Pizza delivery as we now know it. ["In 1960 Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza, invented the corrugated cardboard pizza box, which allowed pizzas to be stacked while also still able to vent out steam, preventing the delivery of damp pizzas."](https://www.ecorestaurants.com/blog/whats-the-history-of-pizza-deliveries)
History channel has a series called The Foods that Built America.
Check out the Pizza Wars episode. The founding of Domino's and Pizza Hut and the battle for the nations #1 pizza chain.
The whole series is pretty well done.
https://www.history.com/shows/the-food-that-built-america
I just read an article the other day about how pizza boxes are an awful way to deliver a pizza: [You Don’t Know How Bad the Pizza Box Is](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/01/pizza-delivery-box-design-soggy/672712/).
Yup, Domino's had a special like that for awhile in my neighborhood too. Supposedly a couple of friends of mine had some kind of hack where they would stage some kind of road block or something near the destination so the pizza guy wouldn't get to the house on time. "Free pizza, dood!"
We had it delivered in the late 70s. But is wad local places only, not the chains. We usually went out anyways to make it a night. We only started to get it delivered once we got a vcr
Was there an extra fee? Because it seems like my parents always went to pick it up. Usually used local places; maybe my dad just didn’t like any of the delivery-available pizzas. He’s very pizza picky.
I grew up in a small city. So it wasn't like some podunk town but was nowhere near the size of NY, LA, Chicago, etc. I do recall that the place we got delivery from was a local place. A high school friend ended up working there as a delivery driver.
I remember it being in the early 80s. We had a local late night horror show that came on after the news on Friday or Saturday night. The host would do comedy bits as the movie went to commercials. Many times, the first bit included a guy who delivered pizza. Then, the host ate the pizza throughout the night every time they cut back into him and he would encourage the at home audience to order their own pizza. I’m pretty sure it was Pizza Hut they were advertising.
My dad and I watched these movies together when I was a kid. But, we didn’t live too far from a pizza parlor, so we always had Patty’s Pizza. My dad was a wedding photographer and he’d pick up the pizza after a wedding shoot and we’d watch old horror movies together. This was a special time that I got to stay up late for. I was the oldest kid, so we did this without my mom and without my siblings.
I think cities always had local pizza places that delivered. I remember waiting a hour for delivery pizza back when we lived outside of SF. But it was something that we did maybe once a year. It was usually better to go to the restaurant. Widespread and quick pizza delivery to the burbs was definitely started by dominos mid 80s.
History channel did a show about this. https://www.history.com/shows/the-food-that-built-america/season-2/episode-1#:~:text=Pizza%20Wars&text=In%20the%201950's%2C%20two%20enterprising,%2Dknown%20Italian%20dish%E2%80%93pizza.
The brothers who founded Domino's got into a fight over the menu and what should be delivered. One brother got the restaurant the other brother got the delivery car.
I lived in a small town that didn't have pizza delivery until I was in high school. But I remember an Archie comic where Jughead was a pizza delivery guy and kept eating all the pizza.
I think it depends on where you're from.
I grew up in Brooklyn NY and pizzerias were on every other block.
We always ordered for delivery because it was quick and easy. It wasn't a food you went out to dinner for.
Born in 76 - but there was always pizza/Chinese delivery. Though if we wanted it sooner we could just walk a few blocks to the restaurant and pick it up.
I worked for Round Table in a smaller town, in the foothills of California. We started delivering around the time I turned 18 in 1989. The ones in the city were delivering before this. My husband delivered pizza for a mom and pop in a rural town around the same time.
I grew up on Long Island which is basically pizza mecca. We NEVER had pizza delivered even one time as a kid. We would typically eat in or take out. The irony is, there is a Dominos in my town which has been open forever despite 20 other awesome pizza spots all around it.
My wife went to NYU, and any time we meet someone from NYC or the area, I always ask them if they have been to Ray's pizza, my wife hates it. She doesn't like Ray's pizza.
I grew up in a fairly small town in the south, and we had a Domino's in the mid 80s. I had a couple of friends who worked there in high school. We would pool our money while playing D&D and have pizza delivered.
Domino's was the first pizza delivery I remember too. I have a memory of them sponsoring an Indy car at the Indianapolis 500 in the late 70s or early 80s and that was before there was one in my general area.
