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What a bunch of management school BS. There is one piece of truth in this article- They started doing better because they finally improved their product after

by parsimo2010 6y ago

What a bunch of management school BS. There is one piece of truth in this article- They started doing better because they finally improved their product after years of cost optimization (read as shitty pizza). That's it. Better pizza = more sales. Keeping it around long enough and word gets out that Domino's is good again, which means more sales and growth. The rest of this article is fluff. The funny thing is that this article is written as if management saved the day by taking "a huge risk." Since when is fixing your shitty core product considered a huge risk? That's not a risk, that's a prerequisite! Domino's aren't currently delivering pizzas by drone or self-driving cars at significant scale, certainly not enough to affect their stock price. They aren't putting enough money into drones or self-driving cars to make investors think that they might have some head start- they will get self-driving delivery the same time as every other pizza company, because they will be buying the solution from another company that is selling to everyone. Domino's pizza tracking and online ordering is cool, but nobody orders Domino's because of it. Because regardless of their tech, they are just about on par with most pizza places when it comes to delivery times. Edit: want a "free pro stock tip" from me (/s)? Domino's is steady/level at ~$400 right now, but they were steady/level at ~$300 in 2018-2019. They got a 33% bump in price from the coronavirus. So 30x of the 90x bump this article brags about has nothing to do with management decisions. Once the Western world has gotten vaccinated, Domino's is not staying at $400. They may not go all the way back to $300, but they won't be keeping every customer once normal life resumes.

