KATHERINE BINDLEY
November 29, 2017
Dow Jones
For a while, Brent Gardiner felt he had a personal connection with the Domino’s employees making his pizzas — until a man named Melinda delivered him one.
Mr Gardiner, 24, of Moosup, Connecticut, was once a devoted fan of a popular tracking feature on Domino’s Pizza smartphone app. It gives customers a real-time play-by-play of their pizza’s production, complete with the name of each employee handling the pie.
If the app told him that an employee named “John” was making his pizza, Mr Gardiner used its feedback feature to send encouragement. “I’d be like, ‘you go, John!’ ‘Hope the pizza’s good, John!’ “
The relationship cooled last year when a man he happened to know showed up to deliver his pizza. The app had told Mr Gardiner that someone named Melinda was doing the honours. “I said, ‘Hey Melinda,’ and he was like ‘what the f*** are you talking about?’ “
“Ever since then, I knew everything they said, I felt, was made up,” he says. “I was like, ‘I wonder if, when they say they’re putting it in the oven, if they’re actually putting it in the oven?’ “
After falling in love with all manner of logistics in the internet age, Americans use their phones to keep tabs on the whereabouts of friends and family and to follow their Amazon packages from warehouse to warehouse. It’s only logical that they feel compelled to monitor the movements of their pizza.
The US-founded Domino’s, which has franchises covering 85 countries including Australia, launched the tracker online in 2008 and built it into its app for Apple’s operating system in 2011.
The company says about 60 per cent of its US orders are digital. The app sports 4.8 stars out of five in Apple’s app store, with about 480,000 ratings.
When the app gets the details wrong, however, some customers say the inaccuracies eat at them.
“The first traumatic experience I had with the app was over the summer,” says Alecia Smith, 23, a graduate student in North Carolina. The Domino’s app gave accurate delivery times until June, she says. Then she and her brothers placed an order. After mapping the store on Google, they calculated that the pizza should arrive within 20 minutes of when the app said the driver left.
“We were watching the tracker really vigilantly,” she says. “We were very scientific.” When it arrived still warm after 52 minutes, she concluded the delivery couldn’t have left when the app said it had.
“If you’ve taken the time to create this technology to try and be engaged with your customer,” she says, “can you do it correctly at least?”
Domino’s spokeswoman Jenny Fouracre declines to discuss specific examples “because without order numbers and store numbers we can’t go back and figure out exactly what happened.” Drivers’ names can get mixed up because they sometimes swap deliveries, she says. “We know that sometimes people make mistakes.”
The reason the examples “are notable is because they are unusual,” she says. “Tracker has worked as intended for nearly a decade for millions and millions of orders.”
But there are also app truthers — people convinced the pizza tracker is fibbing. On Twitter, users have criticised the tracker for saying a pizza has been delivered when it hasn’t, is ready for pick-up when it isn’t or shows a pizza out for delivery for an inordinate amount of time.
Lizzy West, a 21-year-old University of Alabama senior, says the tracker has told her a pizza spent a long time in “quality check” only to show up missing extras like garlic sauce.
On the social-media site Reddit, users claiming to be current or former Domino’s employees answer questions. One question posted: “For at least 6 years now, every pizza I’ve ordered from my local Dominos has been made by ‘Jack’ … Is that just a really devoted employee or is it a name they typed into the computers and isn’t a real person?”
The answer from a redditer claiming to be a former employee: The highest-level employee’s name usually shows up on the make line.
Rival pizza chain Papa John’s added a pizza tracker in March, and Pizza Hut did so in May. Customer tweets suggest those chains face questions about tracker accuracy, too.
A spokesman for Pizza Hut, Doug Terfehr, says the company included fewer steps in its pizza tracker to ensure it would be more accurate. “It’s based on an algorithm,” he says. “We really know precisely where that driver is on their path to the house. We really trust the accuracy of our app as well.”
“Papa Track is highly popular among our customers,” says Papa John’s spokesman Peter Collins. “The tracker enables us an opportunity to engage, entertain and improve the customer experience.”
Chris Hull of Pierre, South Dakota, can see his Domino’s store from his home. His 9-year-old daughter is obsessed with the app, and asks: “’Where’s the pizza dad? John said he’s supposed to be here. Did he get lost?’ “ he says, while “we’re looking out the window.”
He and his wife had a conversation with her about the app. “The way my wife put it,” he says: “It’s like when the server comes by and offers you another glass of milk and she says ‘your dinner will be out in a minute’ when actually she has no idea.’”
Stephen Owen, a Whitehall, Ohio, service technician, recently ordered a pizza and was notified that he had picked it up when he hadn’t. “I was sitting at home,” said Mr Owen, 39. “I’ve run into this problem every time.”
Ms Fouracre of Domino’s said that such a situation could be explained by human error, with someone closing out the order prematurely.
Luke Dier, who runs a Washington, DC, career-consulting business, says when the Domino’s app said his pizza had arrived when it hadn’t, he called an employee about the tracker. “He was like, ‘Oh it’s a suggestion,’ and that really pissed me off.”
Mr Dier, 37, said food-delivery apps like UberEats have raised the tracking bar by letting customers see and contact drivers. “The apps create the expectation of what can be done.”
“I was fine with the way pizza used to work,” he says, “where they’d say it’d show up in 45 minutes and it would take an hour.”
Dow Jones Newswires
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