> pizza
> cheap
> arcade machines
This all sounds too much like heaven to be true.
My roommate could eat so much pizza I'm sure some of those kids were worried they'd run out.
That implies a wide distribution, but digging a little deeper, about half of their 280 locations are in Texas.
It's a shame that bad pizza is so popular, when good pizza is relatively cheap to make.
My normality has been surrounded by people that make their own stuff, from septic systems, to custom cars, to work sheds, to brick barbeques and to wood fired pizza ovens.
There's an entire state here of people that wouldn't see that as much of a challenge to build or aquire if they wanted good pizza.
For years we just used the annealing oven out the back next to the glass furnaces .. other people had other ways.
There's not much challenge to a 320 degree Celsius oven (or 600 F in some parts of the world, apparently).
It's none of the chains anyone mentioned. It was just a single place in a dying rustbelt town, and closed up a decade or more ago.
In hindsight, it was obvious that this kind of place depended on being able to hire labor that it could pay less than it was worth. The dream around there was to snag one of the few steel mill jobs that was left, yet almost everyone I worked with went off to college and never came back. We all worked hard and used our brains. For example, they had tuned the oven such that a pizza was cooked in two revolutions of the stone. By using the peel to place the pizza in different spots on the stone you could vary the amount of time the pizza was actually in the oven without needing to set a timer or keep track of anything. Because, as you know, the perfect cooking time depends on the toppings ;). If you've ever watched a Pizza Hut/Dominoes/Papa John's/etc, you'll see that they just throw the pizza on a conveyor belt and forget about them. Everything gets cooked the same exact amount of time (in an over that looks horrendous for energy efficiency!).
Our big fill-you-up-cheap item was pizza. The ingredient cost for pizza is ridiculously low, even for above-average quality ingredients. An entire pizza was likely $0.50 or so, depending on toppings.
The restaurant oven was this giant gas-fired thing with 5 or 6 circular, rotating stone surfaces with each set to its own temperature. The pizza stone was set somewhere between 550 and 600° F.
My main job was making the pizza, and they were good. Definitely better than anything you could get at a Pizza Hut or Dominos or Little Caesars. People would even ask for custom pizzas, and management didn't care. You put it out on the buffet line and wave at them so they know it's ready. Of course, while they're waiting they aren't eating other things...
The restaurant also had a little game room with arcade machines that spit out tickets for cheap prizes. Kids would have a slice or two of pizza and then run off to play games, making their visits especially profitable.