Domino’s Pizza: Not Fooling Anyone
Dear Domino’s Pizza,
I have had a strained relationship with your company ever since you inexplicably parted ways with the Noid, perhaps the greatest Dadaist marketing campaign ever devised by an LSD-induced vision of pizza freshness.
Your latest transgression, however, crosses the line. Because imagining your institution as some sort of five-star Michelin-rated pizzeria borders on the sort of lunacy typically ascribed to psychotics and lone presidential assassins.
The fact that you, Domino’s pizza, now pride yourself on using fresh vegetables to make your food is red flag number one: This shouldn’t be a source of pride!
When one orders a pizza, one should rightfully assume that the ingredients used to prepare it haven’t been rotting in a corner beneath some broken Whirlpool radiator dripping a combination of water and Freon onto your produce. Furthermore, highlighting your use of fresh ingredients only leads us to presume that your previous decades of pizza production have been with ingredients that may or may not have been passed over by more discerning alley rats.
And let’s not overlook the appearance of your chefs and their kitchens in these commercials.
I’ll concede that it’s possible your kitchens have been upgraded from the grime-encrusted sanatoriums of filth and 17th century pathogens that they were throughout the 80’s, 90’s, and early part of the 21st century, but the idea that somewhere in a nearby storefront Domino’s pizzeria there are freshly shaven chefs devoid of tear drop tattoos and pierced nipples tossing pizza dough into the air in a modern stainless steel facility far exceeds the bounds of credulity.
Your kitchens have historically been havens for teenage drug dealers and divorcees with outstanding child support payments and a history of illicit sex offences, not men in white aprons and a command of multi-syllabic vocabulary. Somewhere right now there is instead grainy black and white security video footage of a random Domino’s kitchen showing an ex-con ashing their cigarette into a can of tomato paste while using his other hand to ejaculate onto the latest “meat-lovers” delivery order.
This letter is not designed to unnecessarily impugn or mock your apparent delusions of grandeur that can only be a mark of a more serious underlying mental condition. Rather, this letter is intended to describe, in detail, how Domino’s has become an institution marred by the sort of delusional, self-righteous thinking that helped precipitate the rise of national socialism in Germany circa 1930. I’m not saying that Domino’s pizza is exactly like Nazism, but I don’t think that it’s a similarity that should be overlooked.
What I’m really trying to say is that Domino’s has become like the desperate homely girl in high school who saw an inspiring episode of Oprah and decided for a few days that she was beautiful enough to date the captain of the football team. Domino’s would do better to stop pretending that they’re living a bad episode of The Facts of Life and get back to cutting itself in the girls bathroom during lunch because no one’s buying that bullshit about hand crafted artisan pizzas.
A better description of Domino’s pizza: Dough aggressively fingered by Jose, spoiled vegetables cut by Antwon, and moderately warm pizza delivered by a alcoholic Josh who may or may not have smeared his inguinal hematoma on the crust but almost certainly blew a formidable snot rocket onto the pepperoni.
So please, Domino’s, know your place and own it. You are the late-night, closing-time bad decision that makes us feel ashamed the next morning.
Sincerely,
PB
