A Cheap Profitable Date

Go on a date, get free pizza, and get paid twenty bucks. How cool is that?

I, for one, thought it was pretty cool.

See, every weekend, Bo and I try to decide what we'll do for a date. We generally end up going to a movie and out to dinner where we either share a meal or eat cheap. Then we wander around the Bigger City, which is about 25 miles away, and try to figure out what else we can do with our time together. Then we spend a half-hour trudging through Stuf*Mart discovering things we didn't know we needed.

A couple of weeks ago, I ran into a neighbor while coming out of the library. Don't worry; he was fine. During the course of our very enjoyable conversation, he told me about his part-time job--delivering pizzas. He said that he and his family go out on Saturday nights and deliver pizzas for a local independent pizza shop. He also told me how much they make a night. He said he enjoys it, that he and his wife or one of his kids will take the evening and drive around, spending time together, listening to books on CD (or maybe I'm embellishing here. Maybe I just thought that would be a good idea), and they make their hourly wage, plus mileage, plus tips, plus half-price food.

So I asked him to put in a good word for us, and, soon enough, I got a phone call from the pizza guy.

Tonight, Bo and I went in to the pizza place to get acquainted with the system and we ended up delivering pizzas for the evening. At one point, it started to get a little stressful because of the tip situation. While the Amish may be great at barnraising and baking, they are not good tippers. Some of them aren't tippers at all. So, while we had to search pretty hard to find some of their houses (the addresses weren't posted on their houses and some of them have more than one house on a lane) and several of them had six or more pizzas, totalling over $100, only two of them actually tipped us. For about ten deliveries, we made exactly three dollars and fifty cents in tips. And the Amish make up about 95% of the pizza shop's business.

Still, when we took into account the three pizzas that we got for half-price and how we would have driven the same distance tonight in order to spend money on pizza and a movie, it really started to sound appealing. We were done in three hours, had three pizzas to show for it, and had twenty bucks on top of it. Plus, we got to listen to a book-on-iPod while we drove.

We have plans to deliver a few more weekend-nights. The other employees said it was a slow night because of a couple of basketball games and being the New Year's Eve weekend. But it went pretty quickly for me.

I may even use it for an incentive when we start lessons back up. Do all of your schoolwork and chores, and you get to help deliver pizza.

You might even get to keep the tips. All three dollars and fifty cents of it.