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I know I haven’t put a new post up here in a while, but it hasn’t been as long as my usual gaps. Only two weeks this time. Part of it’s this keyboard. I really need to get one of the clackity ones I love. I hate this thing. The keys are all just a hair closer or further fucking up my typing. Not to mention that someone broke the tabs that let you angle it so there’s that, and the spacebar sticks. Anyway, I’m moving. Evicted, actually. That’s what happens when a driver, writer, whatever has no job or not enough hours to pay bills. My roommate moved out a few months ago so I don’t have that money, but i really don’t make enough anyway. I’m trying to get a spot near where I am right now. I don’t want to have to borrow money, but I might. If I had to I suppose I could sell my car, but that creates all sorts of new headaches. Besides the fact that I really like my car. I really don’t want to sell it. And there’s the mall thing I still want to do in a few months. I might need to sell my car then to get extra cash. I have a few things in the works that will get me some money. I borrowed an extra $9,000 for school, but I don’t get that till September. Half anyway, the other half i get in the spring. I figure I need $10,000 to be safe so I’m a ways off. My sis wisely said I should do a cash flow analysis so I’ll have to do that one of these days and see how much I need to have exactly. Maybe tomorrow. Anyway, I don’t feel like typing, just wanted to let you know what I’m up to.

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.

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“Kick Rocks” Pizza Delivery Nightmares by Adam Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

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First of all, anything you write about my past is just that: my past. I’m not going to get into it here on my own blog, but nothing in my past has anything to do with any job let alone delivering pizza or owning a pizza place. And if you try to post any of that crap on my blog you should know this blog is moderated by me, so any personal information will be deleted. Feel free to post it on your own site, but I pay for this one.

Here are a few things I will dispel for anyone that read some drivel like at gregspages: Contrary to what Greg and a few other people posted, I did NOT mistreat my employees. Some people said I paid less than minimum wage. Yeah, that’s true, but they had the OPTION of being 1099 employees or getting a paycheck. They CHOSE to be cash employees and I paid them $8 an hour (someone idiot said $7) which is a lot more than they would have taken home had they taken a check. Someone said I didn’t give them mileage reimbursement. That’s also complete bullshit. I paid them $1 a delivery, even if it was across the street. I didn’t have to use the IRS rate since they were independent contractors that made their own hours. Had I used it they would have gotten a lot less considering all the runs were close. Take 3 runs in a mile radius and wind up with maybe 1 mile logged that’s like $1.50. Or you could have the $3 I gave for 3 runs. Use your brains people. These same idiots said I mistreated drivers. Bullshit. They had two things to do when there were no runs: make boxes and sweep and mop once at the end of the night. If you call that abuse I call you a dick. It was part of their contracted job. Ask any waitress if they get to do nothing when there’s no customers. Nope. I had two work stations with internet access and they and the phone girls could watch video, play games, use the internet, whatever if there wasn’t any work. My cook started at $10 an hour and my pizza guy at $13. REAL abusive, right? Everyone made their own schedule. I never once told anyone when they had to work. They told me when they wanted to work and I put them down. Know any jobs like that? They also got off whatever days they needed, I never had drivers on snowy days at all, and they could call out sick without fear of getting fired. One guy played guitar in the store, and also took the occasional nap in the back. I’m evil, I know. Oh, and everyone got free food and drinks all the time. It didn’t matter if you worked 4 hours or 10. Yeah, I did fire three people. One for getting high while he did deliveries, one for flat out refusing to work at all while he was there, and one who stopped showing up. That’s hardly abuse.

Someone said I publicly stated that I was evading taxes. Another blatant lie. Just because you print it doesn’t mean it’s true. I can back up what I’m saying, can you? I mean you’d think there’d be some sort of record if you thought you had proof. I paid sales taxes, payroll taxes, unemployment taxes, and income taxes. That’s something else: someone said I wasn’t paying insurance. Where do you idiots get this? I paid over $600 a month for my business insurance which covered drivers, employees, the business itself, and disability. You DO know you need all this to open legally, right? I also had a food service license, and passed all my inspections. I was even a member of the Chamber of Commerce. Feel free to look up whatever of that’s public record. The place was called Semper Pie Pizza in Wallingford. And yeah, I closed, I made a lot of mistakes, but it wasn’t from treating employees badly or not paying insurance or any of that. I made some very poor choices with things like spending. Lesson learned. But at least I had the balls to ante up and give it a shot and am in the process of starting another business in a few months. How many of you haters have gotten out from behind that keyboard and tried running your own business? None of you? Okay then, shut the fuck up.

