Autism and Employment (another PennSilverTaco thread)!

A list of all the places I refuse to pickup Doordash orders from, their locations, and the reason(s) I refuse...

• Any restaurant in New Hope or Lambertville
• Chipotle (Doylestown location only; Poorly designed and undersized parking lot, Often overcrowded, this older woman who works there is very rude)
• Jules Thin Crust (Doylestown location only; Fly By Pickup that backs up traffic, tiny parking lot, staffed by inexperienced teenagers)
• PA Soup and Seafood (Doylestown; Rude owner)
• Slack’s Steak and Hoagie Shack (Warrington; Abrasive owner)
• Wendy’s (All locations; Dasher must place and pay for order, which wastes time; In the case of the Doylestown location, customers are often within walking distance and I get paid less than $5 for the delivery, even if I were to drive 10 miles from home)

 

There are a couple of independently owned places I refuse to go to as well, but I can’t remember the names. One is a Chinese restaurant in the Buckingham Greene shopping center, with a rude owner who blames Dashers for not being able to find his restaurant. The other one is a pizza place, I believe located in the tiny little village of Gardenville, that is quite out of the way and has employees who take their sweet time.

 

I’ve said it before and I will say it again...

I would never use DoorDash as a customer unless I was drunk and incapable of driving myself to get the food, or perhaps if the weather was really bad (though generally I know when bad weather is coming and stock up in advance).

Why?

It absolutely amazes me what people are willing to pay for the convenience of having food delivered. In many cases, they pay more than half the cost of the actual food order, or even more than the food order!

 

Gardenville is a tiny little hamlet outside of Doylestown, so small in fact that you could probably throw a rock from end to end (to quote a line from the song “Chevy Van”)...

There are two eating establishments in Gardenville, a pizzeria and this huge bar/banquet hall place called the Gardenville Hotel or something. Both have been shitlisted by yours truly due to rude/indifferent staff.

 

Just got a request to pick up from the Dairy Queen in Doylestown, for a measly four bucks...

I turned it down, because that is downright insulting!

 

I am started to get fed up with a place called Lovebird, located on East Oakland Avenue in Doylestown. They used to be fast, but as I type this I am waiting for an order that was supposed to be done at 1:33pm. I was told at 1:38pm that it would be another five minutes, which is funny because the order is supposed to be delivered to the customer by 1:43pm!

 

Lovebird has pulled this the last few times I’ve picked up an order here, and I think I’m going to stop picking up orders here...

 

It’s a nice side hustle though...

 

Have a friend that does UE and DD...he’s knocking down $800-$900 a week and is using 150-200 in fuel in his 2004 Ranger. Not a bad gig around Clemson college campus. Not to mention some real eye candy around there haha.

 

Gas is probably cheaper in South Carolina...

 

DoorDash as a whole is not a hassle, but in my area it certainly seems to be...

 

So, here’s the latest...

Last night, I ended up in the New Hope area as a matter of course. I will not longer be picking up orders from Caputo’s Pizza next to Peddler’s Village primarily because of this obnoxious light (I took these pictures on another trip to the same pizza place last week)...



The light has a timer instead of a sensor, so it will stay green for several minutes even if there are no cars coming, and as you can see it’s “NO TURN ON RED”. I now refuse to go to this pizza place just because of this damned light!

 

We’re about $2.20/gal right now

 

Cheapest I've seen outside of a wholesale club (BJ's, Costco, etc) recently is $2.69.

 

Going back to last night, as I was saying, I ended up in New Hope. New Hope Borough is an overcrowded and overpriced tourist trap, and I don't even like going there for fun because simply parking there is too damn expensive. I did not end up in downtown New Hope last night; The order I picked up from Caputo's ended up going to this mansion the middle of nowhere. The neighborhood (not the house, but whole neighborhood!) was reminiscent of the Corleone Compound, and the house that the order went to was probably bigger than Vito's mansion. This order was a shitshow from the beginning, with the pizzeria haphazardly packing two orders of maybe a dozen wings in a brown paper bag.

