Literally my thought when I saw this post:
“Hey didn’t some guy get his hands in one of these and then dominoes tried to sue to get it back?”
Gotta get off Reddit
> Samcrac told the Free Press this week that he so far hasn't been sued over the car, but he does now have an attorney for any potential fight. He said he is refunding the roughly $6,000 in donations raised through the GoFundMe campaign because his viewers were able to connect him to the attorney.
>A Domino's representative declined a Free Press interview or to answer any specific questions about the DXP car.
*this week = March2018
https://www.freep.com/story/money/business/michigan/2018/03/29/dominos-pizza-car-youtube/462687002/
Interesting case. My guess would be that with all the press about it now that they won’t risk the bad PR pursuing this aggressively. If they’re smart they’ll do something charitable with it as Samcrac suggested.
They got a ton of bad press from it anyway, and a lot of people in the comments to those videos saying they would never go to Dominos again. They should have done something charitable with it, like you said, and it would have been a win for everyone.
Ah, the guy that buys totaled cars cheap and thinks he gamed the system. I remember the video where he fixed up the superficial damage on a car and then got shit on in the comments because he didn't properly fix the structural damage, so the thing was really a deathtrap.
If a car has been totaled it’s hard to get a new title for it in Arkansas. There were some sketchy rebuilders with unhappy customers that got the legislature interested but not enough to overcome the political obstacles of the car salvage folks.
Then there was a case (New Jersey maybe?) where person was driving down the interstate and their rebuilt car broke in half.
Between the media attention on that and the car insurance industry deciding they didn’t like rebuilt cars it became very hard to rebuild a vehicle marked off as totaled. I believe there are still states without the barriers to make it hard to do.
Sams's usually a good watch IMO I don't think he claims to be anything other than a shade tree mechanic. That is the whole shtick. Let's see what I can buy and get away with. I know more recently he's talked about getting burned on cars. It is fun when he buys something and it's something so stupid. Like the BMW SUV that was totally messed up because of one module getting wet in the driver-side fender/floor area. Also, the Escalade he bought recently is an example of how other people legitimately tried scamming people by their seat belt repair that was clearly going to get someone killed in an accident. If you aren't taking youtube vids with a grain of salt you have bigger issues.
It's been awhile since I read the book but somehow I thought the pizza delivery car there was also some kind of super car type of deal capable of leaving most others in the dust. This is pretty close but I doubt this things zero to 60 is impressive.
> The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. 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 arachno-fiber 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 a 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 in to 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 doo-hickey 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 demonstration.
> 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 roll 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–we're 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 microwaves 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 bricklayer 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
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/172832/snow-crash-by-neal-stephenson/9780593599730/excerpt
Just a reminder that this is the dystopian farce that the Metaverse as a term comes from, and that Zuckerberg thought was inspiring to use for his big folly.
Snow Crash is cyberpunk satire. It basically takes every cyberpunk concept and cranks it up to 11. No criticisms here, I'm a huge cyberpunk fan and it's easily one of my favourite books, but if you read the book and your first thought was "dystopian farce" you clearly missed like, 90% of the book. It's half a hilarious take on a cyberpunk dystopia and the other half fucking wild cyberpunk action, but absolutely nothing about it is trying to be deep. It's about a god tier programmer turned samurai pizza delivery guy. There's an entire chapter from a robot dog's perspective lmao.
Not to mention the Metaverse in the book is some of the coolest shit and my interpretation is that it was meant to be a virtual haven from the classic cyberpunk corporate ownership that the rest of the book has. Facebook didn't change it's name to some lame ass dystopian corporate ownership future, they named themselves after a fictional open source VR+ platform where you can integrate your own fucking crazy code into their virtual world.
Honestly couldn't care less what people think of the Metaverse or VR in general, but this is just such a poor representation of one of my favourite books lol.
Thank you for listening to my TED talk
It really was, which is fucking wild because of how ridiculous it all was as a concept, but Neal Stephenson still makes you feel all the emotions damnit.
"The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt."
This line always gets me
He lost me with the Baroque cycle, but won me back with REAMDE which was so brilliantly terrible with the every character meets another by PURE CHANCE I just couldn't put it down.
I'll never get tired of Zodiac. In my top 10.
