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Domino's totally went back and improved their pizza though in a notable way. It's like night and day from how they were doing things for years.
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Dec 29, 2017 15:35
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Ganson posted:This describes like 90% of the Malls in central PA. They stay alive by the sheer fact that there's absolutely nothing else to do in central PA for the 90% of the residents who are too proud to hit up the bang'n thrift stores (The only reason I go home, great way to get good quality incredibly inexpensive furniture. Especially around Mechanicsburg/Carlisle Pike). I actually went to grad school in central Pennsylvania and briefly worked in a mall, and I can corroborate this. I still have some phenomenal furniture from there that I've kept through far too many relocations.
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Dec 29, 2017 15:38
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Loving the pizza responses so far and I agree with all of 'em! I could go on and on, I actually spent 5-6 aimless years working both as a driver and a manager, mostly at PJs but I took turns at all 3 of the Big 3 during different times so I have direct, personal experience with how they all do business. And yeah, PJ shot himself in the foot, then shot himself in the other foot. As someone on the last page said, amazing how capitalist assholes by and large can never seem to play the game when it's fair, they can only win when the rules are broken or tilted in their favor.
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Dec 29, 2017 15:46
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JustJeff88 posted:I actually went to grad school in central Pennsylvania and briefly worked in a mall, and I can corroborate this. I still have some phenomenal furniture from there that I've kept through far too many relocations. I need to get back down to the Shady Maple in Lancaster for their massive smorgasbord and some of the best unfinished furniture you can buy from Mennonites (yes you can do both of these things in the same place).
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Dec 29, 2017 16:45
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anonumos posted:Papa John's truly did kill themselves and the golden goose they rode into town on. When I was in high school before the turn of the millennium, Papa John's was hands down the best national chain (Pizza Hut had already begun its "compromise on quality" before I began middle school). When I was in college, they still served the best delivery you could get unless you were near a local chain or mom-and-pop pizza restaurant. When I left college, they switched out the cheese, watered down the sauce, and did I-don't-know-what to their dough. It was poo poo and therefore I haven't eaten Papa John's in about a decade. It is the same with most restaurants that grow quickly. When they are in the growth stage they use high quality ingredients, train their people well and deliver a good product. Once they hit the income stage they cut costs to the bone, everything turns to poo poo and they act surprised when sales go down. Chipotle followed the same path.
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Dec 29, 2017 16:54
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fishmech posted:Domino's totally went back and improved their pizza though in a notable way. It's like night and day from how they were doing things for years. Did they ever spruce up the decor of their take out places? I haven't been in the one in my old town for over a decade but the last time I was there it was essentially a sad sterile pizza factory. Non-descript everything. It looked like someone built a restaurant around the butcher area of a typical supermarket.
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Dec 29, 2017 17:02
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The only chain pizza place I can deal with now is unironically little caesars. They had one of their takeout only places down the street from me at one of my old apartments and I'd get it once a week or so.
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Dec 29, 2017 17:05
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Devor posted:Here's a deep dive podcast about Mattress stores, why they tend to cluster, and why they're so profitable (for now) Who's buying these mattresses anyway?
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Dec 29, 2017 17:09
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got any sevens posted:Who's buying these mattresses anyway? One sale at Mattress Firm gets them anywhere from $600 to $1000, along with a credit card deal. The one person sitting in there could make one or two sales a week on average and make on okay living. They might even make a significant profit from the credit cards (Synchrony Bank).
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Dec 29, 2017 17:21
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Ganson posted:The only chain pizza place I can deal with now is unironically little caesars. They had one of their takeout only places down the street from me at one of my old apartments and I'd get it once a week or so. Little Caesar's is easily the best chain pizza joint, especially if you get it fresh and not from sitting in their heaters for an hour. The low price is a bonus.
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Dec 29, 2017 17:31
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Ganson posted:The only chain pizza place I can deal with now is unironically little caesars. They had one of their takeout only places down the street from me at one of my old apartments and I'd get it once a week or so. I really respect Little Caesar’s. They’re low quality, but they don’t pretend to be anything else, and charge a commensurate price. I love supporting businesses, even chains, that aren’t trying to get away with something and pulling cute little tricks.
