Sex — the Form of Payment for Pizza?

What did the 2011 story claim?

In August 2011, the press cycle carried a lurid claim attributed to a poll for the online food-ordering service Just-Eat: that fast-food delivery drivers were routinely offered "alternative payment methods" including sex, with nearly a quarter saying they had been propositioned and a similar share reporting they had been greeted by a naked customer.

Did the poll hold up?

Not really. The poll's methodology was never published in any verifiable form, the sample and questions were unknown, and the numbers — suspiciously round, perfectly tabloid-ready — bore the hallmarks of a publicity survey rather than research. No independent verification of the figures was ever produced. The story should be read as what it was: a press-cycle curiosity, not a finding.

Why did it resonate anyway?

Because the doorstep is a genuinely strange social space — a brief, transactional encounter between strangers, one of them at home and the other at work, with money, food, and late-night hours in the mix. In the years that followed, real and documented cases emerged of delivery interactions crossing lines: drivers misusing customers' phone numbers, customers behaving inappropriately toward drivers. The 2011 poll may have been flimsy, but it pointed at a real dynamic: millions of brief, unscripted encounters between strangers, with no norms and no witnesses.

The lesson isn't about pizza or payment. It's about how easily an unverified number becomes a "fact" when it confirms something people already find titillating — and how the real story, the unglamorous one about worker safety and basic decency at the doorstep, gets less attention than the joke headline.