In theory, yes, I agree. But make sure you properly value yourself! You only have so much time to give.
Though, that was also said about digital games instead of physical ones, that the savings get passed onto the consumer. Not a 1:1 but that one is going swimmingly right now 😅
In theory, yes, I agree. But make sure you properly value yourself! You only have so much time to give.
My dude, if you can't assemble the shelf just go pay more for one that is built. No one needs to run around computing their implicit value for such a simple task.
seldomly. i mostly buy supermarket store stuff when i "go out to eat". i sit down with a nice pre-packaged coffee for example. is cheaper than going to a coffee shop.
It still does in my area. Not every grocery store, but the big grocery chain around here definitely does. Sometimes they even offer to take my groceries to the car for me which has surprised me.
Yeah even having moved from there to the US South most grocery stores still have traditional checkout lanes/humans bagging your items if you so choose.
Ah, privilege. Parents had ok jobs. As soon as I needed sports equipment or wanted to go out to eat/pay for friends etc etc it was lawn mowing, paper route, construction from 6th grade.
Yeah, I dunno, I wanted to work, because I know it would give me money to go do things I wanted to do. Got my first job at 15, which was the youngest you could work in NJ, and have had consistent employment ever since. Money is, unfortunately, important.
If it's possible to earn something voluntarily is great.
Tyvm.
I delivered advertisement for a marketing agency of various local businesses.
Was the pay shit? Yes
Did I make enough money to not be a bum and make my mother pay for a gaming pc? Yes.
There's a local restaurant that still does their own delivery, and we order lunch from them each week on the same day pretty regularly. We recently moved (still in area) and he was like "Hey wait you moved!" and we had a nice lil convo, it was pleasant. I miss that.
Also, one person didn't do all that, still doesn't. Phones, oven, and delivery are all separate jobs, with phones and oven overlapping during slow shifts.
Apartments and multi tenant buildings in my country have numbers in a pattern, 1001 bottom first floor first to the left, 1002 next..1101 next floor same etc etc
Finding the right apartment even without a name of the owner becomes a breeze.
Do you think the postal and delivery workers have learnt this? ..nope..
The thin bread line separates not only the hungry from the fed but the men from the boys too. It has a higher casualty rate than being a police officer.
all the addresses are the same on all the parallel streets,
"East" and "West" are all separated by the same long North-South Boulevard,
even numbered express/highways will take you East/West, odd numbered North/South.
Lots of other stuff I've since forgotten, but I went from not knowing the city to knowing it by heart in a couple of months.
Now I do longer haul deliveries so I know areas far from where I live. I spend my time scoping out potential restaurants/areas for day trips or vacations.
That, and each driver would cover a specific area within the delivery range. It's not like they would have to read a map that fast for an address in an area they didn't already have practically memorized.
and the reason they stopped delivering within 30 minutes was cause it led to reckless driving and many, many, many traffic accidents and losses of life.
Yep. There were many wrongful death lawsuits as well, i think which resulted in millions of dollars of payouts to families, and all the coverage really hit domino's reputation to the point they finally dropped the half hour guarantee in the mid 90s because of the financial blows from reputation loss and settlements.
Though I wouldnt be surprised if they try to bring it back via drone deliveries.
ex land pirate here ... we'd keep a map of the city on the wall for reference but it seemed like most of the drivers just remembered where places were if they'd been working there for any amount of time ... I answered phones and made the pizzas when it was still ok to throw the dough up in the air, etc. fun job
eventually they’ll just sell warm pizza food cubes and avoid the hassle of yeast all together because consistency is exactly what everyone wants, … right?
With a chain restaurant... Yes. Consistency is exactly what people want.
Starbucks, McDonald's, Applebee's.
There's a reason they're all global brands, and it's not because they're all unique offerings, it's cause you can walk into any one of them and know exactly what you're going to get.
Like others have said, we had a big map. One thing I remembered though is how fucking often I would forget somebody's 2-liter of Pepsi or whatever. I would just stop and buy one on the way, and then later grab one from work and take it home.
I didn't work for Dominos, but I did spend a year delivering pizza for a different place when I was in college in the late '80s. We had the big laminated map of the area, but after a little bit we'd pretty much know every street and recognize the regulars.