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Dec 29, 2017 17:32
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skooma512 posted:I really respect Little Caesar’s. They’re low quality, but they don’t pretend to be anything else, and charge a commensurate price. I love supporting businesses, even chains, that aren’t trying to get away with something and pulling cute little tricks. I have the same feeling about Waffle House. Sure, it all comes out of bags, but you can see the guy pour the bag into the pan!
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Dec 29, 2017 17:36
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skooma512 posted:I really respect Little Caesar’s. They’re low quality, but they don’t pretend to be anything else, and charge a commensurate price. I love supporting businesses, even chains, that aren’t trying to get away with something and pulling cute little tricks. Exactly. What PJs does instead is use your memories of their quality from 15 years ago to charge more for something that's no better than the $6 special at Little Caesar's anyway. Funny thing too: in my neighborhood the PJ's closed and the Caesar's is fairly new.
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Dec 29, 2017 17:49
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Since we don't have a general cities or transportation thread I figured I'd put this here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html Story from the NYT about why subway construction in New York City is hilariously more expensive than anywhere else in the world ($1.5 billion - $2.5 billion per mile, compared to $450 million per mile in Paris). The story picks out staffing costs, "soft cost" inflation, and bad contracting practices (including corruption, though the story doesn't come right out and say it). Includes a guy from London rolling his eyes at NYC claiming the city is too old to do this cheaply, and someone from Paris talking about how they thought their project was expensive but uhhh I know there's an article out there somewhere comparing NYC and other American cities to Europe and Asia but I can't find it at the moment. US cities are generally always towards the top. Here's a thread expanding on the MTA's terribleness and the constant insistence on innovation, rather than just copying successful systems that work in other countries: https://twitter.com/mtsw/status/946488823478972416 edit: see if you can find The Weirdest Guy Ever in the mentions on this thread Badger of Basra fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Dec 29, 2017 |
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Dec 29, 2017 17:49
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VH4Ever posted:Exactly. What PJs does instead is use your memories of their quality from 15 years ago to charge more for something that's no better than the $6 special at Little Caesar's anyway. Funny thing too: in my neighborhood the PJ's closed and the Caesar's is fairly new. Every PJs I see around Pittsburgh looks like an awful poo poo hole in a wall.
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Dec 29, 2017 17:50
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Badger of Basra posted:Since we don't have a general cities or transportation thread I figured I'd put this here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html Badger of Basra posted:Here's a thread expanding on the MTA's terribleness and the constant insistence on innovation, rather than just copying successful systems that work in other countries:
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Dec 29, 2017 18:11
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skooma512 posted:I really respect Little Caesar’s. They’re low quality, but they don’t pretend to be anything else, and charge a commensurate price. I love supporting businesses, even chains, that aren’t trying to get away with something and pulling cute little tricks. I'll keep Pizza chat going. Of the big chains Little Caesars is also easily my favorite. They don't pretend to be anything different, and their service (at least at my location) is exceptional. Like if it's 8pm on a weds and my fiance and I were both working late, we're hungry, and our budget is tight, little caesars is perfect for what it is. If I want a better quality pizza, I'll go to a sit-down restaurant or make it myself. Also unlike John Schnatter, the guy who founded Little Caesars seemed like a good human being and paid for Rosa Park's rent. http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/15/us/mike-ilitch-rosa-parks-trnd/index.html
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Dec 29, 2017 18:17
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TyroneGoldstein posted:Did they ever spruce up the decor of their take out places? I haven't been in the one in my old town for over a decade but the last time I was there it was essentially a sad sterile pizza factory. Non-descript everything. It looked like someone built a restaurant around the butcher area of a typical supermarket. The last couple ones I was in, it was just a small take-out counter fronted by literally two small tables for someone who needed to wait or eat there, backed by an enormous kitchen area. But usually I'm just doing delivery if I'm getting Dominos.  I mean the waiting/pickup area was clean and not like it was unpleasant or anything, it's just boring.