dralley 6y ago
Also, a massive marketing campaign around their "new and improved" pizza.
- ct0 6y ago
  The profit margin of a repeat customer is nearly unlimited.
  - ant6n 6y ago
    What does that mean?
jannyfer 6y ago
This article seems to be from 2018 and the 90x is from $2 to $180.
- parsimo2010 6y ago
  Well in that case, my edit is inaccurate but the main comment stands. I won't fix the edit so that people won't get confused by your comment. But I will rant that the article/blog doesn't have a publishing date at the top or bottom of the article, nor the URL. Plus, they don't seem to define a firm end date, they usually just referred to the present. So I'm not ashamed by not realizing the article was from 2018, because apparently the only way to pick that out is by noticing their stock chart cuts off in 2018 and they have no mention of current events.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    What you're missing out on is that the stock price of companies is largely based on perception, and not necessarily of reality. "Acting like a startup" gets you investor's money these days. See Nikola, Theranos, AMD, and more. They're not necessarily all bad products, but there's a lot of high-rollers who want to invest into risky companies. In effect: companies pretending that they're risky satisfies a market... a market to sell shares.
    - egman_ekki 6y ago
      AMD next to Theranos and Nikola? Would you care to elaborate? I might need to sell some shares...
      - dragontamer 6y ago
        AMD is a fine company but its stock price has been overtaken by hype. AMD currently doesn't have the capacity to grow its marketshare. Its only got so many TSMC slots. We're in a period where every chipmaker is selling out every single chip they make, but AMD still isn't making as much revenue as NVidia or Intel because they're simply capacity constrained. AMD will stick around for sure IMO, but they're not nearly as strong as their stock price makes them seem. With that being said, the Xilinx purchase (lolwut?) will put them in a stronger position. Frankly though, AMD has no business buying a behemoth like Xilinx. But... if their investors give them enough money, then sure, I guess its a good move.
soared 6y ago
Your criticism is definitely fair, but with retail investors there is a lot more value created by signaling your intent and direction. Pizza Hut would never ever consider talking about drone delivery, or real time order tracking. Dominos is embracing those technologies, meaning they’re open and quick to adopt change. That makes the company much more resilient (reduction in risk) and able to capitalize (larger upside). That is value. It’s comparable to Tesla’s stock price. Yeah the product is good etc, but Elon talks about going to Mars. Part of dominos growth is because they talk about “going to Mars”. To be clear, there is actual value or potential value in this, it’s not just posturing.
- linuxftw 6y ago
  No, it just means their management suffers from an inability to resist buzzwords and dumb ideas.
- petra 6y ago
  The value in talking is that it sometimes increases the stock price, and that has material benefits for companies. But besides the rise in stock price - talking has no value, in my opinion.
- dheera 6y ago
  Yup. Retail investors invest in hype, not fundamentals. It may sound like I'm trolling but this is pretty true across the market. If you want high stock prices, manufacture a bunch of hype. If you want to win in the stock market, figure out how to properly model and predict hype.
  - wolco2 6y ago
    The stock market is a popularity based platform where you try to figure out where the market is heading and go first. Fundamentals are important but they don't themselves drive the market because fundamentals are already known and should be factered in.
fullshark 6y ago
They took a huge risk working for Dominos instead of jumping off a sinking ship I guess.
itsoktocry 6y ago
I think you underestimate how hard it is to differentiate your product in what is essentially a commodity market. Most cities have a hundred pizza joints to order from, with quality and price being the only differentiator. That Dominoes was able to do that by branding might be "management school BS" (I love how tech people use that as a slur btw), but it has paid off for shareholders.
- rowanG077 6y ago
  They raised their quality and got more business. Literally the oldest path in the book. Domino's already has name recognition. They just needed to make their pizza actually good.
  - listenallyall 6y ago
    > They just needed to make their pizza actually good ...while staying competitive in an extremely price-sensitive market, and figuring out how to get it to your door faster and hotter than VC-backed delivery services can. Not so easy. "You can have it fast, cheap or good. Pick 2" -- it's so common, it's a cliche. Domino's does all 3.
- mythrwy 6y ago
  Many (all?) Domino's stores are independently owned franchises.
OminousWeapons 6y ago
I disagree with this. Yes it is true that they dramatically improved the state of their product which helped them substantially and that some of the novel delivery mechanisms are mainly PR hype, but I don't think it's fair to disregard all the work they have done at all levels to simplify the delivery process. Delivery from Dominoes is a seamless, reliable process. It is extremely easy to place orders however you want to place them; you can track the product through the stages of production and delivery in a highly granular way and be confident about when it will arrive; deliveries are fast, usually under 30 minutes; the product that is delivered always hits a certain level of quality in my experience; and you need basically zero interaction with a human to get it done. Contrast this with food delivery services like Doordash which take FOREVER (eg > 1 hour and frequently much longer than that); have unreliable tracking mechanisms and ETAs; result in food that usually arrives cold; are extremely expensive; always require interaction with a human; frequently result in mistakes; and have a dispute resolution process which basically involves Doordash et al saying not my problem or sorry but we don't give refunds, here's a 15% off coupon for your next order.
- krisroadruck 6y ago
  You must live next to an anomalous domino's location. My household orders 2x weekly, same order every time. Quality and delivery time varies wildly between orders, and the "tracker" is clearly an estimate rather than a true tracker. This has been true for years across several moves in several states around the country. Edit: Adding link to story where guy verifies tracker is not real - https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/i-staked-out-my-local-dominos-to-see-just-how-accurate-its-pizza-tracker-is https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/i-staked-out-my-local-do...
  - parasubvert 6y ago
