What about all the businesses that try this or try to reinvent themselves and fail. This is why business case studies are BS and unscientific. It is easy in hindsight to explain why something worked. having a visionary CEO worked for Apple; did not work so well for the company that made the Segway. If case studies were so effective, if you be possible to find companies that meet all the criteria, buy their stock cheap, and get rich. Dominoes stock went up because for some reason there was this sudden surge of demand for pizza, and domino's pizza somehow rose to the top in an otherwise very crowded market. All pizza chains have apps and online delivery.
Case studies are more like a Paul graham blog post than they are documentation. Read it, get some ideas, learn some lessons and advice, apply some of it your situation.
Clayton's Christensen's disruption theory was useful.
But nothing's bulletproof, of course.
So maybe looking at the methodologies serious business academics use to write their PHD, and their work in general, is a good alternative to case studies ?
People generally don’t hand out multimillion dollar assets to do controlled experiments on, and even then the “control” would be relatively weak since there are so many uncontrolled variables.
Does statistical causal analysis work when there are this many variables? Feels like that would just be essentially a case study again.
> If case studies were so effective, if you be possible to find companies that meet all the criteria, buy their stock cheap, and get rich.
This is what investing is.
Also, when they did this no-one had apps or delivery. The pizza market is growing but DPZ took massive share as well. It is surprising to me that so many people are armchair quarterbacking this (I know someone who bought them at $5...all of the stuff mentioned in the article was the bull case: online growth, mismanaged, etc.).
This inspired me to find a quote from War and Peace about generals who explain their strategic brilliance after the battle is over. They had no grand strategy in the moment, it is all post-hoc BS. I can't find the quote though, if anyone knows this quote i will give you unwavering gratitude!
I live in NYC and order domino sometimes. Reasons:
1) Open late
2) Variety and style of toppings often better than traditional NYC pizza places.
Ex. Dominos uses thin pepperoni that crisps on the edges, regular pizza places use fat ones that grease up your pizza. Dominos uses dried jalapeno, regular pizza places use pickled that gets some brine on your pizza. etc.
A few weeks ago my wife and I had a craving for a burger. We went to some hipster place, hoping for something a bit healthier than McDonalds. They said there was a 40 minute wait (for takeout), so we ended up getting McDonalds after all.
There wasn't anyone else waiting there, but I assume they had orders queued up from delivery services. Still, it seems a bit stupid to tell someone in your restaurant to wait - even though you are probably getting more profits from them.
Are “hipster place” burgers, once you account for the miscellaneous accoutrements factually and measurably healthier than say a McChicken per serving? (Arguably if your diet includes a lot of McDonalds regularly that answer is “probably lot not” but I mean 1:1 meals)
Or is there a place where one could see some approximations? I’m curious as someone who loves the McChicken but knowingly keeps his consumption of them to a minimum.
Hipster burgers are thicker with higher fat content, guaranteed to be more calories. They also usually have a brioche bun with more calories and a huge serving of "aioli" (mayo).
Higher fat content also means more satiating, so you won't feel hungry shortly after eating. If all of the ingredients are healthier than McD, that should be a clear win. OTOH I don't think burger is a good choice for a healthy meal anyway. I'd choose a hipster version primarily for taste and aesthetics.
In the UK at least Domino's pizzas are basically exactly as good as they need to be.
The garlic-hollandaise thing they come with is disgusting but the actual pizza itself is usually pretty good, if unhealthy. I enjoy making my own pizzas from scratch so I rarely order but the quality is impressive for the volume they have.
The delivery times don't seem to be particularly different from Uber eats or similar.
Yeah, I don't get Domino's when I want good pizza, sometimes I get the urge to eat one, even though I know I will feel terrible afterwards, and I certainly don't try anything like hot dog filled crusts.
I was surprised visiting Taiwan, the Domino's there is actually pretty passable.
> The garlic-hollandaise thing they come with is disgusting
It really is unbelievably horrible. And every.single.time I order online and hit the checkout button, it pops up asking me if I want to add an extra large tub of it to my order!
I order Domino's on occasion just because my kids like it, and the online ordering process is great, but I'm not a huge fan of their pizzas TBH. I find them very greasy, and strangely the quality seems to vary from time to time - sometimes the dough is thicker, sometimes it's a little undercooked etc.
Also the pricing in the UK is weird. The official prices are actually pretty expensive, but there are always vouchers for 30% or whatever off. Annoyingly, this means I always have to buy more than I want to qualify for the voucher, because it ends up being cheaper to buy more.
