A 29-year-old working minimum wage for a decade and who considers delivering pizzas a "career"?
A note on being a delivery driver. Wage, from minimum to $14/hour. Some places pay a delivery fee to the driver (it was $1.50/order where I worked), others pay mileage at 0.55/mile. On top of that are tips, which averaged about $5.00 per delivery in the market where I worked during COVID.
Now, Trumps simplification of taxes took away the form 2106 deductions for mileage and repairs on an employee owned vehicle for work, which would have given the job the potential to repair all the running gear on a clean bodied vehicle and deduct it. Frankly that hurt.
But back to it. Depending on how well you know the delivery area and take advantage of traffic flow (and the number of orders), it was possible to get in 15-20 deliveries in an 8 hour shift, of which about 7 hours would be spent taking orders out (along with another hour of store cleanup at close).
So....8 hours at, say $8.00/ hour. $80.00
15 deliveries at $1.50 each $22.50
tips at $5.00 average per order $75.00
That's $177.50 for 8 hours work, (just over $22.00/hr)--which is why I did that during COVID. No where near oilfield money, but there was only oilfield money for production hands at the time, the drilling rig count went to zero in the Williston Basin for the first time since oil was discovered in the '50s.
That's the low end, and fuel was cheap when I did it, at about 75-100 miles for the night, or roughly $15 worth of gas.
The delivery people made better money, if they were go-getters and competent, than anyone else in the shop, except maybe the managers and the franchisee.
Now, the expansion of personnel costs in California will affect the cooks, servers, the folks in the back who did prep work and washed dishes and will all get a raise, but the drivers are being eliminated? The people who make ordering a pizza attractive because it comes to you, hot, if the driver did their job well. Door dash and other independent delivery groups folks do their best, but they take longer to get the food from the oven to you than in-house drivers. In the end, this will hurt the business on a grander scale than imagined, because they will lose business, too.