I have three local places that still deliver using their own guy and I order exclusively from them. It limits my options, but fuck the delivery apps. Anywhere else, I either dine in or pick it up myself.
I worked in the kitchen and did deliveries the summer after I graduated high school.
We had a map under a piece of plexiglass on the counter. You'd have to look at it and memorize where you were going before you left.
We didn't have a 30 minute or it's free deal, but there was still pressure to deliver fast. Driving their car too fast, I hit the hump in the middle of an intersection and became briefly airborne. All four tires left the street.
I don't think the difference is the minimum education for entry.
I'd say the difference is how much of your paycheck is because of you specifically and how much is for just general labor.
So a physics researcher job is "skilled" because most of the pay is because the specific researcher knows about physics.
But a waiter job is "unskilled" since the skills needed to do the job are the skills needed for basically any job:
Basic maths skills
People skills
Willingness to work
Physical endurance
Enthusiasm to work
Memory
Handling stressful situations
Other relatively basic skills
Of those, only physical endurance and people skills are "exclusive" to being a waiter. There are some actual jobs that require no physical endurance. And some jobs don't require as much people skills as being a waiter does. But the rest of them are general across basically every job.
Of course, "unskilled job"s do require skills, I just listed a bunch of them. But most of those skills, any other worker that does any other job would have. Therefore I count payment for those skills as payment for "general labor" and not "payment for you specifically".
you do not need special skills to apply for the job
That's definitely the textbook economic definition.
But the colloquial definition is that you don't need special skills to do the job. Employees are interchangeable outside some minimal qualifications (rudimentary intellect, marginal physicality, gender).
And therefore you should be able to fully staff your organization paying the lowest prevailing wage rate, so long as some number of unemployed people exist. Anyone can be fired and replaced at any time with near-zero friction.
And health codes didn't stop them from filling it with all sorts of other stuff, and nobody looked to see that there were 5 sticks of butter and two handfuls of salt in each pizza.
I love the association that younger generations have with paper maps is pirates. Literally everyone used maps, they had racks of them at gas stations. And yet, now they're legendary items that only exist with Xs that mark the location of treasure.
Also, I cannot explain my excitement the first time I cut a human out of the pizza ordering pipeline. With zero regard for the employment impact, all I could think about was never getting the wrong kind of pizza (or it it going to the wrong house and never showing up) again. No longer was there a risk of being misheard or someone else making a mistake entering the order info for your address or a half sausage and onion, half pepperoni jalapeño pizza. Everyone around me thought ordering your pizza through an internet website was the nerdiest thing. Most of them didn't know it was an option and even after my explanation, they preferred to call, wait your turn on hold, repeat your house number, spell out your street name, give a cross street and explain which half of the pizza was your parents toppings and which half was the kids. People just couldn't believe that you could type something into a computer at your house and then a pizza would show up, without the assurance of a person's voice confirming they'd received your order and that they will cook exactly what you requested and bring it to you. Of course there was no feedback in those days. You didn't get an ETA for when it would arrive, an update when your pizza was being cooked, or when the driver left the shop, let alone a GPS tracked map of the drivers location. Once you selected whether you were paying in cash (like a normal person) or paid in advance with a credit card (like some kind of fancy business person), you just waited. If your order didn't show up after 45 mins, you pick up the house phone, find a coupon you saved with the pizza shop number, and manually press physical plastic buttons that moved and beeped, which was the style at the time.
I delivered pizzas in college. In my city I used to be able to tell you what subdivision you lived in, what side of the street you lived on, and the nearest cross road, just by the address.
Used to do it myself. The pizza place I worked for gave me a map of the town and said cya. Once went to the wrong street on literally the other side of town because close to same name streets but one was "drive" and the other was "ave" and I was tired.
Would you believe it's right after 121 and 7th? Not 121 and 8th; that leads to the one way bike path. Obviously. And if you make that mistake you have to use 3 highway ramps in perfect conjunction to get back there. Crossing all lanes for each exit.
As one of those Gen-X land pirates, I really wonder what would happen if GPS suddenly disappeared? Like, when is the last time anyone has seen or used a paper map?