Dominos are ridiculously overpriced in the UK if you buy them straight. Same for Pizza Hut or Papa John's. Especially if you're single and just buying a pizza for one.
The coupons/special offers are good but recently at least Dominos have started moving the minimum order for delivery from like ~£10 to ~£12+. Really expensive just for pizza! They used to do a 'build your own pizza' delivered for about a tenner medium/large size which was a godsend when I was in university halls.
Barely use them nowadays, just get a decent fresh oven pizza from Tesco or the Co-Op. Shame because I used to like Dominos.
Does _anyone_ actually like that weird garlic sauce? I chuck them straight in the bin.
Domino's is the only place that will deliver to me, being on the outskirts of the city. Luckily that Domino's is pretty good and reasonably low on the grease quota, compared to some I've had elsewhere. The one thing I do particularly like about that franchise is the cleanliness; I've been into the shop itself and it's really well kept, compared to some of the other "big" pizza places here.
What a bunch of management school BS. There is one piece of truth in this article- They started doing better because they finally improved their product after years of cost optimization (read as shitty pizza). That's it. Better pizza = more sales. Keeping it around long enough and word gets out that Domino's is good again, which means more sales and growth. The rest of this article is fluff. The funny thing is that this article is written as if management saved the day by taking "a huge risk." Since when is fixing your shitty core product considered a huge risk? That's not a risk, that's a prerequisite!
Domino's aren't currently delivering pizzas by drone or self-driving cars at significant scale, certainly not enough to affect their stock price. They aren't putting enough money into drones or self-driving cars to make investors think that they might have some head start- they will get self-driving delivery the same time as every other pizza company, because they will be buying the solution from another company that is selling to everyone. Domino's pizza tracking and online ordering is cool, but nobody orders Domino's because of it. Because regardless of their tech, they are just about on par with most pizza places when it comes to delivery times.
Edit: want a "free pro stock tip" from me (/s)? Domino's is steady/level at ~$400 right now, but they were steady/level at ~$300 in 2018-2019. They got a 33% bump in price from the coronavirus. So 30x of the 90x bump this article brags about has nothing to do with management decisions. Once the Western world has gotten vaccinated, Domino's is not staying at $400. They may not go all the way back to $300, but they won't be keeping every customer once normal life resumes.
I see sibling comments saying the same thing, so in the interest of during anecdotes into data, I’ll pile on.
First, I largely agree with what you wrote. The core improvement is significant and was also not “risky” or “daring”.
But:
> Domino's pizza tracking and online ordering is cool, but nobody orders Domino's because of it.
I do! Their app is executed beautifully, and is much nicer than phone orders where I hope my crazy order is interpreted correctly. It’s also better than the thinly-wrapped web pages from competitors.
And getting a heads up when the driver left the store allows me to shoo the dogs outside.
Seems like a small thing, but it makes a difference.
Your comment convinced me to download their app and give it a try for lunch.
Apparently delivery is not available in my area. The nearest Dominos is 2.5 miles away.
I am deleting this app now.
Edit: Yeah I know this probably doesn’t have to do with the app itself, but it’s mildly infuriating anyway
Edit 2: I don’t think it is due to Covid because they are advertising contactless delivery and I can also walk into their store right now. Also, I recall having this same problem 1 year ago.
I think the real explanation is that I live in a relatively new (2 year old) community and they haven’t bothered to update their delivery address database. I thought 2.5 miles was close enough, and 2 years was long enough to get a database update. I don’t really know, though.
My point, to clarify, is that this isn’t a very good user experience. Here’s a constructive suggestion: tell me why you won’t deliver, because otherwise we’re left to guess in the HN comments.
Sorry if my comment came off as shallow and dismissive.
I would say this speaks to their efficiency. They probably have optimized routes and know exactly how long a trip is going to take and whether its worth offering delivery to that location.
I used to work as a pizza delivery person and there were some locations that were extremely inconvenient and were money losers to the shop in terms of effort, time I'm away from and order size. I remember spending 40 minutes to deliver a $10 sub for a $2 tip.
You can get even more granular with this and fire customers that live in complicated building complexes that take forever to traverse.
But on the other had, a national chain like Dominoes may want to serve some customers as a loss leader purely for the reputation
It's probably because of Covid-19. I have been getting domino's delivered for years, but all the stores that normally would do have been "not available for delivery" in 2020.
I'm not really sure I understand this-- surely there's not more risk to the driver in delivering to you than in you coming to get it yourself, which they definitely still support. Maybe it's because their delivery drivers can't share cars anymore or something.
