I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned this yet. The founder of Domino’s Pizza has given a lot of money to Operation Rescue and other Christian Right organisations. So when he still owned the company, me and most of my friends refused to eat his pizza because we didn’t want him getting any of our money and giving it to them. I hadn’t eaten Domino’s for about twenty years, until I learned he had sold the company, and then I tried some just out of curiosity to see what I’d been missing. My reaction: not much.
So, pretty much like Pizza Hut and Suck E. Cheese, right?
Substantially like Pizza Hut. (The last time I had Pizza Hut pizza was in the late nineties or early 2000’s, and I recall it came with crust filled with mock cheese and a tub of dip which listed “Artificial margarine flavour” as an ingredient. Pizza Hut is deservedly languishing up here.)
I don’t know if it’s different where you are, but Chuck E. Cheese doesn’t even count as a pizza chain - they are in the Skee-Ball and toddler game business, and don’t even bother trying to make pizza that an adult would voluntarily choose – it compares more with those old Chef Boy-R-Dee pizza kits that your big sister used to make for you to eat during The Muppet Show.
:eek:
Margarine is artificial butter. But they’re so fucking cheap they didn’t just have artificial butter, or even artificial margarine, but artificial margarine flavor???
May as well use artificial wheat flour and Processed Artificial Tomato Flavored Sauce Substitute.
I’ve eaten a lot of Dominos (we had a thing in college where you could swap some of your dining-hall credits for Dominos delivery instead) and it was edible at the time.
I’d shy away from ordering it now, for reasons that aren’t entirely Dominos’ fault:
(1) I’m lucky to have very cheap and solid pizza joints right by me, both of the high end coal-oven type and the high-volume couple-of-bucks slice-when-you’re-drunk type. The current chain specials might skew it, but generally there’s not even an appreciable cost advantage to going with one of the chains.
(2) I’ve gotten to where my personal preference is for the very thin crust, high heat Neapolitan style stuff (this may or may not be poncey affectation, who knows), so Domino’s “normal” crust is too much dough for my liking.
(3) This one is Dominos’ fault – the dough is usually soggy as well as too thick, and the tomato sauce achieves the feat of not tasting very tomato-ey but giving me the same heartburn you’d get from drinking a jar of Ragu.
Maybe it’s where I live (suburban Philly), but no chain beats some of the local Italian pizzerias around here.
The same planet where people think it’s cool to hate Wal-Mart? Or Ben Affleck?
I know people who dislike Wal-Mart for legitimate reasons (mainly, because the ones here in the Chicago area are total shitholes. The ones I’ve visited in Arizona I actually quite liked.) But not to be “cool.” Seriously, adults do this? No comment on Ben Affleck. I had no idea he’s considered uncool to like.
Are you new to these boards? 
I guess I just disagree with the opinion that everyone is doing it to be “cool.”
I tried the new formula, and yeah, it was better - the crust was tastier, at least. But the pizza itself didn’t taste like anything at all. Papa John’s thin crust all the way, baby.
Never underestimate the power of groupthink.
Yeah, but I feel like there’s an anti-perceived-groupthink groupthink also going on. Every time one of these threads pops up, where people express their, quite often, legitimate dissatisfaction with a popular middle-of-the-road restaurant/book/movie/song/etc, there are a group of posters who find it “cool” to point out that these people aren’t expressing legitimate dissatisfaction with the topic at hand, but rather are posers who do so for some fictional “cool points” in an effort to conform to the majority group opinion. So, you know, I get the whole vibe of posters like this saying “I’m cooler than you, because I could see you’re just following the groupthink, and I’m so clever and I can see that and call you on it.”
There was nothing cool about the food poisoning.
Yeah, I don’t hate them. There are none close enough to be convenient, but I would have them deliver if there were.
Actually, what it sounds like to me is that a particular area of the country had a really badly run franchise. Dominoes is a franchise, and usually all the Dominoes stores in one area have the same owner. When I worked at Dominoes, they had quality standards equal to, and in some cases, higher, than Pizza hut. Having the pepperoni smell like dishwater, for instance, would be unacceptable.
So would these be two separate Groupthink Franchises then? One where everybody thought it was good, and another where they all thought it sucked?
On the subject of franchises and varying quality between them, I present Anthony’s Pizza (“The World’s Best Pizza For The World’s Best Customers”), familiar to many an Airman and Soldier who has ever grabbed lunch at the local PX on base. The quality at these places varies a LOT, between different stores, and sometimes between different times of day (always get the pizza fresh, never get it when it’s had time to sit in the turntable).
I’ve found that at some places, it’s super bland, and at other places, it’s fantastic. It can have that limp soaked-in-grease feel, or it can just be popping with flavor. Sometimes it just seems to depend on luck. The ideal seems to be to get a slice or two when you see them take it out of the oven, or during a lunch rush when the pizza won’t get a chance to sit stationary. I always try to give it at least one or three tries on any given base before I write it off, others refuse to get within 50 yards of an Anthony’s.
(Protip: The Combination Pizza at Anthony’s is almost always better than the Pepperoni, probably because the flavors from all the toppings help to overpower any lackings the pizza might otherwise have)
Variances between locations can be huge. I worked at 10+ different Pizza Huts, and so many little things affected the quality between stores. You might have different veggie suppliers, one store might get their veggies diced, others might have to dice them themselves. At one particular store I worked at, the dough rose differently than any other store I worked at. It could have been water quality, temperature, or any number of minor factors that added up to cause a large difference.
And then, you had “training trees.” One particular cook taught a trainee how to do things a certain way, that trainee trained somebody else, etc. etc. etc. We had particular cooking techniques that were characteristic to one geographic area that were rare or unheard of in others.
And then, you had equipment calibration. Newer stores had newer equipment, older stores had older (or possibly broken) equipment, refrigerators were different by a few degrees, one store had a freezer, another didn’t, etc. etc. etc.
I got a call from the area manager. This thread prompted me to send a complaint, and I may have been a little acerbic because of my sprained wrist. Anyway, I was told that it is not Corporate’s policy to restrict the number of slices. It appears to be a misunderstanding, because there are some restrictions on Hot’n’Ready pizzas. The staff were reminded of what changes they may and may not make immediately the manager got my email. On the phone, she wanted me to identify the person who refused to slice the pizza the way I wanted it. I had to tell her that it was a girl, but I didn’t tell her whether she wore a blue shirt or an orange one. I don’t want anyone to get into trouble over a misinterpretation of the rules, and the whole staff has already been talked to. (She said she just wanted to talk to the person to make sure there are no more misunderstandings, but I’m wary of ‘one-on-one’ meetings.) I was just concerned that there might be some silly Corporate policy that forbids double-slicing.
So Little Seizures is going to send me a certificate for a complimentary pie.