P.S. If you actually take the time to cyber-stalk me like Greg said he was going to do from his page, there’s more than a few things wrong with you. First of all, if you have nothing better to do than follow someone else around online, that’s just sad. Second, if you actually think that you know my email addresses, you don’t, you just happen to know some of the public ones. Third, if you actually think you can somehow get people or women to shun me like a leper, you need real help. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess you have problems in the bedroom or you’re really ugly, or have some sort of disability and this is how you let the world know you’re pissed at it. If none of that’s true, you’re just a sad, sad individual that really needs to get a life and stop looking towards others to feel like you have one. Know how many people I follow around the internet? None. Know how stupid it is to think you can actually ruin a person’s life online? Very. Aside from all of that, I never did anything to any of you personally so this “vendetta” you have is just silly. You have to be republicans. Only republicans do this sort of this: latch onto people they don’t like and run with it. Like how every right-winger in CT hangs onto one stupid thing Blumenthal said years ago and just will not let it go even though their former Fuhrer himself said he served in Vietnam when he was AWOL the whole time. You ever hear us harping on that stuff? Nope. But people here take it personally, like they REALLY don’t like him as a person and they smear him online as much as possible years later. And years later some of you idiots are STILL following me around online. What’s it been 6 years now? You don’t see how that’s obsessive childish bullshit that you need help with? Imagine if you knew someone that told you that was happening to them: wouldn’t you think the other person was a psycho? And what have I done that the majority of your republican leaders haven’t? I haven’t done half the stuff they have and you love them. And you’re still all fixated on the past. I guess this is why the republican party keeps losing voters: they look backwards while everyone else looks ahead.
The scary thing is you might wake up one day, realize you’re 75 years old and still stalking people online. The thing you’re really mad at is a different opinion. Yeah, I don’t agree with you. That’s what got all this started on TTPG: I didn’t agree with what the elitists said so they had to make it their mission in life to try to destroy me. It hasn’t worked and to my knowledge not one of my real life friends have ever read a single word you guys said. But the elitists believe things like pizza delivery guys should have no side work, no signs on their cars, no uniforms, should be allowed to carry guns, should have whatever they want, as cushy a job as possible and be paid $30 an hour for it, fuck you that’s just stupid. You go open your own pizza place with your own money and get back to us on how much you go out of your way to sink all your profits into a driver instead of just paying them fairly and treating them well. The pizza driver doesn’t make the business. Sorry. A place could just not deliver and those people wouldn’t have a job. I mean if you’re too much of a snob to fold boxes, you probably shouldn’t be working. Business owners don’t go into business wondering how rich they can make their employees for the least amount of work. That’s just dumb. You go into business to succeed. Part of that is having successful employees, but none of that’s pissing away your entire investment to make sure they reap all the benefits and you get none. When employees are offered private stock and want to pay the owner some of his investment back in exchange for profits THEN they’re entitled to more than what’s fair. Not before that you self-righteous assholes. I dare you to find a place that paid as well as I did and was as relaxed as my place was. You wont find any, and I remember people posting how they thought the businesses should provide cars and still offer mileage. Stuff that’s complete nonsense. Why would a business insure, and fuel a car, provide it to you at work then give you gas and mileage money on top of pay when you’re not maintaining the car in any way? That’s just dumb. And $30 an hour? Get real. Comments like that I’ll disagree with all day long. But again, let’s see you open a place and hire drivers, pay them well over $10 an hour plus the IRS mileage rate, and have them do absolutely nothing at work but take deliveries. Until you actually do that you need to shut up about what you expect.
If I had to do it again I’d offer limited delivery and do them myself. I am the fastest driver in any town. This way no drivers would have to be taken advantage of by getting a higher wage than anyone else paid with all the tedious work like folding the occasional box and I’d save money in every area. Because that’s better, right? Better to not employ someone than have them sweep and mop at the end of the night. You guys are complete assholes if you think so and also have no clue as to how to run a restaurant. You need to google “side-work”, you need to get help with your stalking issues, and you need to get a life.