> I think the real explanation is that I live in a relatively new (2 year old) community and they haven’t bothered to update their delivery address database.
Sounds likely this is it. 2.5 miles isn't crazy, but maybe it is in your area? Who knows.
So, either your address is still not tallied in their system, or they have enough delivery area as it is. Either way, it would be nice to see the reason.
If I get to rave about how much I like the app, you should be able to rant about the same :)
@bigyikes' comment is, well.. a "big yikes" in the "I can't believe a human being is this entitled" way, but I will agree slightly with them that 2.5 miles is well within even the most restrictive delivery radii. I'm sure the sibling is correct that it's most likely due to COVID precautions.
I disagree with this. Yes it is true that they dramatically improved the state of their product which helped them substantially and that some of the novel delivery mechanisms are mainly PR hype, but I don't think it's fair to disregard all the work they have done at all levels to simplify the delivery process.
Delivery from Dominoes is a seamless, reliable process. It is extremely easy to place orders however you want to place them; you can track the product through the stages of production and delivery in a highly granular way and be confident about when it will arrive; deliveries are fast, usually under 30 minutes; the product that is delivered always hits a certain level of quality in my experience; and you need basically zero interaction with a human to get it done.
Contrast this with food delivery services like Doordash which take FOREVER (eg > 1 hour and frequently much longer than that); have unreliable tracking mechanisms and ETAs; result in food that usually arrives cold; are extremely expensive; always require interaction with a human; frequently result in mistakes; and have a dispute resolution process which basically involves Doordash et al saying not my problem or sorry but we don't give refunds, here's a 15% off coupon for your next order.
You must live next to an anomalous domino's location. My household orders 2x weekly, same order every time. Quality and delivery time varies wildly between orders, and the "tracker" is clearly an estimate rather than a true tracker. This has been true for years across several moves in several states around the country.
I think you’re the one getting bad luck, Dominos is incredibly consistent everywhere I’ve been.
Also, the Dominos tracker is real. (I have some knowledge of their IT systems). It doesn’t estimate delivery times, it just tells you the state of the order. It’s up to employees to actually move the state along, so it isn’t perfect. But it is an actual tracker.
1) I feel like this should be obvious, but somehow you didn't do it: you have to compare Domino's with other pizza places--almost all of which have always had internal delivery service--not an external hack like DoorDash.
2) Domino's was always great at delivery, and was always better than all other options (even for pizza). That they bothered to make a slightly better iPhone app than everyone else doesn't somehow affect this: you have to look only at strategy changes. Even the article gets this correct, by stating multiple times that Domino's has always been optimized as a pizza delivery company.
> The most impressive part about Domino’s growth from 1960 to the early 2000s is that they became one of the biggest pizza delivery chains in the world with some of the worst pizza in the world.
> Better pizza = more sales. Keeping it around long enough and word gets out that Domino's is good again
That's not how it went down, and that's not how these things work. The Domino's brand value was in the gutter and would've taken forever to recover - management had to greenlight an absolutely massive advertising campaign to let people know about the new improved product, which is the only reason you know about it. They spent a ton of money and there's a chance it might not have worked. The prevailing theory at the time was that people don't give a shit about fast food quality, they just want food that's fast and affordable to shut the kids up for a bit. Cost cutting and squeezing every last penny out of the margins is the logical call in that environment, but management was competent enough to recognize there might be an untapped market for better tasting corporate chain pizza, and they were right.
The article is overvaluing fluff like drones and self driving, but you're undervaluing their investments in streamlining the ordering process online and via the app. Arguably, they were the first major pizza company to really nail it, and it's paid off in spades. It used to be universally horrible everywhere, so everyone would still call in all their orders, and young people loathe picking up the phone.
> The prevailing theory at the time was that people don't give a shit about fast food quality, they just want food that's fast and affordable to shut the kids up for a bit.
But no one could possibly have believed this was true, right? Other "corporate pizza chains" it competed with were fine... Domino's pizza wasn't. As a college student, I heard--and participated in--people calling for "anything but Domino's" many many times. There is 100% a market for "food in the shape of Pizza that is as cheap as possible", but Domino's pushes that boundary really hard and for anyone to have believed that that market was anywhere near the size of the addressable corporate pizza market size ignored both common sense and the reality that their competitors seemed to exist and sell pizza (despite it being slightly more expensive).
