What to pay a delivery driver for a weekend of setups

You need a second driver for Saturday. You have never paid anyone but yourself.

So you ask around, hear three different answers, and pick the one in the middle. Then in August you find out the number does not work, and you are renegotiating pay with a guy who is already halfway through your route.

Pick the structure first. The number falls out of your own schedule.

Three ways to pay, and what each one teaches

Hourly. You pay for time, including the slow stops. A driveway that turns out to be gravel, a customer who is not home, a fifteen-minute wait at the gate. All of it is on your clock. Hourly is honest and it is what most crews expect. It also means a driver has no reason to move.

Per stop. A flat amount per setup, a flat amount per pickup. Now the driver is fast. Now the driver also skips the walkthrough on stop five because stop six pays the same whether he explains the shutdown procedure or not. Per stop rewards speed and quietly punishes the hard job.

Day rate. One number for the whole Saturday. Predictable for you, predictable for him, and it holds right up until the day the route runs fourteen hours. Then you have either a driver who is angry or a driver who leaves.

There is no correct answer. There is the one that matches how your Saturday actually runs. A tight urban route with short drives rewards per stop. A rural route with forty-five minutes between towns wants hourly or a day rate, because most of the day is windshield time and windshield time is real work.

Most operators end up somewhere hybrid: an hourly base with a per-stop bump, or a day rate with an overtime line after a set hour. Write down whichever one you pick before Friday.

Find your own cost per stop

Do not start with what to pay. Start with what a stop costs you, because the pay has to fit inside that.

Take last season's schedule. Pull one busy Saturday, not an average one. Count the stops. Now time the route honestly, including the parts nobody counts:

• Load out at the yard
• Drive to the first stop
• Setup: unroll, stake or sandbag, blower, cord run, safety walkthrough
• Drive between stops
• Pickup at night: deflate, fold, load, sweep the yard
• The dump run and the wash-down at the end

Add it up. That is your labor hours for the day, and it is almost always more than the number in your head, because the number in your head does not include the forty minutes you spent looking for an outlet.

Divide the day's total pay by the number of stops. That is your labor cost per stop. Hold it next to what you charge for that stop. If the gap does not cover the truck, the fuel, the unit's wear, and the insurance, the price is wrong or the route is wrong. Usually the route.

Pay the pickup like it is real work

Pickups are where the money leaks. They happen after dark, they are wet, and the customer has gone inside. A driver who is paid well for setups and thin for pickups will do fast setups and sloppy pickups, and you will find out in the spring when you unroll a unit that got folded damp in October.

Price the pickup separately. It deserves its own line, and it deserves close to what a setup gets.

Cash on the same day beats a higher number later

A driver working weekends is doing it for near-term money. Paying on Sunday, or Monday at the latest, buys you more loyalty than another two dollars a stop paid in three weeks. Set the schedule and never miss it. Your name in the local labor pool is worth as much as your name with customers, and both travel by word of mouth.

Write the number down where the work lives

The reason pay turns into an argument is that nobody wrote it down. He remembers the number one way, you remember it another, and it is 9pm on a Saturday.

In PartyPad every dispatched task carries its own payment amount. You set it when you dispatch. It sits on the task the driver sees, next to the address and the equipment list, and it stays there after the task is marked complete. At the end of the weekend what you owe is the sum of completed tasks, not a reconstruction from text messages.

Decide the structure. Compute your cost per stop from your own schedule. Put the number on the task.

Then Sunday is just a day off.

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