Explanation of the Domino's Pizza tracker | Hacker News Reader

Explanation of the Domino's Pizza tracker

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133 pointsdanso78 comments

> But if someone is trying to game the system to make corporate believe they get everything done in record time, they can control the system to fake the times.

I find this so incredibly annoying. KFC and McDonald's near me have screens up saying when your order is being "prepared" and when it is "ready to collect", except the "ready to collect" column is totally useless because they always put it in "ready to collect" long before it is actually ready to collect.

I think this is a side effect of "what is measured is managed", combined with people always trying to game systems. If you establish a system to measure how fast people make meals you're just going to get false estimates. The solution I've seen is to trust and then actually manage people if they aren't doing well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Workers are instructed that they must get order times down. What's the best way to do that? Simply marking the order as done whether it is done or not. Numbers are soon looking good and the bosses are happy. Sure the customers aren't, but that was never the metric they were asked to track.

A Pizza shop near me recently got terminated by the franchise for faking their pizza delivery times to collect bonuses. It's only a matter of time before somebody is jailed for pizza delivery fraud.

I noticed the same thing at a Burger King here in Stockholm, Sweden. Very annoying to go to the counter and realize that your "ready" order is far from being so.

I think people fail to recognize how much of everything now is an internet connected computer. This was true at McDonald’s 15 years ago. A bunch of Windows XP embedded machines at various stations(Fries, Salads, Sandwiches, Desserts) getting routed their individual components.

In more recent years it’s gone WAY WAY past that level of complexity. Dual lane drive thrus? They have cameras and track which car is which to try and keep orders straight. All of this data feeds into a system so management has a clearer and clearer idea of what’s actually happening in the stores.

In a smaller operation like a Dominos it’s super easy to cheat and bump everything off, but once you have any real volume it becomes unmanageable.

I'm actually honestly surprised how FEW errors McDonalds has with those dual order drive throughs feeding into a single line.

In my experience, it's extremely common for the operator to select the wrong lane when they're talking to me over the speaker, because I can see my order pop up on the other speaker while my screen stays blank. It seems that the speaker system is totally independent of the screens, probably for redundancy so that they can still take orders if the screens malfunction.

Sometimes the person talking to you isn't in the store, they're at a call center for lack of a better word.

I heard they were testing it at high volume locations and I assume they rolled it out somewhere by now.

This was in Canada, and it definitely wasn't high volume or taken from a call centre. If I'm going to McDonald's, it's usually at midnight when there's nothing else open, and there's only one drive-through lane open anyway. And the person on the speaker is the same one who hands me my food.

Not sure about McDonalds but we have a local car wash with a dual lane system. The operator has to select an image taken of the front of the car right before it enters the wash (it's not very high tech)

I wonder how many people wouldn’t even notice if they got the “wrong wash”.

True but the high $$ wash has rainbow foam that rains down ;)

The cars are mostly in the same order as the food orders, and the cashier can easily swap orders around in the queue if they are out of sequence.

Check out the stories that have been shared here about Chick-fil-a too.

> In a smaller operation like a Dominos it’s super easy to cheat and bump everything off, but once you have any real volume it becomes unmanageable.

Not really. During dinner rushes, a store averaging ~100 pizzas/hr (+ sides) can't bump an order off if they didn't prepare it yet. You simply can't remember all of that information, and once you mark it as complete you have to pull it off the order history or refer to receipts. Trying to do that would be insanely hard.

Most often, stores will bump things off as they're prepared. With good employees on line, things will be prepared much quicker than they go through the oven. Continuing to bump them off although they aren't put in the oven yet, that can contribute to inaccurate times since the system assumes that the moment it's bumped it's put in the oven.

Fun fact: Domino's Australia is the R&D capital for Domino's worldwide. All the latest tech gets developed and tested here. Surprised they haven't rolled out their tech worldwide yet...

All stores have a DRU Pizza Checker (AI powered camera to check every pizza as it comes out of the oven)[1][2].

Some stores in the state of Queensland even have automated DOM robots to deliver pizzas[3] and even drones[4].

Source: Worked closely with Domino's in an old job (not employed by Domino's). Their office was super fun to navigate through with robotics engineers, software developers and more working on some impressive stuff.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp0Tc7hyNKw [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciakelso/2020/07/01/dominos-... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb0nxQyv7RU [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BrrUU7YO08

You can also just look at the patent to see how it works...

https://patents.google.com/patent/US10262281B1/en

Funny to see Snubs on here. Shout out to Hak5, been following them since the beginning, even visited the hack house back in like 2008 I think.

I’ve noticed my local McDonalds fakes their prep times by pretending all the orders are “ready to collect” (then immediately marked as collected) on the system way before they’re ready.

As a customer it’s really annoying because you go up to collect it and are told (as if it’s your fault) to go away and they’ll call you.

I wonder who I could complain to? Presumably the local manager is actually in on it so they look good to head office.

https://mrshll.uk/2021/10/12/thick-description-pizzas/

More in-depth presentation of the same subject matter.

Better readability -

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1630220894919598080.html

Thank you, I was just wondering a few days ago how it worked - if it was all an approximation, manual inputs, or some level of automation.

