Domino’s has always been about easy pizza.
Founded in 1960, they built their reputation on a 30 minutes or less guarantee. That lasted until 1993, when a jury awarded $79 million to a woman whose car was struck by a delivery driver running a red light.
They’ve long been a staple on college campuses. My school had a deal with Domino’s where you could order pizza using your meal plan. My nutrition took a serious hit.
Domino’s recently upped their game by unveiling their Domino’s AnyWare program. It allows you to order pizza via a multitude of innovative channels:
- Text
- Tweet
- Smart TV (Samsung)
- Your car (Ford Sync)
- Smart watch
- Voice (through the Domino’s app)
The concept is brilliant.
Domino’s is trying to make it as easy as possible to order a pizza. The most talked about option is the ability to order a pizza by either texting or Tweeting a pizza emoji.
Unfortunately, the execution seems to be a bit bumpy.
In May, Khushbu Shah published a post on Eater called I Ordered Domino’s With a Pizza Emoji and It Took Three Hours.
Shah detailed a painstaking process of setting up an Easy Order account and then having to place an initial order before being able to order with an emoji.
Even when that got sorted out it didn’t quite work.
@KhushAndOJ We're looking into this now, sorry for the trouble!
— Domino's Pizza (@dominos) May 20, 2015
You could be easily blame Shah’s experience on a few growing pains for a new service. Lessons learned and that sort of thing. After all, Domino’s operates 11,900 stores around the world and delivers more than a million pizzas each day.
Something’s bound to go wrong once in awhile, right?
Fast forward to last week. Gigi Peccolo published a post on the OneReach blog detailing her experience trying to order a pizza via text.
Peccolo’s experience was remarkably similar to Shah’s. It was painstaking, counterintuitive, and filled with several seemingly unnecessary steps. She thoughtfully included screenshots on her post so you can see the back-and-forth.
It’s obvious that a phone call would have been much easier.
The concept is great. It’s just strange that three months go by from the Eater post to the OneReach post and not much has changed in the process.
Finally, there’s an unintended consequence of ordering pizza via Twitter. People will know that you’re ordering pizza.
The big danger for most of us is this may attract a few unexpected house guests. If you’re Bryce Petty, the New York Jets rookie quarterback, you might take a little flack for ordering Domino’s in New York.
