> In Domino's annual report last year, Mr. Monaghan said that ''failing to honor the 30-minute delivery guarantee was one of the big disappointments of 1987.'' He added that the delivery performance ''is still totally unacceptable and therefore must be our biggest priority in 1988.''

> ''Not fulfilling a promise is inexcusable,'' he stated in the report. ''It not only goes against everything we believe in, but it's also bad business.'' [1]

Absolutely zero consideration for the possibility that the problem wasn't the staff, but the completely arbitrary 30 minute policy that couldn't possibly be consistently adhered to across thousands of franchisees without introducing significant risk to staff.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/29/business/fight-on-quick-p...

> Absolutely zero consideration for the possibility that the problem wasn't the staff, but the completely arbitrary 30 minute policy that couldn't possibly be consistently adhered to across thousands of franchisees without introducing significant risk to staff

Could it not? I'm sure I could organise a pizza restaurant with a 99.9% success rate delivering pizzas within 30 minutes (the nationwide top- performing restaurant in TFA had 99%) and no more crashes than, say, the national per- mile rate for short journeys.

But to achieve this, I'd need the restaurant to be overprovisioned in delivery drivers and conservative in rejecting requests that were too far away or too busy. My restaurant would lose money. The #1 priority is never really punctuality or timeliness or customer service - those are just means to an end. It's always money in the end.

Or come up with a way to finish the pizza in transit that delivers an acceptable product.

Attach a pizza oven to a drone...

Masayoshi Son is listening intently.

Ha, well I'd do it as a precooked pizza with a light cheese base, then drop precooked toppings on as needed and use heat lamps to melt the cheese. I doubt it'd be tasty, but it'd be fast.

The article elaborates about that at the end. This isn't "1980s corporate greed". It's just corporate greed, and it's just as relevant today as it was 40 years ago.

Yeah, you can pick a year of your choice, and find a story like this.

I agree in general but I think the 80s deserve special recognition because it marked a turning point in the relationship between wages and productivity[1][2] and the long decline of collective bargaining[3] at the same time it became even more acceptable to brag about wealth because that linked into the Cold War comparisons we made with the Eastern Bloc countries. A lot of older Americans also didn’t track how much things stood in other countries – e.g. the standard of living in much of Europe relative to people doing the same jobs domestically – but I think a lot of younger people are looking at how many trend lines have a knuckle point in that decade and are feeling cheated.

1. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

2. But see also https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/03/when-comparing-wages...

3. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/12/majoritie...

Hypothetically - why wouldn't not having a set amount of time for delivery be corporate greed too? I mean, if a corporation saves money by screwing over the customer it's corporate greed. If it screws over the employees it's corporate greed.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of people left over to screw.

"corporate greed" is gen z talk... The current economic climate has a lot of gen z's suffering, they see capitalism as the problem, thus everything is corporate greed.

It is a low quality signal, along the lines as a fiduciary duty to screw customers for profit.

It seems like an extremely straightforward term to me, describing corporations prioritising their own profit over customer experience. I’m a millennial and I’ve heard the term in use a lot longer than Gen Z have been around.

Because if you ask the owners of most of these business, this was not the plan they had in mind.

Unintended consequences, it is one reason why business students study these cases, to hopefully not repeat them.

Try running a business with low margins and low skilled employees, you make choices or go out of business, some choices win, some don't.

It is still a pretty stupid term that shows they have understanding of economics shallower than a puddle. Not reducing the profit margin to zero is also prioritizing profit over customer experience.