Waking up at 1:30am to Deliver Newspapers
My experience delivering newspapers in today's digital era
Delivering newspapers in 2016 is a tough job. It's far from being the stereotypical suburban paperboy of the 1950s. I consider myself a morning person, but I never had to wake up as early as I did when I delivered newspapers. The depot opened at 2:00am, but on unlucky days, the trucks could arrive as late as 3.
The process works like this: You arrive at the warehouse, grab a shopping cart and your daily report, and get in line. The workers at the depot give you stacks of the different newspapers you need, and you bag them yourself. Then you load your car up and off you go!
I only had one route so if I was lucky I could sometimes get out of there by 3am. But some carriers had 2, 3, or even 4 routes, and almost everyone delivered and then went to a primary job afterward.
Payout was per paper. This means that as less people receive the paper every year, people have to do a heck of a lot more delivering for the same paycheck. I had between 160 and 260 papers to deliver on my route, depending on the day of the week.
My route had good sections and bad sections. Some places I had to get out of the car and walk a considerable distance to get to an apartment, but this was balanced by streets which I could drive at 15mph just throwing the paper out the window.
Below is a picture taken from my car's dashcam. I produced a whole timelapse video of the route but I'm too embarrassed to post it here. (It's not my best work, maybe in the future)
Why I Decided to Quit
The payout for the work I was doing was not bad. After I got the hang of it , the route was taking me about 4 hours to complete on average. This worked out to $9 an hour which was a solid amount for me. I didn't mind waking up super early either. My problem was the company charged me for things I couldn't control. They charged me:
- $4 a month to use the bagging facility
- $0.01 for every bag, adding up to $15-20 every two weeks
- $1.50 every time someone on the route complains (even when a paper was STOLEN, something I can't control!)
- $0.10 out of every tip I get
- All of this came out of the $9/hour I told you about
In the end it just wasn't worth it for me. I was spending a considerable amount on gas as well. So I gave it up after a few months. But I want to end this post on a positive note, so let me go through the positives!
- Seeing the sunrise every morning
- Getting to meet some of the folks who get the paper and them tipping me
- Listening to late night/early morning radio including Coast to Coast AM and Red Eye Radio
- Having the road to myself in the middle of the night
- Coming home at 6am after a job well done and getting a head start on my day
One last note:
If you get the newspaper, consider tipping your delivery person!
(I'm not talking about a free local newspaper that comes once a week, but a larger newspaper like the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Wall Street Journal, etc.)
Those folks go through so much to earn a living, It's the least you can do.
Thank you for reading!
Feedback? More questions? Let's talk about it in the comments!
Helped a friend a tme or two do the same thing back in the 80's. I can relate. He made good money and had about 5 employees doing the actual deliveries. Ton of work to get it all set up every morning tho.
That's awesome! Back in the good old days when most houses got the newspaper. I remember one old guy telling me about how back in the day (the 80s) the trucks would show up to the depot completely full. No longer.
Interesting. I was at the grocery store yesterday and a guy from our local paper couldn't even give away copies for free.
Curious...through what mechanism was the employer able to take $0.10 of every tip from you? Were you just honest and reported all the tips you received? And why were they able to get that money in the first place? The whole purpose of a tip is to give extra money to the person performing the service.
Some of the papers I delivered allowed the subscribers to add a tip on top of their subscription fee. When they do it through the system like that, it gets added to my paycheck. Then the 10 cents gets deducted from that.
Other times, people would be up super early and hand me cash as a tip, which was awesome!