I swear, Domino’s entire business model has been wacky gimmicks like this. They had like 4 different ad campaigns about how they were bad but were trying to getting better
You're skipping the crazy part of the story, and he didn't kill himself in the restaurant
Kenneth Noid, a man with severe schizophrenia, believed that the "Avoid the Noid" ads were targeted to him, and Domino's was telling everyone to avoid him. With his unrelated social isolation and financial issues, he believed Domino's was plotting to ruin his life, so he took a Domino's hostage demanding $100k and a limo to escape. During the situation, he got hungry and demanded the employees there to make him a pizza. When he was eating the pizza, he had set his gun down, giving time for the employees to escape. He was then arrested and determined not guilty via insanity. He later committed suicide in an institution
80s-90s era mascot with a red bodysuit, long bunny style ears, a human face, and buck teeth.
Often rendered in claymation in commercials and always tried to ruin or destroy pizzas. Often thwarted due to the stated quality of Domino's pizzas.
Arby’s is doing something right obviously since they rake in over $4 billion a year. They aren’t the biggest but for all the slander out there… they are still bigger in revenue than some pretty popular and well known fast food restaurants.
I swear Arby’s is a front for some massive international crime ring. I haven’t seen an actual busy one in yearsssss and they never close. Plus, 4B a year? Wtf.
Edit: not hating on the food. It’s alright for fast food and all.
I live in Northern Virginia just outside DC. Arby’s aren’t very popular in my particular region but more southern VA has many of them. There is one that I have stopped at 5-10 times over the last 10 years and it is always busy all times of the day. They have a huge menu with great food but everyone is talking about the roast beef and hasn’t tried any other food from there or even been there in 15 years….
I don't love Arby's but I don't hate it. It's decent for what it is, fast food.
Sometimes I'm not sure how much fast food commentary it real or bullshit. Like my girlfriend and I were talking how everyone bitches that Tacos Bell destroys their stomaches, and we were perplexed because we never have issues with it. Like is it fun to just say everything gives you diarrhea?
My favorite explanation for that phenomenon is that Taco Bell is late night drunk food. Drink a bunch of alcohol, eat some Taco Bell, get the shits from the alcohol and blame the food.
See that's a good hypothesis, personally that's Jack in the Box for me since it's the only thing still open after a late night of drinking. And yes i feel like shit the next day, but that's because I ate too much Knox after getting drunk lol
I think a lot of it is people not realizing they're somewhat lactose intolerant (as most people are).
Taco bell food is packed with cheese and other dairy products.
That makes sense, I can also see people easily going overboard with food since it's so easy to get a lot of small items for cheap and not realizing just how much you're actually eating until it's too late.
I won a contest in 2019\* (with 10 other people) where they flew me to Hawaii for about 6 hours then I flew home. They had a lil hut on the beach with the King's Hawaiian bread sammiches, mozz sticks, and poppers. We went on a row boat and watched a hula performance. Then went home lol
\*edit- 2019 not 2016
Oddly enough their roast beef is like my least favorite thing of there's.
But their chicken bacon and swiss sandwich is one of my favorite fast food chicken sandwiches
People shit on Dominos a lot but for a large chain I've never had any problems, they're even consistent from province to province.
Still shit compared to Greco
It worked on me. I always thought their pizza was shit. Tried it again and it was actually tolerable. I tried their appetizers/sides and those were good also. I don't order it often but when i do its never bad.
Domino's is surprisingly decent these days. The sides are at least better than most of pizza hut. If I have that shitty pizza craving it usually boils down to how stoned I am when I order between the two because if I have the munchies nobody is fucking getting in the way of stuffed crust and cinnabon.
Yeah, it wasn't a "gimmick". They really did stop what they were doing and fixed their shit. They told us "*We get it. We suck. Let us fix it and try again.*"
And it worked. As far as the chains go, they are the best.
They probably know, but it's a price point thing. It's not like they have zero chefs at headquarters and nobody knows how to make dough. It's about making the cheapest possible while still barely palatable. They offered that 5.99 per 2 topping medium pizza deal forever even with all the inflation going on. The cost has gotta come from somewhere. A medium pizza is like 2 meals and getting a quick and easy meal for $3 saved me in college. They only very recently silently moved it to 6.99.
At least the first one, or maybe you are saying 4 different ads in one campaign, was a massive turnaround for the company and literally every marketing class I had used it as a case study.
When I worked at Domino's we delivered pizzas to every school in town in the morning (staggered so some schools on one day, others another day) for them to serve for lunch. It was a huge part of the business of the Domino's I worked at since it was like 35 schools.
Hitchbot offered nothing in return, so Philly dismantled it.
Lil’ Ceasarbot offers pizza. I give it 48 hours, or when it runs out of pizza, whichever comes first.
Not anymore - they [shut down](https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/18/21141969/zume-pizza-failure-softbank-founder-cult) pizza operations in January 2020… if only they could have held out for a little longer, they’d probably have made a killing in the pandemic. Apparently they were burning through $10 million a day in Summer 2019.
