On-Line Pizza Idea Is Clever but Only Half-Baked (1994)(latimes.com)
latimes.com
On-Line Pizza Idea Is Clever but Only Half-Baked (1994)
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-08-25-fi-31168-story.html
23 comments
If that was written in 1994, it was 8 more years (2002) before Domino's had a visualization of your pizza online. I don't know when other chains did it.
If you really want to get a sense of how long ago that was, we coded the Dominos Pizza builder in both Flash and Javascript... because not all browsers had great Flash support.
If you really want to get a sense of how long ago that was, we coded the Dominos Pizza builder in both Flash and Javascript... because not all browsers had great Flash support.
do you work at hs2? https://www.builtinchicago.org/2018/07/30/spotlight-hs2-solu...
No - are they doing the site now? My time on it was just a project way back when. I'm sure nobody working with them recently has any connection to those of us who did it back then.
I worked for HS2, they are now "Bounteous" after rebranding and acquiring some promising eCommerce and marketing agencies.
They did the pizza tracker and consulted on the marketing and some design work (mostly for Dominos Canada) I don't think they did the pizza picker interface.
Great place to work, I only left because they were going through some growing pains in restructuring their eComm practice and some talented people got passed over. I was ready for a leadership role.
https://imgur.com/a/IK6zyBt
They did the pizza tracker and consulted on the marketing and some design work (mostly for Dominos Canada) I don't think they did the pizza picker interface.
Great place to work, I only left because they were going through some growing pains in restructuring their eComm practice and some talented people got passed over. I was ready for a leadership role.
https://imgur.com/a/IK6zyBt
Sun Microsystems had pizzatool in 1990:
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...
OT, but that got me on memory lane to Pizza Tycoon. https://archive.org/details/msdos_Pizza_Tycoon_1994
I remember there was a HyperCard stack that did this as well, that must have been the early 90's.
That article really tries to drive home the message that the author ordered pizza over the Internet, but all I can see for the actual ordering process was sending a fax, which... is not the Internet.
Wow looks like a sys admin made that UI. I knew a brilliant sys admin who loved Solaris and still had it running under his desk. All the forms he designed were way too busy and all over the place. More options than anyone could possibly use.
If you thought PizzaTool looked like a 747 cockpit, you should have seen "XBugTool", which was originally an insanely complicated SunView application called "BugTool" that was run through an AWK script to convert it to XView, and the "monkey on the back of all Sun engineers" that we were required to use to report bugs.
It had dynamically reconfiguring scrolling sub-panels of widgets inside of other dynamically reconfiguring scrolling panels of widgets, that would dynamically reconfigure, flicker, and repaint the screen madly, whenever you picked items from menus or just looked at it funny!
Just don't DARE to use XBugTool to report a bug against itself, as I foolishly tried to do once, after I teased its scrolling lists, and it got angry and froze my mouse, stole my input focus, and would not give it back. I was trapped in XBugTool and could not get out, so I wrote a desperate cry for help as Sun Bug ID #1059974.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/xbugto...
It had dynamically reconfiguring scrolling sub-panels of widgets inside of other dynamically reconfiguring scrolling panels of widgets, that would dynamically reconfigure, flicker, and repaint the screen madly, whenever you picked items from menus or just looked at it funny!
Just don't DARE to use XBugTool to report a bug against itself, as I foolishly tried to do once, after I teased its scrolling lists, and it got angry and froze my mouse, stole my input focus, and would not give it back. I was trapped in XBugTool and could not get out, so I wrote a desperate cry for help as Sun Bug ID #1059974.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/xbugto...
Is there a screenshot of xbugtool (or video but that's prolly asking too much)? Google did not find anything.
I regret never making a screen snapshot myself, so probably not. I fear that Oracle is keeping XBugTool in reserve as kind of a doomsday weapon to deploy on unsuspecting customers they suspect of disloyalty, to prevent them from ever filing bugs against any Oracle software.
One thing I did keep a screen snapshot of was of how XCalc loses its shit after you resize it a bunch of times.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/XCalc....
One thing I did keep a screen snapshot of was of how XCalc loses its shit after you resize it a bunch of times.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/XCalc....
to be fair -- that UI is literally designed to be an example of all the different forms options that were possible. So that was kindof the point.
