The Domino’s Pizza Tracker Theory of Everything

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1:30If you didn't buy either, that's okay too. We're glad to just hang out with you. And to everyone listening, just thank you. Thank you for listening. This is Planet Money from NPR. I hate waiting. I think we all do. But recently I heard a theory about how our relationship with waiting has been totally transformed in the last 20 years. It was a story about how an IT department of a pizza restaurant completely changed how we wait and how we feel when we wait. I heard it from none other than Alex Mayossi. Take it away, Alex. Okay. For all intents and purposes, the story starts when David Haubenstricker got a job at Domino's in IT.

2:20And at the time, the company was in a kind of crisis. See, for a long time, Domino's was known for one thing. They were known for their fast delivery. It was like, if you wanted your pizza fast, you ordered it from Domino's. If you wanted good pizza. If you wanted good pizza, there were other places you would go. They were so into their speedy delivery thing that for many years, they even guaranteed it. If they didn't get the pizza to your door in 30 minutes, you'd get it free. But the guarantee led to problems. It pushed delivery drivers to be reckless. People died. There were lawsuits, and eventually Domino's had to give up on the guarantee.

3:02And all the industry pundits said, Domino's is now dead. Wow. They were basically saying, without the guarantee, who's going to order Domino's pizza? Right. You know? Yeah, David says losing the guarantee was bad. They were ceding market share to the likes of Papa John's and Pizza Hut. And David had this theory of the 30-minute guarantee, which is that it wasn't just popular because it got people their pizzas fast. It was popular for a slightly squishier reason. It had given people a sense of control. This idea was backed up by evidence. Around this time in the early 2000s, Domino's had actually commissioned a study that mapped the way people felt when they ordered a pizza.

3:50And what they learned was it was a psychological roller coaster. Yeah, you're desperately hungry. And so you're like, I want pizza. I want pizza. And so you go and you place your order and it's like, oh, yes, I've got pizza coming. And you're excited. I've done it. I've ordered pizza. This was the top of the roller coaster. And things really went downhill after that. It's completely out of your control at this point. You're like, where is it? Where is it? I'm hungry. Where is it? Especially with kids. You know, where is it, mom? Where is it, mom? Where is it, mom? You know, it's coming. It's coming.

4:29You have no idea where it is. Have they lost my order? You know. Now, regardless of how long getting a pizza actually took, customers just hated the process, the experience of waiting. To solve this problem and to stand out in a crowded pizza market, David and his IT colleagues cooked up a tool that would help Domino's beat their competitors on a kind of novel front, managing their customers' emotional journeys. This tool would allow their customers to obsessively monitor their pizza's progress. It would come to be called the Domino's Pizza Tracker. And this humble pizza tracker, some would argue, and I am arguing, became way more influential than you might expect.

5:14Did you know that it would go on to change the world? No. I'm still somewhat amazed that it changed lives. I mean, that's weird. A status page that changed lives. I mean, that's kind of crazy. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Nick Fountain. And I'm Alex Mayasi. Yes, many of you will recognize Alex's voice from some classic Planet Money episodes. Or his name because he wrote the Planet Money book. Or maybe you're a listener to Alex's new food and economics show. It's called Gastronomics. It is there that Alex laid out this theory that I kind of love. Alex, you call it the Domino's Pizza Tracker Theory of Everything.

5:57Yes, and here's the theory. The Domino's Pizza Tracker would become the canonical model for every website or app that maps out how long a purchase or delivery or service is going to take. And it created a completely new norm for how we expect to feel when we buy stuff. We're talking banking, car repair, tax prep, waiting for an Uber. Your theory is it all started with the Pizza Tracker. So today on the show, we're going to drill down on this theory, hear how the pizza tracker was made, how it spread, how it's been manipulated, and what it tells us about human nature. Also, we hit the streets and do some hard-hitting pizza journalism.

6:38Got a hidden mic right here. We're about to go do investigative journalism.

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7:31Ethos makes it easy. It's 100 % online. No medical exam, just a few health questions. Apply in minutes and get same-day coverage up to 3 million. Get your free quote today at ethos.com slash money. That's ethos.com slash money. Application times and rates may vary. We're back. It's Planet Money. We're tracing the history of the Domino's pizza tracker and how it's changed consumer culture. Where we left off, it's the mid-2000s. And Domino's knew they had this problem, where people hated waiting for pizza. And without their 30-minute guarantee, they were losing their edge in the pizza game. So Domino's reputation was a rather mediocre pizza.