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Dec 29, 2017 18:26
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Nice to see Papa Johns finally failing, but I started boycotting them the moment Schnatter bitched about Obamacare would increase the cost of each pizza fourteen cents. That prompted to me to actually find a mom and pop shop that charged $17 per pizza instead of $10, and actually tasted good.
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Dec 29, 2017 18:35
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I'd like little caesars more if their pizza wasnt 90% bread I saw a commercial for Dominoes take-out insurance yesterday. In case you drop your pizza getting in your car or something. 
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Dec 29, 2017 18:36
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got any sevens posted:I'd like little caesars more if their pizza wasnt 90% bread Pretty sure that's just a joke/advertising gimmick.
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Dec 29, 2017 19:03
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Zebulon posted:Pretty sure that's just a joke/advertising gimmick. No it's an actual thing, but it probably is such a rare occurrence it's basically an advertising gimmick. One that probably won't involve someone having a psychotic break.
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Dec 29, 2017 19:08
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exploded mummy posted:No it's an actual thing, but it probably is such a rare occurrence it's basically an advertising gimmick. What the gently caress. The idea is so dumb I couldn't imagine it being real.
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Dec 29, 2017 21:27
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1. One of the malls near me has 1 to 3 play areas, depending on how you count them. 2. Domino's franchisees are slowly refurbishing their stores. 3. I haven't had PJ since college, and it was decent enough back then.
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Dec 29, 2017 21:42
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Zebulon posted:What the gently caress. The idea is so dumb I couldn't imagine it being real. It's basically an expansion of their return policy to include replacing it within 3 hrs of purchase for an identical pie if you hosed up and ruined it somehow (caveats: return original pie, receipt, not valid if you've taken a bite, blah blah). My guess is they decided the idea of pizza insurance was so out there that they ran with it for the free publicity it'd generate in people mocking it. It's real, but still a marketing gimmick.
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Dec 29, 2017 21:42
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Haifisch posted:We do have a transportation thread! It's nominally about traffic engineering, but its focus has drifted over the years & mass transit pops up in there from time to time. Iirc the London Underground was started in the 1860s and was planned alongside new sewers/water pipes, and even now they have a relatively “clean” underground infrastructure to work with. Putting a new Tube system in a city with a less organised network of pipes and cables is going to be a bitch.
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Dec 29, 2017 21:54
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davebo posted:Nice to see Papa Johns finally failing, but I started boycotting them the moment Schnatter bitched about Obamacare would increase the cost of each pizza fourteen cents. That prompted to me to actually find a mom and pop shop that charged $17 per pizza instead of $10, and actually tasted good. Yeah quality pizza is worth the price, I guess part of the problem is the mindset that pizza is something you should eat everyday so it has to be cheap.
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Dec 29, 2017 22:06
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Pizza is a lot like Chinese food in the sense that America doesnt really include it as a concept when it comes to anything other than cheap and quick. So, generally, the market for high end or more upscale or even just more robust options never pans out.
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Dec 29, 2017 22:40
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I stopped getting papa johns because the only thing worth a drat is their garlic butter and 1) they would routinely forget it even if I paid to have an extra cup 2) they don't include it standard with the thin crust, only their Italian seasoning. Add in the decline in quality and their terrible views it is a no brainer to seek out a better mom and pop place.
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Dec 29, 2017 23:02
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Raldikuk posted:I stopped getting papa johns because the only thing worth a drat is their garlic butter and 1) they would routinely forget it even if I paid to have an extra cup 2) they don't include it standard with the thin crust, only their Italian seasoning. Add in the decline in quality and their terrible views it is a no brainer to seek out a better mom and pop place. I too enjoy some sort of oil flavoured with poo poo-tier garlic powder.
