CHAINS ARE PUTTING THE BYTE ON PIZZA DELIVERIES by Jim Erickson
Tim Turnpaugh was caught off guard recently when he telephoned for a pizza
to be delivered to his home. When he got the pizza company on the line,
the person taking orders greeted him by name like an old friend -- before
Turnpaugh could identify himself -- and cheerily asked if he'd like the same
toppings he asked for on a previous order.
"I didn't have to give them directions to my house, nothing," he said.
Everything the company needed to know was gathered during a previous purchase
and stored in the memory of a computer, ready for instant regurgitation.
This is the brave new world of pizzamation.
Godfather's pizza in Washington [state] is one such firm on the cutting edge
of pizza technology. Inside a gray-walled, nondescript building in a
Renton [Seattle suburb] business park, 80 desktop computers are lined up in
rows at Godfather's state communications center. Not a single pizza oven is
in sight. On a hectic Friday night, as many as 50 part-time employees sit in
front of the tricolor screens, taking orders. ... If you've called before,
the computer instantly identifies and recognizes your telephone number, and
retrieves information from previous orders. "Customers don't even know a
lot of the time they've reached a centralized system," said Donna Brown,
manager of the center. "They still think they're calling a local restaurant."
...
After the order is placed, the computer decides which of 51 restaurants or
outlets in Western Washington, or 10 in Eastern Washington, is closest to the
customer. The computer totals the price and relays the order and delivery
instructions to the kitchen of a restaurant or outlet, where it comes out on
a network printer. ...
Brown said the system allows the company to keep track of sales data, and
since it records addresses -- more than 500,000 are stored in Godfather's
memory banks -- it can be used for direct-mail marketing. ...
Cathy Nichols, owner of four franchised Domino's Pizza stores in Renton
and Maple Valley, installed computers early this year ... Since the computer
matches phone numbers with addresses, it also helps smoke out young pranksters
who habitually order unwanted pizzas for the unsuspecting. ...
Some customers may worry that their local pizza retailer may be keeping records
on their eating habits as well as detailed directions to their house. It can
be unsettling to think that the Big Cheese is watching you. Nichols
acknowledged that large, centralized systems are "kind of scary." "There's one
number in the state that you call, and they know everything about you."
Bill Brown of Godfather's said she could recall only three people who asked
that their records be purged, and only because they didn't want to wind up
on mailing lists. Their records were immediately removed, she said, adding
that Godfather's does not sell its mailing list to other companies.
{Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 18 August 1988}
{contributed by Jon Jacky to RISKS-FORUM Digest 1 September 1988}
