If you’ve recently hit up your neighborhood bodega on the hunt for crunchy munchies and found the shelves suspiciously barren, know that this is not a hallucination induced by junk food withdrawal. Indeed, there is a city-wide shortage of Frito-Lay products — Doritos, Cheetos, Tostitos, etc. — spawned by a massive pay cut to NYC delivery drivers, The Post reports.
After Frito-Lay, a subsidiary of PepsiCo, cut drivers’ salaries by as much as 33 percent (up to $30,000, in some cases) last year, hoards of drivers have quit, taking on gigs driving Uber or delivering for Amazon instead.
For example, at the Brooklyn depot, 35 out of 140 drivers have quit since seeing their pay reduced in August 2017. These chips aren’t going to deliver themselves!
The change not only slashed salaries, but also did away with most commission-based incentives. According to Frito-Lay, the new pay scale will guarantee drivers $50,000 annually, with some opportunities for commission.
“Participating sales representatives have on average seen an increase in overall compensation,” a Frito-Lay rep told The Post.
But according to a source, some NYC delivery drivers saw their annual profits drop from around $90,000 to $60,000.
Bodega owners are getting fed up with the slack in delivery, too, with some going so far as to approach Frito-Lay drivers on the street asking if they can sell them a few bags of chips. Han So, manager of 33 Gourmet Deli stores in Manhattan, told The Post he was “done with [Frito-Lay]” after a company rep told him to order his snacks online.
New Yorkers — bodega owners and customers alike — shouldn’t be cheated out of their Cheetos, and delivery drivers deserve fair compensation. Frito-Lay may be a purveyor of junk food, but that doesn’t mean it should get off being a trashy company.