    I think you’re the one getting bad luck, Dominos is incredibly consistent everywhere I’ve been. Also, the Dominos tracker is real. (I have some knowledge of their IT systems). It doesn’t estimate delivery times, it just tells you the state of the order. It’s up to employees to actually move the state along, so it isn’t perfect. But it is an actual tracker.
bonestamp2 6y ago
> That's it. Better pizza = more sales. I wish it were that simple. I mean, you can't have one without the other, but that's not the only important thing they did. The other really important thing they did was improve customer experience. Being able to order in whichever method has the least resistance for each customer is an important thing that shouldn't be ignored. They were the first pizza chain that made it possible to order by tweet, from your digital assistant, smart watch, etc. Then, after you order, they actually gave transparency into the order process, making more customers comfortable that the order had been received and was progressing. At the time, this level of transparency was missing from delivery -- there used to be this black hole between placing the order and receiving the delivery where you didn't know for sure if someone had actually seen your order come in. That improvement in trust was game changing and you know it's great because it seems so obvious after you see it.
- tlogan 6y ago
  I really think it is that simple. Better product will result in more sales: initially not so much but that extra profit you can spend on improving other component of the business. But who knows - maybe Applebee’s will become a great restaurant without improving their food.
  - bonestamp2 6y ago
    > maybe Applebee’s will become a great restaurant without improving their food That's not what I said though... I agreed that improving the product is important. But, just because you build a better mousetrap, that alone doesn't guarantee that customers will beat a path to your door. There are many examples of an inferior product becoming the defacto product in a category even though a better product exists. So, there must be something else to Dominoes story, and there is! There is other pizza that I like more than dominos, but I still order dominoes sometimes because they've taken away so much friction and sometimes that outweighs a better product -- when you're time/focus limited and also need to get your family's dinner on the table. But, the product still needs to be good for that to work. Dominoes won because they did both.
bko 6y ago
I order Domino's around once a month. The reason I order them is because they're incredibly cheap ($8 medium pies with 3 toppings, at least half the price of local pizza shops), ease of use (online purchase is seamless), tracking (you can see the stage it is in) and consistency. Pizza to me is more or less a commodity product as I'm sure it is with a lot of Americans All of these reasons are driven by technology. The process is automated so it runs very efficiently and with minimal human intervention. No person has to constantly be opening the oven to see the progress being made, which lowers the temperature of the oven and leads to inconsistency, and takes longer. The app is nice and most importantly the product is consistent. I think once I got received a pizza with a missing topping, but didn't follow up on it.
- thinkloop 6y ago
  Somehow my $8 pizza always ends up $20
  - smhost 6y ago
    it's the chocolate lava cake
    - hansvm 6y ago
      Taxes, delivery fees, and tips will add another $7 even without sides or extras.
  - pc86 6y ago
    Maybe, if you can find a place that will deliver you a more-or-less similar quality pizza without the delivery fee, tax, or tip. But you can't. Yeah you can pick up a $10 pizza from a mom & pop that will arguably be better pizza, but nobody orders Dominoes for good pizza, they order it for consistency and convenience. If you compare apples to apples you're paying $8 for a reasonably acceptable pizza.
- superkuh 6y ago
  Until the pandemic happened I would order from Dominos every time their email list sent me a notification that there was a deal for a large 2 topping pizza under $7 with in-store pickup. That was about once every 2 months. Nothing mattered except the price. When the pandemic started I stopped eating food prepared and handled by random people. I am surprised to see in these threads that so many people started ordering food prepared and handled by other people.
function_seven 6y ago
I see sibling comments saying the same thing, so in the interest of during anecdotes into data, I’ll pile on. First, I largely agree with what you wrote. The core improvement is significant and was also not “risky” or “daring”. But: > Domino's pizza tracking and online ordering is cool, but nobody orders Domino's because of it. I do! Their app is executed beautifully, and is much nicer than phone orders where I hope my crazy order is interpreted correctly. It’s also better than the thinly-wrapped web pages from competitors. And getting a heads up when the driver left the store allows me to shoo the dogs outside. Seems like a small thing, but it makes a difference.
- bigyikes 6y ago
  Your comment convinced me to download their app and give it a try for lunch. Apparently delivery is not available in my area. The nearest Dominos is 2.5 miles away. I am deleting this app now. Edit: Yeah I know this probably doesn’t have to do with the app itself, but it’s mildly infuriating anyway Edit 2: I don’t think it is due to Covid because they are advertising contactless delivery and I can also walk into their store right now. Also, I recall having this same problem 1 year ago. I think the real explanation is that I live in a relatively new (2 year old) community and they haven’t bothered to update their delivery address database. I thought 2.5 miles was close enough, and 2 years was long enough to get a database update. I don’t really know, though. My point, to clarify, is that this isn’t a very good user experience. Here’s a constructive suggestion: tell me why you won’t deliver, because otherwise we’re left to guess in the HN comments. Sorry if my comment came off as shallow and dismissive.
  - savanaly 6y ago
    It's probably because of Covid-19. I have been getting domino's delivered for years, but all the stores that normally would do have been "not available for delivery" in 2020. I'm not really sure I understand this-- surely there's not more risk to the driver in delivering to you than in you coming to get it yourself, which they definitely still support. Maybe it's because their delivery drivers can't share cars anymore or something.
  - 6y ago
908B64B197 6y ago
