I ordered my daughter a pizza, something I don't usually do. I got Domino's smallest size with two toppings. I got her cheese sticks and two sauces and tipped the driver 20%. $31.07.
Note I did not buy any food for myself.
To head off questions:
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No, I couldn't cook for her. I'm suffering from a long-term illness where I can't eat solid foods and am extremely smell sensitive. My wife is at a funeral, so I had to order food.
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She's extremely picky and refused to let me order anything but pizza.
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We live outside of town, in a not very big town, with very few pizza delivery options, and they're all at least this expensive.
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No, I didn't also have to buy her the cheesy bread or the second topping or the sauces, but it's nice to get my daughter a treat and that is no excuse for the order being that expensive.
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We're in Indiana, so this should be ludicrous in terms of pricing. This used to be the pricing I would expect when we lived in L.A. and ordered from a good local place rather than a chain.
Edit: Turns out what I should have been infuriated about is people repeatedly telling me to get takeout and having to repeatedly explain why that wasn't an option, having people not believe I'm sick, and being repeatedly berated for not magically knowing food coupons exist on the internet when I never order food on the internet. Oh right, and also being a bad parent for not forcing food my daughter doesn't like down her throat or starving her if she won't eat it.
By the way, I have another thing to be infuriated about. A huge storm came in and this happened to our trees. I assume I will start being berated for not cutting them down before that happened, but because I have no power or internet at home and have to go to the library to post, your further posts telling me what an idiot I am and how I'm an awful parent and how I'm not really sick will take me a while to read. Sorry to ruin your day. Maybe you'll find someone else to treat like shit.
Anyway, have fun telling me I'm the worst person on Lemmy, just don't expect a quick reply.
Oh, and do tell me how stupid I am for not knowing that people who clear up and fix such damage have coupons on their website.
Dominoes has their own cars tho so the delivery fee is in theory for car wear
Maybe this is a regional thing, but every pizza place that I’m aware of which delivers requires the delivery driver to use their personal vehicle… and does not reimburse for wear and tear.
Why does your dominoes deliver by car? Seems like an incredibly expensive and environmentally unsound way of delivering pizza? Here they just use bikes like basically every other delivery place.
Are you in the US? I've literally never seen a delivery driver on a bike, except for that action movie about bike couriers in NYC.
No, I’m in the Netherlands. Why deliver by car when a bike is faster and cheaper?
Because it isn't faster and cheaper in the majority of the US. The nearest Pizza place to me is about 2 miles, the nearest that actually delivers? About 4 miles. And I'm within the city limits of one of the top 20 largest cities in the US. Our population densities are on a completely different scale than the Netherlands. Not saying we have good city designs, but as it is, a bike would a terrible way to deliver food to me.
You’re saying that 6.5 kilometers by car would be faster than by bike in a city? In a car you’d be stuck in slow moving traffic or waiting for a traffic light like 80% of the time.
6.5km by bike would be like 20 minutes max, depending on city and time of day it would be 30-60 minutes by car.
That is correct, the median speed, as a rough guess, from the pizza place near my house, to my house, would be 35mph, including the 2 stoplights in the way. Assuming we had proper bike infrastructure(which we don't); you'd be hard pressed to top the speed a car can go, and you would still have to stop frequently at lights, just like a car. And remember, that is the nearest place, not the only. And a small sub note, this area is not flat, at all. The gradient changes are brutal for bikes and they can't sustain a decent constant speed. Well, at least before electric bikes.
I am not defending, in any way, America's horrible car centric infrastructure. It is what we have though, and as a result, bike deliveries aren't an option for the vast majority of America. Of course, when you leave the city, it gets worse.
Here it’s the exact opposite. There is no way a car can keep up with a bike in the city. Let’s say I wanted to go to the city center by car, which is about 2 kilometers. I would encounter 5 traffic lights just in that short drive. On a working day it would be slow, on a Saturday? Forget it. It would probably be faster to walk. Alternatively, I could go by bike and encounter exactly zero traffic lights. I would ride from my house to the bicycle highway (few hundred meters), and from there it’s an uninterrupted route to the city center. It’s a completely separate path and there are bridges crossing all major roads. Near the city center it turns into a shared space where bicycles have priority over cars. The city center isn’t accessible by car at all, so if you go by car you have to park your car at the edge of the city center (paid) and walk the rest. By contrast, I can cycle right up to any store and park my bicycle right in front of it.
Our cities aren't densely built up, except for New York. The actual urban area of most cities generally has far fewer people than the suburban metroplex surrounding it. 6.5km is literally larger than all of downtown Dallas, depending on how you define downtown.
Even our cities are designed for car travel, so unless it's rush hour you're still faster by car. Unless there's a concert or other event happening, it doesn't take nearly 20 minutes to traverse downtown Dallas in a car.
