But as your customers learn that wasting support time pays off, the game is surely over!

It turns out that human beings are often inclined not to lie for selfish gain, and there is often a certain degree of social pressure not to lie for selfish gain.

In my experience, it depends what the size of the gain is and/or which environment you are in.

Certain countries I've been to, it's perfectly normal to assume the opposing party is lying for selfish gain, and in return you expect it and act accordingly. In these places, there are no stores with return policies that will just take a customer's word for it.

Certain places have a higher trust society, and that allows some stores to be able to offer returns for refunds leniently...as long as the proportion of scammers stays low. However, even in these "high trust" places, I see that while people are hesitate to lie for selfish gain in small transactions, there is plenty of unscrupulous behavior in large transactions concealed by plausible deniability, aka white collar crime. A lot of it is in the form of you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours with someone else's money. There's almost no way to prove it unless it happened to be written down or recorded on audio/video.

Sure, it's a minority that would run a scam like this, but the normal experience is that if you leave an available exploit, it will be used.

Though the people who claim that doesn't happen enough to be significant for other pizza delivery systems seem to know more than I do.

There is no social pressure when you're alone on the phone with some faceless customer service employee.

To restate: “It will be used by a minority” — yes, we agree on this.

I absolutely feel social pressure when I’m alone on the phone with some faceless customer service employee. If you do not, that’s your choice, but it’s not universal.

Generally people trying to scam customer service out of a free pizza doesn't seem to happen at scale at least based on my experience in the food industry.

Folks who demand free food do it regardless of if it can be done or not and most everyone else just shrugs their shoulders and doesn't want to talk to anyone about their experience.

Most people know that they can harass customer support to do ridiculous things, but they don’t act on it. Maybe because they don’t think it’s an honest way to act, or maybe they don’t think it’s worth their time to harass customer support over something like free pizza.

Businesses are free to, and often do, ban highly unprofitable customers. Compensated product only makes business sense if its value is less than expected future margins plus the risk cost of the reputational hit to the company.

Every traditional delivery place will already do this, call Dominos and make up some way they got your pizza wrong and they'll send a new one. The benefit from gaming the system isn't worth it for most people.

Papa John’s is kinda unique in that they game themselves quite often and use it to their advantage. I will order pizza and have zero problem with the delivery or order and I’ll get one of those “we’re sorry” postcards. It’s just a better than average coupon and since they expire quickly there’s pressure to use it.

I’m kinda surprised (and happy) that all these delivery startups haven’t figured out that bs customer service can be a way to make money.