Welcome Back Me!

I worked tonight as a delivery driver. It was my first time back at my 2nd job since my hernia surgery almost 4 weeks ago. My intention was to go in and drive for about 4-5 hours and see how I felt.

I did start to feel a little fatigued after about 4 1/2 hours but I ended up staying 2 more hours after that. We were down to 3 drivers and while we weren't super busy, the runs we had (and continued to get) were spread out to different sectors of our delivery area.

I did what I like to think of as "running interference" for the other 2 drivers. In other words, I took 4 consecutive single runs to the far reaches of our delivery area. The good news was that 3 of the 4 left decent tips of $3.75 or more, including $7.50 on an 8-pizza order to the far southern edge of our delivery area.

So I was making money for sure. In 6.5 hours I took 14 deliveries, drove 67 miles, and made $42 in tips, for a solid average of $3 per delivery. This was helped by our new delivery charge.

When I last worked, the delivery charge was $1.99. It has been raised to $2.29. Since most of our prices are around the even dollar amount ($12.99 for a large pizza), most (9 out of 14) of the orders totalled $xx.25 to $xx.28.

Most customers don't expect the coin change back so that alone adds an extra 70-75 cents to almost every delivery all night long!

Nine of my fourteen tips were $2.75 or more. An interesting aspect tonight was some of the comments from some of my worse tippers.

One woman asked if I got to keep the delivery charge. "We get about half of it for gas" I told her. She replied that she thought I should get it all, and then handed me $1.

Another man remarked "It must be tough to make money with the price of gas" as he tipped me $1.75.

One more strange occurrence, on one of my later deliveries (3 pizzas and an order of wings), the customer looked at the wings, declared them "not cooked enough", and sent them back. I gave him back the $6.99 and called the manager to get the wings voided off the check. I don't think anyone has ever not accepted their food before. (Not counting complaint calls after the delivery driver had left of course.)

Finally, I found a "window flag" from one of our competitors, Marco's, in the road right in front of our shop tonight. It must have broken off one of their driver's cars as they drove past. (Their shop is just a couple hundred yards from ours.

All in all it was good to be back!