8:12And now we've lost our delivery time. We're starting to struggle. It's not like the company was shrinking, but compared to the overall industry, we're not doing that great. David says once Domino's learned about the emotional pizza roller coaster, lots of people at the company had a sense that they should build something like a pizza tracker. But they also knew that corporate would never go for it because it would be really time consuming to build something that would track literally every pizza at every single Domino's. Plus, was it really worth it spending so much effort on basically a gimmick to maybe make some customers a wee bit less anxious?

8:53So instead, at the time, corporate was focused on the tried and true domino's way, beating their competitors on speed. Even without the guarantee, they became obsessed with the metric they called out the door time, as in pizza out the door. And word gets out that the UK franchisee has figured out how to improve these out-the-door times. And he somehow cracked the nut. So Domino's dispatches David's boss to go across the pond to figure out what the UK stores are doing. When he's back, he summoned David and the rest of the technology team. And said, let me tell you about what I saw. You would go into a store and they would have a dedicated monitor that would show nothing but that store's out-the-door times, along with five to ten other stores.

9:48And what this franchisee did was he had them compete against each other. On out-the-door time? On out-the-door time. And then he would pay cash bonuses to the store that was at the top, stuff like that. David's boss said, we need to do this here in the U.S. And did he look at you and say, David, you're on this? Yeah, I was basically the guy who had to make it happen. David knew how he'd build it. Every Domino's had computers where workers would register when an order came in, when a pizza went in the oven, and when it went out for delivery. So David took that information and connected it to a centralized system that broadcast out-the-door times from each Domino's to the other competitor stores nearby.

10:36The out-the-door times were on live dashboards for every teenage worker to see. Shortly after it's rolling out, maybe a week or two, the CEO comes to my cube and says, you know, you worked on that? He goes, there has been nothing in my tenure that has moved the needle as much as that. Wow. Good job, guys. And here's your bonus, David. No.

11:05I'm in IT. The best you do is you get a thank you. So pizza out the door times were getting faster, but they still hadn't solved that other issue. The existential dread of having to wait a whole 30 minutes in pizza purgatory. Except then at some point, David and his colleagues stepped back. Looked around and we're like, wait, you know what? We already have a system tracking every single pizza and every single Domino's. We went, ah, we can piggyback on that and do pizza tracker. Pizza tracker. The way the pizza tracker would work was people would call in their orders, then go online, maybe dial up.

11:56That's not a great impression. and see a little animation of their very own pizza's progress in real time. Now, this was 2006. Most people didn't have smartphones yet. They were not using apps. At the time, FedEx, UPS, and Amazon were tracking packages, but those were generally on the timeline of days, not minutes. A tool to track real-time pizza progress would be completely novel. David set out to work on the back end, and some designers figured out what the tracker would look like. Kind of like a thermometer on its side, a long tube with rounded ends. As the pizza went through each step of the process, from order placed to prep to bake to box to delivery, the next chunk of the thermometer turned bright red.

12:43When David saw the mock-up for the first time, he was not impressed. I go, it's a hot dog. It does gotta look like a hot dog. It's a hot dog! We're a pizza company! Why have you put a hot dog on the pizza tracker? So I'm there kind of going, well, this is the dumbest thing ever. But the big dogs at the company liked it. In fact, they wanted to roll out the pizza tracker right before the craziest day in pizza. The Super Bowl of pizza, one might say. Yeah. The actual Super Bowl. Because the Super Bowl is not necessarily the absolute busiest day, but all four time zones for dominoes synchronize. Everybody's ordering right before the game.

13:34Sure. Everybody's ordering at halftime. The Super Bowl was stressful enough in a normal year. They'd set up a war room with screens showing website traffic, server capacity, and, you know, also the Super Bowl broadcast. We'd have like 50 people. Wow. And we'd be monitoring networks. We'd be looking at our competitors. Hey, Papa John's, they're slowing down, you know. And we're saying, we're still good, we're still good. So maybe not the best time to roll out a totally new piece of pizza technology, but the brass are like, are you kidding? This is going to be awesome. The day comes, all eyes are on David and his tracker.

