While you ‘may’ be able to find street names in a database form, I suspect that only YOU know which streets are in your delivery area. Someone has to customize the available info to fit your area.
The street database used in my store was made up by manually programming every street (many including address ranges) into the computer. You could input all the main roads and ‘thru streets’ in neighborhoods to begin with, and then add them one at a time as new orders come in. You could pay experienced drivers to spend an hour or two each day adding and/or verifying more streets. You could look at old delivery info to get a list of the streets that you have already delivered to, unless this is a new location.
I would imagine after a week or two you could easily have 90% or more of your area entered in the computer. Our maps are divided into sectors (generally neighborhoods) for ease of finding street names on the map quickly. Maybe do one ‘sector’ a day?
The cost of not having an accurate street database is upset customers who you later call back to inform them that Although you took their order as a delivery, you now realize that you don’t deliver there, would they like to come pick their order up? Or wasted employee time running to the map for most orders and trying to find the street (many ‘phone people’ or ‘insiders’ are not well versed in the delivery area and do poorly in determining if ‘we deliver there’). Wasted food costs for those orders that are made before a driver tell you that ‘we don’t go there’ and then the customer don’t want to come in and pick it up, even after a discount for the stores error.
Drivers may resent (I do) being told to take a delivery out side of the delivery area ‘just this one time’ with or without additional mileage. Even with additional mileage pay, you may be asking the driver to go to an area unfamiliar to them which also may not be a safe area. For safety reasons alone I would not send drivers outside of the designated delivery area. If you are a franchise, other legal and contractual issues may arise.
Having an accurate method of determining what places you deliver to promotes efficiency of people, time and money, and allows you to determine the perceived safety of areas BEFORE you send a driver out there alone with cash and food. Like anything else with computers you get out of it what you put into it. garbage in, garbage out. Take the time to do it right, and most everyone is happy.
(Except those outside of your area!
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