Except for the lone pair of baggy Guess jeans and oversize silk shirt I wore most days in middle school, I’ve never been very fashionable. So on my first day as a Domino’s delivery driver in college, when the store manager tossed me a used red-and-blue polo that would constitute my uniform, I didn’t even notice that it was a size too large. He also gave me a goofy Domino’s hat, a light-up Domino’s sign for the roof of my car, and a salary of a little more than $2 an hour, plus tips.
This was the summer of 1998, and I needed work to fund a couple of new habits I’d picked up during my freshman year: dating, Bruce Springsteen CDs, Busch Light. The Domino’s gods had recently dropped a franchise alongside the main four-lane road that cut through the small community of Bryans Road in rural southern Maryland, where I grew up, lifting our culinary scene to new heights. The Domino’s was attached to a drive-through liquor store, which was next to a parking lot where a family sold steamed crabs out of the back of a truck. Also in the area was a Burger King, a McDonald’s, a Subway, and a Chinese restaurant.
But although customers had to drive to all of them, Domino’s drove to the customers. Even in our strange attire, we delivery drivers were like kings who wore the jewel of a Domino’s sign on our crowns. Once, a police officer noticed me going 25 miles over the speed limit. He whipped around, but rather than ticket me, he pulled up beside me and wagged his finger, as if to say, Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
I found myself thinking of my two glorious summers delivering for Domino’s this month when an Uber Eats driver arrived at my doorstep. He held his phone in his right hand and my pizza in his left, tilted down slightly. The cheese would’ve drooped off the pizza, but by that point the pie was lukewarm. I had wanted to try a new pizzeria a couple of neighborhoods over from my home in Charlotte, North Carolina—and anyone with a phone knows the rest: Scroll. Tap. Agree to an extra delivery charge, then agree to a promotion that drops the same extra charge. When the driver arrived, some 50 minutes later, he looked tired and anxious to get to wherever his phone would send him next.
Chillier than the pizza was the realization that pizza delivery drivers like I once was are a dying breed. Most of the other local pizzerias near me deliver via the apps instead of their own fleet of drivers; the bigger chains are moving in that direction too. Last month, Pizza Hut franchises in California announced they would lay off more than 1,100 delivery drivers; in July, after holding out for years, Domino’s also caved and joined Uber Eats. Third-party delivery is so popular and ubiquitous that something like two-thirds of all restaurant delivery in the U.S. happens on DoorDash alone.
Today, drivers deliver not just pizza but basically anything you want. Such is the nature of technology: When one flower dies, a thousand rise in its place. Yet although delivery in the era of apps may have become more efficient, it’s also more fraught, more exploitative, and in some ways, just worse. I’ll miss the pizza delivery driver—and so will you.
At Domino’s, Fridays were the show. The shop phones started to ring at about 4 p.m., and steadily gathered like a Springsteen anthem toward a 7 p.m. crescendo. There was a job for every step of the pizza process: phone-answerers and dough-tossers and sauce-spreaders and topping-adders. Then there was us, the pizza-deliverers, waiting on the other end of the oven to shovel the pies into a box and go: Wayne, Reed, Keith, Kara, Darren, a couple of Billys, and a Big Kirk. (Now that I think about it, AI couldn’t spit out a more cliché list of ’90s small-town names.)
The only navigation system was a large paper map in the shop, which we’d use to outline our routes before we left. In those days before Google Maps, I knew which street signs were down, and exactly how fast to take the most treacherous turns on Billingsley Road. Sometimes I got lost and never found the destination, and had to return to home base to take another look at the map.
Compared with that, life is decidedly more convenient. My porch is a checkout counter for everything: Pampers and COVID tests, dish soap and detergent. As I typed this, no joke, a woman from an online service dropped off our dry cleaning and took a picture of it. One morning when we were out of coffee grounds, two large bags of dark roast appeared on my doorstep, and my wife looked at me and said, “Don’t worry about it.”
Perhaps none of this would be possible without people like me, who delivered pizzas in funny hats and shirts. For a long time, pizza was one of the only kinds of food you could get delivered in much of the country. Americans didn’t just order pizza to their home. They believed in it. Pizza-delivery trends were an assessment of the country’s mood and interests: Domino’s reported a surge in sales during O. J. Simpson’s infamous low-speed chase in 1994. And think about the role of the delivery driver in movies: He (and for whatever reason it is always a he) scrambles away from fake gunshots in Home Alone, interrupts a classroom in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and delivers a fateful pizza in E.T.
Maybe nostalgia has gotten the best of me, but I’d like to think that the pizza we delivered back then was better than it is now. For one, drivers had a proximity to the process that today’s third-party delivery workers lack. At Domino’s, we drivers folded boxes, cut pizzas, and washed all the dishes. A bad pizza might come back to bite me the next time around with my regular customers. One elderly woman in a World War II–era development always left a Post-it note on her door telling me where to drop off her pizza. Another man would always meet me at the end of the long dirt road that led to his house. The only driver I know today, now that I think about it, is our regular UPS carrier.
Not that it was anything like a perfect job. Even on the busiest nights, I never made more than $100, including tips; the work was tiring and unrelenting. I joined Domino’s a few years after the company’s “30 minutes or it’s free” promotion ended in a $79 million lawsuit after a delivery driver struck a car, injuring the woman inside. But that time was still the benchmark. A sticker on the side of every box displayed the exact minute of the order, and our goal was to get it there within 30 minutes. Sometimes 32. Sometimes 34. But 45? Unacceptable. One time, an order was still sitting on the rack beyond the half-hour mark, and my manager told me not to deliver it, because they’d rather make a fresh pizza served very late than a cold one served slightly late.
The irony is that in our DoorDash world, pizza delivery is probably not even the best delivery choice these days. The Domino’s a quarter-mile from my house often has red-and-blue-painted cars parked there, while every few minutes another driver, working for another app-based company, passes them by. They could be carrying anything—a pizza or a coffee or a chicken sandwich. Whatever the case, the product is less likely to show up warm and with a smile. This is the cost of a world of drivers who are not wearers of the crown, but servants to multiple kings.
Not that it’s their fault. I was just a teenager who delivered pizza for some extra cash, whereas today’s workers are busier, more scattered, and probably paid less—many carrying burdens as independent contractors that I never had. If food delivery can feel a bit depressing, that’s because it is. Delivery drivers are now always in a rush, because the only way to make up for a bad tip is to hope for a better one at the next door. Customers overpay for the convenience of delivery because of steep fees, which doesn’t exactly compel them to be more generous. Restaurants, already operating on thin margins, have to pay 15 to 30 percent of every delivery to a faceless tech company. (Skipping the apps is no longer a real option.) Delivery apps are warping the look and feel of the restaurant industry, and even entire cities, as they are the only real winners here.
I look forward to telling my two young kids about my delivery days, even if they won’t understand them. “So people called the pizza shop?” they might ask. “And then they gave you cash?” Yes, I’ll say. And the best words we could ever hear were “keep the change.”
When the Uber Eats guy who delivered my pizza handed me the box, he asked me the strangest question.
“Do you have your pin?”
My what?
“The four-digit pin?”
This, apparently, is an Uber Eats security measure I hadn’t dealt with before, one designed to guarantee delivery success in this trust-no-stranger time. I opened the app again and he helped me find it. And that’s how we sealed the Friday-night pizza exchange in 2024. With a number, not a name.