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Something that seems immediately apparent to me is that these folks are not fresh high school students. Adults used to work these jobs.
I can’t even remember what jobs teenagers were supposed to have. Newspaper delivery? Ice cream bike guy? That’s all I got.
Bagging groceries. That job doesn’t even exist anymore
Work that grocers have passed onto their customers that they used to do themselves:
- Gathering the groceries from the shelves.
- Bagging the groceries.
- Checking out the groceries.
It still does in my area. Not every grocery store, but the big grocery chain around here definitely does. Sometimes they even offer to take my groceries to the car for me which has surprised me.
If you didn’t mow lawns, you were never a tween/teen.
Lemonade stands
And they were a proper fleet who has delivered in the same areas for years, making them extremely experienced in navigating those streets.
This also led to better customer service. You had a relationship with your driver.
Sort of. I did this at 16-18.
Also, one person didn’t do all that, still doesn’t. Phones, oven, and delivery are all separate jobs, with phones and oven overlapping during slow shifts.
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…
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.
They also stopped doing the 30-minute thing because they kept getting sued over the wrecks caused by trying to meet the 30-minute deadline.
When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
So that’s where the idea in SnowCrash comes from!
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.
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.
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.
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?
“unskilled labor”
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.
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.
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.
And you know what else kids? The food was actually good!
I love the association that younger generations have with paper maps is pirates. Literally everyone used maps, they had racks of them at gas stations. And yet, now they’re legendary items that only exist with Xs that mark the location of treasure.
Also, I cannot explain my excitement the first time I cut a human out of the pizza ordering pipeline. With zero regard for the employment impact, all I could think about was never getting the wrong kind of pizza (or it it going to the wrong house and never showing up) again. No longer was there a risk of being misheard or someone else making a mistake entering the order info for your address or a half sausage and onion, half pepperoni jalapeño pizza. Everyone around me thought ordering your pizza through an internet website was the nerdiest thing. Most of them didn’t know it was an option and even after my explanation, they preferred to call, wait your turn on hold, repeat your house number, spell out your street name, give a cross street and explain which half of the pizza was your parents toppings and which half was the kids. People just couldn’t believe that you could type something into a computer at your house and then a pizza would show up, without the assurance of a person’s voice confirming they’d received your order and that they will cook exactly what you requested and bring it to you. Of course there was no feedback in those days. You didn’t get an ETA for when it would arrive, an update when your pizza was being cooked, or when the driver left the shop, let alone a GPS tracked map of the drivers location. Once you selected whether you were paying in cash (like a normal person) or paid in advance with a credit card (like some kind of fancy business person), you just waited. If your order didn’t show up after 45 mins, you pick up the house phone, find a coupon you saved with the pizza shop number, and manually press physical plastic buttons that moved and beeped, which was the style at the time.
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.
Sometimes it was 31 minutes, and free
Where the heck is 122 and an eighth?
Would you believe it’s right after 121 and 7th? Not 121 and 8th; that leads to the one way bike path. Obviously. And if you make that mistake you have to use 3 highway ramps in perfect conjunction to get back there. Crossing all lanes for each exit.
