have sex with you…at least not right now:
On more than one occasion, I had scantily clad or even naked women greet me at the door. On all but one of those occasions, I really didn’t want to see that particular person naked. One older woman actually scared the hell out of me…gravity had been cruel to her and she didn’t even know it.
There were a couple of “Gentlemen’s clubs” that would order from us early in the evening before the “ladies of the night” started stripping. Now, the “Gentlemen’s Clubs” in that area were pretty much sleazy strip clubs with the trashiest strippers you could imagine.
I went in one of these places around 4 pm one afternoon. They weren’t open yet, and the lights were on. There’s a GOOD reason why it’s so dark in these places.
The stripper who had ordered the pizza came up and asked if I wanted a blowjob in exchange for the pizza!
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Ok…I told her a blowjob wouldn’t pay my rent and she gave me a $20 and I got the hell out of there.
Best tips I ever made in one night
It actually sleeted and snowed here one night…I think it was February of '92 or '93. It started around 6 pm. Everybody else in town shut down but we stayed open and the phones rang off the hook. We had about 15 people driving…the 4 usual drivers and a bunch of relatives of the owners and other miscellaneous people who were just around and willing to deliver. It went on until well after midnight and I personally made over $150 in tips in 6 hours. It was the best night I ever had delivering pizza…and the first and only time I ever drove in snow!
Eek! shudder
On the other hand, the upscale Gentlemen’s Club I worked at in Chicago used to treat our delivery guys like gold (and only cash-wise, I assure you, heh). We’d usually place one big order with 10-15 girls ordering at once, and most of us never had change for 20s, so we’d just throw a 20 in for whatever we ordered and never ask for change back. The driver 8 times out of 10 walked away with a 75-100% tip on a 150ish dollar order.
Needless to say, our orders never got screwed up, the food was always hot when it got there, and it got there fast. More than one delivery guy told me they actually had our club on a delivery “rotation” for the drivers due to jealousy. Apparently, there’d been a couple literal fist-fights over who’d deliver to our club. 