Autism and Employment (another PennSilverTaco thread)!

By the job; Distance driven and size of order influence the base pay, and rest is dependent on how much of a tip the customer decides to give you...

 

gotcha. I think I may get a new electric car and charge it at a place other than my residence. My primary company has a vehicle charging station, otherwise I’d just plug it into a place at the Walmart nearby and hang out there lol. Use that for deliveries. I know people are cheap but what would you say the average tip is (%)

 

$3-$5; sometimes $7-$10 or more if you're lucky...

 

that’s pretty decent, are you having to deal with Uncle Sam or are these cash type transactions for the salary an tip? I give them enough and refuse to report more.

 

If you earn $600 or more in a year, DoorDash reports it to the feds and sends you the necessary paperwork...

 

damn, so I guess I’d you split your time between a few companies you could avoid that.

 

I had started my own towing company that was all cash, but people don’t have money today apparently. I would get promises, my bills don’t get paid on those. So I need something a little more stable.

 

DoorDash and Uber Eats are the only ones I've worked for; Prefer DoorDash to Uber Eats and don't know enough about GrubHub or PostMates (or InstaCart) to form an opinion.

 

thanks, that’s good to know. Maybe it isn’t worth trying to go between multiple companies to avoid a tax payment then, I will have to see. My accord gets 35 mpg so I can probably make a pretty good deal off deliveries.

 

I really enjoyed reading about your struggle and frustrations of being a food delivery driver in the snooty ass area that I grew up/work in.

 

That little blue dot in the upper right corner represents my location at the time I took the screenshot; One thing I don’t like about DoorDash is that it sometimes sends me outside the “zone” I scheduled myself to deliver in. Sometimes I get orders while I’m outside my selected zone, but a lot of times I don’t, and it sometimes takes a long time to drive back within the boundaries of that zone...

 

I picked up my most recent order at a Chinese place in Horsham and it took me to the outskirts of Philly; The guy who lived next door to the customer got home around the time I showed up, and he let his dog out as I was leaving. I was about to back out of the driveway when I saw this adorable little terrier running over to my truck; I opened the door, and he immediately made it clear that he wanted me to pet him...




I have to say, I wish my big dingus was this good with strangers, especially men!




Also had very unique coloring...

 

I went a short distance out of the city before accepting orders again, and got summoned to a Chick-Fil-A; This particular location was very inefficiently run; The drive-thru had a super long line and the front door was locked...

More on the story of this Chick-Fil-A later; I got sick of waiting and went to the Wawa next door for a bathroom break, and also ended up getting some munchies. I chatted with the Wawa cashier about the Chick-Fil-A, and told him I was a DoorDash driver; He said that particular Chick-Fil-A was always mobbed and didn’t have particularly good food in his opinion...

 

So, I sat in my truck out in the Wawa parking lot eating and turned down probably four orders at that same Chick-Fil-A; My background check for Uber Eats finally cleared, so I decided to give Uber Eats a try for a bit. I almost immediately got an order that was going to an apartment complex in Elkins Park; I forget what restaurant it was (possibly Panera Bread?)...

After that, I got an order from a Chipotle in Cheltenham; This is where I tend to get annoyed. Every Chipotle I’ve picked up at in my area has its bathrooms open to the public; This one did not, even though it had previously had public bathrooms prior to COVID...



As I was walking back out to my truck with the Chipotle order, I got a request to pick up from a Chinese restaurant a short distance away in Philly. This is where things get interesting...

 

@ColoradoTJ
@shakerhood
@Taco critter

I parked my truck, locked the doors, and turned on the hazards since I was pretty much parked illegally; I went into the Chinese place and picked up the food without incident. As I came back out, this guy runs out of a store across the street screaming frantically that someone had just stolen his car!

I did not see the car drive away, but apparently this guy left the keys in the ignition with the engine running, and somebody had hopped in and taken off. There were a bunch of cars parked the street, and I do not remember which one it was. The owner walked up to a dark red Buick with a wad of cash in hand and begged the driver to go after his car in exchange for money...

As this was going down, I shouted across the street, “Dude, did you just say your car got stolen?!?!”

I seriously did not see what car it had been, and sort of doubted him, thinking it might be a setup to rob a good samaritan; He said yes, and continued begging anyone who would listen to drive after his car for money. There was an empty parking space where a car had clearly been, and this guy seemed to be pretty upset, so I surmised that he wasn’t trying to set someone up. My dashcam does not operate when ignition key is not on, so there’s no way in hell it would have caught anything, and there really wasn’t much else I could do. If he didn’t have a phone, I would have called the cops for him, but I didn’t actually witness the theft and I would never let a stranger into my truck!

A bunch of other people ended up helping him, and I left; I hope he (A) got his car back, and (B) learned his lesson about leaving the keys in the car!

 

Yup! Some guy’s car got stolen just feet away from my truck; I’m not going into Philly for deliveries ever again!

 

I took these pictures while stuck in Abington, not long before just missing the car theft...

 

And I say again, this is why I never leave the keys in the truck in Doylestown, let alone Philly!

 

I generally refuse to take Chick-Fil-A orders because the majority of them are zoos due to the fact that they exclusively do business through the drive-thru because of COVID; For delivery drivers, they generally have an employee out front handing the food to the drivers. This particular Chick-Fil-A did not have an employee manning the main entrance at all times, and instead of leaving the DoorDash orders on a table in the lobby like I’ve seen a lot of places do, they just locked the door and had an employee check every two minutes or so to see if anyone was there...

I really had to use the bathroom, and there was a Wawa next door, so I cancelled the order and drove over there. I swore after the Chick-Fil-A that I would never take orders from through DoorDash or Uber Eats ever again!

 

This spotlight in front of the Chick-Fil-A should give my out-of-area readers a good idea of how deep the snow still is around here...