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Dropping delivery

N

npizza

New member
I’ve been having so many issues with hiring and retaining drivers.
Has anyone on here dropped delivery and switched to pick up only??
Delivery is currently 50% of sales and I’m a small take out and delivery shop.
I’m not there yet but I’m thinking about relying on all 3rd party delivery services.

I’m using Uber now and I’m thinking about adding a few more. Then slowly reducing my delivery area while notifying my customers in the dropped areas that they will now have to order under the 3rd parties for delivery.

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we starting using 3rd party to supplement our drivers for delivery but have stopped for the following reasons:
  1. 3rd party services eating into our profit margin
  2. cannot quality control once 3rd party picks up
  3. most 3rd party delivery drivers were a pain to deal with (rude, impatient etc…)
We now 100% rely on our in house drivers. We did raise our delivery fee and gave a percentage of each delivery fee to drivers as incentives. This has helped in retaining drivers for us
 
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Drivers used to be the easiest hires, but now are the most coveted. Too much competition for their time. They can work for any third party delivery service and not have to clean or work a store. We are a tough sell.

Greater compensation is a good thought, but I’m not sure it ultimately works. Maybe it will help with retention, but generally the compensation is just tips and most drivers won’t think to look to a pizza shop. Just thinking out loud.

Maybe raising the deliver fee $2 given directly to the drivers and advertising that in want ads will work. Maybe customers are already conditioned to pay higher delivery fees because of third party companies.

The way insurance rates are going, and lack of companies willing to provide insurance, this may all be a mute point however. Only the companies that are able to self insure will be able to provide delivery.
 
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Buy a couple of cars. Having your own delivery vehicles allows you to hire drivers that do not have a car or don’t wish to use it. Vehicle costs are offset by not paying mileage or delivery fees to drivers.
 
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bodegahwy said:
Buy a couple of cars. Having your own delivery vehicles allows you to hire drivers that do not have a car or don’t wish to use it. Vehicle costs are offset by not paying mileage or delivery fees to drivers.
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Doing this was the worst thing we ever did. Glad that we sold the cars and moved on from it

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Steve said:
Doing this was the worst thing we ever did. Glad that we sold the cars and moved on from it

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I bought new company cars (fully wrapped Honda Elemants up to 4 at one time) and started delivery this way approx 10yrs ago. We never replaced them after their useful life (approx 200k miles). Looking back I would NEVER do it UNLESS I was a new business in the market and could justify the HUGE expense (gas, repairs, etc) for the sake of MARKETING (a good wrap will turn alot of heads). We have always charged delivery but even at $3 it would not cover the associated expenses, especially commercial fleet insurance. I do miss them on bad winter days when some guys are driving their friends Pontiac Fiero and I have to send them home, but I do not miss making my local auto repair guy a rich man when they beat the snot out of my cars. I would invest in some well designed cartoppers from Cassel Promotion (QuadXL) with the LED bulbs not rechargeable and have a camera feed on the back lot so you can ensure they are plugged in! I will say getting hired/non-owned coverage is a huge PITA though. Looking back approx 3yrs now since we gave away the remaining cars to drivers to register in their name and insure it was a GREAT move for us.
 
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famousperry said:
I do miss them on bad winter days when some guys are driving their friends Pontiac Fiero and I have to send them home.
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Lol! Pontiac Fiero, you sure that was 10 years ago and not 20 years.

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I started buying store-owned cars after about 7-8 years in business and did it that way for 11-12 years until I sold. I bought used Subaru Outbacks. Generally they had about 130K on them and I bought them for $3,000 and put signs on top. Mostly we got 4-5 years out of them and sold them for $1500 with 200K. Besides gas, oil, tires etc we generally had about $500 per year per car in repairs. I think we replaced a clutch or a transmission in every one we owned. Even at that it was cheaper than paying mileage.

The math:

Insurance was a wash. We paid the same for owned-auto as we did for hired-and-non-owned before we got them. I guess if you were flying naked without insurance protection hoping that your drivers had valid insurance you could claim to save money. Otherwise, no difference.

Our driver mileage costs when we had drivers using their own cars was 6% of delivery. Our cost to own the cars, purchase, gas, repairs, tires was less than that in most years. All in all, if we had a low repair expense year we came out a couple thousand ahead.

The real advantage was two-fold: First, we could hire drivers that did not have a car which doubled the pool of available employees in our area and, second, no driver called in saying his car was in the shop and thus could not work.

I don’t get why anyone would split the delivery fee with the drivers if they were driving company cars. Makes no sense at all.
 
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bodegahwy said:
I don’t get why anyone would split the delivery fee with the drivers if they were driving company cars. Makes no sense at all.
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Sorry for the confusion…when we had company cars we kept the entire delivery charge of $2. Now that we no longer have company cars we split the $2.95 delivery charge ($1 drivers, remainder for us but they get $11/hr now and going up every year up to $15!) . We are offsetting this with a $.50 increase in delivery charge each year.
 
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sparrowspizza said:
Could you give some details on your experience?
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For one, we constantly had car trouble but thats the used car game. Our time to take them out of service and get them repaired/maintained became too much of a chore. Some drivers didnt want to drive the car(s) and wanted to stay in their cars because they wanted to smoke/felt more comfortable driving their vehicle, whatever excuse they could come up with just so they could keep their delivery charge. Drivers, typically, dont see the big picture (tires, oil changes, engine wear, miles, etc) they all wanted to make more money than the rest of the drivers that night. We had 2 cars and 7 drivers on and the 2 driving the cars felt like they got screwed out of $30 for taking $30 deliveries in the company car. Then drivers were locking the keys in the cars, taking the keys home with them by accident, honestly, whatever could go wrong, went wrong, except for accidents. The only other thing is that our insurance wouldnt let so many moving violations on a driver’s record be able to drive the car, but they could drive their own. It was just a terrible experience

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Steve said:
Drivers, typically, dont see the big picture (tires, oil changes, engine wear, miles, etc) they all wanted to make more money than the rest of the drivers that night. We had 2 cars and 7 drivers on and the 2 driving the cars felt like they got screwed out of $30 for taking $30 deliveries in the company car.
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This.

We’ve come full circle thanks to Uber and the like.

It used to be that drivers would complain that they were not being properly compensated for the actual cost of using their own car. Now, if you want them to use a company car, they act like they are making less money.

The math doesn’t really work both ways.

All that matters to most is how much money they took home - today.
 
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