"It’s a programming example for The NeWS Toolkit, and it tests out and shows how to use all the different widgets, dialogs, drag and drop, lightweight threading, and PostScript drawing."
"It’s a programming example for The NeWS Toolkit, and it tests out and shows how to use all the different widgets, dialogs, drag and drop, lightweight threading, and PostScript drawing."
That's right! Here's the source code, with meticulous comments explaining how it works, since it was meant to serve as a programming example to help people learn how to use TNT / OOP / NeWS / PostScript.
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt
I even wrote a manual entry (it shipped with Solaris 2.0, so documentation was required):
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6.txt
I just posted more here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21383697
PizzaTool was written in Sun's "NeWS" dialect of PostScript (which James Gosling made after Emacs but before Java), which it has all kinds of extensions for multiple drawing surfaces (canvases), events, light weight threads, networking, object oriented programming, etc.
So for example PizzaTool would fork off a light weight thread to handle spinning the pizza, and another one to draw toppings, and the user interface had its own thread of course. So the user interface would not freeze up while it drew toppings and spun the pizza, all at the same time!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
>NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently:
> - used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming.
> - used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering.
> - used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation.
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt
I even wrote a manual entry (it shipped with Solaris 2.0, so documentation was required):
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.6.txt
I just posted more here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21383697
PizzaTool was written in Sun's "NeWS" dialect of PostScript (which James Gosling made after Emacs but before Java), which it has all kinds of extensions for multiple drawing surfaces (canvases), events, light weight threads, networking, object oriented programming, etc.
So for example PizzaTool would fork off a light weight thread to handle spinning the pizza, and another one to draw toppings, and the user interface had its own thread of course. So the user interface would not freeze up while it drew toppings and spun the pizza, all at the same time!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
>NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently:
> - used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming.
> - used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering.
> - used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation.
I don't know how anyone could maintain their appetite for what they were ordering while looking at that toothpaste-green and tomato-crème color scheme.
I thought of it as "minty fresh"!
At least it wasn't as bad as TCL/Tk's original default "Bisque" (aka "Ousterhour Beige" aka "Baby Diarrhea Gamut") color scheme. ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17173197
https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/tk_bisque
The "bisque is beautiful" slogan first appeared on a T-shirt in 1995.
http://www.nyx.net/~tpoindex/tcl-wear/bisque.html
At least it wasn't as bad as TCL/Tk's original default "Bisque" (aka "Ousterhour Beige" aka "Baby Diarrhea Gamut") color scheme. ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17173197
https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/tk_bisque
The "bisque is beautiful" slogan first appeared on a T-shirt in 1995.
http://www.nyx.net/~tpoindex/tcl-wear/bisque.html
To be fair, most software from that era looked like that. For added old school fun, most of them were terminal apps that didn't support a mouse.
Wait, are you saying you were on the team that built this? Any good blog posts on the subject?
I worked for the consulting company that partnered with them to re-brand and re-code their web site in 2002, yes. It was long ago and while it was cool to have done a site that gets that much traffic, it was a run-of-the-mill consulting project, so no, there isn't anything written up about it.
That's one small step for a consultant, one giant leap for pizza eaters. While maybe not interesting from a technical standpoint it might still find a big audience among non-programmers.
Honestly, I don't think they did nail it, specifically regarding customising the pizza visually. Sure, some sites let you do this but noone cares really. I think the main draw is you don't to talk to anyone. Not having to have a social interaction with a stranger is a major selling point. Also, doesn't apply to pizza, but for other things the main advantage is you don't need to order during business hours.
The big advantage for online ordering is that it removes the time pressure of being on a phone call with a busy live human being. This not only saves the store labor costs, but also increases sales - the time pressure defaults "do I want X" decisions to "no", and given the laxer pace of online ordering, people tend to spend more.
And I would think it prevents mistakes in ordering. Via the phone (a pizza shop etc is not generally very quiet) I often got the wrong order (but not completely wrong; chicken instead of pepperoni, not pasta instead of pizza) and/or delivered to the wrong address etc.