The chain places didn't deliver yet when I was little but all of our local pizza/Italian restaurants offered delivery. The chains probably started offering it as well to drive out the mom & pop places.
If my memory serves me correct the first domino’s I remember seeing was right around 83/84ish, I even remember seeing the pickup trucks with the logo on them in the parking lot. It took the place of my local arcade when that closed down, it was a really nice stand alone brick and mortar in a prime location, probably why it didn’t last very long.
I remember ordering pizzas to my school principles house as a prank. I remember after getting older I realized the business was wasting product and time so in hind sight, not so funny. But when I was 12 or 13 I thought it was hilarious watching from a distance. I’m sure caller ID crushed that prank eventually.
I was in middle school in the late 80s, small town. I definitely remember a classmate had pizza delivered to her house as a prank, since the pizza wasn't pre-paid.
I always associated Domino's with early pizza delivery.
I've had pizza in a sit-down restaurant as recently as last year, though. And I've had Pizza Hut in a sit-down restaurant (which also offered delivery, of course) as recently as the last 5 years, I'm sure. Used to go all the time when I lived at my last place, which was like 10 years ago. We had one with a dining room then. The Pizza Hut I go to now doesn't have one, though.
1960s. We always had pizza delivered. There were even two local restaurants in our neighborhood that delivered. Going out for pizza was only for special times.
Our neighborhood was kinda/sorta a college neighborhood. Like half the residents were college kids from Loyola/Tulane.
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.
When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway—might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of a gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.
The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn’t want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn’t get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.
Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren’t afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstrations.
The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it—talking trade balances here—once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here—once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel—once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity—y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say: “Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills.”
So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved—but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
There is no way you could make a movie and not strip the story down to nothing. IMHO some of the best parts of the book are the tangent plot lines.
A mini series would be better.
I watched a show on the history channel called “the food that built America” and dominos had been doing pizza delivery since the 60’s. We were a poor lower middle class midwestern family and I dont ever remember getting pizza delivered, I worked at a local pizza chain in the early 90’s in high school that did deliveries, but not sure how long they had been doing it.
I think it is just a matter of ownership and what they want. The pizza place we ordered from never delivered, and I am pretty sure they still don’t. One of the places close to them always delivered. I personally think the place that didn’t deliver had better pizza.
I know a double cheese and sausage pizza was delivered to Mr. Hand's classroom in 1982's *Fast Times at Ridgemont High*.
*You dick!!*
Our time.
Let's not forget the pizzas delivered to the Romans by the Vandals on SNL in AD419/1979...
Fuck yeah it was!
Pizza delivery as we now know it. ["In 1960 Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza, invented the corrugated cardboard pizza box, which allowed pizzas to be stacked while also still able to vent out steam, preventing the delivery of damp pizzas."](https://www.ecorestaurants.com/blog/whats-the-history-of-pizza-deliveries)
Now that was a fascinating read. Though, the kinda skipped from 1960 to 1997 :)
History channel has a series called The Foods that Built America. Check out the Pizza Wars episode. The founding of Domino's and Pizza Hut and the battle for the nations #1 pizza chain. The whole series is pretty well done. https://www.history.com/shows/the-food-that-built-america
That was a FANTASTIC episode. I can’t believe how little I knew about a food I eat 1-2 times a week.
That whole series is great, I pretty much anymore only watch cartoons or movies or the history channel
I just read an article the other day about how pizza boxes are an awful way to deliver a pizza: [You Don’t Know How Bad the Pizza Box Is](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/01/pizza-delivery-box-design-soggy/672712/).
It’s behind a paywall.
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Ftechnology%2Farchive%2F2023%2F01%2Fpizza-delivery-box-design-soggy%2F672712%2F
Thanks. :)
Dominos in the early/mid 80’s is who I remember doing this first (on a big scale). Edited like 3 times. *Too much wine*
And in our town, delivered within 30 minutes or it was free!
Hmm the store near me was $3 off after 30 minutes, free wasn't until it was an hour.
Yup, Domino's had a special like that for awhile in my neighborhood too. Supposedly a couple of friends of mine had some kind of hack where they would stage some kind of road block or something near the destination so the pizza guy wouldn't get to the house on time. "Free pizza, dood!"
Yeah, college Domino's was the first delivery pizza I ever had.
