I drove for Domino’s when that policy was still in place. Here’s why that policy was such a problem.
As a pizza driver, you were supposed to come in, look at the runs that were ready to go, and take the oldest one (maybe two, very occasionally three). The drivers decided which runs to take. So if you saw a run that you knew was going to be late, you just didn’t take it, and left it for the next schmuck.
But why would you do that? What did it matter to the driver whether the corporate policy was “30 minutes or it’s free”? Because if it was late, the driver had to pay for it. (And of course, no tip.)
I never had a late run, but I drove very dangerously sometimes to ensure that never happened.
The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
There’s only so many ways you can deliver pizza.
Honestly there should be a whole book based on that one chapter, that was such a cool concept
It’s fertile ground, that’s for sure. But Stephenson does this. He concocts these little vignettes to build the world up, and then ends it, always leaving you wanting more.
It’s been ages since we had a proper Crazy Taxi style-game. I want a Deliverator game, but I’d settle for a Cyberpunk:2077 mod.
Cyberpunk has ass driving physics though.
A GTAV mod is what you need.GTA V has ass physics too. Need a GTA IV mod.
Not even close. GTAV has great driving physics. It was one of the best arcade racers for years.
and then ends it, always leaving you wanting more
After several years of reading, I have realized that most of his books fall into the “Status Quo” genre, much like Marvel movies in which superheroes are cops that work to prevent relatable characters or governments from falling too out of sync with reality. The second their dystopian speculations start to imagine a society better off (due to redistribution of concentrated power or wealth), they immediately end.
Diamond Age (1994): corporations control society by controlling the centralized Feeds that supply matter compilers, justifying their monopoly by saying they keep society stable. MC publishes blueprints for compiling your own Feed. Story ends.
Anathem (2008): The government executes most scientists en masse and imprisons most survivors because technology was too disruptive 3000 years ago. A new global disaster forces the release of the scientists so they can wield ancient technology to solve the crisis. Story ends.
Cryptonomicon (1999) / The Great Simoleon Caper (1994): Some cryptographers think Bitcoin is a good idea even if it might topple governments. They publish it. Story ends.
Termination Shock (2021): Climate change can be solved by billionaires by getting governments addicted to shooting sulfur into the atmosphere. The story ends basically as soon as the operation begins.
Seveneves (2015): The moon blows up, forcing a crash course construction of a modern Noah’s Ark in the form of a fleet of spaceships in low Earth orbit. Eccentric billionaires sacrifice themselves to make the project work to save seven genius women who rebuild society with eugenics and a racial caste system. They discover some pre-disaster survivors whose culture is incompatible with the new society. Talks begin for reïntegration. Story ends.
Fall (2019): People upload and emulate their brains into datacenter computers. The first rich people to upload themselves gain an enormous first mover advantage in the digital afterlife and control the minds of newcomers whose surviving families pay ludicrous amounts of money to keep the dead billionaire-controlled Bitworld running. The system keeps running smoothly until the admin with the credentials to shut everything down dies, is uploaded, defeats the incumbent dead billionaire, thus making the world more equitable. Story ends.
The closest thing to an exception I can find is Atmosphæra Incognita (2014; part of Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future), in which a billionaire fights environmental regulations and NIMBY pushback to build a 20-kilometer steel tower to reduce space launch costs by acting as scaffolding for a mass driver. Although the story portrays most people as against the construction of such an audacious structure, and although the main beneficiaries are corporations wealthy enough to purchase space on the tower to install equipment, if you weigh your definition of “society” towards billionaires and their company org charts, then the story is about breaking the Status Quo (of NIMBY California landowners).
The eloquence with which you express yourself is a breath of fresh air
He do talk purty huh?
Thank you. I have but a humble upvote to give in gratitude.
I did have some used 245/60s on stock steelies in the back of my 70 Oldsmobile at that time.
If you haven’t read snowcrash, and you like cyberpunk and comedy, you should read it!
Pretty sure the driver paying for it is illegal too.
I remember there was also a landmark court case where the companies, especially domino’s, had to pay for drivers getting into accidents, and class them as employees instead of contractors.
Pizza places did a lot of shady shit back in the day.
Funnily enough dangerous driving is what led to the 30 minutes or its free policy being banned by the government in the 90s.
I drove very dangerously sometimes to ensure that never happened.
so nothing really changed. i know a few app delivery people doing this.
I never had a late run, but I drove very dangerously sometimes to ensure that never happened.
Snowcrash intensifies
The driver had to pay for it
Is that even legal? Not that it matters since nobody enforces laws against corporations or politicians…
What is this snowcrash you’re referring to?
Snowcrash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest, Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.
When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway – might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, acm-styled, lightweight, the kind of gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.
The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn’t want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn’t get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.
Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren’t afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstrations.
The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it – talking trade balances here – once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here – once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel – once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity – y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else
- music
- movies
- microcode (software)
- high-speed pizza delivery
The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say: “Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills.”