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.

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First of all, if you wouldn’t risk your own life to go out for anything during the bad weather, why in the world would you order food and make us come to you? Know what that tells us? It tells us that aside from your “Be careful out there” statements that you really don’t give a shit about us. If you cared, you wouldn’t call. It’s as simple as that. Look, we’re making between $6 and $8 an hour. You really think that combined with maybe a $5 tip is worth possibly DYING so you can have that large pizza and wings? A lot of us, like myself, write down all the stupid people’s addresses. One way or another, if you risk our lives or screw us over in any way, we’ll get you back. I wont go into details, but trust me on this one: it’s not worth it. Have a little respect and remember that some day you could have kids doing this sort of job, and they might have to deliver in 8, 9, 10 inches of snow because some asshole like you called up for food.
Also: Your house is your responsibility. If you fail to salt your steps or shovel and we fall we can, and often do sue the homeowner. Don’t believe me? Ask that dumbass in Milford I sued about 5 years ago. I won $16,000. Sure, you have insurance for that sort of thing, but your rates’ll go up. So…it’s another example of how you might be paying for it one way or the other. If you show me that you have no respect for me and top it off with something that gets me hurt, I’m coming for you. I’m not going to attack you, that’d just be silly. I’m not going to jail or anything, but I’ll get my revenge. Other drivers aren’t so nice. I know people that spit in the food, I knew one guy that would come back much later with his lights off, cover his plate and do donuts in the yard, and others that shake up the 2 liter bottle of soda: oops.
We in food service are at the bottom rung. We get paid the very least whether we deliver, bartend, waiter, wait tables, whatever. Everyone else is getting at least minimum wage. We get between $4 an hour to a very high of $8 at the most. That upper tier is RARE. It’s usually between $4 and $6 an hour. So ask yourself how much work would you want to do for $6 an hour? How much risk would you be willing to take? And how much bullshit from customers do you think you’d stand for? And remember, aside from you guys, we often have asshole bosses and coworkers to deal with, too. It’s really stressful. The things that keeps us going are the great customers that use common sense, shovel their walks, put salt down, have the lights on, give great tips for great service, and don’t call for delivery during blizzards!

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.

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“Kick Rocks” Pizza Delivery Nightmares by Adam Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

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So the fist thing was I quit that job in the mornings. It was a horrible job. One of the managers was a total bitch and condescended everyone around her. The other manager was fine, but it just got on my nerves for two weeks since they were always both there. But that wasn’t the real problem. I work for a complete asshole now. lol. The real problem was the pay. They paid minimum which would have been fine…except all of the orders were corporate. Businesses love to spend money on food, but hate giving a gratuity. I kept taking really far deliveries, sizable amounts, for $2 and $3 tips. So I did the math: after gas to get there and back, and gas to all these runs I was averaging about $4 an hour. No way it’s worth it for me to be up early to schlep all the way out there for $4 an hour. Food service people work for tips, which are supposed to wind up making you much more an hour than minimum for dealing with everyone’s shit. I know there are cheap bastards out there that live under the impression that we get paid by the hour and should be happy with it, but come on: it’s a service! For drivers there’s also a lot of risk involved. And expenses. No way it’s worth working for $4 an hour so cheap bastards can have their food hot, and quick and fuck us over. The funny thing is by stiffing us you wind up paying more so restaurants can more fairly compensate employees. Yup, that’s why you’ve probably seen mandatory gratuities and delivery fees. It’s because of the cheap bastards.
Onto the one I lost: it was my favorite job where everyone is always happy and nice and the tips were great. I also got paid daily in cash which was nice. The owner took on a partner who wanted to change the delivery structure and wound up firing all three of us because the new guy had his own crew. WTF. So much for loyalty, right? That part sucks. Shit like that’s happened to me a few times and it annoys the hell out of me. What’s the point of being a great employee and going the extra mile when employers do shit like that? Sigh, so now I’m looking again.

On a side note: this keyboard sucks. I bought a Logitech MK320. The keys are sticky and it skips (new batteries, I checked). I miss the old clackety-style keyboard that felt all loose. Those were so easy to type with. On a good keyboard I type upwards of 140 wpm. Not too shabby, right? I can bang out ten pages in just under half an hour.

