I understand the original process was discontinued because it lead to unsafe driving practices and even lawsuits and deaths, but now when I order delivery from Dominos it seems an hour to 2 hours is the usual time frame for it.
I understand safer driving, but does safer driving really double or quadruple the delivery times?
Two hours seems overly long, but I’m spoiled with proximity to a few different ones.
I do know that some pizza places cut their costs by getting rid of their own drivers and outsourcing to Uber Eats and similar services. This would add dead time in finding a driver who’d then have to go to the pizza joint and then find you. Sometimes they will package several deliveries together, which I hate but understand is part of the deal if you are paying drivers close to nothing.
Pizza is pretty cut-throat competitive near me, and they are all trying to control price rises. Being fast costs money, and I expect that a combination of cost-cutting measures compounds to make your pizza part of the slow food revolution.
1-2 hours seems crazy. When I’m with friends and we order pizza delivery, 30-40 seems to be the norm.
When I was delivering Dominoes in the 30 minute guarantee days we would stop answering the phones if our delivery times started creeping up. (We physically took the phones off the hook) Without the guarantee there is no reason for the stores to throttle business thus creating longer delivery times during unanticipated rushes.
I’ve never waited more than 50 minutes. That was a weird mix up. The driver dropped my pizza off at another address. Domino’s remade my pizza and delivered.
Usually my Domino’s wait time is under 30 minutes. It depends on how many orders the driver has in the car.
Lately I’ve ordered from Casey’s. Don’t let the gas pumps fool you. Their pizza is better than Little Caeser.
Back in the day, the choke point was how many pies the ovens could handle not the number of deliveries the drivers had to make.
Even most traditional pizza delivery guys did that. When I worked at Pizza Hut in the 80s, on busy nights, we’d have several drivers working, and they’d look at all the pizzas waiting, and take a bunch that were all from the same general area. It’s just far more efficient that way.
I’ll add that pizza restaurant menus are far more expansive than they used to be. In the '80s, Domino’s served one kind of pizza, in two sizes, with less than a dozen topping options, and 2-liter sodas. Today they have six different kinds of crust, some of which come in up to four sizes, over two dozen topping options, plus sandwiches, chicken wings and tendies, tater tots, salads, pasta, various types of breadsticks and breads, cheese dip, desserts, and whatever new concept is being test-marketed this month.
The bigger the menu is, the more complex your kitchen operation becomes and the more people you need to staff it efficiently, which means things have to take longer.
I delivered for Domino’s back in the '80s. My store was unusual in having traditional pizza ovens, not the conveyor-belt type. I’ve always thought they made better pizza.
I’d imagine that it’s due to the general shortage of unskilled labor, these days. If a pizza shop used to be staffed by six people but now can only find four people to hire, then they’re going to do everything slower.
If there’s any validity at all to the “Pizza Tracker” function on the website, the place where it always gets hung up is the pre-delivery “quality check”. I’ve taken this to mean that the issue is at the restaurant itself versus the actual delivery time although I suppose a lack of drivers would also cause the pizza to sit around before it gets loaded up. In any event, it feels like a staffing issue.
I’ve never had a two hour wait and the few times it’s come close to an hour, I’ve received a contrite and unbidden “That delivery wasn’t to our standards” email with points for a free medium pizza.
I should clarify that’s for Domino’s since that seemed like the focus of the OP. Other places vary.
In my area, it’s 30 minutes for a thin crust and 50 for a deep dish unless it is Friday or Saturday night. In those cases, thin crust goes up to an hour and don’t bother with deep dish unless you want to starve to death waiting. LOL
Pizza delivery times longer than 45 minutes are outside of my personal experience.
I’m about 7 miles from one Domino’s and 8 miles from another. Neither will deliver here. In fact, the only pizza delivery I can get is from a local place that’s extremely expensive before you add the delivery fee and tip - it’s good, but not that good. So we just pick it up ourselves. By the time we get there, our order is ready, or just out of the oven.
I’m pretty sure that is a reason for longer delivery times, too. I can get pizza delivered from places that absolutely would not deliver to me 20 or 30 years ago. They delivered , but not to me because I was outside their delivery area. but now they have insulated bags
I did delivery for Godfather’s Pizza back in the 80s, and on Fri/Sat nights we had a guy who’s only job was to put the pizzas in thermal bags as they came out of the kitchen, group them in twos or threes by location, and hand them off to the next driver when they came back. (Which was nice, because otherwise you would have drivers picking through the delivery stack looking for the closest ones.)
I remember Dominos had locations positioned near all the neighborhoods in Little Rock in the early 90’s. It made it easier for drivers to drop off pizzas quickly.
Dominos almost disappeared in my city by 1999. There was a point only a couple locations were left. They didn’t deliver in my neighborhood. I had to drive over 8 miles to the store.
Domino’s has reopened a lot of locations in Little Rock. But it’s still not like 1994. The locations are covering a bigger delivery area. That slows down the drivers.
It’s nice having Dominos delivery again. But it is slower.
Wow, regular pizza ovens are “unusual” now? The only place I’ve ever seen the conveyor-belt type was once in a crappy office-building cafeteria!
In the early 1980s, none of the newer Dominos stores had the traditional Baker’s Pride ovens. We heard about some older stores that did and we all wondered how they managed to meet the 30 minute guarantee. From my observations almost all chain delivery locations switched to conveyor belts by the 1990s. They make a decent pie as long as they are gas. The all-electric conveyor ovens (which one of the five stores in our city -Long Beach, CA- had) produced a really sub-parr crust.
They are at Domino’s. I often pick up pizza rather than have it delivered, and I’ve never seen those traditional ovens at any Domino’s other than the one I worked at. I don’t think they were any slower than the conveyor type, just needed a little more attention. Usually it was the store manager working the ovens, turning the pizzas for even cooking, popping bubbles in the crust, taking them out, cutting, and looking for addresses that could be delivered together. With a good manager it worked really well. I only gave away three pizzas in the year I worked there.