The failure of the Domino's 30-minute delivery guarantee
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
> Gig drivers don’t face an edict for speed like past Domino’s drivers, but Wells says the requirement to be fast is built into the job, with drivers hurrying to make financial incentives, avoid bad ratings, and ensure the food is warm upon delivery.
Annoying corporate policy replaced by society taking a wrong turn to being driven by ratings on the I internet - that we unlike the bad policy can't get rid of.
Incentives can cause perverse outcomes, but it’s worse when you are not in control of the outcomes at all.
What are you suggesting then? A company that is selling warm pizza with prompt delivery should not do anything to incentive employees to deliver on that value prop?
Unfortunately though, those same incentives also incentivise risk taking and dangerous driving.
Workers being driven by ratings systems pre-dates the popularity of Internet gig economy jobs. By a lot.
The customer ratings concept even infected places like your local doctor’s office a couple decades ago. Doctors have been complaining about how patient satisfaction surveys have discouraged them from bringing up obesity, smoking, or excessive drinking for decades. Doctors are also more likely to give in to patient demands for unnecessary antibiotics or controlled substances when they know it’s going to result in a hit to their ratings if those ratings are related to their compensation.
Every time I’ve visited a car dealer for service in the past few decades, the service manager is almost begging me to give them a “9 or 10” on the survey that will be sent to me afterward. He pleads that I work with him first to address anything that might reduce his rating.
Even vehicle drivers have had “How is my driving?” numbers on the back of their cars for a very long time.
Having customer satisfaction surveys tied to performance reviews isn’t new if you’ve worked in anything customer-facing. It’s just getting more attention now because “gig economy” has become a journalistic buzzword and people are more likely to be sympathetic to an hourly worker than, say, the doctor or service manager at their local dealership.
Even long before all of this, tipping was the standard way of linking customer feedback to compensation. This applied to delivery drivers, too! The hand-wringing over customer feedback being an internet-era gig economy thing is misplaced. It has always been this way.
It's extremely toxic.
I don't know if it's true or not but he told me he lost out on a $10k volume bonus because someone who was extremely happy with everything gave him 9/10 on all questions and in the comments simply put "I wouldn't change anything about my experience, it was great! But perfection is reserved for God."
I've heard this from everyone I've ever bought a car from, everyone I know who has ever been involved with that industry, etc.
Why even have surveys if the point is just to collect 100%s and not actually find things to change without taking money out of people's pockets?
"So if I implement this system then either I get confirmation that everything I'm responsible for is perfect or I get an excuse to save money on labor?" - management approximately 8 seconds before implementing the surveys.
1 star reviews are mostly people pissed off for some reason, people with unreasonable expectations, or competitors trying to hurt their competition. 5 stars reviews are either zero effort reviews from people with low expectations or they are outright fake reviews from people incentivized to inflate the rating.
The 3 star reviews identify key and serious problems with the product that the customer otherwise would have liked. Usually the most information is found here. 4 star reviews identify weaknesses in the product that the customer still liked despite the drawbacks. 2 stars often are the same as 1 star but from less critical people.
The only signal I pay attention to from 1 star and 5 star reviews is if there are too many of them it's a red flag. More than 10% 1 star usually indicates a serious problem with product defects. More than 80% 5 star indicates a product that's buying fake reviews.
It's ultimately a metric that's been gamified by everyone involved. I think the cynics keep it around because it gives customers a voice.
It’s also why Netflix moved tot the thumbs up/down system. When they moved into new territories their recommendations system had troubles since some territories would rate everything as “bad”, because in that territory 3/5 meant it was fine and they enjoyed the show.
Your electronic report card is now more persistent, and there's a much smaller number of companies dominating these gig industries, and they cross areas (food delivery + driving people, for example). It's not as easy to start over.
Do we want to make it easy for someone to "start over" when that means instead of driving bags of food around they're now driving around people?
Separately, there is a drive towards a sort of "social credit rating" that I do think is a bad thing.
