The two most beautiful words someone can tell you aren’t “I love you,” but “Free pizza.” No doubt about it, plenty of evidence. It’s not in vain the perfect food, one that appeals to absolutely everyone and only brings fights over pineapple or anchovies as toppings (which, by the way, defines you as a person). What would happen, then, if suddenly an entire country as big as the United States discovered all at once that they could have all the pizzas they want without paying a single dollar? I’ll tell you: chaos.
Give me pizza
It all started at the beginning of October when Domino’s Pizza launched a typical promotion without much importance: “Emergency Pizza.” It was something very simple: everyone who ordered a certain pizza from a variety of options would receive a code that could be redeemed for another medium pizza later on. A classic 2-for-1 deal, but with a twist. Well, nothing out of this world, right?
But someone on the marketing, testing, or programming team messed up, and the result was that anyone could use those codes as many times as they wanted. Buy one pizza, get two hundred free. By Thursday, people sharing codes was already a trend on social media and, of course, on the streets: queues began to fill the streets, diners ordered pizzas by the dozens from home, and no one could keep up inside the stores. It was a collapse, indeed.
Meanwhile, in Domino’s offices, all alarms went off, and an investigation started to figure out who had first leaked the information (apparently, it was an employee on Reddit tired of the company). As the story goes, there were people who ordered 58 pizzas, stores that served 170 in an hour and a half… You can imagine the internal chaos without clear guidelines to follow. In just a few days, they could have faced absolute bankruptcy due to a marketing mistake as delicious as it was brutal.
The bosses began sending messages to employees, forbidding them from serving free pizzas (some complied, others didn’t) before a computer expert, putting in extra hours, managed to fix the problem. The collapse of modern civilization could have come about because of a bunch of free pizza. Honestly, I didn’t expect it any other way.
