Thinking up these titles when you’re tired is kinda hard. I had a title before, when I went out for a smoke, but then life happened, and I forgot. Just like I forget spelling and grammar. But they say if you’re bad at that stuff you’re a genius, so I must be like a super-genius. lol. Yeah, I do those, too. Anyway, on to the title topic. The new job is okay, business is starting to pick up, but the guy who owns it could really do some things to help it along. It’s been open for a few years now and has a decent following. It’s a brick oven place, which is great pizza, but no one will know it’s great unless you shout to the world that you’re there. He hasn’t even put a “We Deliver” sign in the window because he thinks it will look tacky or something. He asks for a lot of advice and I always tell him, “I can’t tell you what works, but I can tell you all the different ways I fucked up my place.” The problem is, he does some of the same stuff. If he relied on delivery, he’d be in trouble. He has a pretty good following for sit-down and pick-up, but I’m of the opinion that once you start something, you finish it. There’s nothing worse for anyone working for tips anywhere than sitting around waiting for customers. Even bad tips pales in comparison. I mean think about it: we make on average around $6 an hour. We rely on those tips to make it worthwhile. At a busy place on a good day you could easily average $20 an hour or more. My best weekly average was about $25 an hour. I mean we’re not talking lawyer pay here, but how many jobs do you know that you can make $1200 a week without many more skills than customer service and driving? There aren’t too many.
Saturday I took ten deliveries. I think I made around $40 in tips and another $10 in gas money. So $50. Add my pay for the day, $57 and you get $107 for 9.5 hours of work. So the average is way down for that day. Still, six days a week means at least $600 at the end of the week. Then the problem is buying gas, coffee, cigarettes, etc. It really helps if i do two to three times the amount of deliveries in a day. At least. Ten deliveries is okay for a Monday or Tuesday, but the rest of the week should be between twenty and forty deliveries all day. Split it, take thirty: if I average $3.50 a delivery in tips, that’s $105 in tips, plus $30 in gas, plus $57 in pay. Now you get $193 for 9.5 hours of work. That’s $20.32 an hour. The end of that week I would have $1,158. That’s $60,216 a year. That’s not too bad, especially in this economy. It also makes it a lot easier to budget money. People think it’s easy to just put the money in the bank, but they go to work and go home. We drive work around all day. Our cars are our offices. We need gas. We need food and drinks and such. Yes, it would make a certain amount of sense to go to BJs and get stuff in bulk, or even Restaurant Depot, for those of you who know of it, but it’s all easier said than done. Like how many of you keep your New Year’s resolutions? Yeah, I don’t either. I want to quit smoking. I want to start working out. I want to learn how to save money instead of being a dumbass with my money. I want to be more respectful of my fellow human beings (I’m not rude to them, I just pretty much ignore them if I can). I want to do more things that are living like skiing, ice skating, going to the casinos, camping, traveling, maybe taking cooking classes, get back to learning Spanish and French, and German, too. I want to finish my degree and get another. I want to write a book. There are so many things I want to do. Making sure I put money in the bank just seems to fall short of everything else. Ironically (or maybe not since I don’t get how to use that all the time), a girl was keeping me in line with a lot of the stuff, but she’s caught a rather terminal case of being a neomaxizoomdweebie. Not really terminal, but everything sure seems to be life or death with she and I and we’re not talking as of right now. Such is life, right?
So, back to my original thought: I need people to call so I can present them with excellent service so they tip me well so I can go spend lots of money. That pretty much sums it all up for me tonight. More later.
The Driver (Adam Smith)
© Adam Smith and drivershout.wordpress.com, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Adam Smith and drivershout.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
“Kick Rocks” Pizza Delivery Nightmares by Adam Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License
This isn’t a long-term goal by any means. I have other things I’m working on, like the book, and other books, selling some stuff on Ebay and other sites, as well as trying to get back into the computer thing. I also plan on going back to school shortly to finish my degree in Computer Science, and possibly even following that up with a master’s in the same. Gotta do something, right? I just turned 39. Time to get back into the game of life. I may even try another pizza place of my own in the not to distant future. More later….