A lot of chains did centralized call-taking and modems to send the order right to a triplicate dot matrix printer fairly early on. With a fax backup I guess.
It also helps HQ stop under-the-table sales, or blocking the phone lines when they’re busy.
I think a place I use still has its orders print on that.
It also helps HQ stop under-the-table sales, or blocking the phone lines when they’re busy.
I think a place I use still has its orders print on that.
I order pizzas on-line quite frequently, and to me it has very little to do with talking to other people. The main draw of on-line ordering is that I can pay on-line. I don't usually carry enough spare change in small enough coins and bills to be able to pay for a pizza on delivery without an extra trip to the ATM and then a shop (to exchange bills for smaller denominations).
In my Southern EU country, pizza delivery drivers carry a mobile (GPRS) card payment reader. I never understood why they didn't catch on in the other EU countries I've lived in.
German pizza chain Joey's used to do that, and I always found it to be a mediocre user experience.
If you pay online, you know if your payment cleared right away. With these GPRS card readers, you wouldn't know until the driver has arrived, and frequently the readers wouldn't work for one reason or another. Of course, if you wanted to pay by card, you usually didn't have cash either, so then the driver would have to phone their shop and ask what to do, and it was just a general hassle.
They've since been acquired by Dominos and offer online PayPal/credit card payment and it's much more convenient.
If you pay online, you know if your payment cleared right away. With these GPRS card readers, you wouldn't know until the driver has arrived, and frequently the readers wouldn't work for one reason or another. Of course, if you wanted to pay by card, you usually didn't have cash either, so then the driver would have to phone their shop and ask what to do, and it was just a general hassle.
They've since been acquired by Dominos and offer online PayPal/credit card payment and it's much more convenient.
Do you really have ATMs that spit out $50 and $100 bills? Around here the highest bill is $20. And I've never run across any place that wouldn't take $20s.
German ATM regularly spit out 50€ notes and depending on how much you draw, 100€ notes.
I can't even draw less than 50€ on most of them because some banks apparently have a "minimum draw amount" for my card.
I can't even draw less than 50€ on most of them because some banks apparently have a "minimum draw amount" for my card.
While some ATMs have limits like that, there are many that let you select a custom amount - I regularly withdraw amounts like 45€ or 95€ to make sure I get some smaller bills.
I'm using a CC from an Internet-bank to withdraw without fees from any ATM. But apparently some banks do not like whatever contract they have with mine about that, so they want me to draw at least 50€, very rarely an ATM will even completely refuse to pay out anything.
I also use a CC from a bank that does not have a presence in my town to withdraw. I think it just depends on the ATM.
I've used plenty of ATMs that didn't get the no bills larger than $20 memo. I haven't gotten a $100 out of an ATM, but plenty of $50s. Enough that for quite a while, I'd request $80, instead of $100, because it's less than what I want, but it will definitely be in bills I can use; $120 sometimes worked, if you knew the machine wouldn't mix denominations.
I remember as a kid in the early 90s cashiers would hold $100 bills up to the light to make sure they were real. But there's been so much inflation since then... when will we stop treating $100 bills so carefully?
Given the number of central banks worldwide that are interested in phasing out higher value notes completely...
$100 is still over 13x the federal minimum wage (i.e. a non-trivial amount of money for someone working at or near minimum wage), so I doubt anytime soon.
In Poland, the lowest you can reliably get from an ATM is 100 PLN (roughly $25, or 3x the pizza's worth). Many ATMs allow withdrawing 50 PLN. Very rarely, you can find an ATM that lets you withdraw 20 or even 10 PLN.
(Also, note that 10 PLN is the smallest bill we have, below that we switch to coins - 5, 2 and 1 PLN. Our ATMs don't handle coins.)
(Also, note that 10 PLN is the smallest bill we have, below that we switch to coins - 5, 2 and 1 PLN. Our ATMs don't handle coins.)
Yep. I flaked out the other week and didn't stop by the ATM before the weekend. Near the end of my run on Saturday, I stopped at a Bank of America ATM. I will admit that it offered me the chance to specify denominations, and I didn't take it up. I was quite surprised to get a $100 bill.
[edit] This was in Washington, DC.