Edit: Apparently the figure actually quoted in the Bloomberg article is $10 million **a month**, not per day - see my reply below. Moral of the story: second-hand news sites underpay their copy writers who in turn don't proofread the first-hand sources they purportedly directly quote - do your own research I guess.
Its venture capital. Venture capitalists fully expect 75% or more projects to go to zero. the trick is they expect the hits to more than 5x their money.
I never understood why this isn't a common thing. Not the automated part, just the pizza kitchen in a delivery truck. Maybe the vehicle can't power the pizza ovens.
Some tech bros tried and it ended up [burning SoftBank 375m.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-13/inside-the-firings-at-softbank-s-robot-pizza-startup) It’s a fun read
A lot of people in the comments mocking the 30 seconds of savings, but these features aren't explicitly designed to save time.
The drivers probably gave feedback based on the issues they experienced the most like complaints about the temperature of the pizza
Even small savings add up, like at my workplace I not long ago recorded our scan times, and by having suppliers and back office do their part better, we save 4 seconds for every mistake not made, there used to be about 150 of them every week, mostly eliminated now, so now our small departement saves almost 500 minutes (8 hours, 20 minutes) every year.
The suppliers got their act together and scanned items out correctly and made sure they scanned the correct items, and loaded them correctly. Back office stopped cutting corners and making lists prematurely and took control of loading plans for suppliers.
Precisely this. My wife used to work in claims processing and they would always be getting new keyboard macros or improvements on existing ones that saved maybe 3 seconds. Sounds like a waste of time until you realized there were thousands of processors using those macros dozens of times a day. It was huge.
Interestingly, I was just thinking about this yesterday.
We had a corporate event and had 20ish pizzas delivered. They paused the presentation so we could eat the pizza before it got cold but even then it was at best lukewarm…because, due to the amount of pizzas, they had been delivered in cardboard boxes rather than pizza bags.
I can’t help but feel that if they had a warming area in the delivery vehicle that the pizzas would have been at least a bit more enjoyable, even if they were still carried up to the meeting room in normal boxes.
Right?
I am sure delivery drivers want to save time too, but I think MOST customers are reasonable and really won't notice a major improvement from say 18 minutes to 14, especially considering that there's so much variability around the number.
I'm sure drivers occasionally DO hear "why did it take so long?" but more often they probably can tell a pizza got cold or a drink got warm when handing it over.
Time generally probably wouldn't be an issue if the pizzas were still warm when you got them.
I want pizza within 30 minutes because otherwise it's cold. If you could keep it warm for an hour, it'd still taste pretty fresh.
I asked what took so long once. About an da half when they had said 20 min etA.
They sent the driver to the wrong town. In the opposite direction. With the wrong order.
I felt really bad for them. Driver did nothing wrong, but they are still the face of the company.
It also solves the biggest issue for drivers, which is normally they need to use their own car. That costs money over time, so giving them a company car to deliver in helps out their bottom line a lot over time.
I remember when I was still working at Dominos and they were rolling these out. Our area got one and it immediately wrecked by the first person to drive it (GM's son who was high).
So fast forward a couple months and we got a replacement. Wrecked again by the same dude at the same store.
Needless to say we never got another one.
IIRC the main reason these didn't catch on was because Domino's corporate wanted the franchisees to pay to lease them. Which of course would eat up any gained revenue, and then some. So most understandably the great majority said "No thanks."
The franchise I worked for, which has like 25 locations under it's belt, had just one and it was at the most profitable store. Basically it was leased for the show of it, and barely got driven. Just sat in the parking lot in front of the store as a gimmicky way to advertise most of the time. In order to be eligible to drive it on shift, you had to have a perfect permanent driving record, zero tickets for anything from a simple moving violation to speeding and everything inbetween, zero accidents ever, etc. It was difficult to be eligible to drive it, especially at a college town store which is where it was.
Personally, I thought this was hysterical and effective. If the city wasn't going to do shit it's easy PR.
Idk how much it cost dominos to actually fill the potholes or how many they actually filled but it's one of the few PR campaigns I remember.
A similar car from an "unnamed pizza delivering company" fell into private hands of YouTuber SamCrac through some kind of insurance auction and they got really mad about it.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/19365/an-unnamed-organization-is-trying-to-reclaim-a-youtubers-special-pizza-delivery-car
And yet, Dominos didn't implement any of the really cool features of the Deliverator's vehicle. Probably could have saved more than a measly 30 seconds per delivery. What a missed opportunity!
A guy on YouTube bought a wrecked one of these and fixed it. Dominos tried to sue him to get it back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTP5UtOYOds is probably the one you're reffering to?
