3 ms·

I was a paperboy in the early '90s. The routes me and my friends were delivering were slowly gobbled up by a couple adults using a car instead.

shadowgovt 4y ago
Yeah, that's the thing. People still get papers delivered. It's cheaper for everyone involved in the distribution channel if you divvy up that work among a dozen cars with large cargo space instead of a hundred or a thousand kids with bike baskets. And that's before you get into intricacies and complexities like labor regulation and the ever-growing disdain for child labor in all forms.
- giantg2 4y ago
  Next stop, self driving cars with AI paper delivery auto-cannons on the roof. Personally I like to visualize a Cyber Truck that looks like a Gausshog from Halo driving down the street shooting papers onto porches.
- acdha 4y ago
  I'm curious what the efficiency gain actually is, especially because the main thing I noticed when our local switched was that delivery quality got noticeably worse (always dropped in the street vs. porch, usually late – especially in bad weather). I would guess that this is probably more about the fact that there are fewer kids available (similar to afterschool jobs, if it doesn't look good on collage applications it's not a priority) and those kids having better-paying options available if they are working.
  - matsemann 4y ago
    Not sure how true this is for everywhere, but I know of newspapers that are now sent to the pressing machines much later than before, since they need to have the absolutely latest news included (otherwise people will go online if all paper news is a day old). So don't have as much time during the morning to be inefficient compared to earlier times.
    - acdha 4y ago
      I'm curious how this also works as a function of sprawl & industry decline: paperboys can deliver in parallel but the longer the distance between subscribers the more the higher car speeds will dominate.
guyzero 4y ago
Yep. I was a small town paperboy until '89 and I'm not sure if my immediate successor was an adult in a car but it definitely went that way pretty quickly. It's not like it paid a lot, but then again I only worked for an hour a day - if you covered a larger area it was probably a reasonable low-paying job.
nonameiguess 4y ago
My uncle took a paper route in the mid-90s, which he completed in a car. He ended up with half of his face paralyzed due to the asymmetric cold wind from having his window down at 4 in the morning.
11thEarlOfMar 4y ago
Similar for me. I delivered in about 1972. Paid $2.15 per week. One day, one of my customers asked me to cut his lawn for $5. I had just learned how to divide and calculated the hourly wage for delivering ($0.37) vs. yard work ($2.50) and immediately resigned the paper route. Today, it's a guy in a VW Passat cruising around the neighborhood. I wave to him as I walk the dog each morning. It was actually sad to see the newspaper shrink year after year, starting in the mid 2000s. Then, the paper company started engaging in dark patterns that had them increasing the subscription cost without any notice and I finally dropped them. Media has been in a death spiral since then, with no emerging source to take the place of providing relevant and reliable information about what's going on that matters. It's deeply troubling.
- e_i_pi_2 4y ago
  I was just curious about how these rates scale with inflation, seems like 1972 to now is a factor of 7.13, so $2.15 would be $15.33, and $5 would be $35.65
ok123456 4y ago
This meshes with what I've seen. The guy who delivers my 94 year old neighbour's paper is a scruffy, 40 something in a 2000s Camry and blasting that stereo.
throw7 4y ago
I shared a weekly route with a friend one summer on my bike in the '80s. We basically were covering for a couple that delivered by car at the time. I look back on it now kindof fondly but honestly it was brutal as we lived a couple miles away from downtown and had single speed dirt bikes. Wrapping up papers and huffing two big bags of papers isn't exactly a dream job. The couple asked us the next year if we wanted to do it again... we said no. :D (I do remember one family would tip us 20 dollars though! They specifically wanted their paper delivered in a wicker basket they hung on their door and you bet we always put it in there)
jollyllama 4y ago
There are other jobs like this; I think of the fast food industry. I think this trend was amplified in the 2008 financial crisis as many would-be retirees had to take entry level jobs.

shadowgovt 4y ago

Yeah, that's the thing. People still get papers delivered. It's cheaper for everyone involved in the distribution channel if you divvy up that work among a dozen cars with large cargo space instead of a hundred or a thousand kids with bike baskets. And that's before you get into intricacies and complexities like labor regulation and the ever-growing disdain for child labor in all forms.

giantg2 4y ago
Next stop, self driving cars with AI paper delivery auto-cannons on the roof. Personally I like to visualize a Cyber Truck that looks like a Gausshog from Halo driving down the street shooting papers onto porches.
acdha 4y ago
I'm curious what the efficiency gain actually is, especially because the main thing I noticed when our local switched was that delivery quality got noticeably worse (always dropped in the street vs. porch, usually late – especially in bad weather). I would guess that this is probably more about the fact that there are fewer kids available (similar to afterschool jobs, if it doesn't look good on collage applications it's not a priority) and those kids having better-paying options available if they are working.
- matsemann 4y ago
  Not sure how true this is for everywhere, but I know of newspapers that are now sent to the pressing machines much later than before, since they need to have the absolutely latest news included (otherwise people will go online if all paper news is a day old). So don't have as much time during the morning to be inefficient compared to earlier times.
  - acdha 4y ago
    I'm curious how this also works as a function of sprawl & industry decline: paperboys can deliver in parallel but the longer the distance between subscribers the more the higher car speeds will dominate.

guyzero 4y ago

Yep. I was a small town paperboy until '89 and I'm not sure if my immediate successor was an adult in a car but it definitely went that way pretty quickly. It's not like it paid a lot, but then again I only worked for an hour a day - if you covered a larger area it was probably a reasonable low-paying job.

nonameiguess 4y ago

My uncle took a paper route in the mid-90s, which he completed in a car. He ended up with half of his face paralyzed due to the asymmetric cold wind from having his window down at 4 in the morning.

11thEarlOfMar 4y ago

Similar for me. I delivered in about 1972. Paid $2.15 per week. One day, one of my customers asked me to cut his lawn for $5. I had just learned how to divide and calculated the hourly wage for delivering ($0.37) vs. yard work ($2.50) and immediately resigned the paper route. Today, it's a guy in a VW Passat cruising around the neighborhood. I wave to him as I walk the dog each morning. It was actually sad to see the newspaper shrink year after year, starting in the mid 2000s. Then, the paper company started engaging in dark patterns that had them increasing the subscription cost without any notice and I finally dropped them. Media has been in a death spiral since then, with no emerging source to take the place of providing relevant and reliable information about what's going on that matters. It's deeply troubling.

e_i_pi_2 4y ago
I was just curious about how these rates scale with inflation, seems like 1972 to now is a factor of 7.13, so $2.15 would be $15.33, and $5 would be $35.65

ok123456 4y ago

This meshes with what I've seen. The guy who delivers my 94 year old neighbour's paper is a scruffy, 40 something in a 2000s Camry and blasting that stereo.

throw7 4y ago

I shared a weekly route with a friend one summer on my bike in the '80s. We basically were covering for a couple that delivered by car at the time. I look back on it now kindof fondly but honestly it was brutal as we lived a couple miles away from downtown and had single speed dirt bikes. Wrapping up papers and huffing two big bags of papers isn't exactly a dream job. The couple asked us the next year if we wanted to do it again... we said no. :D (I do remember one family would tip us 20 dollars though! They specifically wanted their paper delivered in a wicker basket they hung on their door and you bet we always put it in there)

jollyllama 4y ago

There are other jobs like this; I think of the fast food industry. I think this trend was amplified in the 2008 financial crisis as many would-be retirees had to take entry level jobs.