@“the same mountainbike”
I grew up near Syracuse NY…about 40% Italian…There are probably 10-20 EXCELLENT pizza places there.
When we moved to NH (Manchester) some 30+ years ago…we had a very hard time finding a good Pizza shop. Moved to the MA border…and found a couple good places…but they are 30 minute drive. Our favorite is Balducci’s in Salem… they are a wood fire furnace. Real good pizza.
Outside of that…have to go to Boston North End.
Since its kinda my fault we went off topic talking about pizza, I’ll try to bring it back around. What about my contention that this “pizza wagon” will make it easier for them to recruit / retain delivery drivers? There’s this guy who has a call-in radio show who keeps telling people (with debt problems) that they can make about $1,500 a month in side money delivering pizzas. And when he says it I always think, ‘but yeah, what about the fuel, wear & tear, risk of accident’ on your car, that kinda negates a lot of that $1,500’. Also, if you drive a car that’s on its last legs you wouldn’t want to press it into delivery service. . .
If Domino’s has this delivery wagon, that takes all those drawbacks away. Of course I guess they might cut their pay accordingly? Would they still get tips?
Specialty vehicles cost a lot of money. When I worked in TV news, our live trucks were based on Ford vans. Depending on what we ordered, we paid between 250,000 and 500,000. That’s outrageously overpriced for a Ford Econoline, but right on for a TV studio on wheels.
It’s not just the oven, it’s the infrastructure requirements to run the oven, which probably involves propane in addition to special electricals. And then you have to upgrade the safety mechanisms so that as Ed noted you don’t get a pizza oven to the head in a fender bender.
And that took a lot of R&D to design, and it’s going to be a low-volume sales vehicle, so it’s going to cost more than an off-the-assembly-line Spark would.
I like Ed’s first thought - it’s somewhat of a travesty that pizza drivers are paid crap wages, the “delivery driver fee” they started tacking on when gas prices went through the roof doesn’t actually go to the driver (or at best, only some of it does), tips are spotty (and since a lot of people think the driver fee is money in the driver’s pocket, they don’t tip anymore even if they used to), and they have to beat the hell out of their personal car to do it. I’d much rather see them driving company vehicles that they aren’t responsible for maintaining if we aren’t going to pay them decently in the first place.
@“the same mountainbike” and @MikeInNH, your favorite pizza parlor a cant be the best because they aren’t in metro NYC. Ask @VDCdriver. I don’t doubt that you have great pizza near you given the large Italian heritage nearby, and I had terrific brick oven pizza at Johns near Times Square.
That was my point in my earlier post. It’s hard for me to imagine that @VDCdriver could have confused the point with an endorsement of chain restaurant food. Many chains do have good food; that’s how they got large. Look at UNOs for deep dish.
“Look at UNOs for deep dish.”
Do I have to?
Trust me…that’s not pizza.
The end result will be that the customers and delivery drivers will be the ones paying for those vehicles used to deliver sub-par pizza.
It will also be interesting to see what happens when a few of those vehicles get wiped out by enthusiastic delivery drivers; leading to death and injuries of the ones they hit.
It could be that Dominos will set the delivery section up as a separate business entity just in case.
The local Pizza Hut does just that. That way if a driver plows into a school bus and kills 8 people the lawyers can’t go after the deeper Pizza Hut pockets and I would imagine that’s how Dominos currently operates with the driver provided vehicles.
Some Domino’s pizza locations have company vehicles. These oven equipped cars are $10,000 more than the typical sub compact cars they use, not a great expense for a business if they can 5 years service out of the vehicle.
"Look at UNOs for deep dish."Do I have to?
Trust me…that’s not pizza.
I agree…Uno’s is NOT Pizza. Not sure what it is.
To elaborate on @shadowfax comment about all the R&D costs for a low volume vehicle. I wonder if some of the cost is for an exclusivity agreement. In other words, is this vehicle ONLY to be made for Domino’s, or can Roush Enterprises and GM start cranking out more of them for Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, etc?
