It would be interesting to hear what they think the net gain is. Some places are pretty optimised already. Little Caesars, for example, usually has only 2 or 3 workers.

The article says that can make about 10x as many pizzas as a similarly staffed pizzaria. Along with their delivery innovations, it seems like they could serve a wider area and deliver pizzas much faster, especially at peak hours. The last bit strikes me as important: I really haven't ordered much pizza since the early 00's because at peak hours it could take 20 minutes or an hour - if it was a reliable 20 minute delivery, it might be more tempting (especially if automation grants some quality improvements).

Ah, interesting. I wonder how much the longer drive hurts the quality though. I can certainly tell when my pizza sat around too long.

Pizza places need more drivers than anything.

I wonder if there's some business opportunity there. I would guess a pool of drivers that serve more than one pizza chain might be more efficient than ones assigned to a specific company. Or maybe the pizza companies have some vision to leverage their own driver networks for things other than pizza?

A multi-pizzeria network of drivers might work; they could call themselves Deliverators.

After all, like Stephenson said, when you get down to it America really only does four things very well. Music, movies, microcode, and high-speed pizza delivery.

Jamie Zawinski was just complaining about the lack of options in this market on his DNALounge blog last week.

Like Ubereats?

Well your leverage with a pizza place that already has its own drivers might be a bit different.

More like a white label offering. Which has lower margins, and requires the customers don't view their driver network as an asset.