Autism and Employment (another PennSilverTaco thread)!

So, what’s the cost to deliver a McD order?

 

The one I actually completed was like $7.25, to deliver it a mile and a half; The one I aborted was like $8.25 or so...? Read on...

 

Also, this is mostly just a side hustle that I do to get out of the house on weekends; I went on a roughly 6-month hiatus in June 2021 and just started up again last weekend, but I have still made almost $8,000 just doing DoorDash in 2021! I have a primary job with a 401K and paid vacations that DoorDash merely supplements.

 

So, something seemed a bit funky during the first trip to the McDonald's, located on 611 in Plumstead Township; That order went to the McMansion pictured above...

 

For starters, this freshly renovated McDonald's seemed to be staffed by girls ranging in age from "barely old enough to drive" to "not old enough to drink"...

I rarely go through the drive-thru at fast food places anymore, and at the height of the pandemic when a lot of places (McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, etc) were takeout only and would only let people use the drive-thru, I stopped going. Once these places started allowing DoorDash and Uber Eats drivers to bypass insanely long drive-thru lines, that's what I started doing, and that was my intention tonight even though the place was deserted and there was no line for the drive-thru...

So I parked the truck and went to the door, only to find it locked; There was no sign on the door saying "takeout only", but there was a lone teenager sitting on a bench by the door bullshitting away on her phone, and she let me in when I knocked.

Nobody in the restaurant was wearing a mask, and there was no sign on the door saying a mask was required to enter; Every other table had a sign on it asking not to use it, to encourage social distancing. However, if it weren't for those signs on some of the tables and benches, you'd think it was December 2019!

 

So, yeah, it was an existing McDonald's that had probably been built in the late 1980s or early 1990s and then thoroughly renovated with the new corporate look; I thought it was very nice...

However, when I told the teenaged employee who unlocked the door for me that I was there to pick a DoorDash order, she told me that there were no DoorDash orders for pickup at that location when I have her the customer's name and the order number. Another teenaged female employee, who seemed a little older than the first one, asked me for the number again and I gave it to her...

The second girl apologized for the mixup and handed me the order which, as stated above, went about a mile and a half around the corner to the decorated McMansion seen in the pictures on the previous page.

As I headed for the door, I couldn't help but notice the second girl (who gave me the order) and a third teenage girl goofing off behind the counter, acting more like middle schoolers in a gym locker than employees at a restaurant...

 

I didn't even get to put the truck in reverse before I was summoned back to the same McDonald's I'd just come from, and it was for about a dollar more than the order I'd just dropped off at the McMansion; Okay. Sure.

So, I drive the roughly mile and a half back to the McDonald's and unlike the first there is a huge line at the drive-thru; I am definitely not wasting valuable time in the drive-thru this time around!

I parked in the same spot I'd parked in the first time and went to the same door I'd gone to the first time...

Locked. AGAIN.

So, at this point it was about 6:15pm, on a Saturday night; No reason for a McDonald's to be closed. Again, the harshest COVID restrictions on restaurants in the suburbs were done away with months ago and there was absolutely no reason for the door to be locked...

 

I started knocking on the door, and nobody came; I walked over to the window and saw all three teen girls behind the counter. I knocked on the window, but could not get their attention. By this time,m the drive-thru was empty again, but I knew that if I went through the drive-thru I'd end up letting these poor girls have it; Why?

Because it had been a long day, I was running on empty, and there was absolutely no reason the door to be locked! My theory is that they were primarily doing business through the drive-thru that night and were trying to dissuade customers from ordering inside because they were lazy; If they had concerns about COVID and/or crime, then they would have been wearing masks and the one girl wouldn't have readily let me in the first time I went there...

It's possible that the manager or owner told them to lock the door, but I did not get the impression that was the case since they let me in; Also, this McDonald's is not in a shitty location. It is in a very upscale area with expensive homes literally just around the corner, and again they let me in, so if they were really not supposed to be letting customers in they wouldn't have made an exception for me...

I unassigned the order on the grounds that the store was closed, even though it wasn't, so my completion rate wouldn't be affected; I will not be going back to that McDonald's in the near future!

 

@Taco critter

Yet another insultingly low order...

 

I ended up accepting an order from that same DQ that did pay well, and it went to a 55+ townhome community in Dublin; When I arrived, Santa was making his rounds with the local volunteer fire department...

 

@ColoradoTJ
@shakerhood
@Taco critter

 

What ended up happening is that some of the residents of this 55+ community who came out to take pictures of the fire truck thought I was with the firefighters, and I ended up shooting the shit with them and forgetting I had Dairy Queen in my truck with the heater on...

 

The ice cream didn't melt or anything, and I ended up delivering it successfully after the fire truck had left...

 

It got incredibly foggy and that's why I ended up heading home early...