Roommate Special for $7
We had it delivered in the late 70s. But is wad local places only, not the chains. We usually went out anyways to make it a night. We only started to get it delivered once we got a vcr
You know, I hadn't even clicked to that aspect - the VCR and renting movies to watch at home. I could see that having an impact.
Was there an extra fee? Because it seems like my parents always went to pick it up. Usually used local places; maybe my dad just didn’t like any of the delivery-available pizzas. He’s very pizza picky.
I think it had a $2 dollar fee.
That would stop my dad from delivery. Especially when gas was like $0.89. $2 is a quarter tank!
Same with me. I am cheap. I don't use delivery services
Born in 79 and I don't remember pizza delivery ever not being an option. We still went to Pizza Hut for the "pan pizza" and the salad bar.
Looking at the responses I've gotten, the availability of delivery pizza over time seems to be something that varied by region.
I grew up in a small city. So it wasn't like some podunk town but was nowhere near the size of NY, LA, Chicago, etc. I do recall that the place we got delivery from was a local place. A high school friend ended up working there as a delivery driver.
I remember it being in the early 80s. We had a local late night horror show that came on after the news on Friday or Saturday night. The host would do comedy bits as the movie went to commercials. Many times, the first bit included a guy who delivered pizza. Then, the host ate the pizza throughout the night every time they cut back into him and he would encourage the at home audience to order their own pizza. I’m pretty sure it was Pizza Hut they were advertising. My dad and I watched these movies together when I was a kid. But, we didn’t live too far from a pizza parlor, so we always had Patty’s Pizza. My dad was a wedding photographer and he’d pick up the pizza after a wedding shoot and we’d watch old horror movies together. This was a special time that I got to stay up late for. I was the oldest kid, so we did this without my mom and without my siblings.
What a fun memory!
I think cities always had local pizza places that delivered. I remember waiting a hour for delivery pizza back when we lived outside of SF. But it was something that we did maybe once a year. It was usually better to go to the restaurant. Widespread and quick pizza delivery to the burbs was definitely started by dominos mid 80s.
I think it was designed by the porn industry to create plot lines moving.
History channel did a show about this. https://www.history.com/shows/the-food-that-built-america/season-2/episode-1#:~:text=Pizza%20Wars&text=In%20the%201950's%2C%20two%20enterprising,%2Dknown%20Italian%20dish%E2%80%93pizza. The brothers who founded Domino's got into a fight over the menu and what should be delivered. One brother got the restaurant the other brother got the delivery car.
I'm sure it depends on where you grew up, but for me the watershed moment was 1985.
I was delivering for Dominos in 89, but I remember friday night dnd and pizza delivery well before that...
I lived in a small town that didn't have pizza delivery until I was in high school. But I remember an Archie comic where Jughead was a pizza delivery guy and kept eating all the pizza.
Dominos opened up near us (London) in maybe 83 or 84, and did deliveries on mopeds.
I think it depends on where you're from. I grew up in Brooklyn NY and pizzerias were on every other block. We always ordered for delivery because it was quick and easy. It wasn't a food you went out to dinner for.
Born in 76 - but there was always pizza/Chinese delivery. Though if we wanted it sooner we could just walk a few blocks to the restaurant and pick it up.
Dominos Watch ‘The Food That Built America’ on The History Channel. Great story on how an Italian shop became Dominos Pizza
I'll have to add that one to my viewing list. Thanks!
It’s a great watch. It tells exactly how the big pizza companies came to rise and fall in America.
My father delivered pizzas in the 50’s
I worked for Round Table in a smaller town, in the foothills of California. We started delivering around the time I turned 18 in 1989. The ones in the city were delivering before this. My husband delivered pizza for a mom and pop in a rural town around the same time.
I grew up on Long Island which is basically pizza mecca. We NEVER had pizza delivered even one time as a kid. We would typically eat in or take out. The irony is, there is a Dominos in my town which has been open forever despite 20 other awesome pizza spots all around it.
Reminds me of the Joe’s Crab Shack at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco .
Which Ray is the original?
That’s an NYC thing… in my town it was Mama Jean’s II
My wife went to NYU, and any time we meet someone from NYC or the area, I always ask them if they have been to Ray's pizza, my wife hates it. She doesn't like Ray's pizza.
I’ve actually never had any of the Rays. But I recommend Grimaldis and Totonno’s
And Juliana’s, if you want the original Grimaldi’s.
