Does the driver wait to make sure the delivery is received?

I live in an apartment building with a broken intercom where I can’t see or hear the front door area, so even in the best of times, I need people to call to let me know they’ve arrived. My building is on Dwight Way and when I’ve tried leaving things I was giving away in front of the front door, they got snatched before they reached their intended recipients. Even things like old magazines and wool sweaters with holes in them got snatched before they reached their intended recipients. So my question is: does the driver wait (at a distance) to make sure I get the rations before leaving?

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@selene, I think this works with our process. Here is what we do with apartment buildings right now:

  • The driver is on a delivery run and goes from one delivery to the next. She calls you from the previous delivery location, before she leaves, and asks you to come down to pick up the delivery.

  • Important: she uses the phone number you entered at registration time (which you can change, btw).

  • She arrives at your location. Hopefully she can see you waiting, in which case she puts the go-to bag down 6 feet away from you (she is wearing a mask and gloves btw). If not, she calls you again, and waits a couple of minutes in front of the door.

  • After a couple of minutes of waiting, she goes to the building’s front door, leaves the to-go bag, walks back to the car, and calls again to let you know that she left the delivery downstairs.

The only issue is if you were not able to take the phone call. The driver normally has 8-10 deliveries to do, so, unfortunately, she can only wait so long.

What do you think? And do you have any suggestions as to how we approach the process for apartment buildings?

the process sounds good. My only suggestion would be to have options for giving special instructions as well as a box/bubble to check indicating whether the driver should leave the food at the front door, stashed some place nearby or freeze/refrigerate it if there is no confirmation that someone is about to retrieve the rations.

I guess if the driver calls from the previous location, the driver’s phone # shows up on my caller ID, yes?

Also, is there a window of time in which deliveries are made? afternoon? evening?

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Can you give an example of how that would work?

That would be thought for us, as we have no way to stow food. But we’ll see if we can figure out something in the future.

Yes. It is their personal cellphone so it will not show anything about HelpBerkeley, though.

Yes. The driver show up at the restaurant at 6:00pm. So she will show up at your place some time in the next 2 hours (typically more like 45mn-1 hour).

whether the driver should leave the food at the front door, stashed some place nearby

Can you give an example of how that would work?

I’m just thinking that the area in front of the lobby to my apartment gets stuff snatched from it, but I might be able to find a place… there may be a recessed or hidden area less likely to be ripped off that would be a better place to leave something unattended.

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Ok now I understand, that makes sense. Let me see what we can do.

It would take a week or two to set something like that up. We would need to modify the registration fields.