> Domino's pizza tracking and online ordering is cool, but nobody orders Domino's because of it. I disagree. Ordering from your local pizza place (pre Uber Eats) usually meant ordering from the default options because there was no way you could get a custom order in without having some sort of mix-ups. And good luck if you tried to order to a non-standard location (like a college campus building). Ordering from the website removed all these issues, plus you could pay with a credit card beforehand so no cash transactions required. This combined with > Keeping it around long enough and word gets out that Domino's is good again, which means more sales and growth. and the ubiquity of Domino's locations made it the default option in many cases. It was good enough that it wasn't worth it to see if the local pizza place was better.
jakear 6y ago
One more vote against “nobody orders because of the app”, back in college ordering Dominoes (or Daaahhmmss, as we were more likely to refer to it at the time), was the go-to purely because of the app. It saved each of our favorite orders, our payment methods, and our locations. Thus it was trivial to make complicated purchases even N drinks into the night. No other pizza provider came close to that level of simplicity. Hell, barely any software in general receives the esteemed “can you use this while totally blasted” UX certification.
didibus 6y ago
I didn't read the article, I just want to say the online ordering app is why I started using dominos again, it's just a nicer customer experience. I never heard the pizza used to be bad, and got better, that said, had the pizza been bad after ordering from the app I wouldn't have ordered again. So a combination of better customer experience in ordering and delivery, and good enough pizza did it for me.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
> Better pizza = more sales. Keeping it around long enough and word gets out that Domino's is good again That's not how it went down, and that's not how these things work. The Domino's brand value was in the gutter and would've taken forever to recover - management had to greenlight an absolutely massive advertising campaign to let people know about the new improved product, which is the only reason you know about it. They spent a ton of money and there's a chance it might not have worked. The prevailing theory at the time was that people don't give a shit about fast food quality, they just want food that's fast and affordable to shut the kids up for a bit. Cost cutting and squeezing every last penny out of the margins is the logical call in that environment, but management was competent enough to recognize there might be an untapped market for better tasting corporate chain pizza, and they were right. The article is overvaluing fluff like drones and self driving, but you're undervaluing their investments in streamlining the ordering process online and via the app. Arguably, they were the first major pizza company to really nail it, and it's paid off in spades. It used to be universally horrible everywhere, so everyone would still call in all their orders, and young people loathe picking up the phone.
- saurik 6y ago
  > The prevailing theory at the time was that people don't give a shit about fast food quality, they just want food that's fast and affordable to shut the kids up for a bit. But no one could possibly have believed this was true, right? Other "corporate pizza chains" it competed with were fine... Domino's pizza wasn't. As a college student, I heard--and participated in--people calling for "anything but Domino's" many many times. There is 100% a market for "food in the shape of Pizza that is as cheap as possible", but Domino's pushes that boundary really hard and for anyone to have believed that that market was anywhere near the size of the addressable corporate pizza market size ignored both common sense and the reality that their competitors seemed to exist and sell pizza (despite it being slightly more expensive).
  - _rutinerad 6y ago
    People believed that everyone would be using a netbook by now.
nunez 6y ago
I disagree. Domino’s is actually throwing quite a lot of money and effort at their tech strategy. This is reflected in their app, (amazing) website, and a (still nascent, but still improving) tech culture that didn’t exist before. NOTE: I don’t work at Domino’s, and I haven’t used their services in over a year. Understand that quick-serve restaurants are typically as conservative as retail when it comes to anything not core product because of their low margins. I do agree that Domino’s has done quite a lot to cost-optimize their product, including significant investments in line automation and process improvements. If you need proof, tell me another pizza quick-serve that has a Terraform provider for ordering pizza: https://github.com/ndmckinley/terraform-provider-dominos https://github.com/ndmckinley/terraform-provider-dominos And they’re running AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dominos/case-study/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dominos/case-s... And from what I can tell Kubernetes based off of some headers from their store locator service. Now, other, not-Dominos, companies are making some/all of these moves. Using the tech is easy. It’s Domino’s commitment to reduce delivery times to 10 minutes from first order that makes them different. Management realized that they would need a massive investment in tech to make this happen. So they microserviced their API and worked on the delivery process. That is worth giving them some credit.
dangerboysteve 6y ago
I would also add the large backlash against Papa John's ex-Founder which helped move some customers over to Dominos. But everything you pointed out was spot on.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
2012 was the switch in advertising back to the original. It's pretty dramatic on the sales chart.
listenallyall 6y ago
You are revealing your own lack of understanding. I'll agree there's some fluff in the article and it is selectively edited after-the-fact. But dismissing the concepts here is naive. > Domino's aren't currently delivering pizzas by drone or self-driving cars But it gets them a ton of free publicity -- even better than paid advertising. And it gets into your subconscious -- the idea that Domino's really cares about getting you a hot pizza, and is actively developing technology to make that happen, certainly more than any of the competition. "Hot" (or lack thereof) is likely the attribute most-highly correlated with customer satisfaction vs disappointment, so this is huge. > Domino's pizza tracking and online ordering is cool, but nobody orders Domino's because of it. Yes, plenty do. It adds accountability and transparency to a rather chaotic process. Would you continue to use Fedex if they got rid of all tracking numbers? When Domino's delivers as promised, and the transaction went smoothly, and all the steps along the way were displayed, people remember it -- especially the next time they want a pizza. > they finally improved their product after years of cost optimization. Better pizza = more sales So if they stopped optimizing costs, how do their prices stay super-competitive? Better pizza doesn't translate to more sales if it also means higher prices

