Let’s see…since 1978, I’ve lived in 1) New Haven, Conn.; 2) Mulberry Street in Lower Manhattan (the main drag of Little Italy); and 3) Brooklyn. In other words, the greatest pizzamaking areas outside of Naples or Sicily. In that time I’ve ordered dozens of pizzas to be eaten at a restaurant table, fresh out of the oven; hundreds delivered to my home; and thousands of slices consumed standing up.
Number of times I got the wrong thing on my pie: zero.
Maybe this is a “restaurant chain” problem. If you’re getting pizza from Domino’s or Pizza Hut or some other running dog imperialist joint where the pimply employees probably spit on your pie after they load it with unwanted anchovies, try supporting your local independent pizzeria.
99 out of every 100 wrong. I can remember getting exactly three orders right in the last 20 years. That’s right - Three - it happens so infrequently that it stands out in my memory like one lone elm tree would in the Sahara.
(I gave up on the national chains early. Gave up on the local places, too. Now I’ve just resigned myself to either living in “Uh, how could you screw this up - again!” hell - or in frozen pizza land.)
Thing is, I don’t like a lot of exocitc stuff on my pizza, so it ain’t a particularly difficult order, either!
(How do you screw up “1 Large Pepperoni with a side of garlic bread” - So. Many. Times?)
I remain optimistic. I really do believe that someday someone in one of the pizza places in this town will learn the difference between Canadian Bacon and Pepperoni.
Just to prove what a true optimist I really am, I’m planning a trip to McD’s for lunch today to see if they can get a 1/4 Pounder into the bag (instead of one of those fishy or chickeny things. I know. It’ll never happen. Oh yeah, and fries are those long skinny potato thingys -* this* appears to be a salad.)
I rarely get the wrong toppings on my pizza. I think only once in all the times I’ve ordered from Papa John’s, regardless of the location, have they gotten it very wrong. My roommate hated pepperoni, so we ordered without…and they put the pepperoni UNDER the cheese.
My favorite pizza from Papa John’s is their BBQ chicken & bacon pizza. I love the sauce. So I always order Extra Sauce, but the last few times I ordered that I got almost no sauce at all. So on a hunch, with my last pizza I didn’t ask for anything special, and it arrived drenched in the stuff.
I get my pizza from Papa Murphy’s now, and out of maybe 6 or 7 pizzas I’ve ordered from them so far, not one has been wrong.
Hold up–is THAT how they screw it up 99 times out of 100? methinks maybe you’ve got unrealistic expectations about what constitutes pepperoni in pizzaland :dubious:.
I wonder whether other folks who report lots of screwups are talking about similar things. It’s very rare that I get a pizza screwed up. Once they brought us pizza with almonds instead of walnuts at a sit-down restaurant, but the restaurant was incredibly loud, and I think the waitress was trying to lip-read, and “almonds” looks kinda like “walnuts” when mouthed. Another time was clearly a mix-up by the delivery driver, resulting in a bunch of vegetarians receiving a ham pizza.
Those are the only two times I can think of. I order complicated stuff sometimes, but it’s complicated and unambiguous.
I’ve pretty much given up on delivery pizza. I can’t eat raw onions without suffering for two or three days afterwards, and somehow, “Veggie pizza, with hamburger, no onions” always results in a pizza with extra onions, no matter who I order from.
“Hi, I’d like a veggie pizza, with hamburger. Does that have onions on it?”
“Yes.”
“Oh no, I can’t eat onions, I’m really allergic to them. Can you make sure that there aren’t any onions on it?”
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
“Thanks. So, what’s going to be on the pizza?”
“Veggie and hamburger.”
“Any onions?”
“No onions.”
“Great–thanks so much!”
That is:
Make your desire not to have onions extremely clear and unambiguous (i.e., don’t say it in a way that can be misheard).
Get them to repeat the order back to you,
Focusing on the presence of onions.
On the occasions where I make special requests, I do something like this, and very rarely get the special request unfulfilled.
My phone number was similar to that of a Domino’s, and I would get pizza orders all the time. It got to the point where I just started to answer the phone, take their order, and tell them it would arrive as soon as pizza was re-legalized. Sometimes the same person would call back. I would tell him to call his congressperson.
No, I recognize the difference. And it isn’t always Canadian Bacon. Once got a pie with nothing but mushrooms and onions. (The manager was completely mistified. No one had ordered such a pizza - so it wasn’t someone else’s pie, either.)
Isn’t pepperoni one of the most common ingredients used on pizza? I just can’t understand why someone who makes pizzas for a living can screw it up every damn time. Even after getting them to repeat the order. I’ve even gone so far as to call back 10 minutes later to confirm. Geezzzz.
They screw up my order at McD’s / BK / Wendy’s four out of five times too. As I suggested - must be something else like bad karma. :dubious:
Feel like ‘The Raingod’ in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy - Except I never put it all down in a book. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so damn frustrating!
The mushroom one, that sounds like a screwup. But if you’re really getting your order wrong on pepperoni vs. Canadian bacon the majority of the time, let alone 99 times out of 100, it seems to me that the simpler explanation is that you disagree with them on what constitutes pepperoni. The only other explanations I can think of are:
THey’ve got it in for you specifically, and have conspired to give you the wrong order; or
Where you live, people are so accustomed to getting the wrong order that they’ll continue to order pizza from multiple restaurants that always get it wrong, letting those places stay in business. This is coupled with an amazing incompetence among the pizza shops in your area, unrivalled elsewhere in the country.
Neither of those seems very likely to me :).
If you’re getting orders wrong once in a long while, it’s probably the shop’s fault. If you’re getting your order wrong the majority of the time, it’s probably something to do with you.