So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved – but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
Just as a side note: it’s very worth reading, despite the fact that the main character is named Hiro Protagonist
It’s a novel that was a major contributor to cyberpunk culture. It could probably be viewed as a predecessor for movies like Ready Player One. The cyberworld in Snowcrash is what the Metaverse was trying to duplicate. I envy you getting to experience it for the first time.
Uncle Enzo does not like to apologize.
Snowcrash was my first thought too! Love being in the sort of community where people have heard of it!
Probably not legal, but who was going to fight it? The teenage pizza drivers?
They’re all franchises, could have just been my shitty owner, but somehow I doubt it was just the one bad apple.
but who was going to fight it
It were the people involved in accidents with a teenage driver trying to beat the 30 minute time in unsafe ways. They sued and won.
Only after the pizza joints all dropped “30 minutes or less” did the large pizza companies add those advertising signs to their delivery driver’s cars. This to me is a tacit acknowledgement by the pizza companies that they knew their drivers were driving dangerously before they dropped that policy.
Lol they got free insurance
And often ran red lights, had very small delivery areas, and people literally died for their pizza.
30 minutes or it’s free was short lived.
My weed dealer in the 90s was our local pizza delivery guy. Brilliant business model.
And I bet he wasn’t even called Doober.
It’s actually kinda funny. His name was Neil, and his best friend/partner in crime was Bob.
Everybody loved Neil and Bob.
Neil and super talkative bob
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I drove across the country, from Detroit to LA and all I had was a piece of paper with a list of the roads I needed to take. If I lost that paper the plan was to follow the setting sun. I could also drive the opposite direction of a rising sun but sometimes it was hard to tell which way the sun was going.
I guess nobody told you how highways are numbered? 😁
TLDR: Ends in odd, goes north and south. Even, east to west.
It’s numbered from top right to bottom left. Eg, Rt1 goes from Maine to Florida and is the most eastern route. 66 goes east-west and is south of the parallel route 50.
Edit: On further thought, all the highways are clear.rly marked north south east west. Using the sun… Was an interesting thought.
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You just aKchtually’ed with a K over some minutia over highway numbering and it seems personal. Wew lad.
Sorry, I got a kick out of your username and was trying to riff on it. Clearly I failed miserably. Comment deleted!
They need to bring that back.
No, they don’t. It was done away with for many important reasons, including but not limited to:
-people intentionally giving the wrong address so that it takes over 30min, costing everyone from the driver to management both time and money
-drivers speeding to meet their time quota, and causing wrecks at increased rates
-driver shortages, amplifying the last point
I worked for dominos as recently as last year. The number of people that still try to scam you over the 30min/free rule is asinine, and at least twice a week I had to explain to would-be customers that 30min/free hasn’t existed in at least 30yr for a lot of really good reasons. I’ve even had customers ask if they could tip “extra” to get it sooner. Unless you’re tipping enough that everyone involved (cook, dispatch, driver) gets as much as the order’s base cost (multiplying order price by 4 at minimum), we’re never going to do that.
That was before the internet. If they type in the wrong address, no free pizza.
Driver shortages can be solved by raising pay.
But you have to agree that a pizza shouldn’t be sitting out for 50 minutes before it leaves the store.
But you have to agree that a pizza shouldn’t be sitting out for 50 minutes before it leaves the store.
In an ideal world sure, but we live in the real world with real world limitations…
I too, would love to live in an ideal world where ideals override simple facts.
But that isn’t the real world, and frankly, will likely never be true.
So get over yourself and get used to existence, you abominable dirt-head.
do people not still do this ??
Drivers rushing to make the deadline lead to some deaths, which was followed by lawsuits. I don’t remember if there was a huge payment from one of those, but I know a bunch of pizza places have chosen not to risk it.
A lot of jurisdictions banned it too for that reason.
It probably paid way better too, adjusting for inflation
No, definitely not or at least not in the US
Why is Nicolas Maduro working at domino’s did he finally stop being Venezuela’s leftist dictator? Wow, time flies
Or get lost and take 2 hours to deliver a pizza. I’m old I remember the primitive times.
Didn’t they end the 30 minutes or it’s free promotion because it encouraged their delivery drivers to speed?
And run red lights, and drive recklessly and…,
To add to what the other guy said, IIRC, people were also taking advantage of it by ordering from restaurants that were further away than 30 minutes.
I remembered someone dying after their drivers ran over someone.
by using a paper map like some sort of mystical land pirate
Oof, I remember going to people’s homes to install phone and Internet links using paper maps because we didn’t have maps on our phones back then and the GPS were mostly shit and out of date.
Some of the smaller villages were barely there on the regional maps, aside from maybe a dot near a main road with none of their actual streets.
For these, we’d call or stop by city hall, sometimes they’d have a shitty map or just directions.I’m getting old…
Ngl, I still do the modern version of this. I tend to leave GPS off on my phone, so I’ll use Google Maps or OpenStreetMap to plan a route beforehand and then just use road signs to navigate.
I remember printing out turn-by-turn directions from MapQuest lol
I used ViaMichelin
I’m remember reading those to my parents while they blamed me for us getting lost.
