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Whether it’s a heart in a cooler or a pizza in a cardboard box, Chris Robertson of Swifty Delivery says he’ll deliver it.
The 33-year-old Evansville, Ind., native said he started the freelance delivery service a couple months ago and already delivers for Quizno’s and Southern Que Barbecue restaurants, as well as anyone else who contacts him.
The idea for Swifty Delivery came when Robertson and his friends were at a bar in Evansville and ran out of cigarettes.
“The bar didn’t sell cigarettes, and we couldn’t get a pack of cigarettes delivered by anybody, and we said ‘Why don’t we just start doing this?’” Robertson said.
Robertson and a friend set up a business in Evansville that offered various low-cost shipping services, he said.
“We finally got to where we were delivering organs for the hospitals and saved them quite a lot of money because the ambulance services always charged them a lot,” Robertson said.
Robertson left his friend in charge of the Evansville service when he moved to Carbondale to manage Jimmy John’s, he said. But he said he had a falling out with the owner and decided to set up a service in Carbondale similar to the one he founded in Evansville.
Robertson, who is the sole employee of Swifty Delivery and does most of the deliveries himself, said he would deliver just about anything to anywhere in the region.
“If a lawyer needs a document sent from here to the courthouse in Marion, I’ll deliver it. You think about it, I’ll pretty much deliver it, as long as it’s not against the law,” he said.
Robertson said he charges $4 per any in-town delivery, and a dollar extra for each additional stop.
He eventually would like to build his operation to a full-scale delivery service, complete with a fleet of trucks that would compete with other shipping services such as FedEx, he said.
Robertson believes bringing such a company to Carbondale would provide a large amount of jobs.
“Eventually I could probably have a hub here 10 years down the road if everything works out right … and I could probably employ 100 people to anywhere from 600 or 700 people,” he said.
The Rev. Sidney Logwood, owner of Southern Que Barbecue, said he turned to Robertson’s delivery services because his newer business does not have the customer base to hire a full-time delivery driver.
“It was hard to get somebody just to be on-call without having a lot of deliveries,” Logwood said. “One day we might get six deliveries, the next we might get 10 — we could never be for sure. (Robertson) came by and made us aware of the services he offered, and we thought it was great idea.”
Robert Frassato, owner of Quizno’s, said he turned over his delivery responsibilities to Robertson two weeks ago to save labor and better serve his customers.
“It makes it a lot more easier on us as far as scheduling and ... it allows us to concentrate more on what the customers need in the store,” Frassato said.
Frassato said he’s received positive feedback from several customers who received deliveries from Robertson.
“There are times when he’s running three different deliveries for three different establishments, and we haven’t had any complaints about him thus far,” Frassato said.
Nick Johnson can be reached at nickj39@siu.edu or 536-3311 ext. 263