Time for an anecdote; Years ago, when the pizza tracker was new, I worked on a team that deployed/managed bare metal and physical Linux hosts. Someone higher up got excited about it and then we had to have discussions about having a "pizza tracker" for our server deploy process. Fun times...

Shout out to my man Jacob at the Renton Domino’s.

Tracker is always accurate and the pizza is always good.

For my small family, domino’s (using coupons) is a great option.

My wife loves the gluten free pizza.

Oh yeah. I order one 2 topping large pizza a week, for $5.50. Three lunches.

I thought it was GPS

That's just the last part when the pizza is out for delivery. The steps before that all happen in the store.

The Domino pizza tracker states are "preparing", "baking," "quality check," and "out for delivery" or "ready for pickup." You can't track your delivery driver.

oh yes you can. I watched my delivery driver make the journey via map on the order tracker just two weeks ago.

Reminds me of webshit weekly, “dominos, business plan Uber for pizza”.

I miss hacker news weekly so badly :(

I always thought UPS intentionally obfuscated the live delivery tracker to prevent people from following their package around with their car and demanding it from driver before allocated delivery time

The part about the ovens all running at the same time is funny to me.

10 years from now when some new type of tech is discovered that will let pizza cook faster some lonely programmer somewhere will have to find all the places it was hard coded.

The pizza ovens at this scale are massive industrial conveyer belts: the bake time is the time it takes the conveyer to move from the start of the oven to the end of the oven. The length of the conveyer belt is influenced by the number of pizzas (and other baked goods such as pastas, wings, and baked desserts) they want to be able to bake in somewhat parallel (obviously it is something more like a queue, but there's a major overlap in baking times of consequent items). The speed of the conveyer belt is influenced by operator safety concerns and also avoiding the "Lucy and Ethel backup problem" (from the famous episode of I Love Lucy about the conveyer belt at the chocolate factory).

In many ways, at this industrial scale of oven the pizza recipes (and pasta recipes and wing types and baked desserts and everything else sent through the oven) are calibrated specifically to the bake times of the chosen oven conveyer belt length and speed rather than the other way around.

(Which isn't to suggest that such ovens don't get redesigned from time to time, but that's likely a large enough project that Tracker programmer has plenty of lead time.)

The conveyer pizza ovens I've seen had configurable speeds and temps on them, though nobody ever touched them. I always assumed it was for different altitudes. So the tracker program likely already expects configurable times.

I've seen similar controls on conveyor toasters, and seen conveyor pizza ovens in operation. If you really wanted to adjust the temperature/speed for a particular item, you'd need to leave a gap before and after that item (or group of that items, I guess), and that would ruin your throughput. You really want everything to cook at the same temperature and the same speed. Or you need multiple pipelines, one for each temperature and speed.

Adjusting for a particular item is nearly impossible, but an oven somewhere like Denver might have a different configured speed and temperature than an oven in Texas.

I've seen a pizza place where they had two different speed ovens, one was for the simple pizzas and the other was for more complicated/thicker ones.

Back when I worked in a pizza place, we solved this same issue by just pushing the pie in further (for thin), or by yanking one back to the start after a couple minutes (for well-done requests).

In the second scenario, prep guy would put an empty screen behind the pizza to reserve the space.

Those pizzas ovens are designed for efficiency, consistency, and not to require skilled workers: you pop the pizza in and it will come out exactly the same every time.

Handling a traditional pizza oven is tricky and requires skills.

> some new type of tech is discovered that will let pizza cook faster

Pizza is actually cooked hot and fast compared to most other dishes already. I want the back of the oven to be 500C / 930F before I start. This is why a pizza oven is specialised equipment, a standard-issue kitchen oven doesn't get that hot (usually tops out under 300C), so doesn't give nearly as good results.

And why it takes about 90-120 seconds per pizza to cook in a proper pizza oven.

Though IDK, maybe Dominos process is different to this, for their different pizza style.

If you wanted to cook even faster, then less toppings would help, but you may not want that, though you might get a good result in 60 seconds.

And an even hotter might not work- I suspect that it would not give as good results, e.g. burned in one area and undercooked in another.

> And an even hotter might not work

Indeed. >1000F is into meme-like territory regarding cook speed vs temperature tradeoff. If you had an extremely consistent process & everything was tuned you could maybe pull it off, but the stability of the system would be really bad.

There's plenty of room for improvement.

<40s: Pressurize the cooking chamber like an autoclave (KFC fryers do this!) Use decompression to get a nice puffy crust edge, like a chinese popcorn bomb.

<20s: Add a microwave emitter in the oven floor to ensure the interior cooks before the outside gets charred.

<10s: Raise the temperature to cone 10, with a reducing atmosphere to minimize charring. Mount a passive Q-switched laser overhead to blast away any inorganic ash that forms on the surface.

<.0000000005s: inertial confinement, I guess

Hot air convection ovens with a microwave booster are a real thing. TurboChef tried an industrial size oven that didn't sell well. They had a lot more success making the countertop ovens for Subway and Starbucks.

