Takeout deliverers weigh risk vs. reward
A ‘calculated’ gamble, drivers, owners wonder what choice they have
They all look at it as it rolls by, pausing their evening walks, bike rides and outdoor workouts to take in its rust-colored shape, the words 1.833.PIG.LOVE inscribed on its side. Has a delivery van ever inspired such awe?
Thomas Ward parks the Pig Floyd’s Urban Barbakoa van just off the street in suburban Winter Garden, in front of a house one shade of greenish beige removed from its neighbors. He slaps on black latex gloves and slips behind the truck — where rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine is depicted in pig form on the back door — and emerges with two brown paper bags smelling of barbecue.
For those stuck at home, delivery has become one of the remaining lifelines to a once-normal world. For those delivering, it’s the only tether left sustaining any semblance of a livelihood — perhaps at great personal cost.
As soon as Ward, who owns the popular Pig Floyd’s, drops the meals on the welcome mat, the dogs inside start barking. But no one comes to the door.
Instead, a shout emits from an open window on the home’s second floor: “Thank you!” the owner yells, drawing out the “you.” She sneaks in a photo of the van when he’s back inside and thinks he can’t see, then adds a sticker of an MVP crown to the top of it and
posts it to Instagram with the caption, “Thanks for dinner, @pigfloyds !!!!! ”
Ward laughs as he drives off, six more homes to visit.
“It’s really funny, people when they see, me,” he says, switching to a high-pitched voice, “they’re like ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe the owner is delivering food!’”
Ward already has had to furlough 18 staff members at his Lake Nona location. He’s rotating between about eight at his Mills 50 restaurant, where he says profits are down 50%.
So, yeah, he’s delivering anywhere that’ll have his Caribbeaninspired BBQ.
Last week he was in Tampa delivering 10 “family meals,” a new promotion responsible for 58% of his current sales. It serves four adults for about $50. This week he’s taking another 50 family meals to Miami, too.
Across Central Florida’s restaurant industry, drivers are setting out every day in an effort to keep some businesses from shutting down due to coronavirus. At East End Market, many of the vendors at the food hall are joining in on a delivery van that distributes for them all, and apps such as Uber Eats and Postmates are seeing their number of orders bloat.
It’s a race just to stay open, said Geoff Luebkemann, vice president of education and training at the Florida Restaurant & Lodging Association.
“People that are normally competitors, walls are broken down, people are collaborating,” he said. “Everyone is just looking for a way to get through.”
The restaurant industry experienced its largest-ever one-month employment decline in March — 417,000 lost jobs, according to preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s six times the previous record in October 2000.
Luebkemann said the association hasn’t been able to fully quantify the coronavirus’ impact on Florida’s restaurant industry yet. Some places are running at as little as 10% of normal business. Stay-at-home orders hit fine dining especially hard. And the ones that already did delivery are hanging on — but just barely.
“It’s bleak,” Luebkemann said. “Bleak.”
Reward
East End Market owner John Rife did the only thing he thought could help his food hall’s 17 vendors. By partnering with local startup Fleat, which provides fully outfitted delivery vans with temperature-controlled fridges, a small sink and a logistics system, he could give the dozen small restaurateurs that operate out of East End a fighting chance at some delivery orders.
But the night before the truck’s maiden journey last week, Rife was struck with doubt. Would people be too scared to place orders in a pandemic?
No, answered the order for warm chocolate chip cookies from
Gideon’s Bakehouse, when it dinged into the system. And no, assured him the request for fresh juices from Skyebird, as did the one for artisan cheeses and charcuterie from La Femme du Fromage, paté from Hinckley’s Fancy Meats and ramen from Domu.
“When orders started coming in … I actually started getting choked up,” Rife said. “This is going to work.”
The next day, last Friday, he and his kitchen manager, Harvey Vives, head out with 30 orders loaded in the truck. Vives, standing up in the back of the van, clutched the counter for balance. They fanned out across College Park. For now, they’re delivering the orders neighborhoods at a time to save on gas.
