Delivering phonebooks/yellow pages

hannah29_2

thanks for that, i have fell lucky with mine as i live in a small village, collection is only 3 miles away and i wont need a car for delivering as its quite a small village and a close nit community.
hannah

rpsheridan

Me and my partner just finished two thompson local rounds in 3 days delivering 2 x 980 books in South Oxford (they are quite thin so not bad).

£83.22 + 3.33 fuel allowance to deliver the first 979
£83.81 + 3.35 fuel allowance to deliver the second batch of 986

We only had to drive one mile to collect and about 3 miles overall to deliver.

Nice to get out and explore the area since we have just moved here

The hours we spent were:
1st day 10-12
2nd day 11.30-5
3rd day 10.30-4.30

So 13 and a half hours doing it together so 26 hours and plus if you were doing it on your own so beats minimum wage just. Would definitely do it again.

cocoloco

Thank you for the very informative thread I just signed up with DEYA (i think) so findgers crossed!

PS- how do you sign up? I sent an e-mail with my details...

DermotFlanigan

I have just been offered a job delivering 664 yellow pages for £81. Im not sure how long it's going to take but I will keep you updated in anyones interested..

youngmummy

how did it go dermot ?

Cherico

My husband was put on the reserve list to deliver yellow pages in our area and the night before the deliveries were due to be collected we had a call to say that the route he was on reserve for wasn't available but an alternative route was. He was told that he would need to deliver 944 directories which should take no longer than 22 hours for which he would be paid £137 plus a fuel allowance of £15.30 to include the 20 mile round trip to the distribution centre to collect the directories.

We were told that the route was rural so we were being paid a little more for this (£20 I think!) but when we got out to the starting point we found that it was a very, very rural area with the majority of properties being isolated country properties or remote hill farms that were often located up long tracks at least a mile from the road. Within a few hours it became very clear that it was going to be impossible to achieve the target of making one drop every 96 seconds in order to achieve minimum wage and that the time, mileage and fuel costs had been considerably under estimated by DEYA. After being hard at work for 4 hours we had covered a massive 28 miles but only managed to deliver 63 directories so after a few quick calculations, taking into account a more realistic time, mileage and fuel costs, we had to make the decision that it was not financially viable to continue.

We spoke to the team leader who wanted us to continue with the deliveries and she would speak to her manager on the Monday to see if it would be possible to negotiate a more realistic payment retrospectively, but we did not want to continue to then find DEYA were not prepared to increase the payment so we stopped the deliveries and, although are waiting to hear from the team leader tomorrow, are more or less resigned to the fact that we are going to have to cut our losses and be thankful that it was only 4 hours of our time plus fuel costs that we lost.

Worryingly to get us to complete the route over the weekend, the team leader told us ‘not to worry about’ and to ‘skip’ postcodes that were too difficult, which completely contradicts the terms and conditions on the contract that states that deductions would be made for any missed deliveries and any perceived infringements so more alarm bells started to ring. If it came to a dispute we have no doubt that Deya will go with what is on their contract and not what we were told us verbally, which would lead to financial penalties and deductions from our payment and if we failed to complete the route we would not be paid at all. Needless to say we were not willing to continue!

During the call to the team leader let slip that the person that had previously done the same route had taken three weeks to do it so they are clearly very aware that it is impossible to do the route within the 22 hours allocated to earn even minimum wage yet they told us it was. I'm not sure that's even legal!!!!

Maybe this does work in towns / villages where properties are clustered together so that you can walk from property to property but if you are given a rural route with predominately isolated farms walk away! I don't know if we have just been very naive and trusting but we feel very mislead and are now out of pocket for the time we spent delivering directories yesterday for which we won't receive anything.

Should_be_out_gardening

Thats not good cherico. I can't give any advice here , I'm stumped as to what you should do. I have applied to do this round here but never got a job with them

GromitFan

I delivered phonebooks July 2010. Never again! We live in a village, so was given the village plus a more rural route just outside.

