HELL ON WHEELS
Horror stories mount about delivery workers
Cindy Orozco didn’t expect to be punched in the head by a delivery worker when she arrived at her job at Good Pizza in Los Angeles last March.
The blow came from an enraged food delivery worker who stormed into the tiny pizzeria demanding, “Where’s my f---ing order.”
When she told him it wasn’t ready, he threw the contents of a tip jar across the small Playa Del Ray eatery, according to interviews and surveillance video footage obtained by The Post.
Things escalated when Orozco and the courier — who was sent to Good Pizza by food delivery giant DoorDash — got into a physical confrontation. The courier fled — without the order.
The violent incident is the latest in a growing number of horror stories from restaurateurs who say they are being forced into heated interactions with angry delivery people — thanks to big tech companies like DoorDash that motivate their couriers to move quickly and handle high volumes.
“These companies like DoorDash claim to do heavy background checks, but I wouldn’t want to have these people at my door at 11 p.m.,” Good Pizza’s owner, Nando de Stefano, told The Post. De Stefano filed a police report over the March incident.
Kwan Disbanchong, who owns Ruam Mitr, a Thai restaurant in LA, said she recently received a negative Yelp review from an out-ofline DoorDash worker calling the food “trash” because he was angry about how long it took for the order to be cooked.
“Trash food, took over an hour for them to cook it,” read the Feb. 24 review, which implied the courier was a customer.
After finding the same review on the courier’s personal Facebook page, Disbanchong complained to DoorDash, which said it would “tell the driver” about her complaint, she said.
Another DoorDash hire made a scene in Disbanchong’s restaurant after he got a ticket for parking in a loading zone, she said.
“He told me that I need to pay for his ticket and he got louder and louder because he wanted my customers to hear,” the Ruam Mitr owner told The Post.
“We investigated these reports of inappropriate behavior as soon as they were brought to our attention and took appropriate action in each case,” said DoorDash, without specifying the actions it took.
Orozco, Good Pizza’s general manager, claims DoorDash “didn’t do anything” after it was informed of her assault, which she says sent her to the hospital.
The privately held company is the fastest-growing Silicon Valley food delivery business, recently overtaking the longtime industry leader, Grubhub — which owns Seamless — in market share, according to sales data tracker Second Measure.
The San Francisco company and its competitors, Postmates and UberEats, generally pay their delivery hires a flat fee based on the time and distance they estimate it will take a courier to complete the order, sources told The Post. Under this scheme, the more quickly couriers can move, the more they stand to get paid per hour.
In some cases, companies can send couriers to restaurants to place an order and wait for the food to be cooked — often for little to no pay, sources said.
“Postmates pays pennies for the courier to wait and DoorDash pays nothing,” said George Montgomery, who has delivered food for both.
Adding to the couriers’ stress are restaurants that are hostile to outside delivery people, the Charlotte, NC, resident said.
“I’ve had a Cheesecake Factory manager tell me to shut up and sit in the corner and if I ask how long the order will take, he’ll kick me out of the restaurant,” he said.
Concerns over aggressive and unsanitary behavior from third-party couriers generally have spurred a group of restaurant owners in LA’s Westwood neighborhood to call on the city’s health department to regulate the industry. They want the city to require food couriers to be trained in proper food-handling procedures, including temperature issues, and to inspect drivers’ vehicles.
“I have concerns about how clean and safely my food deliveries are made and whether my customers feel safe,” Roozbeh Farahanipour, owner of LA-based Delphi Greek, told The Post. “If a customer gets hepatitis, they are going to sue the restaurant.”
One viral video from earlier this year showed a DoorDash delivery person, known as a Dasher, sneaking a sip of a milkshake before ringing the doorbell of a Stockton, Calif., homeowner who ordered the beverage. In another widely reported story, a Yorktown, Pa., diner complained he opened his order — also delivered by a Dasher — only to discover two of his six ribs had been eaten.
DoorDash has said it terminated the milkshake courier, and the Pennsylvania customer received a refund from DoorDash for his meal, according to reports.
“I’ve seen homeless people deliver food from their cars which are stuffed with all of their belongings and it’s heartbreaking,” Farahanipour said about the industry generally. “But we do not exist to be a charity.”