One annoying thing about rural New Hope at night is the lack of street lights, and stop signs that are seemingly randomly placed and thus tend to pop up out of nowhere. I encountered "unexpected stop signs" at least three times that night, and I braked hardest on my way to the "Corleone Compound". The bag of wings went flying off the stack of pizzas in the front seat and landed in the passenger footwell. I did not find anything wrong with the package, so I just placed it back where it had been and continued on.

I am at fault here for not reading the extra instructions, but they ended up being damn near useless anyway. The address was 106 so-and-so, and the GPS was directing me to this house, so that's where I went. When I arrived at this house, I realized that something red had exploded in the wing bag and was now seeping out onto the pizza box. After letting loose a torrent of profanities, I walked up to the front door and was greeted by a nice old man who immediately said "we didn't order a pizza." It was at this point that I reviewed the instructions and saw "house at end of circle", but no house number. The instructions made no sense to me because circles don't have "ends"...

By this time the bag was oozing red dipping sauce, and the well being my truck comes before the customer's food, so I put the order in the bed. The owners of the mansion at "106" directed me to the correct address based on the name on the order, and I drove four houses down the street. "106" was a mansion, bigger than any house I will likely ever be able to afford. The house at the correct address was obscenely huge, probably 12,000+ square feet. The customer was in the driveway waving his hands. I explained the situation to him (leaving out the part where I'd had to slam on the brakes at the stop sign) and he was pretty cool about it. Most of the wings were salvageable. My rating dropped from 4.69 to 4.65, which isn't as bad as I was expecting.

The moral of the story? No more Doordash in No Nope! Er...um, I mean New Hope!

 

Picking up in New Hope isn't horrible if I'm nearby (which does happen from time to time). The most obnoxious thing about New Hope is that I often get orders when I'm 20+ minutes away in Doylestown or Warrington, and these orders aren't anymore lucrative than the ones near me. What some people don't realize is that us Dashers are not getting paid for driving to the restaurant, or for the miles racked up on our vehicles. On top of that, as mentioned above, most of the homes in New Hope are not in neatly organized subdivisions but rather in the middle of the nowhere on roads with little or no lighting at night.

 

Yesterday, while driving the loaner Corolla, I had an interesting delivery. I delivered an order to the front desk of this office building in Horsham, and as soon as I got in the car I got an order for a fast food place around the corner for like three bucks (US$3). Yes. Really.

The only reason I took it was because the restaurant was literally right there, and it was going six tenths of a mile up the street to a high school. I had never heard of this fast food chain (It was Dane’s and Something, or Something and Dane’s; I forget). Everything about the order went perfectly, but I couldn’t resist asking the female high school student who placed the order if “cafeteria food was really that bad”. Specifically, I told her that it had been more than 12 years since I’d graduated from school myself, and then asked her if cafeteria was really that bad. Her friend was with her, and both girls said that yes, cafeteria food was pretty bad. We had a good laugh about it and I left...

 

Baskin Robbins is now on my personal shit list of places I will never pick up a Doordash order from ever again. Why? Because Baskin Robbins, known just about everywhere as 31 Flavors, requires Dashers to place the order themselves!

Call me selfish or even lazy, but my job is to pick up food at the restaurant and deliver it to the customer in a timely manner! Even using the Doordash-provided debit card to pay for orders at certain places is pushing it my opinion. My job, in my opinion, is to pickup the food from Point A and deliver it to Point B!

Also, this Baskin-Robbins was one those “package stores” where two different restaurant franchises are located in the same space; In this particular case it was a Dunkin Donuts. In case you didn’t know, all Dunkin locations have been added to my “do not pick up orders here” shit list because they require the Dasher to pay for the order the themselves. To be clear, the Dasher does NOT pay for the order out of their own money; Doordash pays the bill through provided debit card, but it’s still a pain in the ass in my opinion.

In addition to Baskin-Robbins and Dunkin, Wendy’s has also been shitlisted due to its “place this order yourself” policy.

 

Generally they are included in the pay, but sometimes I get tipped in cash. $3 was the total for the high school girl and I have no idea if she included a tip, but I doubt it. However, it was such an easy pickup and delivery that I didn’t particularly care.

 

@Taco critter

Am I right for not wanting to place the order myself? I think it wastes valuable time!