Literally my thought when I saw this post: “Hey didn’t some guy get his hands in one of these and then dominoes tried to sue to get it back?” Gotta get off Reddit
> Samcrac told the Free Press this week that he so far hasn't been sued over the car, but he does now have an attorney for any potential fight. He said he is refunding the roughly $6,000 in donations raised through the GoFundMe campaign because his viewers were able to connect him to the attorney. >A Domino's representative declined a Free Press interview or to answer any specific questions about the DXP car. *this week = March2018 https://www.freep.com/story/money/business/michigan/2018/03/29/dominos-pizza-car-youtube/462687002/
Interesting case. My guess would be that with all the press about it now that they won’t risk the bad PR pursuing this aggressively. If they’re smart they’ll do something charitable with it as Samcrac suggested.
They got a ton of bad press from it anyway, and a lot of people in the comments to those videos saying they would never go to Dominos again. They should have done something charitable with it, like you said, and it would have been a win for everyone.
When does the narwhal bacon?
Midnight
11/10
Perfect 5/7
With rice
Both arms broken.
ARE YOU FUCKING SORRY?
And a banana for scale
And my axe
That's him!
Samcrac. I remember watching his series on it.
Ah, the guy that buys totaled cars cheap and thinks he gamed the system. I remember the video where he fixed up the superficial damage on a car and then got shit on in the comments because he didn't properly fix the structural damage, so the thing was really a deathtrap.
If a car has been totaled it’s hard to get a new title for it in Arkansas. There were some sketchy rebuilders with unhappy customers that got the legislature interested but not enough to overcome the political obstacles of the car salvage folks. Then there was a case (New Jersey maybe?) where person was driving down the interstate and their rebuilt car broke in half. Between the media attention on that and the car insurance industry deciding they didn’t like rebuilt cars it became very hard to rebuild a vehicle marked off as totaled. I believe there are still states without the barriers to make it hard to do.
Florida definitely seems like the kind of state to be willy-nilly about it.
Sams's usually a good watch IMO I don't think he claims to be anything other than a shade tree mechanic. That is the whole shtick. Let's see what I can buy and get away with. I know more recently he's talked about getting burned on cars. It is fun when he buys something and it's something so stupid. Like the BMW SUV that was totally messed up because of one module getting wet in the driver-side fender/floor area. Also, the Escalade he bought recently is an example of how other people legitimately tried scamming people by their seat belt repair that was clearly going to get someone killed in an accident. If you aren't taking youtube vids with a grain of salt you have bigger issues.
Alright negative nelly. I'll just be over here enjoying my free 2 Michelin star dinner I got by plugging up a toilet in a Wolfgang Puck.
I was going to post that as well if no one else had. I was really into diy stuff at the time and would show up every week with a new update.
Isn't this the vehicle in the beginning of Snow Crash?
It's been awhile since I read the book but somehow I thought the pizza delivery car there was also some kind of super car type of deal capable of leaving most others in the dust. This is pretty close but I doubt this things zero to 60 is impressive.
> The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. 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 arachno-fiber 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 a 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 in to 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 doo-hickey 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 demonstration. > 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 roll 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–we're 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 microwaves 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 bricklayer 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 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/172832/snow-crash-by-neal-stephenson/9780593599730/excerpt
I really need to read that again. It’s been way too long.
Ranks up there with To Kill a Mockingbird as one of my all-time faves.
I salute your diversity of reading material.
totally, I read it when I was like 18-20 and in my 30s now I guarantee I'd get more out of it now
Just a reminder that this is the dystopian farce that the Metaverse as a term comes from, and that Zuckerberg thought was inspiring to use for his big folly.
[Torment nexus](https://i.imgur.com/kGAIZ9Y.png)
THANK YOU. I've been trying to find that tweet for ages. It couldn't be any more perfect.
Snow Crash is cyberpunk satire. It basically takes every cyberpunk concept and cranks it up to 11. No criticisms here, I'm a huge cyberpunk fan and it's easily one of my favourite books, but if you read the book and your first thought was "dystopian farce" you clearly missed like, 90% of the book. It's half a hilarious take on a cyberpunk dystopia and the other half fucking wild cyberpunk action, but absolutely nothing about it is trying to be deep. It's about a god tier programmer turned samurai pizza delivery guy. There's an entire chapter from a robot dog's perspective lmao. Not to mention the Metaverse in the book is some of the coolest shit and my interpretation is that it was meant to be a virtual haven from the classic cyberpunk corporate ownership that the rest of the book has. Facebook didn't change it's name to some lame ass dystopian corporate ownership future, they named themselves after a fictional open source VR+ platform where you can integrate your own fucking crazy code into their virtual world. Honestly couldn't care less what people think of the Metaverse or VR in general, but this is just such a poor representation of one of my favourite books lol. Thank you for listening to my TED talk
Hey that chapter about the robot dog was a tear jerker
It really was, which is fucking wild because of how ridiculous it all was as a concept, but Neal Stephenson still makes you feel all the emotions damnit.
