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Old 10-21-2014, 11:01 AM   #47 (permalink)
Xist
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Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: Show Low, AZ
Posts: 12,186

Chorizo - '00 Honda Civic HX, baby! :D
90 day: 35.35 mpg (US)

Mid-Life Crisis Fighter - '99 Honda Accord LX
90 day: 34.2 mpg (US)

Gramps - '04 Toyota Camry LE
90 day: 35.39 mpg (US)

Don't hit me bro - '05 Toyota Camry LE
90 day: 35.79 mpg (US)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cobb View Post
The only way to rake it in is to rig the books.

Many jobs that pay miles, pay less in drive pay. For example I wanted to go into pest control. They pay x for an hour for a service call and y an hour to drive their truck or y+per mile to drive your vehicle.

In the end it paid more to do service calls, than drive to service calls.

Now for newspaper delivery it can help to own a eco car, but you need to be able to haul 400+ news papers and deliver them in a short time frame.

The nice thing about papers, you can cheat and deliver for several brands at the same time and get paid 2-3 times.
I had a paper route in 2,003 that went about as well as anything else that I have done. I had 255 Sunday papers that barely fit into my Prelude, many of them fell on me when I took the first corner, and the weight made my car scrape on level ground. They had us use what they called "smart books," which were like giant PDAs. I could not keep mine secured, so it would fall, I would need to stop, try to figure out if it had jumped to another part of my route, and reattach it. I do not know if I had people stealing papers or my customers were just jerks, but I constantly had people calling in and saying that they did not receive their paper when I specifically remembered delivering the paper to their house that morning. After that first Sunday, I made three trips, I pre-folded everything available the night before, then showed up when the front section was available, drove the first half of my route, and made one last trip. I delivered many papers late and lost money on some days.

Then my clutch went out, I could not find a rental, I called my manager and let her know that I could not drive in the morning, and then rode my mechanic's wife's bike, with a tire that kept going flat, several miles each way to fold the other sections. Then they fired me for not showing up for work.

I wonder if I actually lost money overall, with the clutch replacement. I did not make enough money to deduct mileage from my taxes. I had a coworker at the bus yard that said that he lied about his mileage and made some good money that way. He said that for Thanksgiving, they just drove straight to the recycling center. He said that he got out to get a soda one time and they paid them for recycling his fat butt along with the papers.

Unless you fly a carpet, you are killing the planet. Think of the puppies!
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