I did this as well. When it was new, it was freaking revolutionary.
Barely a decade prior to that, you’d have to call AAA, give them your itinerary, and they’d mail you a custom triptik for your journey. And it would cost. You can still get these, but why?
Good backup in case your phone shits the bed or you end up somewhere with no data
You can download your trip for offline use in google maps or Apple Maps. Or fall back to the gps of your car.
I really don’t see any point nowadays tbh.
Eh. I might consider this if I had a long and complex road trip. Last major trip I took (1000 miles) I stayed on interstates for about 90% of it.
I remember going to our AAA office to pick That up. Our agent would walk through the trip with us.
I remember MapQuest on dialup
I also remember MapQuest on dialup. Holy cow.
That brings back some (mostly annoying) memories!
I recall wanting (and maybe using?) an option on MapQuest on dialup to choose how many of the turn-by-turn targeted maps to download, to save time and ink.
And I recall having to factor in dial-up map image download times and printer print-out times, into my total travel-time calculations.
Yes, I should have downloaded and printed the maps the night before, but my mother had a phone call with her mother.
Seems like dispatches problem to me.
I remember when Google started taking photos of roads to create StreetView, I thought it was crazy. Surely it would have been impossible to document enough roads to make it worthwhile!
i mean maybe the new drivers used maps, but even in the days of GPS I didn’t use any kind of map after the first 6 or so months of delivering, faster to not look it up when the address already tells you everything you need to know when you know the area.
Map reading is a useful skill. It’s not that hard.
Memorizing the turns you’ll need to make to get the pizza where it needs to go in under 30 minutes from it being ordered is a VERY hard skill
It wasn’t even that long ago, I delivered for Papa John’s in the late 00s. Some of the guys had tomtoms, but they were always out of date, and would lead you astray more often than not.
We mostly just used a giant laminated map of our delivery area that was attached to the heat shield of the pizza oven. You’d be surprised how quickly you can memorize the layout of a small city when your pay is dependent on it.
I haven’t been back to that town since college like 20 years ago, but if you gave me an address there, I could still prob pin point it on a blank map.
Yup, I delivered pizza for the Hut around the same time. Big ol’ map of the area divided into sectors, each order listed which sector the address was in. I’d write directions on the back of the order slip, and go off into the night with nothing but a flashlight. First day I got a lecture by the manager on how to navigate by address and tell which side of the street a house was on, I learned more about navigating that day than in the entire rest of my life.
Sometimes I miss those days and wish I could be 19 and driving my tiny Honda Civic through the highlands again, listening to video game songs downloaded from OCRemix on my little MP3 player plugged into the car audio with a tape adapter.
how to navigate by address and tell which side of the street a house was on, I learne
Whether the number is odd or even, right?
Yup, and also how to orient yourself and the direction you were going by the progression of the address numbers–for example, if you were on Sunset Blvd SE, you knew address numbers increased as you drove south and east.
Fuck yeah OCRemix. So many amazing songs people put on there
Lol, I too delivered in a Honda Civic. I feel like there were like 4 vehicles back then with decent mpg.
Though my tape deck was broken, so I had to use one of those things you plugged into the cig lighter and tuned to an unused radio frequency. Oddly good times, when I think back to it.
I have many nostalgic memories of FM transmitters
I was a delivery driver in highschool. Good ol’ Thomas guide. When the internet goes down I’d love to see anyone born after 2000 get around.
If the internet goes down, nobody will be doing deliveries. Or making pizza, or driving, really.
Plenty of people can still answer the phone and write down orders, and payment systems have offline modes. The Internet is not an absolute necessity even now for food delivery to happen.
I kinda meant that if the internet fails for a significant period of time, it’s probably a society-breaking problem that causes logistical issues for the entire world. Pizza will not be a priority.
I don’t think phone networks will work if the internet goes down
Cellular calling and text can still work without Internet, using separate channels wholly owned by the telcos.
If the internet is down permanently, we’re talking societal collapse. Nobody is delivering pizzas.
If it’s just a temporary outage, google maps has offline mode.
There is very little pots phone left. If the Internet is down, many areas will be without both.
I think the only POTS left are hobbyist mini exchanges, and even those use computers emulating the old systems. Most couldn’t be blue boxed
My passenger seat-back pocket was always stuffed with Rand McNally’s.
I wonder if kids today would even know to stop at a gas station for directions if they got lost.
Those gas stations used to have a map rack. One in my town next to a freeway had a laminated one on the wall behind the maps with a big arrow saying “You are here.”
When people asked for directions the clerks just pointed.
Me and friends went from Italy to Spain about 13 years ago using paper maps we bought along the way. By that time it was already uncommon.
My wife did a cross country trip recently and picked up a rest stop map in every state. I think there was only one state that didn’t have any available. They’re pretty good maps before my kids colored and cut them up. I think they might be a few years out of date but close enough that if you know how to read a map and road signs you can figure out how to get wherever you’re going
Osmand, Organic Maps and so on