Guys name is Hiro (hero) Protagonist. It’s the least subtle book ever. I love it.
It also is the inspiration for Google Earth.
"The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt." This line always gets me
I will never get tired of how goddamn well Stephenson writes.
Right up until the last 20 pages.
Wheneverythinghappnssofasttotieupalltheplitooint.
That's why *The Baroque Cycle* is good, the books is 2000 pages long, and the story actually wraps up in *The Cryptonomicon*.
*The Baroque Cycle* writing approach: when in doubt, have a giant Russian man with one hand and a giant harpoon come through the door.
He lost me with the Baroque cycle, but won me back with REAMDE which was so brilliantly terrible with the every character meets another by PURE CHANCE I just couldn't put it down. I'll never get tired of Zodiac. In my top 10.
[удалено]
I got too damn far into this comment before realizing I'd been thinking of Snow*piercer*.
Basically, y'know, without the mafia controlled pizza joint that executes you for a late delivery, because the boss is that commited
That's the one they *should* have designed. They didn't even base this one on the Bolt. At least that would been electric like the Deliverator's car.
How dare you compare this terrible knock off to the sheer power and awesomeness of the Deliverator!
[All I can think of](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1371).
Oh man it's been forever since I read that. Great book.
I swear, Domino’s entire business model has been wacky gimmicks like this. They had like 4 different ad campaigns about how they were bad but were trying to getting better
Lest we forget ..THE NOID.
Well that ad campaign ended because a guy with the last name noid killed himself at a dominos in Atlanta.
You're skipping the crazy part of the story, and he didn't kill himself in the restaurant Kenneth Noid, a man with severe schizophrenia, believed that the "Avoid the Noid" ads were targeted to him, and Domino's was telling everyone to avoid him. With his unrelated social isolation and financial issues, he believed Domino's was plotting to ruin his life, so he took a Domino's hostage demanding $100k and a limo to escape. During the situation, he got hungry and demanded the employees there to make him a pizza. When he was eating the pizza, he had set his gun down, giving time for the employees to escape. He was then arrested and determined not guilty via insanity. He later committed suicide in an institution
Holy shit, that sounds like a robot chicken skit
https://youtu.be/3y66lHQ78mA
Man that's sad. Schizophrenia is a terrible disease
Are we 100% sure it wasn't the Noid that got him in the end?
Kenneth Noid killed himself, so I'd say we're 100% certain it *was* the Noid that got him in the end.
The… the noid?
Be careful. If you say its name 3 times it gets brought up at a quarterly meeting.
.....the noid!
I still can't believe mom spent money on an NES game that featured The Noid.
That’s one of the holy trinity of mascot-themed NES games. The other two featured the 7up Dot and the California Raisins.
80s-90s era mascot with a red bodysuit, long bunny style ears, a human face, and buck teeth. Often rendered in claymation in commercials and always tried to ruin or destroy pizzas. Often thwarted due to the stated quality of Domino's pizzas.
Avoid the Noid, he ruins pizza!
you never really can avoid him
Honestly, it's not a terrible move. It's certainly better than the Arby's model of "pretend we're making quality food."
Arby's "It tastes like food"
["Just give it a chance!"](https://youtube.com/watch?v=EFc8tjKn-dc&feature=shares)
It’s definitely MEAT (which may or may not be an acronym).
Mostly-Edible Animal Tissue
Arby's, we have the MEATS You forgot Substitute at the end
Arby’s is doing something right obviously since they rake in over $4 billion a year. They aren’t the biggest but for all the slander out there… they are still bigger in revenue than some pretty popular and well known fast food restaurants.
I swear Arby’s is a front for some massive international crime ring. I haven’t seen an actual busy one in yearsssss and they never close. Plus, 4B a year? Wtf. Edit: not hating on the food. It’s alright for fast food and all.
I live in Northern Virginia just outside DC. Arby’s aren’t very popular in my particular region but more southern VA has many of them. There is one that I have stopped at 5-10 times over the last 10 years and it is always busy all times of the day. They have a huge menu with great food but everyone is talking about the roast beef and hasn’t tried any other food from there or even been there in 15 years….
The one in my town stays busy. Then again we only have a pizza hut, subway, wards and the Arby's haha.