I also delivered pizza back in the days, and yeah - the big paper map was a thing, but after awhile, didn't even need that
I still grab the latest highway maps from rest stops. What I haven't seen, that used to be in almost every gas station and convenience store, were the multi-page county atlases. Damn things would set you back $15-20 a pop but you'd look up a street name, get the page and grid location, then work backward to whatever highway you were taking. We had a stack of them in my buddy's work van and used them to get to everywhere. Navigating DC by paper map was an experience.
"ADC the Map People" made the ones for the DC/Maryland/Virginia area but stopped in 2010. It looks like they probably also made those massive wall maps used by the local pizza joints too. Doesn't seem like anyone makes anything similar to them now. Makes me wonder what LEO/Fire/EMS does now; they used to all carry atlases for their service area - even just as a fallback after GPS became widely available.
Oh man… I’m dyslexic so basically without GPS I’m constantly confused.
I worked for a weird IT company called AllSafe J/K AllCovered™ that really leaned into their homegrown dispatch software. And it was pretty impressive… but it relied on the GPS in our Dell laptops, which was not so hot inside a Ferriday cage, or frankly even sitting on top of a car, so I remember having a Thomas Guide, and several other paper maps that I would try desperately to use to find the next client location.
It was almost never the same client twice so learning a route was basically impossible. I got shitcanned for bitching out my supervisor, who didn’t know he was my supervisor, because none of us knew who each other were. Good-fuck, social engineering would have been a piece of cake back then.
the land before the techbro company that adds very little value got rich by putting themselves in the middle, scamming clients and exploiting workers, while making them angry with each other.
115 replies
Something that seems immediately apparent to me is that these folks are not fresh high school students. Adults used to work these jobs.
I can't even remember what jobs teenagers were supposed to have. Newspaper delivery? Ice cream bike guy? That's all I got.
teenagers as a group designation used to not be a thing. you were a child until you could do adult jobs and then you were an adult.
children would have menial jobs like coal miner, day labourer, the guy who sticks their hand into the mechanical loom when it gets stuck...
True, but not in the late 20th century when pizza by delivery was common but there was no gps
we didn't have delivery where i lived at that point, only take-away. quirks of living in a place with less than 10 people per km^2^ on average.
Bagging groceries. That job doesn't even exist anymore
Work that grocers have passed onto their customers that they used to do themselves:
Good ol shadow work.
Ikea is the greatest.
All of those used to be paid work, some even being part of the "white glove" service. Instead, we pay with our time, a finite resource.
When is comes to Ikea, what you pay in time is taken off the price, according to my experience
That's their literal business model.
In theory, yes, I agree. But make sure you properly value yourself! You only have so much time to give.
Though, that was also said about digital games instead of physical ones, that the savings get passed onto the consumer. Not a 1:1 but that one is going swimmingly right now 😅
My dude, if you can't assemble the shelf just go pay more for one that is built. No one needs to run around computing their implicit value for such a simple task.
Same with Aldi. And you better bring your quarter and own bags.
At least it's good exercise
My dude here opening a Heathkit and being like "why the fuck did I pay less to have to assemble everything?!"
You're missing the entire concept of what shadow work is. And why it's being pushed further and further.
I use ikea myself. I DIY'd my grid tied solar system, battery and all. I've no problem performing the labor. That's not the point here.
i mean i wouldn't want another employee touching every single food item. this is also a hygiene issue.
How do you think your produce ends up in the bin in the produce section?
Do you not ever go out to eat?
seldomly. i mostly buy supermarket store stuff when i "go out to eat". i sit down with a nice pre-packaged coffee for example. is cheaper than going to a coffee shop.
It still does in my area. Not every grocery store, but the big grocery chain around here definitely does. Sometimes they even offer to take my groceries to the car for me which has surprised me.
Market Basket, Stop and Shop, and so many others still have people for this.
Hello New Englander.
Yeah even having moved from there to the US South most grocery stores still have traditional checkout lanes/humans bagging your items if you so choose.
If you didn't mow lawns, you were never a tween/teen.
Lemonade stands
How about none ? You're a teen, you just need to learn, socialize and have fun. Don't work before your an adult.
Ah, privilege. Parents had ok jobs. As soon as I needed sports equipment or wanted to go out to eat/pay for friends etc etc it was lawn mowing, paper route, construction from 6th grade.