14:15Would it work? Would people look at it? Would they like it? The spotlight is on us. And we're basically in there watching the pizza tracker. And if this crashes, then we're going to launch this and we're going to do this. And so we have all these plans. And it basically, fortunately, went off without a hitch. Not only did it go off without a hitch, it actually blew up. Over the next months and years, it became a cultural phenomenon. Tracking your pizza became not just a tool, but an event. People blogged about it. A CNN morning show tested it out on live TV. And we are awaiting that pizza delivery.

14:54Will the Domino's man make it in time? Customers flooded the Domino's comment box with comments. Oh, this is the best thing ever. It was mainly from like, the main commenters were moms. Basically, this has gotten my kids off my back. I order the pizza and then I have my kids sit in front of the computer watching the little flashing lights. Yeah. And the kids would like would turn around and go, mom, mom, mom, it's in the oven. Hey, mom, mom, mom, it's being prepared. It's out for delivery. You've got to get ready. It's out for delivery. Yeah. The pizza tracker actually made the pizza waiting experience kind of fun.

15:33I remember actually being more fascinated with the tracker than actually interested in the pizza. Like a thing where I was like refreshing constantly to be like, what is it going to look like now? This is Shuya Gong. She teaches design at Harvard and she was previously a design director at IDEO, the design firm famous for, among other things, the original Apple Mouse. We called Shuya to talk about why the pizza tracker works and how it ended up getting way bigger than pizza. Shuya came up as a designer in the mid-2010s, so several important years after the Pizza Tracker was launched. Important because more and more people had smartphones, and every company needed an app.

16:16Many of these companies were Shuya's clients, and in meetings where they'd be sitting around saying, what is our app? Shuya found that she kept referencing the same excellent model. One of the most effective meetings I had was actually like ordering pizza and just putting the tracker on the big screen in the room and being like, so how are you feeling right now? Like let's experience this together because you are able to, uh, in your body, very viscerally understand how much anxiety is going up or down, how much you feel reassurance, how much you feel groundedness, and then be able to say like, okay, what parts of that do you want people?

16:58Do you want your customers to feel when they are using your product? This seems like a boss move that you would like start your meeting with your important clients to be like, OK, I'll explain why later, but let's all order the pizza. Like, hands up for cheese, hands up for pepperoni. In fact, the idea of the pizza tracker became kind of a shorthand in Shuya's design world. A client would come in, describe what their business did. And if it at all involved a customer doing any kind of waiting, she and her colleagues would look at each other and say, oh, easy. They need the pizza tracker. Shuyas says one reason pizza trackers were so popular was because as more and more shopping experiences became digital, a tracker replicated a really important part of paying for something in the real world.

17:45Watching people do the work. When you are having an online experience, you don't have that kind of visibility. And because you don't have that kind of visibility, it sometimes gets easier to be impatient. Researchers have documented that this reminder of the work that goes into product or service makes customers value it more. They call it the labor illusion. And Shia said something else about why pizza trackers are so effective. It's a little bit trippy. She says they change our perception of time. Wow. Like, there's something that we have literally all experienced, which is a known phenomenon in psychology, where when people walk somewhere, they feel like the walk on the way back is shorter than the way there.

18:33Even though it might be the exact same minute by minute, second by second amount of time, it feels shorter. Shui says one explanation for the walk thing is that the way back is familiar. And that's actually kind of what happens with the pizza tracker, too. It gives us a familiar route and shows us landmarks along the way. It's giving us wayfinding. It's giving us those familiar things to look out for that makes a journey feel shorter. And those familiar things are, pizza's being made. It's on its way now. Pizza's being delivered. So all this is why many apps and websites now have pizza tracker-like trackers.

19:09The most obvious ones are Uber and Lyft, but I've started seeing them everywhere. Like the other day, I'd dropped my car off at the mechanic and it was taking a while. I started getting nervous. Had they forgotten me? Should I call? Then I got a text with a link to a tracker, a little timeline that showed where my car was in its repair process. I felt calmed and reassured. Yeah, this is why pizza trackers are everywhere now. Because we, as consumers, love them. But as the whole economy has become more digital, more like ordering a pizza, something weird has started happening. Pizza trackers have become less honest.

19:53Yeah, Shuya gave me a good example. In the mid-2010s, she was working with banks and fintech companies whose customers were transitioning from in-person, slow cash-and-check transactions to digital deposits and payments. And the companies were actually kind of having the opposite problem that Domino's had had. Because as their customers adapted to online banking, they were uncomfortable with just how fast transactions were happening. It doesn't actually take that much time for two computers to talk to each other and say, like, is this the amount of money that we're sending over? Yes, this is the amount of money we're sending over.

