First of all, a salute to all the hard-working pizza men and women out there who show up to strangers' homes in sketchy neighborhoods carrying cash and delicious foodstuffs. It's thankless work, and dangerous.
Take last night, for instance. At 10:30 p.m., a Pizza Hut driver was delivering some pies to a house in the 10300 block of Whitington Street in Pleasant Grove when two men toting semi-automatic pistols approached him and ordered him on his knees. They demanded everything he had, which turned out to be $318, a GPS unit, and a kitchen knife.
"Get the fuck up and get out of here," they told him when they were done stealing his stuff. The men ran off through the alley. At the end of the alley, one of them turned, aimed the gun at the pizza guy, and repeated himself: "Get the fuck out of here."
About an hour earlier, on a dead-end street in East Oak Cliff, a Domino's driver found himself in a similar situation. Two men, one carrying a nickel-plated revolver, approached the from a vacant lot near the house the pizzas were called to. They demanded all his money, $40 in all, then took the three pizzas and order of wings he was carrying for good measure.
The same thing happened Saturday night to a Domino's driver on Shaw Street in West Dallas, except that there was no gun, just five men, including the one who'd ordered the pizza, who jumped him. The driver escaped to his car with some minor scrapes. Another Domino's driver delivering to an apartment in Far East Dallas on December 21 was confronted by a gunman who demanded everything he had. The driver replied that, "No, I'm not giving you shit!" before walking slowly backwards to his car and driving off.
That last response, ballsy as it may be, might not be the wisest.
"Better just to hand over the pizza and the cash," advises no less an authority than pizza.com, adding "Pizza delivery can be a good job, but it is definitely not worth losing your life over. It might be different if pizzerias could afford to equip every urban delivery driver with an armored van that resembled something the A-Team might have used, but that approach is obviously cost prohibitive in the real world."
Obviously. Just keep all that in mind the next time you're debating whether to tip your pizza guy.
