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I really liked being a pizza delivery driver pre-GPS. It did require some skill, but you learned quickly about how things work:
- Is it a complex of some sort (e.g., trailer park, apartment, condo)? Look for a unit map.
- Evens on one side of the street, odds on the other
- You learn all of those weird roads that have the same name in two disconnected parts of town
It was easily the best “shitty job” I’ve ever had.
I remember buying my first mapsco and thinking: well shit, I literally can’t get lost now…
Apartments and multi tenant buildings in my country have numbers in a pattern, 1001 bottom first floor first to the left, 1002 next…1101 next floor same etc etc
Finding the right apartment even without a name of the owner becomes a breeze.
Do you think the postal and delivery workers have learnt this? …nope…
Pizza delivery though? No issues at all
Pizza goes cold, packages (usually) not.
Thank you for your service 🫡
The thin bread line separates not only the hungry from the fed but the men from the boys too. It has a higher casualty rate than being a police officer.
Same. I loved the independence of it. But it didn’t pay enough to cover the repair bills it generated.
That, and each driver would cover a specific area within the delivery range. It’s not like they would have to read a map that fast for an address in an area they didn’t already have practically memorized.
I was in the burbs so we all covered the whole thing.
In my city:
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all the addresses are the same on all the parallel streets,
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“East” and “West” are all separated by the same long North-South Boulevard,
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even numbered express/highways will take you East/West, odd numbered North/South.
Lots of other stuff I’ve since forgotten, but I went from not knowing the city to knowing it by heart in a couple of months.
Now I do longer haul deliveries so I know areas far from where I live. I spend my time scoping out potential restaurants/areas for day trips or vacations.
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Like others have said, we had a big map. One thing I remembered though is how fucking often I would forget somebody’s 2-liter of Pepsi or whatever. I would just stop and buy one on the way, and then later grab one from work and take it home.
I didn’t work for Dominos, but I did spend a year delivering pizza for a different place when I was in college in the late '80s. We had the big laminated map of the area, but after a little bit we’d pretty much know every street and recognize the regulars.
and the reason they stopped delivering within 30 minutes was cause it led to reckless driving and many, many, many traffic accidents and losses of life.
I didn’t know that, crazy.
Yeah pre internet lots of shit was easy to ignore.
Yep. There were many wrongful death lawsuits as well, i think which resulted in millions of dollars of payouts to families, and all the coverage really hit domino’s reputation to the point they finally dropped the half hour guarantee in the mid 90s because of the financial blows from reputation loss and settlements.
Though I wouldnt be surprised if they try to bring it back via drone deliveries.
Though I wouldnt be surprised if they try to bring it back via drone deliveries.
I’m all about drone pizza delivery! As-the-crow flies point-to-point means it arrives faster.
until they start having drone malfunctions that result in concussions, sliced throats, and decapitation.
Dinner AND a show?! What a deal 😎
And now we will never have the beginning of Snow Crash happen irl. Damn.
“The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallow subcategory.”
I just reread that intro and it’s so over-the-top awesome
ex land pirate here … we’d keep a map of the city on the wall for reference but it seemed like most of the drivers just remembered where places were if they’d been working there for any amount of time … I answered phones and made the pizzas when it was still ok to throw the dough up in the air, etc. fun job
Hang on. They don’t throw the dough up in the air anymore?!?!?!?
There’s a pizza dough spreader machine now. Makes it more consistent.
Smaller places often still throw the dough, but chains usually have the machine so every pizza is the same.
eventually they’ll just sell warm pizza food cubes and avoid the hassle of yeast all together because consistency is exactly what everyone wants, … right?
With a chain restaurant… Yes. Consistency is exactly what people want.
Starbucks, McDonald’s, Applebee’s.
There’s a reason they’re all global brands, and it’s not because they’re all unique offerings, it’s cause you can walk into any one of them and know exactly what you’re going to get.
