Hell, even the existence of this post on HN is basically some confirmation that hail corporate bullshit slips past this crowd.
Don't buy the PR wank folks, this is just an ad masquerading as some noble effort.
This is email address harvesting for marketing pushes. It's also corporate PR.
This would be what I tell myself is a noble goal while working on this project.
>Is the primary objective sales?
Yes, but indirectly. Primary goal here is likely brand awareness and keeping the brand in the public consciousness for awhile.
They want people who notice that that one nasty pothole on their way to work is fixed thinking "Huh, I wonder if Domino's paid for that to be fixed."
This makes it sound as if there aren’t hard choices to be made and that budgets aren’t tight. Would you rather have smooth roads, clean water, or low taxes?
Road maintenance is expensive, and tends to get deferred because of lack of funds or more important priorities. This means that road maintenance gets even more expensive. People then like to criticize the city for not fixing things when it would have been cheaper.
We like the narrative that government is wasteful and stupid and has all the money it needs to maintain everything in the city. Sometimes it is lazy and stupid, but mostly (especially at the city level) it is not.
When there isn’t money to do work, the government doesn’t do work—even if there’s work to do. Until we allow enslavement of government workers, this will continue.
I make no accusations of stupidity or incompetence. My belief is more along the lines of the citizens have unrealistic expectations, e.g. how many miles of road their muni can actually afford to run & maintain for the taxes citizens are willing to pay.
You hit the nail on the head. I worked for a poor local government. The highway department was always the first on the chopping block, not because their issues weren't important, but because they were the only department with a significant amount of money.
The leadership here is another issue entirely, but every county in this area all had issues with money and the first thing that the board members asked was what roads could wait until next year.
The highway dept wanted to fix the roads so that they wouldn't need maintenance every few years, but they couldn't afford to do it to more than one road. So even though it is much worse band-aiding the roads that need work, it's better than not being able to do any work with them.
Then the cycle continues the next year.
Not only does the comment depict a complete lack of understanding of infrastructure in the US and the upkeep challenges, but it helps to magnify Domino's marketing by providing an effectively useless contribution to the discussion.
No, not really - it's more an indicator of how a lot of people in the US (myself included) have no idea how our tax dollars are spent, if they are spent wisely and if we're even paying the right amount in the first place.
Its our own damn fault, really. We let government slide on a lot of this stuff because we can't be arsed to demand accountability. If we do, then the first loudmouthed activist, polemicist or even vaguely interesting squirrel that wanders by captures our attention instead. Sometimes even the vicissitudes of daily life are too much of a distraction.
I don't know that I'd consider this ad wankery or noble effort - at least someone is trying something.
However, I'll deduct points for it being advertising. That stuff can burn in Hell.
I'm not buying this marketing as good at all. This kind of marketing shouldn't even work, because we should be a first-rate nation that actually maintains the infrastructure.