Delivery Driver

What is your role in the restaurant?

I deliver for five locations around the city. We don’t get a lot of deliveries. We aren’t a pizza place after all. but our wings and ribs are popular delivery options. I am on call for each of the delivery locations. If one of them gets a delivery, I get a notification on my phone. I go pick up the food from the location nearest the customer. Then I drive to the customer, and deliver their food. I collect their payment if necessary. Sometimes they pay online. In that case I don’t have to do much, just drop off the food.

What challenges do you face?

You mean other than traffic and customers annoyed with the delivery times? I think the app they give me is probably my biggest headache. I have this app on my phone. When I get a delivery it notifies me. It gives me all the details about the order and the customer. I also have a dongle that I attach to my phone that allow me to collect credit/debit payments.

The problem is that sometimes it doesn’t work. I will be on the way to a customer site when suddenly it just stops. I get some error like “unable to communicate with server” or something. When that happens I lose everything. I don’t have access to the customer address or their order. Thankfully they always print that information out on the bill before the delivery so I can still use that. But then when I go to collect the payment I end up having to use one of those old credit card swipe machines. The manual ones that take an imprint of the card. That doesn’t work if the customer planned to pay with debit though. In those cases I am out of luck.

Apparently they are going to start offering customer loyalty cards as well. They tell me that those will go through the same app. That just sounds like more headache. So now when the system goes down I am going to have to write down the customer’s loyalty number, and then enter it when manually when the system comes back up.

• Driver gets notifications through the app on their phone.
• Driver picks up orders and delivers them to the customer.
• Driver collects payments.
• Workarounds for unreliable software in the form of printed receipts.