I just can't get behind the article. Starting with headline.
It just tacks on the word - "startup". Companies re-orient and re-brand themselves routinely. Some companies are more adventurous than others but that doesn't make them a startup. They have a lot of legroom to make a mistake and still come out. But, if we follow the advice of this article - Google also acted like a startup when it created Alphabet. Or Coco Cola acts like a startup every time it tries to rejig the formula.
Secondly, Stock Value as a KPI is just wrong. There are many ways to manipulate the price - optimistic outlook, buybacks and dividends even if earnings aren't that great. Sure market does come around to the truth eventually. But as Keynes said - "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." So, finding out might take time.
The only thing which works for me is a description of Domino's digital strategy. The Pizza tracker has worked in Dominos favor. Though I am a fan of the tracker, over time it has become increasing clear it is just a psychological trick. Show some progress bar to make people happy. Many times I find the tracker stuck at "preparing" and only to update delivered directly.
> Though I am a fan of the tracker, over time it has become increasing clear it is just a psychological trick. Show some progress bar to make people happy. Many times I find the tracker stuck at "preparing" and only to update delivered directly.
I haven't delivered in over 5 years, but when I worked there it was 100% real. It was worked into the inventory and time tracking system. At each step an employee had to key their employee # to move the pizza to the next step on the in-store computer. Generally after saucing the dough, after applying other toppings, after removing from the oven, and then when the driver finally takes it.
Of course, there's no physical limitations preventing you from just passing a pizza along the toppings table and going "This one is pepperoni", so that does tend to happen during peak-hours and things get cleared in batch whenever there's a moment to breath. Usually by a manager because you need an override code when keying in too many items at a time. At least in my store, we tended to prioritize getting too many orders over too few, so this was pretty common. During big sports events and stuff we'd sometimes just pick up the phone and say "the oven is broken" to 50% of callers because we were so slammed with orders. It's better to just not take an order than deliver it an hour late. In the first case, they'll still try another order next week.
I delivered at a few other stores afterwards. Mostly small Mom & Pop style places, but I also tried Burger King when they launched delivery. And all I can say from that experience is Domino's really had their shit together technologically. Burger King specifically was the worst. Domino's had a great mapping system that would plot orders. At Mom&Pop shops the owner or manager would just work it out in their head. But at Burger King, it was some crappy naive implementation where orders were assigned to drivers chronologically. So I would frequently get 2 orders on opposite sides of town, meaning one of them will be arriving cold and late.
Don't specifically know where I was going with that anecdote... but while I agree Domino's isn't run like a startup at all they really had their tech together during the time I worked there, and felt much "younger" than other companies in that regard.
Sanitized at opening and closing every day. And my store was really strict about washing your hands in between things like that. Caught not washing hands once? It's a scolding. Caught twice? Go home. Actually all the fast food and delivery places I worked at were very strict about this, which was relieving.
Technically we were supposed to wear gloves while touching food but no one did. Makes it too slow when you need to key your next order or pick up the phone (even though there were specific job titles, everyone just did every role). Maybe at OP's store the reason the tracker is never updated in real time is because they actually wear gloves :P
> I just can't get behind the article. Starting with headline. Stock Value as a KPI is just wrong.
For a quantitative measure of a company's success in creating good pizza, stock value is a functional KPI. It shows that investors are optimistic about the company, as you said, and it does reflect the company's expansion to the world's largest pizza chain.
> Secondly, tacking on the word "startup".
It's true they aren't a startup, but are definitely startup-like in the move-fast-and-break-things department, especially relative to their peers. They're even testing autonomous robots! I know that on HN we reserve "startup" to mean "taking a big financial risk and having a core industry other than ads", but most of the public still views Google, FB, etc., as "startup" companies due to their corporate culture compared to, say, TJX or Pizza Hut or Merrill Lynch.
> Many times I find the tracker stuck at "preparing" and only to update delivered directly.
I've ordered at least half a dozen times in Boston and I've never seen that. Maybe it's human error responsible rather than Domino's system?
They also generated startup-style returns for investors. Startups use stock chicanery practically by definition to create giant returns on paper for early investors with comically inflated valuations.
I thought this was an unusually heart warming success story about how a company used technology and the 'damaging admission' sales technique to a happy result.
The 'damaging admission' is the sort of technique a seminar speaker person uses when she tells you have how 13 years ago to the day she was licking spilled cocaine off the bathroom floor while the cops were breaking down the door to arrest her, and that now she enjoys a successful career in real estate.
The ovens are as close to robotics as you can get, the stages are all automatic and the time the pizza takes through the various stages is determined by the speed of a conveyor belt. The dough is prepared in bulk (as are all the other ingredients). There is very little left to chance in large scale pizza generation when it comes to ingredients and process. The biggest effects that humans can still have on the final result is the speed of delivery and whether or not they followed sanitation rules.
That will have a huge effect on repeat business and local marketing and advertising, but successful pizza chains live by the fact that they take the human out of the equation as much as possible.
But your point is valid in that a bad manager will likely be able to screw it up completely no matter what HQ comes up with in terms of quality control and process.
