The Atlantic

You Will Miss the Pizza Delivery Driver

DoorDash has nothing on old-school delivery workers.
Source: Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.

Except for the lone pair of baggy Guess jeans and oversize silk shirt I wore most days in middle school, I’ve never been very fashionable. So on my first day as a Domino’s delivery driver in college, when the store manager tossed me a used red-and-blue polo that would constitute my uniform, I didn’t even notice that it was a size too large. He also gave me a goofy Domino’s hat, a light-up Domino’s sign for the roof of my car, and a salary of a little more than $2 an hour, plus tips.

This was the summer of 1998, and I needed work to fund a couple of new habits I’d picked up during my freshman year: dating, Bruce Springsteen CDs, Busch Light. The Domino’s gods had recently dropped a franchise alongside the main four-lane road that cut through the small community of Bryans Road in rural southern Maryland, where I grew up, lifting our culinary scene to

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