In the narrower space of having a criminal history, the US is very different in how that affects people that have done their time. Any company can do a dirt-cheap background check, this makes people close to unemployable. In other countries, like Australia, employers can request a "yes/no" answer to "is this person's history suitable for this specific job" from a government agency...but they can't just get history themselves.
The combination of consolidation in the space into a few giants, and dirt cheap sharing of data across employers is, over time, applying the same sort of permanent mark problem to everyone else. I think it's a bad thing.
https://www.nelp.org/publication/ban-the-box-fair-chance-hir...
I don't see an obvious solution, because compelling commercial insurance to cover someone with repeat duis/reckless driving/addiction issues in a work truck doesn't feel quite fair, but there needs to be a path to gainful employment for ex-cons if we want our supposedly rehabilitative justice system to have even a chance of working, and there's not a lot of options that aren't customer facing, don't involve driving, and don't put you in some sort of security context or in charge of accounts or money.
Basically, any job that pays worth a damn requires a bit of trust, and we simply don't trust ex cons. And they're probably statistically somewhat less trustworthy, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have a path out. For our sake as much as theirs.
Criminal history is not a protected class (nor should it be), there's nothing wrong with a company saying it doesn't want to hire people with criminal histories in the recent past for certain jobs, or any job.
Your words imply we do need to do that.
I mentioned the Australian system...when the employer sends the candidate name/info and the complete job description, and a government agency replies yes/no. I assume they have some criteria for how long ago the offense was, etc. And that candidates generally know if they apply for a job that's not a good match, they will get a "no".
In the US system, even for a job where driving is not involved, the employer gets the full record and gets to decide what to do with that information with whatever arbitrary opinions they have.
Regardless, it’s something I would expect doctors to nag patients about, the same way my dentist nags me to floss.
There are medical options that doctors can prescribe (or refer to another doctor for a prescription). WeGovy/semaglutide, Adipex, HCG, good old adderall, etc. I haven't followed the space in about a decade so I don't know what's in and what's banned, but I'm aware there are a range of options there. I believe there are some outpatient programs as well, semantically similar to outpatient rehabs.
There are also surgical options that doctors can refer patients to a surgeon for. Laparoscopic bands, gastric bypasses, I think there's a third that I can't recall.
The incredibly sad issue is that doctors are sometimes forced to fall back on advice to diet and exercise because many of these treatments are contra-indicated with common comorbidities of obesity. Anesthesia can be very risky for patients with a BMI of 45 or 50, so they may need to lose weight the old fashioned way until they're at a weight where they can be safely anesthetized. Stimulants (adipex and adderall) are very effective at curbing hunger, but are contra-indicated by high blood pressure which is incredibly common.
I also believe there's a large segment of primary care physicians who aren't up to date on weight loss procedures, because they change fairly frequently relative to something like treating strep throat.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6169796/#:~:tex... (
The effective binary nature of ratings (if you don't give the best one, you may as well give worst one) was the last straw for me. Ratings are a game that harms both customers and the people providing good and services.
In my opinion, ratings need to decay over time. For service workers like Uber drivers any rating >1 year old (or maybe less) should decay to 0 significance. For online retail like Amazon, maybe 2 years but not much longer than that. This not only allows people to "clean up their act" after bad ratings, but makes botting a recurring cost instead of a one-time investment.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/22275-sedat...
Having people with little to no understanding of work evaluate and exercise power over it has been foundational for capitalism since its beginning.
The proof is simple. If you move this system from a single workplace to multiple workplaces with an ID for the worker, you get social credit.
This is a system that many governments and corporatists are in love with, as it generally “punishes troublemakers” without having anyone who’s a lawsuit target get overly involved. In my opinion, social credit systems are repression and totalitarianism masquerading as systems of personal responsibility.
The markup on delivered pizza at THAT time was in the 800% range, so a free pie now and again wasn't going to hurt that much. A lawsuit over a crash probably would, though.
I suspect I was lucky there.