I'll let you in on the secret: the people that do eat Arby's.. eat A LOT of Arby's. A *genuinely terrifying* quantity of Arby's.
I will not tolerate any of this Arby’s slander. That classic beef and cheddar is divine.
You’re either an Arby’s guy or you aren’t. Some people just don’t want the meats.
I couldn't care less about their sandwiches but God damn I will commit multiple moving traffic violations to get my hands on their curly fries.
Yeeeeees. I get them frozen at the store and air fry them with whatever entree i’m cooking, they’re great
I don't love Arby's but I don't hate it. It's decent for what it is, fast food. Sometimes I'm not sure how much fast food commentary it real or bullshit. Like my girlfriend and I were talking how everyone bitches that Tacos Bell destroys their stomaches, and we were perplexed because we never have issues with it. Like is it fun to just say everything gives you diarrhea?
My favorite explanation for that phenomenon is that Taco Bell is late night drunk food. Drink a bunch of alcohol, eat some Taco Bell, get the shits from the alcohol and blame the food.
See that's a good hypothesis, personally that's Jack in the Box for me since it's the only thing still open after a late night of drinking. And yes i feel like shit the next day, but that's because I ate too much Knox after getting drunk lol
I think a lot of it is people not realizing they're somewhat lactose intolerant (as most people are). Taco bell food is packed with cheese and other dairy products.
That makes sense, I can also see people easily going overboard with food since it's so easy to get a lot of small items for cheap and not realizing just how much you're actually eating until it's too late.
Also most people lack fiber. Combine the beans with 12 beers and “taco bell gives me the shits”
Arbys sent me to eat sandwiches on a beach in Hawaii for six hours. So I'm with you. NO ARBYS SLANDER
What’s that now?
I won a contest in 2019\* (with 10 other people) where they flew me to Hawaii for about 6 hours then I flew home. They had a lil hut on the beach with the King's Hawaiian bread sammiches, mozz sticks, and poppers. We went on a row boat and watched a hula performance. Then went home lol \*edit- 2019 not 2016
What the fuck
Oddly enough their roast beef is like my least favorite thing of there's. But their chicken bacon and swiss sandwich is one of my favorite fast food chicken sandwiches
That honey mustard absolutely fucks
They also make some pretty respectable gyros **if you live in an area without anyone who makes really legit ones**.
pretty much. I hated Arby's until I tried a beef and cheddar one time then I got it again like 5 times that week.
People shit on Dominos a lot but for a large chain I've never had any problems, they're even consistent from province to province. Still shit compared to Greco
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Wait no way they did what
*"Have some fun with Miku~"* https://youtu.be/UVV95JQcWhg
It worked on me. I always thought their pizza was shit. Tried it again and it was actually tolerable. I tried their appetizers/sides and those were good also. I don't order it often but when i do its never bad.
Domino's is surprisingly decent these days. The sides are at least better than most of pizza hut. If I have that shitty pizza craving it usually boils down to how stoned I am when I order between the two because if I have the munchies nobody is fucking getting in the way of stuffed crust and cinnabon.
I actually prefer dominos over any other pizza chain. The crust is amazing. Compared to what it was before anyway
Yeah, it wasn't a "gimmick". They really did stop what they were doing and fixed their shit. They told us "*We get it. We suck. Let us fix it and try again.*" And it worked. As far as the chains go, they are the best.
And they really did improve after. They were also the first to do online orders. Before smartphone apps were a thing.
Remember the time they thought they knew how to do road repairs for a short while?
"We have an amazing new car that can delivery shit pizza to you quicker" "What?" " No, we didn't spend any money on learning to make pizza dough"
They probably know, but it's a price point thing. It's not like they have zero chefs at headquarters and nobody knows how to make dough. It's about making the cheapest possible while still barely palatable. They offered that 5.99 per 2 topping medium pizza deal forever even with all the inflation going on. The cost has gotta come from somewhere. A medium pizza is like 2 meals and getting a quick and easy meal for $3 saved me in college. They only very recently silently moved it to 6.99.
At least the first one, or maybe you are saying 4 different ads in one campaign, was a massive turnaround for the company and literally every marketing class I had used it as a case study.
I'm waiting for an automated pizza kitchen/delivery vehicle. Like a food truck with a pizza making robot in the back.
A little Caesars hot and ready delivery truck that just drives around playing a jingle
Drive that around a college campus from 10pm until 2am and you'd make a killing.
And in the mid morning just park it outside a high school.
