The Domino’s Pizza Tracker Theory of Everything

Planet Money

The episode explores the 'Domino's Pizza Tracker Theory of Everything,' tracing how a simple IT tool for monitoring pizza progress revolutionized

Key takeaways

• David Haubenstricker helped develop the Pizza Tracker at Domino's to mitigate customer anxiety during the waiting process.
• The 'labor illusion' suggests that seeing progress or work being done makes customers value a service more.

Main topics

• Domino's Pizza Tracker history
• The Labor Illusion in UX design

Notable quotes

A status page that changed lives.

Conclusion

The episode provides a fascinating look at how psychological design in

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) This is Ira Glass. On This American Life, we tell stories about when things change. Like for this guy, David, whose entire life took a sharp, unexpected, and very unpleasant turn. And it did take me a while to realize it's basically because the monkey pressed the button. That's right. Because the monkey pressed the button. Surprising stories every week, wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (0:24) Hello, Speaker 1 (0:25) Planet Money listener. It's Kenny Malone. So there's been this odd thing happening, and we were hoping that you, like you personally, could help us fix this, perhaps. You probably know that we wrote a book. We made a game. And thanks to you, a lot of those have been sold. And this is great. But given how well they've been selling, our partners for both the book and the game have pointed out like a mystery. There simply are not... that many reviews or ratings on sites like Barnes & Noble or Amazon compared to what you would expect given the sales numbers. So first of all, I mean, thank you for even just coming along with us on our many zany adventures and for spending your hard-earned money on a Planet Money book or a Planet Money game. Like truly, we cannot thank you enough. Secondly, though, we realize now perhaps in hindsight, we were maybe too proud to ask for this. But if you bought either the book or the game, or if you plan to, giving us a rating or a review on whatever site or with whatever store you bought it from really, really helps us at the show, especially in this age of algorithms. If you didn't buy either, that's okay too. We're glad to just hang out with you. And to everyone listening, just thank you. Thank you for listening. This is Planet Money from NPR. Speaker 3 (1:55) I hate waiting. I think we all do. But recently I heard a theory about how our relationship with waiting has been totally transformed in the last 20 years. It was a story about how an IT department of a pizza restaurant completely changed how we wait and how we feel when we wait. I heard it from none other than Alex Mayossi. Take it away, Alex. Speaker 8 (2:21) Okay, for... All intents and purposes, the story starts when David Haubenstricker got a job at Domino's in IT. And at the time, the company was in a kind of crisis. See, for a long time, Domino's was known for one thing. Speaker 7 (2:36) They were known for their fast delivery. It was like, if you wanted your pizza fast, you ordered it from Domino's. If you wanted good pizza. If you wanted good pizza, there were other places you would go. Speaker 3 (2:49) They were so into their speedy delivery thing that for many years, they even guaranteed it. If Speaker 7 (2:55) they didn't get the pizza to your door in 30 minutes, you'd get it free. Speaker 8 (2:59) But the guarantee led to problems. It pushed delivery drivers to be reckless. People died. There were lawsuits, and eventually Domino's had to give up on the guarantee. Speaker 7 (3:10) And all the industry pundits said, Domino's is now dead. Wow. They were basically saying, without the guarantee... Who's going to order Domino's pizza? Right. You know? Speaker 3 (3:22) Yeah, David says losing the guarantee was bad. They were ceding market share to the likes of Papa John's and Pizza Hut. And David had this theory of the 30-minute guarantee, which is that it wasn't just popular because it got people their pizzas fast. It was popular for a slightly squishier reason. It had given people a sense of control. Speaker 2 (3:49) This Speaker 8 (3:50) idea was backed up by evidence. Around this time in the early 2000s, Domino's had actually commissioned a study that mapped the way people felt when they ordered a pizza. What they learned was it was a psychological roller coaster. Speaker 7 (4:04) Yeah, you're desperately hungry. And so you're like, I want pizza. I want pizza. And so you go and you place your order and it's like, oh, yes, I've got pizza coming. And you're excited. I've done it. Speaker 3 (4:17) I've ordered pizza. This was the top of the roller coaster. And things really went downhill after that. Speaker 7 (4:23) It's completely out of your control at this point. You're like. Where is it? Where is it? I'm hungry. Where is it? Especially with kids, you know, where is it, mom? Where is it, mom? Where is it, mom? You know, it's coming. It's coming. You have no idea where it is. Have they Speaker 3 (4:39) lost my order? You know, regardless of how long getting a pizza actually took, customers just hated the process, the experience of waiting. To solve this problem and to stand out in a crowded pizza market, David and his IT colleagues. cooked up a tool that would help Domino's beat their competitors on a kind of novel front, managing their customers' emotional journeys. Speaker 8 (5:07) This tool would allow their customers to obsessively monitor their pizza's progress. It would come to be called the Domino's Pizza Tracker. And this humble pizza tracker, some would argue, and I am arguing, became way more influential than you might expect. Did Speaker 3 (5:22) you know that it would go on to change the world? Speaker 7 (5:26) No. I'm still somewhat amazed that it changed lives. I mean, that's weird. A status page that changed lives. I mean, that's Speaker 3 (5:37) kind of crazy. Speaker 3 (5:40) Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Nick Fountain. And I'm Alex Mayossi. Yes, many of you will recognize Alex's voice from some classic Planet Money episodes, or his name because he wrote the Planet Money book, or maybe you're a listener to Alex's new food and economics show. It's called Gastronomics. It is there that Alex laid out this theory that I kind of love. Alex, you call it the Domino's Pizza Tracker Theory of Everything. Speaker 8 (6:06) Yes, and here's the theory. The Domino's pizza tracker would become the canonical model for every website or app that maps out how long a purchase or delivery or service is going to take. And it created a completely new norm for how we expect to feel when we buy stuff. Speaker 3 (6:22) We're talking banking, car repair, tax prep, waiting for an Uber. Your theory is it all started with the pizza tracker. So today on the show, we're going to drill down on this theory, hear how the pizza tracker was made, how it spread. how it's been manipulated, and what Speaker 2 (6:40) it tells us about human nature. Also, we hit the streets and do some hard-hitting pizza journalism. Speaker 3 (6:46) Got a hidden mic right here. We're about to go do investigative journalism. Speaker 5 (7:03) This week on Up First, we talk about the economy. Trucks, trains, and tractors run on diesel, which is now priced at record highs, with less than 50 days until the midterm elections. So the next six weeks are going to be intense. Let Up First get you through it one morning at a time with three stories you need to know each day. Listen to Up First on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (7:27) This week on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, we talk with Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Hernan Diaz about how he's used the same fountain pen for the last 30 years. What would happen if you lost it? Do you guys know those big pens with four colors? Oh, yeah. I grew up with that. Don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games. Listen to the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (7:51) We're back. It's Planet Money. We're tracing the history of the Domino's pizza tracker and how it's changed consumer culture. Where we left off, it's the mid-2000s. And Domino's knew they had this problem where people hated waiting for pizza. Speaker 2 (8:04) And Speaker 8 (8:05) without their 30-minute guarantee, they were losing their edge in the pizza game. Speaker 7 (8:09) So Domino's reputation was a rather mediocre pizza. And now we've lost our delivery time. We're starting to struggle. Speaker 1 (8:18) It's not like the Speaker 7 (8:19) company was shrinking, but compared to the overall industry, we're not doing that great. Speaker 3 (8:24) David says once Domino's learned about the emotional pizza roller coaster, lots of people at the company had a sense that they should build something like a pizza tracker. But they also knew that corporate would never go for it because it would be really time consuming to build something that would track literally every pizza at