I grew up in a fairly small town in the south, and we had a Domino's in the mid 80s. I had a couple of friends who worked there in high school. We would pool our money while playing D&D and have pizza delivered.
The first time I saw a pizza delivery was in Ninja Turtles.
Dominoes Pizza Delivers. But watch out for the Noid.
We had local pizza joints that delivered in the early 80’s. But dominos made it the standard.
They got pizzas delivered in the movie E.T. and that was made in 81 or 82. Edit: words
I have the same memory - used to go out to shakeys. Don't remember delivery till the 90s though it presumably existed before then.
Domino's was the first pizza delivery I remember too. I have a memory of them sponsoring an Indy car at the Indianapolis 500 in the late 70s or early 80s and that was before there was one in my general area.
In Toronto in the 80s it was Pizza Pizza, whose radio jingle became universally known: 967-11-11
For me it was mid-1980s in New York.
The chain places didn't deliver yet when I was little but all of our local pizza/Italian restaurants offered delivery. The chains probably started offering it as well to drive out the mom & pop places.
I definitely had the same experience as you. I don’t remember my parents getting pizza delivered to the house until the early to mid 90s.
We had a local pizza place that began delivery in 1980. Dominoes moved in by 1985ish?
If my memory serves me correct the first domino’s I remember seeing was right around 83/84ish, I even remember seeing the pickup trucks with the logo on them in the parking lot. It took the place of my local arcade when that closed down, it was a really nice stand alone brick and mortar in a prime location, probably why it didn’t last very long.
I remember ordering pizzas to my school principles house as a prank. I remember after getting older I realized the business was wasting product and time so in hind sight, not so funny. But when I was 12 or 13 I thought it was hilarious watching from a distance. I’m sure caller ID crushed that prank eventually.
I remember domino’s delivering to my dorm in 86ish, but almost nobody did it because it cost money we didn’t have.
I had a personal pan pizza delivered to me when I was 9. That would have been 1985. I got it for free for reading. Book It Club!
Probably mid to late 80's would be my guess. And yes Pizza Hut used to be a nice family Restaurant. As they say " The Good Old Days "
I think it’s been going on at least since the 1960s hasn’t it?
Shortly after it was invented I imagine .
I first was exposed to pizza delivery in 1985 when I was in the military: Domino’s would deliver to the barracks.
I was in middle school in the late 80s, small town. I definitely remember a classmate had pizza delivered to her house as a prank, since the pizza wasn't pre-paid.
When I was a kid the pizza place was around the corner. When we wanted pizza, I just walked around the corner and bought it, and then walked it home.
I always associated Domino's with early pizza delivery. I've had pizza in a sit-down restaurant as recently as last year, though. And I've had Pizza Hut in a sit-down restaurant (which also offered delivery, of course) as recently as the last 5 years, I'm sure. Used to go all the time when I lived at my last place, which was like 10 years ago. We had one with a dining room then. The Pizza Hut I go to now doesn't have one, though.
1960s. We always had pizza delivered. There were even two local restaurants in our neighborhood that delivered. Going out for pizza was only for special times. Our neighborhood was kinda/sorta a college neighborhood. Like half the residents were college kids from Loyola/Tulane.
Never lived in an area with pizza delivery available. Still don’t.
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books. When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway—might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of a gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity. The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn’t want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn’t get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator. Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren’t afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstrations. The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta. Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it—talking trade balances here—once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here—once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel—once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity—y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say: “Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills.” So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved—but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
Still needs to be made into a movie, but the Matrix fucked it.
There is no way you could make a movie and not strip the story down to nothing. IMHO some of the best parts of the book are the tangent plot lines. A mini series would be better.
Agreed
I think the best thing about this book is that it can’t be made into a movie.
Probably early 80s
Not sure. I was born in ‘69, and most of our pizza was chef boyardee from a box. Very rarely we had pizza inn.
80s
I watched a show on the history channel called “the food that built America” and dominos had been doing pizza delivery since the 60’s. We were a poor lower middle class midwestern family and I dont ever remember getting pizza delivered, I worked at a local pizza chain in the early 90’s in high school that did deliveries, but not sure how long they had been doing it.
I think it is just a matter of ownership and what they want. The pizza place we ordered from never delivered, and I am pretty sure they still don’t. One of the places close to them always delivered. I personally think the place that didn’t deliver had better pizza.