dralley 6y ago

Also, a massive marketing campaign around their "new and improved" pizza.

ct0 6y ago
The profit margin of a repeat customer is nearly unlimited.
- ant6n 6y ago
  What does that mean?

jannyfer 6y ago

This article seems to be from 2018 and the 90x is from $2 to $180.

parsimo2010 6y ago
Well in that case, my edit is inaccurate but the main comment stands. I won't fix the edit so that people won't get confused by your comment. But I will rant that the article/blog doesn't have a publishing date at the top or bottom of the article, nor the URL. Plus, they don't seem to define a firm end date, they usually just referred to the present. So I'm not ashamed by not realizing the article was from 2018, because apparently the only way to pick that out is by noticing their stock chart cuts off in 2018 and they have no mention of current events.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  What you're missing out on is that the stock price of companies is largely based on perception, and not necessarily of reality. "Acting like a startup" gets you investor's money these days. See Nikola, Theranos, AMD, and more. They're not necessarily all bad products, but there's a lot of high-rollers who want to invest into risky companies. In effect: companies pretending that they're risky satisfies a market... a market to sell shares.
  - egman_ekki 6y ago
    AMD next to Theranos and Nikola? Would you care to elaborate? I might need to sell some shares...
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      AMD is a fine company but its stock price has been overtaken by hype. AMD currently doesn't have the capacity to grow its marketshare. Its only got so many TSMC slots. We're in a period where every chipmaker is selling out every single chip they make, but AMD still isn't making as much revenue as NVidia or Intel because they're simply capacity constrained. AMD will stick around for sure IMO, but they're not nearly as strong as their stock price makes them seem. With that being said, the Xilinx purchase (lolwut?) will put them in a stronger position. Frankly though, AMD has no business buying a behemoth like Xilinx. But... if their investors give them enough money, then sure, I guess its a good move.

soared 6y ago

Your criticism is definitely fair, but with retail investors there is a lot more value created by signaling your intent and direction. Pizza Hut would never ever consider talking about drone delivery, or real time order tracking. Dominos is embracing those technologies, meaning they’re open and quick to adopt change. That makes the company much more resilient (reduction in risk) and able to capitalize (larger upside). That is value. It’s comparable to Tesla’s stock price. Yeah the product is good etc, but Elon talks about going to Mars. Part of dominos growth is because they talk about “going to Mars”. To be clear, there is actual value or potential value in this, it’s not just posturing.

linuxftw 6y ago
No, it just means their management suffers from an inability to resist buzzwords and dumb ideas.
petra 6y ago
The value in talking is that it sometimes increases the stock price, and that has material benefits for companies. But besides the rise in stock price - talking has no value, in my opinion.
dheera 6y ago
Yup. Retail investors invest in hype, not fundamentals. It may sound like I'm trolling but this is pretty true across the market. If you want high stock prices, manufacture a bunch of hype. If you want to win in the stock market, figure out how to properly model and predict hype.
- wolco2 6y ago
  The stock market is a popularity based platform where you try to figure out where the market is heading and go first. Fundamentals are important but they don't themselves drive the market because fundamentals are already known and should be factered in.

fullshark 6y ago

They took a huge risk working for Dominos instead of jumping off a sinking ship I guess.

itsoktocry 6y ago

I think you underestimate how hard it is to differentiate your product in what is essentially a commodity market. Most cities have a hundred pizza joints to order from, with quality and price being the only differentiator. That Dominoes was able to do that by branding might be "management school BS" (I love how tech people use that as a slur btw), but it has paid off for shareholders.

rowanG077 6y ago
They raised their quality and got more business. Literally the oldest path in the book. Domino's already has name recognition. They just needed to make their pizza actually good.
- listenallyall 6y ago
  > They just needed to make their pizza actually good ...while staying competitive in an extremely price-sensitive market, and figuring out how to get it to your door faster and hotter than VC-backed delivery services can. Not so easy. "You can have it fast, cheap or good. Pick 2" -- it's so common, it's a cliche. Domino's does all 3.
mythrwy 6y ago
Many (all?) Domino's stores are independently owned franchises.