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Dec 29, 2017 23:03
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learnincurve posted:Iirc the London Underground was started in the 1860s and was planned alongside new sewers/water pipes, and even now they have a relatively “clean” underground infrastructure to work with. Putting a new Tube system in a city with a less organised network of pipes and cables is going to be a bitch. The London Underground started in the 1860s yes, but with short stretches of covered trackways for plain old steam locomotives running very close to the surface. There are similarly parts of the New York City Subway nearly as old - parts of the subway in southern Brooklyn were steam railways built and running as early as 1864 as cuts through the surrounding landscape with stretches of bridging over them for streets to cross and so on. Some other things to consider though is that the entire NYC Subway system is far more interconnected between the lines and services, runs 24 hours a day 7 days a week, and has a ton more stretches of 3 and 4 track mainlines than the London Underground. While the high interconnectedness and provision of express and local tracks means the system can adapt to damage or needed closings for repairs more easily, it also means you have to make sure new things you build on may need more serious spending because of how they must interconnect. For instance, a major cost factor in building the currently open parts of the Second Avenue Subway involved work on the IND/BMT 63rd Street Line to handle trains going from the Second Avenue stub section to the rest of the city, and signaling upgrades and changes down onto the IND Sixth Avenue Line and BMT Broadway Line to match up. Oh and part of supporting that involved signaling changes on some other lines that feed into or out of that... you see how the scope of work snowballs. And sure you could strictly speaking have skipped a lot of that for the time being, but it needs to be done anyway so it might as well be done now. Some of the stuff that had to be replaced in that process had been in place since before WWII after all.
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Dec 29, 2017 23:04
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So If I’m reading this right, in order to upgrade or extend one bit you find that you have to upgrade or change a whole chain of 83 other things, and all while keeping the whole subway system running so New York’s entire transport infrastructure does not collapse. So I’m thinking the billion or so in money isn’t really for X miles of track, it’s to do maintenance on a system that is massively out of date due to a lack of past investment?
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Dec 29, 2017 23:16
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mandatory lesbian posted:Yeah quality pizza is worth the price, I guess part of the problem is the mindset that pizza is something you should eat everyday so it has to be cheap. I think it's more that a pizza is made out of like 8 ingredients total and all of them are basically the cheapest things that exist. You can make a pizza to feed a family for like 2 dollars of ingredients. some sort of pizza was always going to end up being super cheap.
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Dec 29, 2017 23:35
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learnincurve posted:So I’m thinking the billion or so in money isn’t really for X miles of track, it’s to do maintenance on a system that is massively out of date due to a lack of past investment?
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Dec 29, 2017 23:36
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Haifisch posted:This is America, so "massively out of date due to a lack of past investment" is always a correct assumption about our infrastructure. And in most other places it's true as well, just not quite to such an extreme extent. Having grown up in areas completely rebuilt after WW2 with comparatively brand new subway systems, my first thought when stepping on both the Paris but especially the London subway/tube was "man it's obvious this poo poo was built several world wars ago and they're having to fit modern tech and several times too many passengers into undersized tunnels". e: I'm sure 2100 kids will say the same about post WW2 subways suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Dec 29, 2017 |
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Dec 29, 2017 23:43
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Haifisch posted:This is America, so "massively out of date due to a lack of past investment" is always a correct assumption about our infrastructure. The neighborhood that I grew up in still has concrete streets that were poured in the 30s by the WPA.
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Dec 29, 2017 23:44
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Reminder of that time one junction box got flooded with concrete and brought the London Underground to it’s knees. http://metro.co.uk/2014/01/23/set-in-stone-victoria-line-closed-after-control-room-is-flooded-with-fast-setting-concrete-4275088/
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Dec 29, 2017 23:50
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Dameius posted:Pizza is a lot like Chinese food in the sense that America doesnt really include it as a concept when it comes to anything other than cheap and quick. So, generally, the market for high end or more upscale or even just more robust options never pans out.  dunno where you live but there are three more-upscale pizza places off the top of my head in my small-to-medium Texas city, not counting upscale-places-that-have-pizza
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Dec 29, 2017 23:50
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This is quite the bougie store i found Thats a real stuffed bear, $4200 bucks
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Dec 30, 2017 00:23
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learnincurve posted:Reminder of that time one junction box got flooded with concrete and brought the London Underground to it’s knees. http://metro.co.uk/2014/01/23/set-in-stone-victoria-line-closed-after-control-room-is-flooded-with-fast-setting-concrete-4275088/ The desperate battle to minimalize the upfucking is an amazing story.
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Dec 30, 2017 00:29
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