I think the conveyor belt ovens are more idiot proof. No judging whether the pizza is done. I worked at Chuck E Cheese forty years ago and the store had a conveyor belt oven. (There was a door halfway down the length through which we inserted the sandwiches to be heated.)
That’s the case at our favorite pizza place. They don’t deliver, but usually when we order for pick up it’s 45 minutes or so. At times it’s over an hour. We just plan ahead and order an hour or so before we want it.
Agreed. I don’t order from Domino’s often, but I do sometimes get a craving for them. The nearest Domino’s is less than 2 miles away from me, and up until a couple of years ago, my pizzas would usually get here within 30 to 45 minutes.
Now, it’s a crapshoot, and it’s become very common for the bottleneck, as shown on their Pizza Tracker, to be the “quality check” (i.e., pizza is out of the oven, and waiting to get picked up by a driver) – there have been times when my order is in that stage for well over a half-hour, and making the total time, from placing the order to getting my food, at an hour or more.
I strongly suspect that it’s a staffing issue; they can’t get (or can’t afford) enough drivers to handle the order load at dinner time.
I ordered pizza and a couple of other things from a local independent pizza shop on Friday two weeks ago. When the estimate I received from the website was 90 minutes, we cancelled and went elsewhere. Obviously, restaurants are busy on Fridays and Saturdays.
Staffing a Domino’s is probably an art in itself. Mondays were slow nights, unless the Seahawks were playing on Monday Night Football, and then they would put more drivers on the schedule. We were busy during the Super Bowl, of course. One of our neighboring stores delivered to an Army post; don’t know what factors they had to plan for.
Definitely. In the 1980s the key was having young drivers (usually college students) who would jump at the chance to cut their shift short when business slowed. That way you could overstaff on Fridays and Saturdays but still keep labor cost under 25% of sales.
Where I worked, of course Fridays and Saturdays were busy, but so was every other Wednesday. That was the government payday, and in a government town, that meant a lot of people saying, “Screw it, I’ve got money, let’s get a pizza!”
On busy nights, we’d have one or two cooks pre-preparing doughs with base sauce and cheese, and four to six working the “make table” putting the pizzas together. The conveyor oven would be just about at maximum capacity for a few hours straight, and we’d have two people on the cut table, one to take the pizzas off the conveyor and cut them, and one to figure out where it was supposed to go next - into a box for delivery, or back in the deep-dish pan for the sit-down restaurant. We’d have a line out the door for at least an hour or two on those nights.
Add in a pasta cook, and the kitchen was pretty damn busy.
That was a big no-no where I worked. The dough wasn’t slapped out until the order came through because the raw dough would slowly shrink to less than the diameter of the screen.
This was Pizza Hut, where the dough was proofed right in the pan. So we had no such difficulties.
And the pre-saucing really only happened on those busy days. The doughs would only be in that state for a few minutes. There was a bit of an art to anticipating the flow of small, medium and larges so that the line cooks never ran out of them.
I delivered for Domino’s in the early 1990s, and we have the conveyer belt oven.
And most runs were two deliveries. Sometimes three. We used insulated bags to keep them hot. Sometimes I would use two bags (a “bag-in-a-bag”) if the run was long, though this had the unfortunate side effect of making the box soggy.
I also recall we changed the terms of the guarantee at one point. Instead of it being free if > 30 minutes had elapsed, we gave them $3 off.
And… pizza must be getting cheaper. Because I recall the price of our pizzas being around $8 to $10, and I am seeing these same prices today.
That’s what I remember. And we were told never to dispute the time with the customer; just give them the discount no matter how wrong they were about the time (which was always handprinted on the slip (Is that what we called the three-layer carbons? I forget.)
That’s was my impression for decades after I stopped delivering pizza. In the mid-1980s the price of a large “Extravaganza” (everything) was $10.95. I saw similar pizzas going for about the same or less well into this century.
A little bit OT, but I do recall one interesting thing while working at Domino’s at around 1990: a couple quality-control folks from the corporate office showed up unannounced around 10 AM, which is when we opened for delivery. The first thing they did was stick a thermometer into the grated cheese. They told us, “The cheese is too cold. You removed it from the freezer too late. You need to let it thaw for an hour or two before using it.” So we had to wait until the cheese got up to a certain temperature before we were allowed to make pizzas. (Normally the manager didn’t care - she would make pizzas with frozen cheese without giving it another thought.)
I worked at Domino’s in '85-'86, I think. I remember the name changing from “Price Destroyer” to " “Extravaganzza”; or maybe it was the other way around.
When I worked there, there was word that Tom Monaghan, the founder and still head of Domino’s, was going to be in our area, and might drop in on is. We cleaned the place from top to bottom the night before. That whole, long, stainless steel prep table where we made the pizzas, and which I assumed was bolted in place, got moved so we could mop every inch of the floor.
I said I usually pick up pizzas these days. Is there a place I can get one of those insulated bags to bring a pizza home in?
Amazon has a selection.
Here’s one with an integral heater. 
What differentiates it from any other kind of heater?
I usually order pizza at the restaurant, wait for it and then go straight home. So it has little time to cool.
Though I remember once as a child, bringing home a pizza when it wasn’t held level and toppings slid to one side during the drive.
Said another way, “Quality check” is an all-too-transparent euphemism for “awaiting an available delivery driver”.
Paging @purplehorseshoe who in fact works currently at a locally popular takeout + delivery pizza joint. I bet she can give us some insight into current pizza processes and challenges vice the 30- to 40-year old experiences some of us had in college.
Place I work at hasn’t delivered in years. Doesn’t stop us from still getting at least one call a night, sometimes several, asking for it.
So no, sorry, I can’t speak directly to the logistics of delivery, although in current times, staffing difficulties (and gas prices!) plus the existence of alternatives like UberEats or GrubHub to bring food to people’s homes, have definitely had an impact.
But I don’t know where y’all are seeing ten-dollar pizzas anymore. Where I work, a small cheese-only is close to fifteen bucks, and a large deluxe (pepperoni, sausage, green pepper, mushroom) is just under $27.