I order Domino's around once a month. The reason I order them is because they're incredibly cheap ($8 medium pies with 3 toppings, at least half the price of local pizza shops), ease of use (online purchase is seamless), tracking (you can see the stage it is in) and consistency. Pizza to me is more or less a commodity product as I'm sure it is with a lot of Americans
All of these reasons are driven by technology. The process is automated so it runs very efficiently and with minimal human intervention. No person has to constantly be opening the oven to see the progress being made, which lowers the temperature of the oven and leads to inconsistency, and takes longer. The app is nice and most importantly the product is consistent. I think once I got received a pizza with a missing topping, but didn't follow up on it.
Until the pandemic happened I would order from Dominos every time their email list sent me a notification that there was a deal for a large 2 topping pizza under $7 with in-store pickup. That was about once every 2 months. Nothing mattered except the price.
When the pandemic started I stopped eating food prepared and handled by random people. I am surprised to see in these threads that so many people started ordering food prepared and handled by other people.
The prevailing risk of infection is from respiratory droplets. There's probably some limited fecal-oral transmission, but nowhere near as much as airborne.
Mucosal tissues are mucosal tissues. It doesn't really matter if you get it on them from a respiratory droplet that is temporarily in the air or one that has landed on your food.
But I agree. Surface contamination is a much lesser issue. And one I think it still makes sense to pay attention to.
Maybe, if you can find a place that will deliver you a more-or-less similar quality pizza without the delivery fee, tax, or tip. But you can't. Yeah you can pick up a $10 pizza from a mom & pop that will arguably be better pizza, but nobody orders Dominoes for good pizza, they order it for consistency and convenience.
If you compare apples to apples you're paying $8 for a reasonably acceptable pizza.
Your criticism is definitely fair, but with retail investors there is a lot more value created by signaling your intent and direction.
Pizza Hut would never ever consider talking about drone delivery, or real time order tracking. Dominos is embracing those technologies, meaning they’re open and quick to adopt change. That makes the company much more resilient (reduction in risk) and able to capitalize (larger upside). That is value.
It’s comparable to Tesla’s stock price. Yeah the product is good etc, but Elon talks about going to Mars. Part of dominos growth is because they talk about “going to Mars”.
To be clear, there is actual value or potential value in this, it’s not just posturing.
> Domino's pizza tracking and online ordering is cool, but nobody orders Domino's because of it.
I disagree.
Ordering from your local pizza place (pre Uber Eats) usually meant ordering from the default options because there was no way you could get a custom order in without having some sort of mix-ups. And good luck if you tried to order to a non-standard location (like a college campus building).
Ordering from the website removed all these issues, plus you could pay with a credit card beforehand so no cash transactions required. This combined with
> Keeping it around long enough and word gets out that Domino's is good again, which means more sales and growth.
and the ubiquity of Domino's locations made it the default option in many cases. It was good enough that it wasn't worth it to see if the local pizza place was better.
I disagree. Domino’s is actually throwing quite a lot of money and effort at their tech strategy. This is reflected in their app, (amazing) website, and a (still nascent, but still improving) tech culture that didn’t exist before.
NOTE: I don’t work at Domino’s, and I haven’t used their services in over a year.
Understand that quick-serve restaurants are typically as conservative as retail when it comes to anything not core product because of their low margins.
I do agree that Domino’s has done quite a lot to cost-optimize their product, including significant investments in line automation and process improvements.
And from what I can tell Kubernetes based off of some headers from their store locator service.
Now, other, not-Dominos, companies are making some/all of these moves. Using the tech is easy. It’s Domino’s commitment to reduce delivery times to 10 minutes from first order that makes them different. Management realized that they would need a massive investment in tech to make this happen. So they microserviced their API and worked on the delivery process. That is worth giving them some credit.
I wish it were that simple. I mean, you can't have one without the other, but that's not the only important thing they did. The other really important thing they did was improve customer experience. Being able to order in whichever method has the least resistance for each customer is an important thing that shouldn't be ignored. They were the first pizza chain that made it possible to order by tweet, from your digital assistant, smart watch, etc.
Then, after you order, they actually gave transparency into the order process, making more customers comfortable that the order had been received and was progressing. At the time, this level of transparency was missing from delivery -- there used to be this black hole between placing the order and receiving the delivery where you didn't know for sure if someone had actually seen your order come in. That improvement in trust was game changing and you know it's great because it seems so obvious after you see it.
I really think it is that simple. Better product will result in more sales: initially not so much but that extra profit you can spend on improving other component of the business.
But who knows - maybe Applebee’s will become a great restaurant without improving their food.