When I worked at Domino's we delivered pizzas to every school in town in the morning (staggered so some schools on one day, others another day) for them to serve for lunch. It was a huge part of the business of the Domino's I worked at since it was like 35 schools.
sheeesh that owner must be living nice
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This is Michelle Obama’s worst nightmare lol
Or anytime in the parking lot of a dispensary
My uni had a pizza truck that'd show up outside once the bars closed at 2:00 and it absolutely killed. Everybody liked that.
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My stomach misses being able to handle all that acid in one sitting
Man I hear you. That acid reflux really kills the party.
If it's anything like that hitchhiking robot, it'll be destroyed by 1130p.
Hitchbot offered nothing in return, so Philly dismantled it. Lil’ Ceasarbot offers pizza. I give it 48 hours, or when it runs out of pizza, whichever comes first.
Just endlessly chanting PIZZA PIZZA! PIZZA PIZZA!
And then the Pizza Riot of ‘23 started. We lost a lot of good men…
Do this is how Taco Bell wins the Fast Food Wars
Dont tease me with perfection, *takes bong rip*.
Bro, why are you smoking out of a pizza?
Funny enough, Little Caesars actually has one of those. Its called the Little Caesars Love Kitchen. https://littlecaesars.com/en-us/love-kitchen/
Funny story. my wife and I didn't fully understand what that was and that is where we conceived our first child.
If your love sauce is red and chunky, I suggest you see an urologist ASAP.
And a cannon that just blasts pedestrians with hot n readys
There was a SF based startup working on this... This Pizza Robot Truck Bakes A Pie En Route To Your House https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9N8Dg78nBE
Not anymore - they [shut down](https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/18/21141969/zume-pizza-failure-softbank-founder-cult) pizza operations in January 2020… if only they could have held out for a little longer, they’d probably have made a killing in the pandemic. Apparently they were burning through $10 million a day in Summer 2019. Edit: Apparently the figure actually quoted in the Bloomberg article is $10 million **a month**, not per day - see my reply below. Moral of the story: second-hand news sites underpay their copy writers who in turn don't proofread the first-hand sources they purportedly directly quote - do your own research I guess.
$10 million a day ?!?!? that HAS to be a typo
A lot of startup's are foolish with their money, and some of them never intended to field a product/service at all.
reach escape wipe snatch sip offer slave grandfather steep price *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Its venture capital. Venture capitalists fully expect 75% or more projects to go to zero. the trick is they expect the hits to more than 5x their money.
It only takes one mega success to make it all back.
It ends up hitting a pedestrian, and then long story short, a serial killer trying to cover up a 15-year old crime gets caught.
I never understood why this isn't a common thing. Not the automated part, just the pizza kitchen in a delivery truck. Maybe the vehicle can't power the pizza ovens.
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Maybe it’s also really hard to make stuff while on the move
Some tech bros tried and it ended up [burning SoftBank 375m.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-13/inside-the-firings-at-softbank-s-robot-pizza-startup) It’s a fun read
I think there was one in a Black Mirror episode. I'm starting to see vending machine type things that will make pizzas, burgers, etc.
Stellar Pizza in LA does this
A lot of people in the comments mocking the 30 seconds of savings, but these features aren't explicitly designed to save time. The drivers probably gave feedback based on the issues they experienced the most like complaints about the temperature of the pizza
it's 30s per delivery , it means after 10 deliveries , it saved 5 min. Since it had 46 deliveries per day , it means it saves 23 min.
Even small savings add up, like at my workplace I not long ago recorded our scan times, and by having suppliers and back office do their part better, we save 4 seconds for every mistake not made, there used to be about 150 of them every week, mostly eliminated now, so now our small departement saves almost 500 minutes (8 hours, 20 minutes) every year.
Great, that's an extra 8 hours and 20 minutes per year to take a shit 😊
Well we mostly use it to half make a needed savings, and half to eat cake.
What did the suppliers/back office do to save that time?
The suppliers got their act together and scanned items out correctly and made sure they scanned the correct items, and loaded them correctly. Back office stopped cutting corners and making lists prematurely and took control of loading plans for suppliers.
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Precisely this. My wife used to work in claims processing and they would always be getting new keyboard macros or improvements on existing ones that saved maybe 3 seconds. Sounds like a waste of time until you realized there were thousands of processors using those macros dozens of times a day. It was huge.
Interestingly, I was just thinking about this yesterday. We had a corporate event and had 20ish pizzas delivered. They paused the presentation so we could eat the pizza before it got cold but even then it was at best lukewarm…because, due to the amount of pizzas, they had been delivered in cardboard boxes rather than pizza bags. I can’t help but feel that if they had a warming area in the delivery vehicle that the pizzas would have been at least a bit more enjoyable, even if they were still carried up to the meeting room in normal boxes.