For small businesses, doing the deliveries themselves is “just not economical,” Rife said, taking a turn onto a cobblestone street that rattled the van’s stainless steel appliances. “If there’s a $15 order and you’re paying someone $15 an hour to make deliveries, it just doesn’t work. These businesses are too small and run too close to
the wire. The profit on a smaller store is always going to be tighter.”
It’s part of the reason so many have turned to rely on food delivery apps.
Michael DiBenedetto, CEO and founder of food delivery app aggregator FoodBoss, said orders on Uber Eats, Postmates, Caviar, EatStreet and Delivery.com are up but didn’t give specific numbers. His app compares prices and delivery times across platforms for more than 200,000 restaurants in about 50 cities, including Orlando.
“More and more people seem to be getting a little nervous to go to the grocery store and stand in line with a variety of other people,” DiBenedetto said. To fill that growing need, “third-party delivery companies are really trying to work with the restaurants to provide food in an easy fashion.”
They haven’t done that without some pressure, though.
Typically delivery services charge the restaurants a 30% commission, on average, to provide delivery. That’s on top of what customers also pay for the delivery, said restaurant analyst John Gordon.
Gordon said that even before the coronavirus outbreak, “thirdparty delivery companies had gotten a tremendous amount of backtalk and push back from both independent restaurants and chain restaurants to lower commissions.”
Uber Eats has already waived delivery fees for customers at independent restaurants — the restaurants still pay their commission — and DoorDash is waiving commissions for 30 days for independent restaurants that join the app through the end of May. Local restaurants already on the app will also see commission fees cut in half.
Risk
All that business is keeping Uber Eats drivers like Robert Pash weaving through Orlando on a mad dash to complete orders.
For a week that ended April 6, Pash said he made $1,067 for 52 hours of work — that’s $20.52 an hour before taxes and gas, but still good considering a restaurant waiter in Orlando makes a median wage of $9.43 an hour without tips.
During a four-hour lunch run on Wednesday, his drive took him on a tour of coronavirus’ wrath.
He stopped in restaurants with closed dining rooms, where chairs were stacked on tables. An order from Black Rooster Taqueria on Mills Avenue took him to a medical office where patients’ temperatures were being taken at the door. A Chick-fil-A order landed him in Colonialtown North, where the person requested that Pash leave the food at the door — about 30% of his customers request contactless orders.
Pash lost his job making prepackaged foods at the Colonial Landing Lucky’s Market when it closed earlier this year, then had a brief stint at a pizzeria before he started driving for Uber Eats in March. He feels lucky not to be in the restaurant business now.
At 46, he’s also not “too concerned about the virus itself. I feel like I’m pretty healthy,” he said, though he does wash his hands a lot, a habit he picked up working in restaurants.
For managers like Ward, going out in the middle of a pandemic is “a calculated risk,” he said. But he has a choice — it’s his business after all. For Rife, too. If East End’s tenants can’t make sales, they won’t be able to pay him rent.
The cash coming in from Ward’s family meal tour, which stops in a different area of town every day, is enough to pay his supplier and his employees.
“It’s not like I’m becoming a rich man here, right?” he said. But at least his business is still operating.
He’s told his employees there’s a risk, but most of them brush it off. Only one wears a mask from behind the cash register, the others fill orders at a rapid clip with gloves on, determined to get the deliveries out on time.
“They’re like, ‘Yeah, we need the money,’” said Ward, a Puerto Rican transplant who went broke during the recession, before ultimately opening a food truck with zero cooking experience and then Pig Floyd’s six years ago.
He knows what it’s like to work hard. On an hour-and-a-half drive making deliveries around Winter Garden last week, he took four calls: His attorney who helped come up with the family deals idea, his longtime friend who gave him the name for his food truck (Treehouse Truck, for Ward, who is 6-foot-8), his small business loan adviser and a client putting in a catering order.
He’s made his choice. He knows why his employees have made theirs.
“[Most of them] are like, ‘whatever,’” he said. “Yeah, for real. My manager is like, ‘We’re going to the end of the world, I don’t give a f***.’”