> maybe Applebee’s will become a great restaurant without improving their food
That's not what I said though... I agreed that improving the product is important. But, just because you build a better mousetrap, that alone doesn't guarantee that customers will beat a path to your door. There are many examples of an inferior product becoming the defacto product in a category even though a better product exists. So, there must be something else to Dominoes story, and there is!
There is other pizza that I like more than dominos, but I still order dominoes sometimes because they've taken away so much friction and sometimes that outweighs a better product -- when you're time/focus limited and also need to get your family's dinner on the table. But, the product still needs to be good for that to work. Dominoes won because they did both.
I think you underestimate how hard it is to differentiate your product in what is essentially a commodity market.
Most cities have a hundred pizza joints to order from, with quality and price being the only differentiator. That Dominoes was able to do that by branding might be "management school BS" (I love how tech people use that as a slur btw), but it has paid off for shareholders.
They raised their quality and got more business. Literally the oldest path in the book. Domino's already has name recognition. They just needed to make their pizza actually good.
> They just needed to make their pizza actually good
...while staying competitive in an extremely price-sensitive market, and figuring out how to get it to your door faster and hotter than VC-backed delivery services can. Not so easy.
"You can have it fast, cheap or good. Pick 2" -- it's so common, it's a cliche. Domino's does all 3.
You are revealing your own lack of understanding. I'll agree there's some fluff in the article and it is selectively edited after-the-fact. But dismissing the concepts here is naive.
> Domino's aren't currently delivering pizzas by drone or self-driving cars
But it gets them a ton of free publicity -- even better than paid advertising. And it gets into your subconscious -- the idea that Domino's really cares about getting you a hot pizza, and is actively developing technology to make that happen, certainly more than any of the competition. "Hot" (or lack thereof) is likely the attribute most-highly correlated with customer satisfaction vs disappointment, so this is huge.
> Domino's pizza tracking and online ordering is cool, but nobody orders Domino's because of it.
Yes, plenty do. It adds accountability and transparency to a rather chaotic process. Would you continue to use Fedex if they got rid of all tracking numbers? When Domino's delivers as promised, and the transaction went smoothly, and all the steps along the way were displayed, people remember it -- especially the next time they want a pizza.
> they finally improved their product after years of cost optimization. Better pizza = more sales
So if they stopped optimizing costs, how do their prices stay super-competitive? Better pizza doesn't translate to more sales if it also means higher prices
Well in that case, my edit is inaccurate but the main comment stands. I won't fix the edit so that people won't get confused by your comment.
But I will rant that the article/blog doesn't have a publishing date at the top or bottom of the article, nor the URL. Plus, they don't seem to define a firm end date, they usually just referred to the present. So I'm not ashamed by not realizing the article was from 2018, because apparently the only way to pick that out is by noticing their stock chart cuts off in 2018 and they have no mention of current events.
What you're missing out on is that the stock price of companies is largely based on perception, and not necessarily of reality.
"Acting like a startup" gets you investor's money these days. See Nikola, Theranos, AMD, and more. They're not necessarily all bad products, but there's a lot of high-rollers who want to invest into risky companies.
In effect: companies pretending that they're risky satisfies a market... a market to sell shares.
AMD is a fine company but its stock price has been overtaken by hype.
AMD currently doesn't have the capacity to grow its marketshare. Its only got so many TSMC slots. We're in a period where every chipmaker is selling out every single chip they make, but AMD still isn't making as much revenue as NVidia or Intel because they're simply capacity constrained.
AMD will stick around for sure IMO, but they're not nearly as strong as their stock price makes them seem. With that being said, the Xilinx purchase (lolwut?) will put them in a stronger position.
Frankly though, AMD has no business buying a behemoth like Xilinx. But... if their investors give them enough money, then sure, I guess its a good move.
You claim that online food has grown more than 10x per year for the last decade? I'm going to have to see some data to believe that, it sounds rather high.
One more vote against “nobody orders because of the app”, back in college ordering Dominoes (or Daaahhmmss, as we were more likely to refer to it at the time), was the go-to purely because of the app. It saved each of our favorite orders, our payment methods, and our locations. Thus it was trivial to make complicated purchases even N drinks into the night. No other pizza provider came close to that level of simplicity. Hell, barely any software in general receives the esteemed “can you use this while totally blasted” UX certification.
I didn't read the article, I just want to say the online ordering app is why I started using dominos again, it's just a nicer customer experience. I never heard the pizza used to be bad, and got better, that said, had the pizza been bad after ordering from the app I wouldn't have ordered again. So a combination of better customer experience in ordering and delivery, and good enough pizza did it for me.
