Food Delivery Question

So, after listening to the most recent Bombcast, a realization came into my mind. In cases of food delivery, there must be people who say "I've changed my mind, I don't want it anymore" when the delivery person gets to the door. What the hell do you do in this situation? You've not only prepared the food, but wasted the time and gas to take the food to the door. In my food service experience (which did not involve delivery), we'd just take someone changing their mind after food was made as a loss and move on, but this seems like a pretty big loss to take for a single house. Is there some kind of mandatory delivery fee? If so, what happens if they flat-out refuse to pay a dime?

Just a random question that popped into my head, hoping some duder out there can sate my curiosity. I'm sure the answer isn't actually all that interesting.

The only time i refused delivery is when it took about an hour and half to get here and i was unable to get anything other than a busy signal when calling to see what's up.

After an hour i took my car and got myself some McDonald's.

Delivery guy didn't say anything.

Former pizza driver here.

It's never happened to me before, but a few times one of my coworkers would come back with the food because the customer didn't have enough money. So the driver gets no kind of tip, but they still get paid for their time on the road ($1.25 for gas, $5/hr wage on the road instead of minimum wage for being in the store )

Usually if someone wants to cancel an order , they'll at least have the decency in calling the store to save us time. Plus, we get a free pizza!

I'm not sure what they'd do, but some restaurants here ask for the credit card number over phone and charge it before it gets delivered.

Woah really? That sounds shady as fuck.

Can you even use a credit card for like pizza being delivered? Ive never tried. I guess i always assumed it was only cash. Weird.

I've worked food service and similar stuff before, but never delivery. I'd imagine it works the same though. The customer doesn't pay, they don't get the food. At that point, anywhere I worked at, it was open season on the already made food. In all honesty, those companies aren't losing much at all on the ingredients for a single order. It'd have to be something pretty significant to register as a real problem to a corporate office. If a customer does it multiple times, I'm sure the store could refuse future service to them.

I've canceled an order once in my life. It was for take out though, not delivery. It was after accidentally ordering from the shitty Chinese place that was across the street from the good Chinese place. Thus very similar addresses in the phone book and my confusion. And yes, I'm old enough to have used a phone book to find restaurants.

I think that could be a reason why most stores here are trying to get people to order online through their store.