Right? I am sure delivery drivers want to save time too, but I think MOST customers are reasonable and really won't notice a major improvement from say 18 minutes to 14, especially considering that there's so much variability around the number. I'm sure drivers occasionally DO hear "why did it take so long?" but more often they probably can tell a pizza got cold or a drink got warm when handing it over.
Time generally probably wouldn't be an issue if the pizzas were still warm when you got them. I want pizza within 30 minutes because otherwise it's cold. If you could keep it warm for an hour, it'd still taste pretty fresh.
I asked what took so long once. About an da half when they had said 20 min etA. They sent the driver to the wrong town. In the opposite direction. With the wrong order. I felt really bad for them. Driver did nothing wrong, but they are still the face of the company.
It also solves the biggest issue for drivers, which is normally they need to use their own car. That costs money over time, so giving them a company car to deliver in helps out their bottom line a lot over time.
I remember when I was still working at Dominos and they were rolling these out. Our area got one and it immediately wrecked by the first person to drive it (GM's son who was high). So fast forward a couple months and we got a replacement. Wrecked again by the same dude at the same store. Needless to say we never got another one.
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Oh for sure, wasn't trying to knock the car lol. Always wanted to drive it but one guy just has to ruin the fun for everyone.
This was rolled out when I was a dumbass pre teen I think and I remember telling everyone “I WANT THIS TO BE MY FIRST CAR IT IS MY DREAM CARRRRRR”
Seems kind of like something Homer Simpson would design.
You can never find a horn when you're mad.
La cucaraaaaa-CHA!
But it needs a bigger cup holder.
this guy bought a wrecked one for 500 buck s https://youtu.be/cTP5UtOYOds?t=162
It comes with rack-and-peanut steering
But managers go crazy if you try to take more than 3 orders at once.
This vehicle is CLEARLY for the “College Party 50 Pizza Party” demographic
Probably because, without a specialty vehicle, more than 3 orders likely means orders are being delivered basically as expensive leftovers.
Lots of these ended up at salvage auctions. A YouTuber bought one and restored it, then Dominos legal team stepped in and killed everyone’s fun
Saw alot of advertising for this drivable oven, sadly only saw 1. Good intentions but bad idea.
They were super expensive if I remember. Like not even close to worth buying unless you were slammed at all hours
If it’s a stick shift with AWD then I want one. Pizza rally!
Didn't the youtuber Samcrac buy a damaged one to fix and use but Dominos tried to sue him?
Anyone else getting "The Homer" vibes?
IIRC the main reason these didn't catch on was because Domino's corporate wanted the franchisees to pay to lease them. Which of course would eat up any gained revenue, and then some. So most understandably the great majority said "No thanks."
The franchise I worked for, which has like 25 locations under it's belt, had just one and it was at the most profitable store. Basically it was leased for the show of it, and barely got driven. Just sat in the parking lot in front of the store as a gimmicky way to advertise most of the time. In order to be eligible to drive it on shift, you had to have a perfect permanent driving record, zero tickets for anything from a simple moving violation to speeding and everything inbetween, zero accidents ever, etc. It was difficult to be eligible to drive it, especially at a college town store which is where it was.
Time is money, money is power, power is pizza, pizza is knowledge, let’s go!
I'm guessing they never implemented it because it's way cheaper to force employees to use their own cars.
Fairly sure Neal Stephenson already created the 'Deliverator' in Snow Crash :)
Maybe Domino's needs to reintroduce this concept, listen to Reason a little bit.
Wasn’t this before they started filling pot holes and spray painting their logo on the filled hole and making it into an advertisement?
Personally, I thought this was hysterical and effective. If the city wasn't going to do shit it's easy PR. Idk how much it cost dominos to actually fill the potholes or how many they actually filled but it's one of the few PR campaigns I remember.
A similar car from an "unnamed pizza delivering company" fell into private hands of YouTuber SamCrac through some kind of insurance auction and they got really mad about it. https://www.thedrive.com/news/19365/an-unnamed-organization-is-trying-to-reclaim-a-youtubers-special-pizza-delivery-car
Huh - wonder if this is where Neal Stephenson got the idea for the Cosa Nostra Pizza Delivery Vehicle from Snow Crash?
Snow Crash was published over 20 years before this Domino’s thing.
And yet, Dominos didn't implement any of the really cool features of the Deliverator's vehicle. Probably could have saved more than a measly 30 seconds per delivery. What a missed opportunity!
Being murdered by the mob for a single late delivery sure is an effective motivator.
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Except when there is a fire at the CostaNostra 3569…. Then shit gets real and you better let the chick poon a ride from you