20:25You've got that amount of money? Amazing. Now I've got this amount of money. Computers talking to each other, like, there are no roads that they are crossing. There is no cheese that is melting. It is, it's numbers on a spreadsheet moving back and forth. But for people who are used to money taking a while to transfer, money moving instantly, it feels sus. And so what we would do in that instance is actually slow down the pizza tracker, the money tracker. And instead of giving you a real-time reflection, we might actually give it a little bit of a buffer and make you wait. So in the world of money apps, Shia helped companies add pizza trackers that actually manufactured a fake waiting period.

21:09Even though the work that was happening was instantaneous. In a context like that, slowing down the time and using that concept of a tracker to say, this is the step that's happening right now, it's getting sent to the other party, we're verifying it. Slowing down that time intentionally and adding some meaningful friction in there means that the experience of waiting is something that you actually want to have. And in that experience of waiting, you're feeling the gravitas and the seriousness of sending over hundreds of dollars to this other magical space in the ether that now has your money.

21:46Which seems reasonable enough, though there is another way of thinking about that. How do you feel about recommending, like, oh, you should do a status bar, but one that's not accurate? Like, it's not real-time accurate. Right, right, right. How much are we recommending lying to your customers? Yes, to put it more bluntly. Right. So I would think about it less as lying to someone who's going through this experience and more about curating the experience to put in the physics that have traditionally existed in these experiences to make people feel comfortable. Sure. But at a certain point, this all gets more sinister.

22:29Like TurboTax. TurboTax has these little status updates as you go from section to section and animation pops up where they say, we're checking to make sure you've got all your deductions or credits or whatever. But a few years back, someone looked into the code and found that the animation was the same for everyone, no matter what. Took the same amount of time. And I guess the question is, is TurboTax trying to make us feel at ease during the frankly scary process of filing taxes? Or are they using the labor illusion to convince us that it's worth it to pay gobs of money for something we could do for free?

23:08Yeah, or like recently I was traveling and I had to use Uber a lot. And over and over they sent me updated pickup times. And seemingly every time, the car arrived later than they promised. It felt like the tracker was part of an intentional deception. To convince me to book with them instead of Lyft. To not cancel. To be on the street so early I'm anxiously watching for the car and hop right in. By the way, we reached out to TurboTax asking if anything has changed or if they wanted to comment. They did not. And we asked Uber for an interview on how they calculated the pickup times. While they didn't make anyone available, they did share some stats that suggested that their pickup times are pretty accurate.

23:49But this is the weird final stage of pizza tracker history. Pizza trackers went from an internal tool to manage workers to an external experience providing transparency for customers. Customers loved them so much that they were adopted by companies around the world, but then some companies at least twisted them to be less than accurate. These trackers sometimes have become tools of deception. And this brings us back to the OG pizza tracker, the Domino's pizza tracker. Because there's this whole world of people who think that the Domino's pizza tracker is also veering into deception. Some of these pizza tracker truthers think it's not real at all.

24:42After the break. Oh, dude, this is like a spy movie. I'm right behind him. We hit the streets to investigate.

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25:40Learn more at easycater.com. This is Ira Glass. On This American Life, we tell stories about when things change. Like for this guy, David, whose entire life took a sharp, unexpected, and very unpleasant turn. And it did take me a while to realize it's basically because the monkey pressed the button. That's right, because the monkey pressed the button. surprising stories every week wherever you get your podcasts this week on the npr politics podcast the midterms are less than 50 days away and in some states people are already voting we've got a special episode previewing key races to watch across the country it's your midterm survival cheat sheet don't miss it this week on the npr politics podcast

26:32All right, test one, two. Last week, I got on my bike and rode the approximately three minutes to my local Domino's. I was there to put the Domino's pizza tracker through the ringer to see if what it says on the app is actually what's happening in the store. Alex? Nick, hello. I called Alex. All right. Did I ever tell you the joke? What's the difference between a podcaster and a large pizza? No, you have not told me this joke. A large pizza can feed a family of four. Anyway, the plan was I was going to order a distinctive looking pizza. We decided on half Hawaiian, half pepperoni. And get it delivered to your house, Nick.

27:23And then from my home computer, I'd monitor what the pizza tracker was saying was happening to this pizza while you staked out the joint. This is hard-hitting investigative journalism right here. Okay, I am placing this order in three, two, one. Okay, I'm walking in.