Yeah, I dunno, I wanted to work, because I know it would give me money to go do things I wanted to do. Got my first job at 15, which was the youngest you could work in NJ, and have had consistent employment ever since. Money is, unfortunately, important.
If it's possible to earn something voluntarily is great.
Tyvm.
I delivered advertisement for a marketing agency of various local businesses.
Was the pay shit? Yes
Did I make enough money to not be a bum and make my mother pay for a gaming pc? Yes.
And they were a proper fleet who has delivered in the same areas for years, making them extremely experienced in navigating those streets.
This also led to better customer service. You had a relationship with your driver.
There's a local restaurant that still does their own delivery, and we order lunch from them each week on the same day pretty regularly. We recently moved (still in area) and he was like "Hey wait you moved!" and we had a nice lil convo, it was pleasant. I miss that.
Sort of. I did this at 16-18.
Also, one person didn't do all that, still doesn't. Phones, oven, and delivery are all separate jobs, with phones and oven overlapping during slow shifts.
I really liked being a pizza delivery driver pre-GPS. It did require some skill, but you learned quickly about how things work:
It was easily the best "shitty job" I've ever had.
I remember buying my first mapsco and thinking: well shit, I literally can't get lost now...
Apartments and multi tenant buildings in my country have numbers in a pattern, 1001 bottom first floor first to the left, 1002 next..1101 next floor same etc etc
Finding the right apartment even without a name of the owner becomes a breeze.
Do you think the postal and delivery workers have learnt this? ..nope..
Pizza delivery though? No issues at all
Pizza goes cold, packages (usually) not.
Thank you for your service 🫡
The thin bread line separates not only the hungry from the fed but the men from the boys too. It has a higher casualty rate than being a police officer.
Same. I loved the independence of it. But it didn't pay enough to cover the repair bills it generated.
In my city:
all the addresses are the same on all the parallel streets,
"East" and "West" are all separated by the same long North-South Boulevard,
even numbered express/highways will take you East/West, odd numbered North/South.
Lots of other stuff I've since forgotten, but I went from not knowing the city to knowing it by heart in a couple of months.
Now I do longer haul deliveries so I know areas far from where I live. I spend my time scoping out potential restaurants/areas for day trips or vacations.
That, and each driver would cover a specific area within the delivery range. It's not like they would have to read a map that fast for an address in an area they didn't already have practically memorized.
I was in the burbs so we all covered the whole thing.
By the end of the century, modern fantasies is just going to be the 90s.
Already is
Has been for years.
They also stopped doing the 30-minute thing because they kept getting sued over the wrecks caused by trying to meet the 30-minute deadline.
When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
So that's where the idea in SnowCrash comes from!
and the reason they stopped delivering within 30 minutes was cause it led to reckless driving and many, many, many traffic accidents and losses of life.
I didn't know that, crazy.
Yeah pre internet lots of shit was easy to ignore.
Yep. There were many wrongful death lawsuits as well, i think which resulted in millions of dollars of payouts to families, and all the coverage really hit domino's reputation to the point they finally dropped the half hour guarantee in the mid 90s because of the financial blows from reputation loss and settlements.
Though I wouldnt be surprised if they try to bring it back via drone deliveries.
I'm all about drone pizza delivery! As-the-crow flies point-to-point means it arrives faster.
until they start having drone malfunctions that result in concussions, sliced throats, and decapitation.
Dinner AND a show?! What a deal 😎
And now we will never have the beginning of Snow Crash happen irl. Damn.
"The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallow subcategory."
I just reread that intro and it's so over-the-top awesome
ex land pirate here ... we'd keep a map of the city on the wall for reference but it seemed like most of the drivers just remembered where places were if they'd been working there for any amount of time ... I answered phones and made the pizzas when it was still ok to throw the dough up in the air, etc. fun job
Hang on. They don't throw the dough up in the air anymore?!?!?!?
There's a pizza dough spreader machine now. Makes it more consistent.
Smaller places often still throw the dough, but chains usually have the machine so every pizza is the same.
eventually they’ll just sell warm pizza food cubes and avoid the hassle of yeast all together because consistency is exactly what everyone wants, … right?
With a chain restaurant... Yes. Consistency is exactly what people want.