I would also add the large backlash against Papa John's ex-Founder which helped move some customers over to Dominos. But everything you pointed out was spot on.
I'll come here to profess my odd love for Little Caesars. The pizza is pretty good, but I love their ease and extreme cheapness. They only have a few options, they are $5, $6, $7. You can just walk in and order it, they have vending machine-like dispensers. I've spontaneously driven by one before, decided to buy a pizza for myself.
No coupons, just "I hand you $5 and you hand me a pizza."
For comparison, by me the equivalent dominoes pizza is $14.
Everyone else seems to be constantly trying to go upmarket. Not Little Caesars. They just make it as easy as possible to get the best pizza one can buy for $5, and that is amazing in its own way.
In that case if you haven’t seen this Company Man episode of Litte Caesars I hope you enjoy! Little Caesars gives me nostalgia, I loved their pizza’s (along with Macdonalds) as a kid in the 90s. My go to is Dominos now.
I thought I was the lone madman out here chanting little caesars praises. So many people have called me cheap or complain that their pizzas are garbage. Maybe I just have humbler tastes but for the price of what you're paying, it's single handedly the the best $/cal ratio you can get for a $5-7 food thing. I mean for an average sized person (not average american sized), it's 1-2 days of food. Where else can you get that much food for that price?
Mid-range frozen pizza is 8-10$. That is beatable by a Little Caesar's.
They also have the fastest drive thru I've ever done.
They've joined a lot of other fast food joints in terminating their desserts though. My GF has seen four desserts at four different chains disappear in the last few months.
I thought dessert was always the second highest margin item besides fountain drinks.
A lot of dominos early success was because they thought of their core product as convenience and speed, and not pizza.
When people complain about your product (pizza) make it better. (This article talks about this was a brilliant and brave maneuver but I'm not convinced)
Personal take - the less amount of human interaction for fast food, the better for me. My order doesn't get messed up, no pressure on explaining anything, just order through the app and go.
Here in the UK Domino's have their own online ordering system and they deliver themselves. There are not on platforms like Deliveroo but their system works better.
They seem to have a pretty good strategy and team to execute on it.
They tried to expand into the Nordics in 2017, with headlines promising opening hundreds of pizza places. By the end of 2019 they canceled all new plans of expansion and have been trying to sell the restaurants since [0], really bland boring pizzas.
A good example of not understanding the market while still forging on. In Sweden everyone has their own mostly immigrant ran local pizza place which is "the best", with pizzas ready for pickup within 10 minutes after a call or delivery through some Delivery Hero subsidiary [1], or on their own. Couple this with razor thin margins and all take home essentially being paid below table.
Domino's tried to take on this market through upscale restaurants in premium locations with lower quality pizzas, really mindboggling. Here they are on the Delviry Hero app/page, though using their own people, probably because otherwise no one would even consider them as an alternative.
On one hand this is wonderful, it's great to see regular companies 'innovate'.
On the other, this is the 'industrialization of food and culture' - and not remotely a 'leap forward'.
Technology is supposed to support our lives, not replace them. I don't want all the local pizzerias, with all their bits of diversity steam-rolled by an algorithm.
Instead of 'Ribs' we have 'McRibs' once every few years when McD's product managers decide to roll them out.
I honestly don't care how much technological innovation Dominos has implemented or how much they have re-invented themselves. At the end of the day, a human getting paid minimum wage is making your food in an attempt to meet corporate guidelines. Minimum wage doesn't help to attract the most desirable people as well.
Having worked at a Domino's location in the past, I wouldn't trust any Domino's worker to make my food unless I made it personally.
I think the question isn't "should you act like a startup", the real question is:
Are you in a market that rewards quality and premium pricing that can support investment, or are your customers just so many that you can get by, booking revenue from people who will tolerate the minimum viable product until something clearly better comes along?
I think for Domino's, pizza was the 2nd situation, until they found it wasn't any more...
Is there some reason that a Domino's can't create a crispy, cracker thin crust in a proper oven, and has to use the thick unpleasant doughy stuff that goes through a lower temperature conveyor belt oven?
Too hard for general experience (high attrition) part time workers to manage?
Would a proper crisp crust just fail to survive the delivery ride anyway?
Has anybody compared Domino's pizzas across countries? I tried it a few times in Europe. The crust indeed tastes like cardboard and overall bland. I was wondering if the recipe differed between countries.