OminousWeapons 6y ago

I disagree with this. Yes it is true that they dramatically improved the state of their product which helped them substantially and that some of the novel delivery mechanisms are mainly PR hype, but I don't think it's fair to disregard all the work they have done at all levels to simplify the delivery process. Delivery from Dominoes is a seamless, reliable process. It is extremely easy to place orders however you want to place them; you can track the product through the stages of production and delivery in a highly granular way and be confident about when it will arrive; deliveries are fast, usually under 30 minutes; the product that is delivered always hits a certain level of quality in my experience; and you need basically zero interaction with a human to get it done. Contrast this with food delivery services like Doordash which take FOREVER (eg > 1 hour and frequently much longer than that); have unreliable tracking mechanisms and ETAs; result in food that usually arrives cold; are extremely expensive; always require interaction with a human; frequently result in mistakes; and have a dispute resolution process which basically involves Doordash et al saying not my problem or sorry but we don't give refunds, here's a 15% off coupon for your next order.

krisroadruck 6y ago
You must live next to an anomalous domino's location. My household orders 2x weekly, same order every time. Quality and delivery time varies wildly between orders, and the "tracker" is clearly an estimate rather than a true tracker. This has been true for years across several moves in several states around the country. Edit: Adding link to story where guy verifies tracker is not real - https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/i-staked-out-my-local-dominos-to-see-just-how-accurate-its-pizza-tracker-is https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/i-staked-out-my-local-do...
- parasubvert 6y ago
  I think you’re the one getting bad luck, Dominos is incredibly consistent everywhere I’ve been. Also, the Dominos tracker is real. (I have some knowledge of their IT systems). It doesn’t estimate delivery times, it just tells you the state of the order. It’s up to employees to actually move the state along, so it isn’t perfect. But it is an actual tracker.

bonestamp2 6y ago

> That's it. Better pizza = more sales. I wish it were that simple. I mean, you can't have one without the other, but that's not the only important thing they did. The other really important thing they did was improve customer experience. Being able to order in whichever method has the least resistance for each customer is an important thing that shouldn't be ignored. They were the first pizza chain that made it possible to order by tweet, from your digital assistant, smart watch, etc. Then, after you order, they actually gave transparency into the order process, making more customers comfortable that the order had been received and was progressing. At the time, this level of transparency was missing from delivery -- there used to be this black hole between placing the order and receiving the delivery where you didn't know for sure if someone had actually seen your order come in. That improvement in trust was game changing and you know it's great because it seems so obvious after you see it.

tlogan 6y ago
I really think it is that simple. Better product will result in more sales: initially not so much but that extra profit you can spend on improving other component of the business. But who knows - maybe Applebee’s will become a great restaurant without improving their food.
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  > maybe Applebee’s will become a great restaurant without improving their food That's not what I said though... I agreed that improving the product is important. But, just because you build a better mousetrap, that alone doesn't guarantee that customers will beat a path to your door. There are many examples of an inferior product becoming the defacto product in a category even though a better product exists. So, there must be something else to Dominoes story, and there is! There is other pizza that I like more than dominos, but I still order dominoes sometimes because they've taken away so much friction and sometimes that outweighs a better product -- when you're time/focus limited and also need to get your family's dinner on the table. But, the product still needs to be good for that to work. Dominoes won because they did both.

bko 6y ago

I order Domino's around once a month. The reason I order them is because they're incredibly cheap ($8 medium pies with 3 toppings, at least half the price of local pizza shops), ease of use (online purchase is seamless), tracking (you can see the stage it is in) and consistency. Pizza to me is more or less a commodity product as I'm sure it is with a lot of Americans All of these reasons are driven by technology. The process is automated so it runs very efficiently and with minimal human intervention. No person has to constantly be opening the oven to see the progress being made, which lowers the temperature of the oven and leads to inconsistency, and takes longer. The app is nice and most importantly the product is consistent. I think once I got received a pizza with a missing topping, but didn't follow up on it.