In regards to, "end result will be that the customers and delivery drivers will be the ones paying for those vehicles. . . " the customers and delivery drivers are the ones paying for whatever vehicles they’ve used in the past. Its just overhead, as well as the insurance I suppose they have against any of their drivers causing catastrophic damage in an accident. Probably why a pizza delivered is $16.99 or more but the carryout special is $7.99.
I only ever ate at Pizzeria Uno once, but it was AWE-some!!! The only one around me is down in the tourist district where you have to wait & wait to be seated, and the price is $$$$! Those of you who say it isn’t “pizza”; well, I suppose you could call it casserole, you certainly couldn’t pick it up to eat it, it required fork & knife. I understand there is a rivalry between New York style thin crust, and Chicago style deep dish, hard-core fans of one don’t consider the other to be pizza.
Either I’m just cheap or I don’t have hoidy-toidy tastes, but I like the Domino’s $7.99 carryout deal. The one I go to usually throws in the garlic sauce cup gratis, and if I have to wait for more than a few minutes, they usually offer me a complimentary bottle of soda as well. They do seem to be severely understaffed, as in 1 person taking orders and making pizzas, and 1 person making deliveries, while the little printer that spits out the internet orders like a ticker tape dangles down to the floor with orders they haven’t even gotten to yet. (And they tape a job application onto every pizza box, just in case you’d like to work there. . . . . 
)
Papa John’s is (or was) pretty good, but I very rarely have their pizza 'cause they’re kinda high and don’t really do carryout specials, at least in my area. I refuse to pay $16 - $18+ for a pizza. I prefer an all-you-can-eat pizza place where I can eat as much as I want for about $10or less.
Many years ago, in what feels like an entirely different life, lived by someone else, I had a series of pizza delivery jobs (including Domino’s), and not knowing what to do with my life, worked my way up to management. Now it’s been a lot of years, but here are some things to throw in:
-The big chains might have 1 or (rarely) 2 company-owned vehicles at a location. (Domino’s had S10 pickups when I was there) On a busy night there may be 5-10 drivers working to accommodate the dinner rush. Obviously most of them will need to use their own cars. Usually the company would only let their more seasoned drivers use the company truck or if a driver’s car had broken down. In the winter, the Domino’s company truck was unloved due to it being a RWD vehicle with a light rear end. I usually drove it as this didn’t bother me so much, but some of the drivers were genuinely afraid of it in the snow.
-It used to be that you could make decent money if you knew what you were doing on a delivery job like this. Drivers made minimum wage or better, plus either X amount per mile or per delivery (when driving their own vehicle), depending on the company. (and tips of course, which no one declared that I knew of) Drivers were supposed to notify their insurance company and/or have special insurance for the job, but I never met one that did either.
Nowadays, most companies charge more for delivery and the driver doesn’t get that money, or much of it. Gas is a lot more expensive, so are repairs/maintenance, insurance has certainly gone up, yet people don’t really tip much better than they did in those days. And a lot of companies are now considering drivers a “tipped employee”, so they pay a much lower wage such as wait staff gets. So now you’d have to be a fool or desperate to work a job like this, even if you had a company vehicle to drive. And that’s not even counting things like increased road rage and robberies.
I guess the moral of the story would be to treat the pizza guy or gal nice and tip accordingly, as it can be a real s#{t job and is often looked down on by people who feel such things are beneath them. (Doctors and other professionals were usually the worst tippers BTW)
GM has been selling “Sparks” in other countries for several years. In Mexico, they have replaced the old VW “Bug” as an entry level vehicle…
Photo Gallery: Domino’s DXP Delivers Pizza To Free Party At Matick Chevy In Redford,
from The Detroit News
The rubber and the dough have hit the road! Here are the pictures to prove it.
CSA
The small Chevy replaced the VW bug in popularity in Mexico, some years ago. Then, the Atos took over, and as you say now the Spark is moving up, based on what I see on the streets.