Delivery charges

[The_Calzone_Kid]

Quick question for you all, I have a feeling I will be in the minority on this…

What do you charge for delivery and how much goes to the driver?
I am currently charging $1.50/delivery and all that goes straight to the driver. I’m strongly considering raising the delivery charge to $1.99, but keeping the drivers at $1.50/del reimbursement. That .49 cents would add about $5000 dollars a year which equals what I spend on the non-owned auto insurance each year.
I’m just not convinced that this is the right time economically to raise the price on anything. It would be kind of a bummer for my drivers if their tips go down from this, but 4 of my 7 drivers have nicer houses than me anyways!

Any thoughts?

TCK

 

[jackaloo]

We also charge $1.50 for delivery but we give the drivers 1.25
We’re leaning more towards raising the food prices a little here and there instead of raising the
delivery charge to $2. Seems like this might be better for the drivers and still bring in more money.
On the other hand $2 for delivery is a bargain and still cheaper than the competition is charging.

Paul

 

[RobT]

before i got company vehicles, i used to keep .50 of the charge for my expense.

Now that i have company vehicles, the charge pays for the car payments, insurance & Maintenance.

 

[brad_randall]

We were (and are) getting killed by the higher commodity prices this fall. Instead of raising prices, we opted to increase our delivery charge from $.99 to $1.49 once we realized that both our main competitors had already increased their fees. I’ve not heard of a single customer complaint in the few weeks since we did that. And the bottom line last period already looked better.

We reimburse the drivers by a percentage of sales - that amount averaged out to $1.19 a delivery (and has gone up by a few cents since the delivery fee gets raked in the computer calculation). We are also one of the few places in town that decided to pay our delivery staff minimum wage instead of declaring them tipped employees and holding their hourly pay back in the $5 to $6 range. Of the Pros (career drivers) I’ve talked with, none have said anything about their tips declining… and they do not hesitate to let us know when a change cuts into their bottom line.

One thing we’ve done since adding the delivery fee originally is to print “Delivery fee extra. Gratuity not included” on all our advertisements. We’ve done our best to train our customers that the fee does not equal a tip.

 

[Roger]

I charge $2.00 a delivery and it all goes to the driver. I started charging for delivery a few years back when we had record high gas prices so the timing was just right. Very few customers complained and my drivers still make around the same amount in tips.

 

[Kris]

We charge 2.00 and the driver gets 1.50. Has worked out fine. No problems from customers or drivers. Sometimes lunch order might get a bit frustrated if they are ordering something smaller but nothing really big.

 

[GT1]

We charge $2 for delivery and .75 goes to drivers. We have a small delivery area. It costs money to keep drivers in the store even when there are not many deliveries. We also pay our drivers more thqan min wage after 3 months.

 

[bodegahwy]

We charge $2.00. My cars, My gas, I keep the charge.

Drivers make $6.50 hour and average about $4.00 per delivery on tips. On a typical night a driver might do 15-20 deliveries in 4 hours. Five hour total shift so the tips come out to about $12-15 per hour which means they often are making $20 per hour.

 

[Rockstar_pizza]

1.50 I keep 50 cents, same I use that toward the insurance