thinkloop 6y ago
Somehow my $8 pizza always ends up $20
- smhost 6y ago
  it's the chocolate lava cake
  - hansvm 6y ago
    Taxes, delivery fees, and tips will add another $7 even without sides or extras.
- pc86 6y ago
  Maybe, if you can find a place that will deliver you a more-or-less similar quality pizza without the delivery fee, tax, or tip. But you can't. Yeah you can pick up a $10 pizza from a mom & pop that will arguably be better pizza, but nobody orders Dominoes for good pizza, they order it for consistency and convenience. If you compare apples to apples you're paying $8 for a reasonably acceptable pizza.
superkuh 6y ago
Until the pandemic happened I would order from Dominos every time their email list sent me a notification that there was a deal for a large 2 topping pizza under $7 with in-store pickup. That was about once every 2 months. Nothing mattered except the price. When the pandemic started I stopped eating food prepared and handled by random people. I am surprised to see in these threads that so many people started ordering food prepared and handled by other people.

function_seven 6y ago

I see sibling comments saying the same thing, so in the interest of during anecdotes into data, I’ll pile on. First, I largely agree with what you wrote. The core improvement is significant and was also not “risky” or “daring”. But: > Domino's pizza tracking and online ordering is cool, but nobody orders Domino's because of it. I do! Their app is executed beautifully, and is much nicer than phone orders where I hope my crazy order is interpreted correctly. It’s also better than the thinly-wrapped web pages from competitors. And getting a heads up when the driver left the store allows me to shoo the dogs outside. Seems like a small thing, but it makes a difference.

bigyikes 6y ago
Your comment convinced me to download their app and give it a try for lunch. Apparently delivery is not available in my area. The nearest Dominos is 2.5 miles away. I am deleting this app now. Edit: Yeah I know this probably doesn’t have to do with the app itself, but it’s mildly infuriating anyway Edit 2: I don’t think it is due to Covid because they are advertising contactless delivery and I can also walk into their store right now. Also, I recall having this same problem 1 year ago. I think the real explanation is that I live in a relatively new (2 year old) community and they haven’t bothered to update their delivery address database. I thought 2.5 miles was close enough, and 2 years was long enough to get a database update. I don’t really know, though. My point, to clarify, is that this isn’t a very good user experience. Here’s a constructive suggestion: tell me why you won’t deliver, because otherwise we’re left to guess in the HN comments. Sorry if my comment came off as shallow and dismissive.
- savanaly 6y ago
  It's probably because of Covid-19. I have been getting domino's delivered for years, but all the stores that normally would do have been "not available for delivery" in 2020. I'm not really sure I understand this-- surely there's not more risk to the driver in delivering to you than in you coming to get it yourself, which they definitely still support. Maybe it's because their delivery drivers can't share cars anymore or something.
- 6y ago

908B64B197 6y ago

> Domino's pizza tracking and online ordering is cool, but nobody orders Domino's because of it. I disagree. Ordering from your local pizza place (pre Uber Eats) usually meant ordering from the default options because there was no way you could get a custom order in without having some sort of mix-ups. And good luck if you tried to order to a non-standard location (like a college campus building). Ordering from the website removed all these issues, plus you could pay with a credit card beforehand so no cash transactions required. This combined with > Keeping it around long enough and word gets out that Domino's is good again, which means more sales and growth. and the ubiquity of Domino's locations made it the default option in many cases. It was good enough that it wasn't worth it to see if the local pizza place was better.

jakear 6y ago

One more vote against “nobody orders because of the app”, back in college ordering Dominoes (or Daaahhmmss, as we were more likely to refer to it at the time), was the go-to purely because of the app. It saved each of our favorite orders, our payment methods, and our locations. Thus it was trivial to make complicated purchases even N drinks into the night. No other pizza provider came close to that level of simplicity. Hell, barely any software in general receives the esteemed “can you use this while totally blasted” UX certification.

didibus 6y ago

I didn't read the article, I just want to say the online ordering app is why I started using dominos again, it's just a nicer customer experience. I never heard the pizza used to be bad, and got better, that said, had the pizza been bad after ordering from the app I wouldn't have ordered again. So a combination of better customer experience in ordering and delivery, and good enough pizza did it for me.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago

