Not too long ago I posted about Budget and Time Warner not being very good at communicating what happens on their website to the real people who also work for them. In order that none may claim me to be a negative Nancy, I’m going to post about one company that seems to have gotten it right: Papa John’s.
At first I was afraid to order pizza from a website. It’s the kind of thing that requires instant communication to the human beings in the brick & mortar location. If it’s not done right, your pizza could take hours to get prepared, or worse yet it might not get made at all. If this required the manager to check his e-mail or something, it would not go well. But after the time I called in an order for pick-up, and they decided to deliver it (and Stephanie called me from the apartment just as the cashier was trying to find my order in the computer), I decided I’d try to remove the idiot answering the phone in a noisy room from my pizza-ordering process.
I’ve now been ordering Papa John’s online for over a year. That’s a whole year without hearing “Thank you for calling Papa John’s, please hold.” In that time, I’ve only once had an order messed up, when I got pepperoni instead of pineapple. Even in that case it was printed correctly on the receipt, so I think the guy making the pizza just didn’t read closely enough. This is a problem that could easily be solved by replacing all the humans with pizza-making robots. The kind which will someday take over the world.
My only real complaint is that I can’t use the coupons they send in the mail when I order online. But usually they have the same deals or better online so it’s not that big of an issue. On the plus side, you can take advantage of the system to some extent. For example, Stephanie and I prefer to get pizzas with pineapple and bacon. A large 2-topping pizza is $12.99. Now, either through an unadvertised online promotion or a glitch in their system, a large Smokehouse Ham & Bacon specialty pizza is $11.99 (with ham, bacon, onions, and green peppers). You can remove or substitute two toppings from a specialty pizza and still get it at the same price (I’m not sure if the rule is 2 toppings, or half of the toppings). So if we substitute pineapple for onions and remove the green peppers (or substitute extra cheese), we now have the original pizza we wanted, with an extra topping or two, for a dollar less. And when there are deals such as “free cheese sticks with a large specialty pizza,” which there usually are, we are able to take advantage of them (we technically have a specialty pizza). So now we’ve got extra toppings and cheese sticks for a dollar less. Funbelievable!
Stephanie and I finished
I just finished playing through
We clocked in at just under 60 hours, including finding all the heart pieces, which I am proud to say did not require GameFaqs (although we did use the assistance of the fortune teller to find three of them). That also includes hunting down all the Poes, something for which I did use GameFaqs (but just for the last ten). If there were some way in-game to tell if you got all the Poes in a given area, I wouldn’t have cheated. But with the entire game to explore, I just didn’t have the patience. In Ocarina Of Time, there would be a Skulltula icon beside the name of each area on the map for which you had found all the Skulltulas. Something like that for Poes would have been nice. A way of changing day to night would have helped too, since most Poes are only out at night.
Stephanie and I went to see
September 18, 7:54 pm
I’ve been ordering online from Papa Johns for quite some time now as well, and I couldn’t be happier. The folks at our local establishment consistently got my order wrong, so I stopped phoning in. Not to mention that I never got connected with the actual store, but with the Papa Johns call center. There’s something a little odd about giving your pizza order to someone that’s who-knows-where on the planet.
I really like their new “favorite orders” feature, where you can save your previous orders. I no longer have to go through the pizza “set-up” process, since I usually order the same thing every time.