Starbucks, McDonald's, Applebee's.
There's a reason they're all global brands, and it's not because they're all unique offerings, it's cause you can walk into any one of them and know exactly what you're going to get.
Cookie cutting of bean counters and nefarious practices.
Which is not that good. Can't compare to the local Pizzeria. A heat up burger from the next supermarket is also not worse or more expensive.
Like others have said, we had a big map. One thing I remembered though is how fucking often I would forget somebody's 2-liter of Pepsi or whatever. I would just stop and buy one on the way, and then later grab one from work and take it home.
I didn't work for Dominos, but I did spend a year delivering pizza for a different place when I was in college in the late '80s. We had the big laminated map of the area, but after a little bit we'd pretty much know every street and recognize the regulars.
And if you couldn't pay for the pizza, they'd have sex with you
Sometimes they’d cut a hole in the middle and stick their dick in the pizza though which was weird.
Is that a guarantee?
I have three local places that still deliver using their own guy and I order exclusively from them. It limits my options, but fuck the delivery apps. Anywhere else, I either dine in or pick it up myself.
I do the same. If anyone uses those stupid apps, I consider them to be lazy bitches.
I worked in the kitchen and did deliveries the summer after I graduated high school.
We had a map under a piece of plexiglass on the counter. You'd have to look at it and memorize where you were going before you left.
We didn't have a 30 minute or it's free deal, but there was still pressure to deliver fast. Driving their car too fast, I hit the hump in the middle of an intersection and became briefly airborne. All four tires left the street.
That's rough, at least i had a crappy photocopy to work with haha
"unskilled labor"
Not this again.
"Unskilled labor" means that you do not need special skills to apply for the job; you will be trained on the spot.
That would mean every management job is unskilled and CEOs should be paid minimum wage.
I can dig it.
So when I pay your mom for feet pics, she's working and an unskilled labourer?
I don't think the difference is the minimum education for entry.
I'd say the difference is how much of your paycheck is because of you specifically and how much is for just general labor.
So a physics researcher job is "skilled" because most of the pay is because the specific researcher knows about physics.
But a waiter job is "unskilled" since the skills needed to do the job are the skills needed for basically any job:
Of those, only physical endurance and people skills are "exclusive" to being a waiter. There are some actual jobs that require no physical endurance. And some jobs don't require as much people skills as being a waiter does. But the rest of them are general across basically every job.
Of course, "unskilled job"s do require skills, I just listed a bunch of them. But most of those skills, any other worker that does any other job would have. Therefore I count payment for those skills as payment for "general labor" and not "payment for you specifically".
That's definitely the textbook economic definition.
But the colloquial definition is that you don't need special skills to do the job. Employees are interchangeable outside some minimal qualifications (rudimentary intellect, marginal physicality, gender).
And therefore you should be able to fully staff your organization paying the lowest prevailing wage rate, so long as some number of unemployed people exist. Anyone can be fired and replaced at any time with near-zero friction.
So all apprentices are unskilled labour?
And the pizza actually tasted better than it does today.
The science of embalming food hadn't progressed as far at that point.
And health codes didn't stop them from filling it with all sorts of other stuff, and nobody looked to see that there were 5 sticks of butter and two handfuls of salt in each pizza.
no shit, food in 1960 was full of additional flavoring chemicals.
And it was incredibly affordable compared to today.
prices didn't go up, wages went down.
I mean prices also went up
I was one of those land pirates, once upon a time- and after a few weeks on the job we didn't need the paper maps, either.
Pizza dude's got thirty seconds.
Wise man say, “forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza.”
Imagine not being able to look things up on your phone the instant you think of them
You'd have a notebook with you to write it down for later.
But yeeeaahh...No bueno for getting it now.
After the internet too.
I delivered pizzas for quite some time and we had a map on the wall laid out like a road map with grids.
Order came in, address matched to grid, find the address and go.
Our slower drivers would use gps or maps. The good ones just knew the area.
They also didn't charge you $20 just so the franchise can pocket it.
I love the association that younger generations have with paper maps is pirates. Literally everyone used maps, they had racks of them at gas stations. And yet, now they're legendary items that only exist with Xs that mark the location of treasure.