But when you own a dozen stores (like one of the stories in the article) all you see are numbers, you don't care, you push as hard as you can to "drive efficiencies" and you end up with managers who are getting yelled at because they're at 97% sub-30m delivery instead of the 98.5% goal or whatever. And then you have a manager pulling a pizza out of a car wreck and giving it to another driver.
Would love to see what this person would think after Covid. If microwaves wrecked this person's outlook on people, covid would have blown their mind
It was some of what was written, but also about how we don't sit on the front porch and visit with neighbors in the evening, and rarely see our front doors, much less our neighbors.
Going back before frozen dinners you're back to the time when people actually cooked at home, going out to eat was a rare treat rather than a daily occurrence.
Fwiw some of us still cook at home and go out rarely. It’s cheaper, tastier, healthier, and can be a pretty relaxing evening activity
Steak is one where I've had better at a restaurant, but it was a $100/person type of place that work paid for. Mine at home is not quite there, but far above the average steak.
When I eat out now I'm hoping to find some combination of spices I don't use or some new idea to take home.
It's a text book size cookbook. The author experiments different cooking methods and documents, taste tests.
It boiled down to seasoning the steak over night so the salt extracts juices and tenderizes. Getting the temperature just perfect using a thermometer (I have a Ninja Foodi Grill that does it automatically).
The quality and thickness of meat also matters. I get mine at Costco or Sam's Club.
My pasta game is a lot better too. Main thing was to stir as the pasta cooks.
Cooking is 60% having good ingredients, 30% avoiding mistakes, and 10% technique.
Sous vide makes steaks 100% idiot-proof. Takes zero skill to get a perfect steak every time. Kosher salt, pepper, granulated garlic, vacuum seal it, drop it into the circulator for ~2 hours, then use whatever the hottest method of cooking you have available to give a quick sear on each side. I use my gas grill pre-heated to about 800 degrees.
But to really kick it up another level, get yourself a smoker. Doesn't have to be a fancy $2000+ offset, a $600 Traeger or even a $200 electric can give good results. Smoke at 225F until it gets to about 125F internal, then sear like above. If you like it extra smokey, you can smoke at a lower temperature.
Now, the only expensive meals I will go out for are seafood. I haven't quite mastered seafood. Fish can be very delicate and fall apart, and it's hard to get the right color on shrimp without overcooking it and drying it out.
I don't like eating out anymore because it's all either expensive greasy over seasoned food, or extremely expensive tiny portion food that maybe tastes about the same as home cooked.
Not so common when people get in from picking the kids up from daycare at 7.30pm and have to be up and out by 7am the next morning.
Longer commutes, less time at home, and all that extra income has gone into housing and childcare costs. Yeay.
I do hope that everyone is living the life they want and I'm just out of touch though. The idea of being away from home and my kids for 12+ hours every day and eating out before going to bed and doing it all over sounds miserable to me, but to each their own!
"We" have done nothing. Our managers, bosses, and executives have made everyone else's lives miserable, for their benefit.
Companies won't make products that no one will buy. Bosses can't fill roles that no one is willing to take. Executives won't keep their job if employees choose to leave the company rather than work for them.
It definitely takes some effort up front. It took us a few years to really build up a good list of go-to recipes we like and get to the point where we could wing it in the kitchen without chasing down recipes for everything.
Part of our motivation was going further down the rabbit hole learning how industrial agriculture and the food industry actually work. Dig far enough and you'll want to plant a garden, raise chickens, and cook at home as much as you can.
It can take a bit of time to get to the point where you can experiment and still be confident that the result will be edible, but that time investment is definitely worth it. It’s nice to be able to improvise whatever recipe depending on what’s actually available. It’s like a puzzle game, a kind of reverse Tetris when opening the fridge.
(It’s also nice to have a bunch of no-brain required easy and quick recipe for when you don’t want a challenge)
So my habits have changed to eating out much more rarely, but at much nicer restaurants.
