Scores of Big Apple convenience stores have run out of Doritos, Cheetos and other Frito-Lay products — and snack fans can blame PepsiCo chief executive Indra Nooyi for their less crunchy lunches.
Frito-Lay, a unit of PepsiCo, started to cut the pay of its drivers last year by as much as 33 percent, or $30,000, prompting dozens to quit, The Post has learned.
Even with management taking over some routes in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens, there are not enough trucks on the road to supply every customer, sources said.
“I call the distribution center and no one answers,” the owner of the lobby newsstand at a Park Avenue office building who hasn’t gotten a Frito-Lay delivery in three months told The Post.
At the Brooklyn depot, about 35 of the 140 drivers — who deliver to stores in that borough and to those in Manhattan south of 49th Street — have quit since the August change to drivers’ pay scales, sources said.
The change vastly trimmed, or mostly did away with, commissions, which had rewarded drivers who hustled to increase their revenue.
The new structure, which is being rolled out nationally, is more salary-driven, sources said. It comes as Frito-Lay North America’s revenue rose just 1.6 percent last year, to $15.8 billion, on the strength of price hikes, not growth.
“This is a national initiative with the aim of aligning all sales associates,” a Frito-Lay spokesman said. “Participating sales representatives have on average seen an increase in overall compensation.”
That may be true in some non-urban markets, but pay fell in Gotham, sources said.
For some Big Apple-based drivers, the new structure will cut pay to about $60,000 a year from $90,000, sources said.
The salary trim comes at a bad time for the company given recent reports of a national truck driver shortage.
Indeed, some Big Apple Frito-Lay drivers who have quit have set up their own businesses so that they can work freelance for Amazon.
Others, while still working for Frito-Lay, have been forced to jump into gig economy to maintain their middle-class lifestyle. They are driving for Uber on the weekends, one Brooklyn driver said.
Some store owners who have not gotten a Frito-Lay delivery in weeks are going so far as to approach random drivers in other neighborhoods to ask them if they can sell spare chips or pretzels.
“Bodega owners with a few stores are asking for my help, but I won’t if it is not on my route,” one driver in downtown Brooklyn told The Post last week.
The mostly salaried pay scale guarantees $50,000 a year with just a few commission incentives. But even those commissions are based on a target the company sets — and can change every four weeks.
The pushback by drivers seems to be having an effect on Frito-Lay.
In Cleveland, Teamsters, citing the commission killing, voted down the new plan, setting up a showdown, sources said.
In New York, where the new pay plan was rolled out gradually among its three depots, PepsiCo has delayed implementation of the new commission plan at the Bronx depot until September.
In part, the delay will allow the company to recruit new drivers, one source said, after 12 of 105 drivers recently quit.
Han So, who manages 33 Gourmet Deli outlets in Midtown, said Frito-Lay recently stopped servicing him — and then told him to buy his snacks online, a work-around that doesn’t work.
“I’m done with them,” he said of Frito-Lay.