There’s a reason they’re all global brands,
Cookie cutting of bean counters and nefarious practices.
and know exactly what you’re going to get.
Which is not that good. Can’t compare to the local Pizzeria. A heat up burger from the next supermarket is also not worse or more expensive.
A map at the start, sure, I’d bet these drivers had “The Knowledge” like a London cabbie.
I delivered pizzas in college. In my city I used to be able to tell you what subdivision you lived in, what side of the street you lived on, and the nearest cross road, just by the address.
I worked in the kitchen and did deliveries the summer after I graduated high school.
We had a map under a piece of plexiglass on the counter. You’d have to look at it and memorize where you were going before you left.
We didn’t have a 30 minute or it’s free deal, but there was still pressure to deliver fast. Driving their car too fast, I hit the hump in the middle of an intersection and became briefly airborne. All four tires left the street.
That’s rough, at least i had a crappy photocopy to work with haha
And it was incredibly affordable compared to today.
prices didn’t go up, wages went down.
I mean prices also went up
And if you couldn’t pay for the pizza, they’d have sex with you
Sometimes they’d cut a hole in the middle and stick their dick in the pizza though which was weird.
Is that a guarantee?
And the pizza actually tasted better than it does today.
The science of embalming food hadn’t progressed as far at that point.
And health codes didn’t stop them from filling it with all sorts of other stuff, and nobody looked to see that there were 5 sticks of butter and two handfuls of salt in each pizza.
no shit, food in 1960 was full of additional flavoring chemicals.
I have three local places that still deliver using their own guy and I order exclusively from them. It limits my options, but fuck the delivery apps. Anywhere else, I either dine in or pick it up myself.
I do the same. If anyone uses those stupid apps, I consider them to be lazy bitches.
They also didn’t charge you $20 just so the franchise can pocket it.
“unskilled labor”
Not this again.
“Unskilled labor” means that you do not need special skills to apply for the job; you will be trained on the spot.
So when I pay your mom for feet pics, she’s working and an unskilled labourer?
That would mean every management job is unskilled and CEOs should be paid minimum wage.
I can dig it.
I don’t think the difference is the minimum education for entry.
I’d say the difference is how much of your paycheck is because of you specifically and how much is for just general labor.
So a physics researcher job is “skilled” because most of the pay is because the specific researcher knows about physics.
But a waiter job is “unskilled” since the skills needed to do the job are the skills needed for basically any job:
- Basic maths skills
- People skills
- Willingness to work
- Physical endurance
- Enthusiasm to work
- Memory
- Handling stressful situations
- Other relatively basic skills
Of those, only physical endurance and people skills are “exclusive” to being a waiter. There are some actual jobs that require no physical endurance. And some jobs don’t require as much people skills as being a waiter does. But the rest of them are general across basically every job.
Of course, "unskilled job"s do require skills, I just listed a bunch of them. But most of those skills, any other worker that does any other job would have. Therefore I count payment for those skills as payment for “general labor” and not “payment for you specifically”.
you do not need special skills to apply for the job
That’s definitely the textbook economic definition.
But the colloquial definition is that you don’t need special skills to do the job. Employees are interchangeable outside some minimal qualifications (rudimentary intellect, marginal physicality, gender).
And therefore you should be able to fully staff your organization paying the lowest prevailing wage rate, so long as some number of unemployed people exist. Anyone can be fired and replaced at any time with near-zero friction.
So all apprentices are unskilled labour?
Imagine not being able to look things up on your phone the instant you think of them
You’d have a notebook with you to write it down for later.
But yeeeaahh…No bueno for getting it now.
Used to do it myself. The pizza place I worked for gave me a map of the town and said cya. Once went to the wrong street on literally the other side of town because close to same name streets but one was “drive” and the other was “ave” and I was tired.
I was one of those land pirates, once upon a time- and after a few weeks on the job we didn’t need the paper maps, either.