I often see this mentioned during discussions of home cooking as if it were objective truth, but it confuses me because I enjoy a pie from the local pizza parlor as much as I enjoy my boeuf bourguignon. It's a different experience for sure. There's pleasure to be had in taking the time for the mise en place and coming up with tweaks over time to micro-optimize the flavor, but is it really tastier?
When I do eat out there is always something nice about not having to cook or clean up. That skews it a bit for me, maybe it wasn't actually as tasty as cooking at home but the whole experience is nicer (on occasion).
(And was probably in part about the large "boomer" generation aging and having kids and thus going out less)
and then a little farther on you learn part of the book takes place in the virtual internet world. and i’m absolutely sure the pizza stuff is all part of this virtual world…
one of my favorite books
So he ordered pizza with the delivery time carefully planned to coincide right when traffic was greatest.
Yet somehow the drive was able to get it to his house in 28 minutes. He tried to ask the driver how this was possible, but the driver was allready rushing back to his car.
If some hacker notices that a website has sequential id's and no session cookies and you can use this to dump their entire database, you think this doesn't cause any stress for the employees?
While I agree it made things unreasonably shitty for drivers, the customer can't really be blamed and shouldn't have to sit at home thinking "am I being a prick by making this person do their job?"
1. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
2. But see also https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages...
3. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/12/majoritie...
> ''Not fulfilling a promise is inexcusable,'' he stated in the report. ''It not only goes against everything we believe in, but it's also bad business.'' [1]
Absolutely zero consideration for the possibility that the problem wasn't the staff, but the completely arbitrary 30 minute policy that couldn't possibly be consistently adhered to across thousands of franchisees without introducing significant risk to staff.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/29/business/fight-on-quick-p...
Could it not? I'm sure I could organise a pizza restaurant with a 99.9% success rate delivering pizzas within 30 minutes (the nationwide top- performing restaurant in TFA had 99%) and no more crashes than, say, the national per- mile rate for short journeys.
But to achieve this, I'd need the restaurant to be overprovisioned in delivery drivers and conservative in rejecting requests that were too far away or too busy. My restaurant would lose money. The #1 priority is never really punctuality or timeliness or customer service - those are just means to an end. It's always money in the end.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of people left over to screw.
It is a low quality signal, along the lines as a fiduciary duty to screw customers for profit.
Unintended consequences, it is one reason why business students study these cases, to hopefully not repeat them.
Try running a business with low margins and low skilled employees, you make choices or go out of business, some choices win, some don't.
The amount of folks in US who legally own guns and never ever should be allowed to touch one is staggering.
(Somalia: 7.02 per 100K, US: 10.84 per 100K)
"America -- slightly safer than Somalia!"
Somalia suicide rate: 7.90 per 100K
United States suicide rate: 14 per 100K
How many of these US and Somalia deaths are associated with organized crime?
[1] https://ennyman.medium.com/a-lesson-from-29-golden-gate-suic...
> You're more likely to get killed using a gun in the US than Somalia
How is suicide or the regret thereof relevant to "getting killed?"
After the rush calmed down people started saying "hang on, what's this pizza doing here", then they made a new one and delivered it.
Of course the correct thing to do is issue an apology and refund with the replacement.
Their app tells you when the pizza is ready, about 30% of the time the pizza was not ready when their app said it was. This means the workers were gaming their timing system with fake pizzas.
Often times I'd be sitting in their pickup area for 20 minutes after the pizza was supposed to be done.
Or it meant the person cutting and boxing your order was falling behind.
At least ~15 years ago, the way Domino's timer works is that when the cook puts the order in the oven, they hit a button. ~8 minutes later it says it's ready, which is how long it takes to get through the oven. That was the only input for carryout, delivery had another for when the driver left.
If it was 30% of the time, I'd guess you requested something unusual like "no garlic spray" where the mistake happened or was noticed after the computer says your order is ready, then had to remake it. Or most of the times it was just a few minutes and somebody was boxing it.