There's no way I'd even have been able to find all the places if it wasn't for my husband's knowledge (he works for the council). It was bad enough in the village, but once you went to outside the village it was a complete nightmare, often having to go miles up no-through roads (or tracks as might be more accurate).

In the village I probably averaged out about £3 - £3.50 per hour. Sure there were some streets that were easy (sequential numbers and close together), but equally there were streets which were really difficult - Some houses were just up little paths with no indication they were there, some had long drives.

Outside the village on the more rural route I probably averaged out about £2 - £2.50 per hour. Thankfully they gave us extra because of the mileage, but tbh the amount they gave us probably only just covered it as we have quite an economical car anyway. Certainly wouldn't cover any wear and tear factor, which you probably should think about when you considered the type of roads/tracks it was on.

Sure, it was money, but certainly nowhere near a minimum wage and like I said I'd really have struggled to find lots of the places if it wasn't for my husband knowing where they were from his work. The more rural work I was really ready to pack in after a few hours, but my husband persuaded to keep going, though never wants us to do it again.

Suarez

Cherico wrote: »

My husband was put on the reserve list to deliver yellow pages in our area and the night before the deliveries were due to be collected we had a call to say that the route he was on reserve for wasn't available but an alternative route was. He was told that he would need to deliver 944 directories which should take no longer than 22 hours for which he would be paid £137 plus a fuel allowance of £15.30 to include the 20 mile round trip to the distribution centre to collect the directories.

We were told that the route was rural so we were being paid a little more for this (£20 I think!) but when we got out to the starting point we found that it was a very, very rural area with the majority of properties being isolated country properties or remote hill farms that were often located up long tracks at least a mile from the road. Within a few hours it became very clear that it was going to be impossible to achieve the target of making one drop every 96 seconds in order to achieve minimum wage and that the time, mileage and fuel costs had been considerably under estimated by DEYA. After being hard at work for 4 hours we had covered a massive 28 miles but only managed to deliver 63 directories so after a few quick calculations, taking into account a more realistic time, mileage and fuel costs, we had to make the decision that it was not financially viable to continue.

We spoke to the team leader who wanted us to continue with the deliveries and she would speak to her manager on the Monday to see if it would be possible to negotiate a more realistic payment retrospectively, but we did not want to continue to then find DEYA were not prepared to increase the payment so we stopped the deliveries and, although are waiting to hear from the team leader tomorrow, are more or less resigned to the fact that we are going to have to cut our losses and be thankful that it was only 4 hours of our time plus fuel costs that we lost.

Worryingly to get us to complete the route over the weekend, the team leader told us ‘not to worry about’ and to ‘skip’ postcodes that were too difficult, which completely contradicts the terms and conditions on the contract that states that deductions would be made for any missed deliveries and any perceived infringements so more alarm bells started to ring. If it came to a dispute we have no doubt that Deya will go with what is on their contract and not what we were told us verbally, which would lead to financial penalties and deductions from our payment and if we failed to complete the route we would not be paid at all. Needless to say we were not willing to continue!

During the call to the team leader let slip that the person that had previously done the same route had taken three weeks to do it so they are clearly very aware that it is impossible to do the route within the 22 hours allocated to earn even minimum wage yet they told us it was. I'm not sure that's even legal!!!!

Maybe this does work in towns / villages where properties are clustered together so that you can walk from property to property but if you are given a rural route with predominately isolated farms walk away! I don't know if we have just been very naive and trusting but we feel very mislead and are now out of pocket for the time we spent delivering directories yesterday for which we won't receive anything.

That story is almost idectical to my experience. Would
NEVER do yellow pages again.

HeavensDevil

Make sure you know what kind of area you are going to first - council estates or similar areas with rows of terraced houses are fantastic and simple - I did my local area and cleared over 700 books in 7 hours - but I would definitely never ever do rural areas or trading/industrial estates again, so much time wasted trying to find house names and unit names/numbers! :mad: