Skip to Content
ON AIR NOW7:00 PM - 12:00 AMPhilys Og
listen live
Home

Local News Now

Kamloops-based Mitchie’s Delivery closing

Victor Kaisar
Jul 11, 2022 | 1:29 PM


Kamloops-based Mitchie's Delivery closing

Photo via Mitchie's Delivery

Mitchie’s Delivery, a Kamloops owned and operated delivery service, is closing its doors as of today.

Owner Sean Martin says the closure is due to inflation and the high price of gas, noting it was becoming difficult to find and keep drivers.

“We’ve had days where we’ve either right on the edge of having to close because we don’t have enough drivers or we’ve lost a driver and that has been enough to push us over the edge that we’ve had to close for the night,” he said.

“It was getting more and more consistent where we are close to that. We just couldn’t come up with ways to make it more profitable for the drivers. It is tough for somebody to reasonably drive consistently when you are paying more than $2 a litre for gas.”

In order to try and make money, Martin says they were faced with either charging restaurants more or charging consumers more.

“We can’t charge the restaurants more, we didn’t feel that was fair. And charging the consumer more was also a very difficult decision,” he said. “There was nowhere really to go with it.”

Launched in 2019 with five drivers, Martin says Mitchie’s Delivery was up to 50 drivers during the initial COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. But over the last eight months or so, he says they had fewer than 20 drivers at times, with around 10 in the last couple of months.

“It is not so bad when you’re running around the downtown core but if we have five drivers and there are orders spread out to Barnhartvale, Westsyde, and Rayleigh, we lose them for 45 minutes or so at time,” Martin said. “If you get a bunch of orders in that time, it is difficult to manage how to get things going.”

“Overall, I think we did a good enough job to keep things reasonable but it just got increasingly more difficult as time went on.”

Martin says he is grateful for all of the Kamloopsians who supported Mitchie’s Delivery over the past three years.

“For people to put their trust in us to do what we did, to allow us to compete with companies [like Skip the Dishes or DoorDash] that are that big, for restaurants to trust us with their business, that is a big thing,” he said.

“It didn’t didn’t go unnoticed. It was a big responsibility and we were humbled by it.”