The Domino's location near me very obviously hits that button as soon as they get the order when things are busy, regardless of if it's actually going in the oven then or not. I've had many, many times where I arrived at the location, with the app saying "your pizza is ready!", only to have them say "it's not in the oven yet, it'll be 10 minutes" when I ask for my order.
I'm certain the stores and even individual employees are rated on how fast they get the orders done so of course they're going to mess with that system to show the best metrics they can. I'm not even a little bit surprised, nor do I really blame them. Even though it's frustrating to find out my order isn't actually in the oven, I just say "no worries" and wait a few minutes.
They weren't fifteen years ago. The only speed incentive was not pissing off the customer. That may have changed, I can't say.
One thing I didn't consider earlier, if the store is busy enough the oven might be full and the cook hits the button to clear the entry they're done with so they aren't confused.
As adding the garlic spray is part of the prepare step, it's really easy to fuck up. It's not uncommon to mess it up, ask for a remake, then mess it up again. When you follow the same steps every time it's hard to skip one.
If you want a tip, the Brooklyn style (I think they renamed it?) doesn't come with the spray by default, so it's easier to stop yourself. Only other difference is the pizza has less dough.
This is actually a good example of a mediocre product growing due to an incredible offer. Something that most business don’t event bother to consider. Your offer is definitely more important than even features in most cases.
I was one of them, and the policy sucked ass. There was zero incentive for us to beat 30 minutes, and when we did, the customer was always UNHAPPY that we got there on time and would not get any discounts. The tip always sucked when we beat the clock.
When we didn't beat the clock, we got a decent tip. Our manager was an old fart from GA, and while he didn't say anything to promote speeding, he didn't say anything about not beating the clock. After a few accidents in other shops, the whole thing was trashed, which is when the quality of the driver and tips improved significantly. I also don't recall that it was less busy when the policy was removed. All in all, I don't think anyone liked this policy.
And if an order exceeded 30 mins, the customer will receive a 9-inch pizze coupon.
Were they that desperate for funding that they had to come up with some AI stuff for an already solved problem?
Especially in places where street data isn't complete or works differently (no street names) than in the western cities where Google Maps etc. are developed.
Grab (https://engineering.grab.com) always has interesting blog posts about these topics like: https://engineering.grab.com/road-localisation-grabmaps
Path finding is one of the classic AI research areas, back when it mostly meant making robots able to interact with their environment. Yes, it's an "already solved problem", in that we already have several good enough algorithms derived from all that AI research; but that doesn't change the fact that this is "AI stuff", and it doesn't prevent new AI approaches from being used (perhaps something based on neural networks as a path finding heuristic, since we have a lot of computing power to spare nowadays).
It may not be AGI, but that was never claimed.
I'd argue that "AI" doesn't have to be attempting to achieve AGI to be considered AI. For example, "Computer" players in games are AI. This applies whether you're talking something as advanced as a deep strategy game like the Civ series, or something as basic as the ghosts in Pac-Man, or even an automated Tic-Tac-Toe player.
So...is a path finding algorithm "AI"? I dunno. I could go either way.
But like...I seriously can't come up with a real definition of "AI" that wouldn't end up including things that definitely aren't AI. For example, is AI simply any code that seems like it has agency and makes decisions? If so, then is any sort program that triggers execution based on certain detections "AI"? Certainly not. Is it code that attempts to mimic human behavior, even at a basic level? If so, then is AutoHotKey AI? Nope, definitely not.
During that time there was also controversy about dip tags being ~100% exempt from ticket penalties. (IDK about today.)
Confidence was high that those pizzas always arrived on time.
Inter-building tubes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMTZvA8iFgI
Food by tube in a cafe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTHZLKFblKo
And inclement weather, and overhead wires, and crashes, and liability, and NIMBYs, and all the creeps (from local cops to data aggregators to foreign intel orgs) who want access to the data, and ...
Read the section "Service Guarantee"
https://pizzaonline.dominos.co.in/tnc
Also see: https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-cm/domino-s-p...
Their website and ordering experience in Canada is so frustrating that I mostly stopped getting Dominos, except for exceedingly rare occasions