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.

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So I still work at the place in Stamford on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. But that’s just at night from 5 to 9. It’d hardly be worth driving 20 miles each way to work except my new car gets better gas mileage and I’ve had nights where I made $100 in 4 hours (with pay). Of, that’s another thing: I got rid of my WRX. I know a lot of you like that car, but the lack of room was killing me and I got tired of borrowing people’s Jeeps and trucks to move stuff. I traded it for a 2008 Toyota Rav4. It has 4 wheel drive, and since it has the 4 cylinder, it gets a few miles more per gallon than my WRX did. It’s slow as shit in comparison, but I’m over the racer-boy stage of my life anyway. I love how much space there is inside. It has compartments everywhere and since the tire is on the back door it has ninja storage space under the back floor that has THREE milk crates worth of gear that used to take up my hatchback in the WRX. Then there’s more space under the back seats I haven’t got used for anything. I’m thinking I’ll have a powered subwoofer installed back there when I get my new radio. I plan on keeping this one for a while, but if I had the funds I’d trade it on a 4Runner. I love the new 4Runner. I want that.
Anyway, I saw an ad for another pizza place that’s closer looking for drivers and they happened to need them Tuesday through Thursday from 5 to 10. Perfect. The only thing about this place is the owner’s a little grumpy at times, which I hate. I get $6 an hour. I used to own a place. I NEVER stressed out my employees with my bullshit. Then they hate you and you make them miserable when you’re there which rubs off on customers. Don’t do it. Oh, and this place I have to sweep and mop at the end of the night, along with trash, etc which I wouldn’t mind, but I have to do the whole kitchen area, too. Usually the kitchen guys do their own shit at most places. This place is like 100 feet long. It’s a lot of work. Plus the owne wants the floor mopped twice. Why, I have no idea. I usually do it once. So last week I see place in Stamford looking for a catering driver from 10:30 to 3. Monday through Friday. Even better. So now I have three jobs. I start that one tomorrow. I hope it pays well with tips. I would really rather just work at the Stamford pizza place all day because it pays the most and the tips are the best. I might consider moving down there if that happened, but they have a full-time guy. But they pay $8 an hour and everyone is happy there. It’s a huge place, too, like 6,000 square feet (upstairs and down). They’re always closed Monday so I’d be happy to do 6 days a week open to close. That’d be $520 a week just for showing up and doing whatever side work the full-time guy has to do. To figure out what a driver gets you multiply that number by 2.5 so my weekyl GROSS pay with tips would be $1280. It’d obviously be more gas, but probably no more than $100 a week. It’d still be a nice take home amount, and all cash.
So as much as I like being employed, I’m tired of working for other people so I have two new ideas besides the book that hasn’t been written yet (I promise when I get a laptop I’ll bang it out). Idea one is to do a delivery business like Gowaiter and undercut them and take all their clients. They get 30% of the order plus $3.99 from the customer. I mean that could be like $10 a delivery plus tips. I could do that with VERY LITTLE start up cash and not even have to get insurance or incorporate or get a tax license. They pay the sales tax (the restaurants). The other idea, idea number two I like a little better but I figure would cost about $6,000 to start up: A kiosk at a mall selling cheap iPhone cases bought from China at pennies on the dollar for less than most stores sell them. I’ve seen lots of 1,000 selling for $200. That’s 20 cents a piece. I’d sell them for around $10 which is still about $20 less than places like Staples and cell phone stores sell them for. But getting into the mall costs “seed money” which usually runs $2,000 and the first month’s rent which is another $2,000, and then figure another $2,000 for supplies. And you have to dress nice and be there all day every day or have employees. Still, if I sold 30 a day, or 3 an hour, I’d gross $9,000 a month. I’m betting I can sell double that. I like that idea because I don’t have to drive and I can work on opening a second one while I’m at work. You know, planning, etc. If the kiosk is big enough I can get a helper, pay them well, bonuses, etc. Sigh. I really need to figure this out. I want to be independent in the next ten years instead of relying on pizza delivery jobs.

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.

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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.

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“Kick Rocks” Pizza Delivery Nightmares by Adam Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

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