Papa Johns Can Predict When Your Fridge Is Empty
adexchanger.com
adexchanger.com
There are three things. Papa Johns also hates to see well compensated employees. They've been successfully sued several times for wage theft, they were forced to stop their “no-poach” policies which prevented franchise owners from hiring workers at other Papa Johns restaurants in an effort to keep wages down, and they insisted that if they had to provide health insurance to their workers they'd pass that cost onto consumers rather than spend a penny of the $87 million in gross profit they were making.
> When discussing how he would distance himself from racist groups, Mr Schnatter said that Colonel Sanders, the founder of KFC, had never faced criticism for using the N-word, Forbes reported.
As such, we can't really complain when people use acceptable words of the time.
Feel free to tell them that they're wrong.
> When discussing how he would distance himself from racist groups, Mr Schnatter said that Colonel Sanders, the founder of KFC, had never faced criticism for using the N-word, Forbes reported.
The conversation was pretty non-exciting: 'What people?' 'Um, colored folk.' 'We prefer to be called black.' 'Oh, okay...' End of chat.
Someone seeking out the most respectful language to use - the opposite of bigotry.
BTW, why don’t we tax the bots for UBI?
The assumption with that statement is that there is a net amount of money to be dispensed, and either a few highly compensated employees get those jobs or many low wage employees.
But the very fact of wage theft indicates that the employers want to keep more money in their hands, and distribute less of it. So it really just amounts to small numbers of underpaid jobs.
Second one is I think what garnered downvotes, and said sincerely: TAX.THE.BOTS.FOR.UBI.NOW!
The mechanism would be some business somewhere would have thousands of hours of tasks that were worth around $12/hr to the business. If the market wage was $15/hr, that work doesn’t get done. If the market wage is $8/hr, it gets done, at least to a much greater extent than in the $15/hr case.
Whatever their formula is, it's working.
It's certainly working on you
PJ's gross profits are much higher than this, in the hundreds of millions, usually over $500M. $87 million is approximately their net income for 2024 ($83.49M, down to $30.5M in 2025).
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PZZA/papa-johns/gr...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PZZA/papa-johns/ne...
What she means is that they want to do it subtly enough so people aren't creeped out, because when it's put like that it really is creepy.
Anyways, I wonder if instacart can predict political affiliation. I bet their data scientists have at least tried.
My other thought is that companies like Papa John’s that make shitty products are most likely to engage in desperate growth tactics like this.
You know what helps tempt people into ordering pizza? Making good pizza.
The problem is that it’s cheaper to purchase analytics and serve an ad for “pizza” at the literal moment the viewer is out of groceries.
I wonder if their fancy analytics can also tell them how many of these customers regret not just buying groceries after they finish their Papa John’s.
Instacart users should have been upset about that while reading Instacart's privacy policy prior to signing up and refused to use the service in the first place. Having their data being packaged up and sold was something every user already agreed to.
Your credit card company, every merchant you interact with, even your employer's payroll processor all sell your data.
I guess if you work under the table cash-only jobs, only purchase items in-person, again cash only, and don't use any apps on your phone you are safe from corporate snooping?
You're not wrong but I can't help but wonder if we'd be at this at the point in modern society now if we'd been smart enough to avoid signing up for services that promised up front to be abusive long before the practice was so widespread and unavoidable. Instacart started 14 years ago. It wasn't an essential or unavoidable service. Why should corporations treat us any differently if we keep telling them that this abuse is acceptable to us and then reward them for it?
Instacart is now an ad-company. so as almost every company now.
ads are just too lucrative to pass up on if you sit on some rich data.
If this ad campaign backfires on them it won't be the first time. They were sued for illegally spamming 500,000 people over text with ads. (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/papa-johns-faces...). Although ultimately, they got away with paying out just 11 million in cash and a whole lot of coupons for their pizza to a tiny fraction of the people they spammed so maybe it was worth it to them in the end.
He mentions that that they have a model that can predict both guest numbers and revenue:
“We have forecasting models based on historical data—the trend of the past six weeks and also the trend of the previous year,” Gordon told me. “The predictability of the business has become astounding.” The company has even learned how to make adjustments for the weather or for scheduled events like playoff games that keep people at home."
And this was in 2012!
I highly recommend both the book and the article as both talk, in detail, about how to build systems even in very dynamic environments.
I can only imagine how accurate the models have gotten now.
They have data for a full month. They know if it worked or not. They decided to make a positive press release despite it failing to increase sales.
So OK maybe some corp can reprogram you to not restock on food. CONVINCE ME THAT'S GOOD. Is it not just an attempt to make people worse? Less self-sufficient? More miserable?
Instacart sells data to Papa Johns for better pizza ad timing.
Papa Johns isn’t somehow able to predict this based on their own data (which is the impression I initially got from the headline), they are buying it from Instacart.
Name and shame.
It seems like the only way to avoid it is to only shop in person and to stick to mom and pop stores that can’t afford to do all these shenanigans, while also avoiding ads like the plague.
Maybe I’m rare in that what you describe is literally how I’ve always done it, but are there more people getting groceries delivered than shopping in store now?
Stores seem plenty full to me.
There has been talking (maybe tests as well) of using facial recognition to manipulate digital price tags on shelves based on the buyer. Several states are already working to pass legislation to block this.
There was that widely published issue years ago of Target starting to advertise pregnancy related items to a teenage girl before her parents even found out she was pregnant. They now actively try to avoid being too targeted, to avoid the creep factor.
They’ve had video monitors at self-checkout in many stores for years now. While I heard at some stores they were just a scare tactic and not hooked up to anything, it’s not beyond the capabilities to use facial recognition at checkout to link a person to their purchases. That’s easier today that it’s ever been.
When ApplePay was rolling out, stores like Walmart were trying to push their own standard called CurrentC, blocking ApplePay. It was a QR code based payment system that would allow them to better track your purchases. ApplePay was a problem, since it generates a random number each time.
Amazon had those stores without registers that tracked uses around the store and what they grabbed. I’m sure that, and now Whole Foods purchases, are used to influence what is pushed on Amazon. That’s not too far fetched.
Almost every store these days has loyalty cards to scan, or ask you to put in your phone number. These are used to track what you buy and tie to you.
Lots of avenues, even in person, to collect and use data.
The key distinction I was making was mom and pop stores. I don’t think those are doing it, unless they are getting bought up by private equity and getting new systems deployed, which I suppose is possible. But the big chains where most people shop are absolutely doing this kind of thing, or trying hard to figure it out.
Increasingly they are pushed for insurance purposes to automate “loss prevention” and make it auditable and also help build cases.
If the question is how do you get away from surveillance the answer is “you don’t anymore” unfortunately.
At this point it is pervasive and there is no way to avoid it. I’ve been extremely close to surveillance systems my whole career and it’s to the point where if somebody wants to completely surveil you 24/7 they can do it very easily for very little money
“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”
The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.
On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
Perhaps a graphic, on the front page, above the fold, pointing to pregnancy-related sales on interior pages of the flyer. Non pregnancy-related sales should dominate the front page.
Targeted advertisement (and, modern advertisement in general) should be illegal. I don't consent to having my attention stolen by these scumbags