Yeah, it's a bit of a puff piece. The app, the social media push, none of that would have worked if their pizza still tasted like unwashed feet. The biggest thing Domino's did to turn the company around was to start making better pizza.
The article mentions something that always fascinates me: the extent to which branding and presentation influence taste perception:
"As complaints got louder, this became more obvious. Domino’s ran consumer tests and discovered that people actually liked pizza less if they knew it was Domino’s than if they thought it was a random unbranded pizza."
They 100% absolutely did start using better ingredients, etc. but if they'd failed to rehab their brand I wonder if it would have taken off.
I was just talking with my wife about this the other day. I've had Domino's a few times in the last ~2 years, and it's okay pizza, but I would never go out of my way to purchase Domino's pizza.
It's not 'taste perception' that is affected. It's literally taste. People aren't lying or tricking themselves, the pizza literally tasted worse if they knew it was Dominos in those studies. They've done similar studies with wine. They took professional sommeliers and gave them cheap wine in bottles with expensive labels, and expensive wine in bottles with cheap labels, and had them try them while lying in fMRI scanners. The bottle it came out of had monumental effects on the taste centers of the brain.
The book 'How Pleasure Works' goes over a lot of this sort of research and is quite interesting. The 'American Association of Wine Economists' (which isn't what it sounds like) also does tons of research on things like this. It's thanks to them we know that people can't actually tell the difference between expensive patte and wet dog food.
Taste perception would be "I like this, it tastes good", the opinion the person has of their taste experience. The taste itself is the actual experience. It's the taste itself that is very heavily determined by context and unrelated to objective reality.
Yeah, it's noticeably better. Then again, the bar was so low that this isn't much of an achievement.
It's not my favorite pizza, but if you live in an area with a Papa Johns, a Pizza Hut, and some local crap-pie joint, then it's going to be your best option.
They still sell "cheap" pizza, so there's an upper limit to how good it can get. Their cheese quality can only be so high (since it's such a large portion of the cost) and their offerings need to appeal to like 90% of customers.
They honestly made it worse. The crust is like bad bread. I didn't used to mind eating Domino's if someone ordered it, but now I won't touch it. It's the only type of pizza my son actually won't eat.
That opinion really depends on where one grew up. Those who didn't grow up in Chicago or a similarly-benighted locale know that even though pizza crust may be arbitrarily thin, there is a definite maximum for pizza crust thickness.
I kind of disagree with that though. They knew their core product was bad and that it was severely hurting their business.
That's a lot less difficult to find the courage to take a risk on changing than when your core product is decent/good but not as great as it "could" be.
There's always risk in changing a product that has more than zero existing customers. You risk losing them and not getting any new ones. And the change itself costs money, which may be lost.
It depends on why you have those customers. They kept some things constant. If you like Domino's because they're cheap or because they have fast delivery at decent hours, then maybe changing the pizza recipe is not so much a risk.
Plus, they did A/B tests across the nation [0] to further reduce the risk.
The app, the social media push, those things DID begin making a difference, even when their pizza DID taste like unwashed feet. But I agree that a better product was the most significant innovation they made.
I'm a fan of Dominos since their re-making, but I don't think they really deserve much credit for it. My understanding is that the USDA spent millions working with Dominos to basically come to the conclusion 'yeah, use more cheese'. The tracker has always made me curious. At least according to the delivery drivers I have questioned from my local place, the names which appear are indeed accurate, and the timing advancement is not fully automatic (so if your pizza is sitting there not getting any attention, it shouldn't move forward on its own). But, in talking to a friend whose wife works part time in a Dominos in a different part of the country, she says at least for her store the names are all fake and the progress bar has nothing to do with whats going on in the store.
Also, not sure if this is commonly known but I went to the Dominos site a couple weeks ago to order... got a blank page. Thinking it strange, I viewed the page source. The source had loaded, there was just some screwup with the js I presume. But I noticed a comment block in the source that was the Dominos logo in ASCII art... except it was clearly base 64 encoded text. Upon decoding it, it presents a little js coding challenge and tells you to tweet a solution to their careers account. Pretty neat.
> The only thing which works for me is a description of Domino's digital strategy. The Pizza tracker has worked in Dominos favor. Though I am a fan of the tracker, over time it has become increasing clear it is just a psychological trick. Show some progress bar to make people happy. Many times I find the tracker stuck at "preparing" and only to update delivered directly.
Back when we were ordering pizza semi-regularly (university), one factor in choosing Domino's was that they were the only place that could give a reliable delivery estimate (+/- 10 minutes). Regardless on whether or not the tracker itself works, they clearly had the basics of that down.
Secondly, Stock Value as a KPI is just wrong. There are many ways to manipulate the price - optimistic outlook, buybacks and dividends even if earnings aren't that great. Sure market does come around to the truth eventually. But as Keynes said - "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." So, finding out might take time.
The only thing which works for me is a description of Domino's digital strategy. The Pizza tracker has worked in Dominos favor. Though I am a fan of the tracker, over time it has become increasing clear it is just a psychological trick. Show some progress bar to make people happy. Many times I find the tracker stuck at "preparing" and only to update delivered directly.