> Better pizza = more sales. Keeping it around long enough and word gets out that Domino's is good again That's not how it went down, and that's not how these things work. The Domino's brand value was in the gutter and would've taken forever to recover - management had to greenlight an absolutely massive advertising campaign to let people know about the new improved product, which is the only reason you know about it. They spent a ton of money and there's a chance it might not have worked. The prevailing theory at the time was that people don't give a shit about fast food quality, they just want food that's fast and affordable to shut the kids up for a bit. Cost cutting and squeezing every last penny out of the margins is the logical call in that environment, but management was competent enough to recognize there might be an untapped market for better tasting corporate chain pizza, and they were right. The article is overvaluing fluff like drones and self driving, but you're undervaluing their investments in streamlining the ordering process online and via the app. Arguably, they were the first major pizza company to really nail it, and it's paid off in spades. It used to be universally horrible everywhere, so everyone would still call in all their orders, and young people loathe picking up the phone.

saurik 6y ago
> The prevailing theory at the time was that people don't give a shit about fast food quality, they just want food that's fast and affordable to shut the kids up for a bit. But no one could possibly have believed this was true, right? Other "corporate pizza chains" it competed with were fine... Domino's pizza wasn't. As a college student, I heard--and participated in--people calling for "anything but Domino's" many many times. There is 100% a market for "food in the shape of Pizza that is as cheap as possible", but Domino's pushes that boundary really hard and for anyone to have believed that that market was anywhere near the size of the addressable corporate pizza market size ignored both common sense and the reality that their competitors seemed to exist and sell pizza (despite it being slightly more expensive).
- _rutinerad 6y ago
  People believed that everyone would be using a netbook by now.

nunez 6y ago

I disagree. Domino’s is actually throwing quite a lot of money and effort at their tech strategy. This is reflected in their app, (amazing) website, and a (still nascent, but still improving) tech culture that didn’t exist before. NOTE: I don’t work at Domino’s, and I haven’t used their services in over a year. Understand that quick-serve restaurants are typically as conservative as retail when it comes to anything not core product because of their low margins. I do agree that Domino’s has done quite a lot to cost-optimize their product, including significant investments in line automation and process improvements. If you need proof, tell me another pizza quick-serve that has a Terraform provider for ordering pizza: https://github.com/ndmckinley/terraform-provider-dominos https://github.com/ndmckinley/terraform-provider-dominos And they’re running AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dominos/case-study/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dominos/case-s... And from what I can tell Kubernetes based off of some headers from their store locator service. Now, other, not-Dominos, companies are making some/all of these moves. Using the tech is easy. It’s Domino’s commitment to reduce delivery times to 10 minutes from first order that makes them different. Management realized that they would need a massive investment in tech to make this happen. So they microserviced their API and worked on the delivery process. That is worth giving them some credit.

dangerboysteve 6y ago

I would also add the large backlash against Papa John's ex-Founder which helped move some customers over to Dominos. But everything you pointed out was spot on.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago

2012 was the switch in advertising back to the original. It's pretty dramatic on the sales chart.

listenallyall 6y ago

You are revealing your own lack of understanding. I'll agree there's some fluff in the article and it is selectively edited after-the-fact. But dismissing the concepts here is naive. > Domino's aren't currently delivering pizzas by drone or self-driving cars But it gets them a ton of free publicity -- even better than paid advertising. And it gets into your subconscious -- the idea that Domino's really cares about getting you a hot pizza, and is actively developing technology to make that happen, certainly more than any of the competition. "Hot" (or lack thereof) is likely the attribute most-highly correlated with customer satisfaction vs disappointment, so this is huge. > Domino's pizza tracking and online ordering is cool, but nobody orders Domino's because of it. Yes, plenty do. It adds accountability and transparency to a rather chaotic process. Would you continue to use Fedex if they got rid of all tracking numbers? When Domino's delivers as promised, and the transaction went smoothly, and all the steps along the way were displayed, people remember it -- especially the next time they want a pizza. > they finally improved their product after years of cost optimization. Better pizza = more sales So if they stopped optimizing costs, how do their prices stay super-competitive? Better pizza doesn't translate to more sales if it also means higher prices