I lived in Dallas, this is bullshit. Dallas has traffic jams all the time and it gets worse and worse. There are more than enough studies you can find, just search them on some search engine and look at the data.
I live in DFW right now. I'll admit i don't commute through downtown proper daily, but even when i do go through downtown after work it's bad, but not nearly as bad as plenty of other places in thr US.
4 miles (approx. 6km?) would be 3mins per km -> 18mins by bike
Where is the problem?
In my city in Austria like 90% of the deliveries are done by bike/e-bike
There is even a platform/app where it's guaranteed to be delivered by bike.
How long do you thing does it take to bike a few kilometres?
Yeah, maybe your infrastructure isn't bike friendly, but that's a problem that can be solved.
I just don't get the mentally of "well, it is that way and everything else can't apply here"
Edit: being stoned and somehow missed finishing my first sentence
And here, it can be as little a 6 minutes by car, assuming good light timing, and a max of 15 minutes, assuming terrible timing and unusual traffic.
Bike is not faster for a 20 mile delivery range
Who the fuck orders food 32 kilometers away? Who the fuck even delivers at that distance? You’d pay more for gas than for the food. Never mind that your food would be cold when it arrives.
I live in a small city in a rural area and I have like 150+ delivery restaurants within 5 kilometers. It wouldn’t even cross my mind to order from a restaurant in the next city over (not that they would accept it), let alone one 40 minutes away.
The US. Our dominos served a 15-20 mile radius in my medium sized suburban town growing up.
That’s absolutely insane. How many delivery drivers do they have for such a large area? 32 kilometers that’s an hour roundtrip even in a rural area with little traffic. If you order around dinner time you must have to wait for hours to get your food, even id they have like 10+ cars.
I checked and there are 18 dominoes in that radius around my home.
Something else you seem to be missing is often, a lot Americans live off highways. 20 miles may only take 20 minutes of drive time. When I lived in slightly more rural area, most driving took almost exactly minute per mile. Our entire country is designed around vehicles moving at high speed. My city is wrapped in a 60 mile interstate. An unbroken loop around the city who's speed limit is 70mph. Outside of rush hour, you can take it all the way around at 80mph without ever braking in the slightest, unless there is a slow moving car camping the passing lane.
Pizza delivery has electronically heated insulated containers for the drivers to keep the pizza in during the drive. Generally I think they group up orders so one delivery driver will hit up maybe 10-20 deliveries in that one run. It's normally not driving 20 miles just to deliver one pizza.
32 kilometers is still insane. How long do you have to wait for your pizza if they have to first wait for that many orders that need to go in that particular direction. Must be hours. Here it usually takes 15-20 minutes.
15-45 minutes... I'm not exactly knowledgeable about pizza delivery logistics, so forgive me if I'm wrong about specifics. There was a decade or so where every chain promised delivery in 30 minutes or the pizza was free, but that's no longer a guarantee these days.
It depends on how busy it is. It’s mainly the time it takes to make the pizza. Delivery is a 900 meter bike ride. I think Dominoes uses e-bikes so that’s maybe 2 minutes?
I wish we could ride bikes but here in the US there is absolutely no infrastructure for it. The closest Domino's to me is 3 miles away. Riding a bike there would be extremely scary.
Even if you take Google's specified bike route through the neighborhoods you still have to go out onto the main roads at some point. First main road speed limit is 30mph where people routinely go 40-45. Second main road is 35mph where people also go 40-45. And the final stretch of "stroad" speed limit is 45mph where people go 55-60mph.
Here you can use Google streetview and follow the route as if you were biking and see it yourself. https://maps.app.goo.gl/v4MnfPeZ9LuFzV8y6?g_st=ac (Don't worry, I'm not doxxing myself)
I’m shocked not just at the lack of proper infrastructure but also at how badly maintained and decrepit everything looks. If you showed me these pictures and told me this was somewhere in a former soviet state in eastern Europe I would have believed you.
You can take a look around my nearest Domino’s. This one is the closest to my place (not doxing myself either here). There is no dedicated cycling infrastructure here as this is in a 30 kilometer zone near a shopping center and a school (max speed ~ 18mph) so there’s lots of speedbumps the road is fairly narrow to encourage driving at low speed. If you move out of the 30 km/h zone you’ll see cycling infrastructure appear. It’s also a few hundred meters from the F35 bicycle highway.
Wow everything looks so well maintained! Guess that's the difference when you look at taxes as doing your part for the good of everyone vs the "gubment stealin ur hard earnd cash" sentiment we have around here. Also it looks like things are just plain closer together too.
There are some nicer places a little bit southeast of where I live but they're even further apart because the houses are bigger, the lots they are on are bigger and that makes the neighborhood larger which makes getting anywhere pretty much require a car. Not like I could afford living over there anyway haha