Also, I cannot explain my excitement the first time I cut a human out of the pizza ordering pipeline. With zero regard for the employment impact, all I could think about was never getting the wrong kind of pizza (or it it going to the wrong house and never showing up) again. No longer was there a risk of being misheard or someone else making a mistake entering the order info for your address or a half sausage and onion, half pepperoni jalapeño pizza. Everyone around me thought ordering your pizza through an internet website was the nerdiest thing. Most of them didn't know it was an option and even after my explanation, they preferred to call, wait your turn on hold, repeat your house number, spell out your street name, give a cross street and explain which half of the pizza was your parents toppings and which half was the kids. People just couldn't believe that you could type something into a computer at your house and then a pizza would show up, without the assurance of a person's voice confirming they'd received your order and that they will cook exactly what you requested and bring it to you. Of course there was no feedback in those days. You didn't get an ETA for when it would arrive, an update when your pizza was being cooked, or when the driver left the shop, let alone a GPS tracked map of the drivers location. Once you selected whether you were paying in cash (like a normal person) or paid in advance with a credit card (like some kind of fancy business person), you just waited. If your order didn't show up after 45 mins, you pick up the house phone, find a coupon you saved with the pizza shop number, and manually press physical plastic buttons that moved and beeped, which was the style at the time.
And you know what else kids? The food was actually good!
A map at the start, sure, I'd bet these drivers had "The Knowledge" like a London cabbie.
I delivered pizzas in college. In my city I used to be able to tell you what subdivision you lived in, what side of the street you lived on, and the nearest cross road, just by the address.
Used to do it myself. The pizza place I worked for gave me a map of the town and said cya. Once went to the wrong street on literally the other side of town because close to same name streets but one was "drive" and the other was "ave" and I was tired.
Sometimes it was 31 minutes, and free
Where the heck is 122 and an eighth?
Would you believe it's right after 121 and 7th? Not 121 and 8th; that leads to the one way bike path. Obviously. And if you make that mistake you have to use 3 highway ramps in perfect conjunction to get back there. Crossing all lanes for each exit.
As one of those Gen-X land pirates, I really wonder what would happen if GPS suddenly disappeared? Like, when is the last time anyone has seen or used a paper map?
I also delivered pizza back in the days, and yeah - the big paper map was a thing, but after awhile, didn't even need that
I still grab the latest highway maps from rest stops. What I haven't seen, that used to be in almost every gas station and convenience store, were the multi-page county atlases. Damn things would set you back $15-20 a pop but you'd look up a street name, get the page and grid location, then work backward to whatever highway you were taking. We had a stack of them in my buddy's work van and used them to get to everywhere. Navigating DC by paper map was an experience.
"ADC the Map People" made the ones for the DC/Maryland/Virginia area but stopped in 2010. It looks like they probably also made those massive wall maps used by the local pizza joints too. Doesn't seem like anyone makes anything similar to them now. Makes me wonder what LEO/Fire/EMS does now; they used to all carry atlases for their service area - even just as a fallback after GPS became widely available.
You can look into places where GPS is heavily jammed like Ukraine, Russia or the baltics. It's not great, but people will adapt.
Oh man… I’m dyslexic so basically without GPS I’m constantly confused.
I worked for a weird IT company called
AllSafeJ/K AllCovered™ that really leaned into their homegrown dispatch software. And it was pretty impressive… but it relied on the GPS in our Dell laptops, which was not so hot inside a Ferriday cage, or frankly even sitting on top of a car, so I remember having a Thomas Guide, and several other paper maps that I would try desperately to use to find the next client location.It was almost never the same client twice so learning a route was basically impossible. I got shitcanned for bitching out my supervisor, who didn’t know he was my supervisor, because none of us knew who each other were. Good-fuck, social engineering would have been a piece of cake back then.
the land before the techbro company that adds very little value got rich by putting themselves in the middle, scamming clients and exploiting workers, while making them angry with each other.
"progress"
Where I live it's still like this minus the map (they don't need one)
Childhood memories unlocked! They even made time for the best 4th grade field trip ever 🤤
We got to make our own tiny pizza 🍕
What was yours?
In some countries it's still a thing...well without the paper map
I always enjoy staring at this exact framed photo any time I'm waiting at my local Domino's. It really gives me that Saturday night pizza feeling.