Possible, but it's expensive tech for marginal gains on an already fast process.

The big gains worth paying for are from halving the times of things that take 45 Minutes (i.e. pressure-cooking grains) not taking 30 seconds off a 90s process.

I've seen a pizza place with a conveyor oven, that would stall the customer at the till going through drinks options for 30 seconds or so. By the time they've paid, their pizza is ready. Same effect, much cheaper, plus an opportunity to upsell.

Working at a pizza place, I was surprised there was a well-done and an al-dente option. Nobody knows to ask and it was a pain to track, so I never asked customers. . IIRC there was a button to slow the belt, but generally sliding the pizza back before taking it out generally did the trick and that pizza did not have to be cooked individually

The most surprising part is that the order is communicated to the store over telephone. Surely that can't be the case?

That's only if people call and somebody inputs the order manually. If it's done online, it just automatically shows up on the prep line screen.

Do people who call also get access (SMS link?) to the tracker? If so then I see where I was mistaken.

Sometimes it's simply easier to pick up the phone and say, "Two large pepperonis and a box of breadsticks to 123 Avenue Lane please" and pay the delivery driver, rather than stumble through the online order flow. The main reason to order online is that there are always deals.

According to a quick search, 75% of orders are online now, which means 25% are still phone or walk-in.

I was referring to the line "When the phone CS puts in the order, it goes to the prep line, then bake."

What I understood is, when you place an order on the Domino's website, someone in a call-center phones the branch and reads off the online order. It isn't directly sent to a computer at the store.

That line is saying what happens when the person in the store answering calls puts an order into the system. Online orders automatically go to stores.

Most people use the tracker after an online order, but I believe you can call in then go to the tracker and input your number. See https://www.dominos.com/en/pages/tracker/

Yeah I always call and talk to the order taker. Much faster and simpler. My kids think I’m crazy.

This afternoon I overheard a university student refer to a period of time in which I was already an adult as "in the 1900s", so now thanks to this comment I'm really 0-2 here today.

Anyway brb putting my other foot in the grave, I guess.

Different demographics contribute to different phone orders. Most college towns, for instance, have a lower than average phone order rate.

Most busy stores can't answer every call during a rush, and so some calls go unanswered. During some very very busy rushes, online ordering is disabled in order to prevent people from placing orders that can't be fulfilled in a reasonable amount of time.

Seems unlikely that each step is actually updated by the workers themselves. I’d put money on an algorithm. The button or tablet they’d have to use would to signify completion would just get loaded with schmutz. Plus they’d be likely to forget to update during peak hours. A foot pedal might work.

> Seems unlikely that each step is actually updated by the workers themselves. I’d put money on an algorithm. The button or tablet they’d have to use would to signify completion would just get loaded with schmutz. Plus they’d be likely to forget to update during peak hours. A foot pedal might work.

Obviously Twitter is not the best for long form, but did you scroll through the replies from the first tweet that she added? She literally explains how it works, the options workers have, etc. No need to speculate haha

I did now and you're right. Thanks.

> Seems unlikely that each step is actually updated by the workers themselves. I’d put money on an algorithm.

Orders are automatically added to the "prep" stage, and again to the post-oven "quality check" stage. But they aren't automatically moved from the prep stage to the oven stage; I know this because I've had domino orders that get stuck in the prep stage for half an hour and when I show up to pick up my pizza anyway, they admit they haven't started making it yet. The pizza getting added to the oven stage means the workers actually did put the pizza in the oven, or at least told the computer they did so.

I worked in fast food during school and there are absolutely physical buttons[0]. They are tiny little pill buttons under a plastic label. They don't get as dirty as you think, mostly because the sanitary requirements in food prep mean that things are never allowed to ever truly get dirty.

[0]: https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/img/cb125v2-kds-handle-min.jpg

> mostly because the sanitary requirements in food prep mean that things are never allowed to ever truly get dirty.

Having worked at multiple restaurants and a Domino’s in particular all I can say is lol

I have traveled quite a bit and found that even within the U.S., food safety regulations are very variable. Some counties and states take food safety very seriously. Some do not.

Where was the nastiest you found? (Putting the 'rat' into ratatouille?)

Louisiana and Mississippi were the worst, in my experience. I am told that Louisiana has improved.

Love hearing about this. Thanks for the correction.

OF COURSE I'VE SEEN THESE! D'oh! Thank you.

Dominos kitchens are viewable from the lobby, just go look at it on google images.

You don't forget it because the same screen is your personal work tracker that contains the order you are making right now. You need to mark it as complete in order to see your next task.

TIL,thanks.

You don't think people in kitchens can use buttons, because they would get dirty?

What? You're hallucinating. I said no such thing.

UPDATE: Pretty neat. These buttons exist, they're used, and I now realize I've seen them myself. Extensive downvotes not surprising to me but it was very cool learning about it. Learned a bunch of things that have been at the back of my mind for years.

Keyboards are frequently used at most Domino's locations. The entire keyboard is covered in a disposable plastic wrap that is changed as needed. Unless you have a lot of sauce on your fingers, your hands are typically pretty clean and the buttons/keyboards don't get very dirty.

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