[edit] This was in Washington, DC.
Wells Fargo ATMs give you the choice of $50's or $20's depending on how much cash you're getting.
In the EU, yep. I remember in Austria having to withdraw "80" so I wouldn't get stuck with yet another 100 EUR note. You get used to finding the ATMs that let you get the smaller note sizes, because damn I hate being the jerk in the group that forces the waiter to break up your 50 or 100
Huh now I'm curious where you live that they don't do this? In Canada 50s and 100s come out of the ATMs. In Japan, you get 10,000 yen (~$100 USD) in ATMs.
I can't remember an ATM that I've used in the US that dispensed anything other than $20 bills, in a very, very long time.
In Boston, in the mission hill neighborhood, I was really surprised that the Bank of America ATM handed out $10 bills instead of $20 ~5-6 years ago and that was the only ATM I've encountered that does that.
That said, it seems like all of the Bank of America and TD Bank ATMs I use in Boston are starting to let you choose the bills you want on screen. Was recently in Montreal and had the same experience there too so I'm guessing that's what ATMs are trending towards.
That said, it seems like all of the Bank of America and TD Bank ATMs I use in Boston are starting to let you choose the bills you want on screen. Was recently in Montreal and had the same experience there too so I'm guessing that's what ATMs are trending towards.
I've never seen a US ATM spit out anything but $20 bills. Ever.
Higher denominations are so rare that many businesses don't accept them.
Higher denominations are so rare that many businesses don't accept them.
TD Bank around NYC has started to do $50s by default in high-demand locations, obviously so the machine needs refilling less often. One workaround hack is to withdraw a number like $80, to force the transaction into $20s instead. Although I've never yet had a problem spending a $50.
Also, ATMs on casino floors in Vegas dispense $100s.
Also, ATMs on casino floors in Vegas dispense $100s.
Interesting that it's a Canadian bank (TD) doing this. I wonder if they're using the same ATM tech in the US as they're using up here.
I've noticed a couple of banks in Canada where, if you ask the ATM for $100, it'll ask you if you want a single $100 bill, two $50 bills, or five $20 bills.
I've noticed a couple of banks in Canada where, if you ask the ATM for $100, it'll ask you if you want a single $100 bill, two $50 bills, or five $20 bills.
Vegas, baby! Las Vegas ATMs give you $100 bills. That's the only place I've ever seen it, though.
(Maybe Atlantic City, too. I can't remember...)
(Maybe Atlantic City, too. I can't remember...)
In Singapore I get 100 SGD bills from the ATM. (That's about 75 USD.)
I think they have options for smaller bills, too.
I think they have options for smaller bills, too.
My usual ATM only has $20 bills or above!
How do you tip the delivery guy then?
It'd be easier if that's just factored into the price.
I kinda prefer to put cash in someone's hand. That way companies with stellar labor practices like Uber cannot mess with their other payment.
>Honestly, I don't think they did nail it, specifically regarding customising the pizza visually. Sure, some sites let you do this but noone cares really.
I may be in the minority but I find this feature quite useful. As someone whose is a more visual learning person, having the ability to virtually see how my product will turn out makes it easier for me to make choices. Instead of thinking about if item X and Y go together, it gives me a better idea of how it may taste when I see them stacked on top of each other. I know X tastes like this, so seeing them next to each other, it may allow me to better think if tastes will work together.
We also can’t forget about people who may not be able to read properly. Instead of worrying what they’re ordering, they just make it look like what they want. (somewhat of an extreme case but possible)
So while I agree this small design is not a high priority for UX designers, I do think not having it would be somewhat of an accessibility barrier for some users.
I may be in the minority but I find this feature quite useful. As someone whose is a more visual learning person, having the ability to virtually see how my product will turn out makes it easier for me to make choices. Instead of thinking about if item X and Y go together, it gives me a better idea of how it may taste when I see them stacked on top of each other. I know X tastes like this, so seeing them next to each other, it may allow me to better think if tastes will work together.
We also can’t forget about people who may not be able to read properly. Instead of worrying what they’re ordering, they just make it look like what they want. (somewhat of an extreme case but possible)
So while I agree this small design is not a high priority for UX designers, I do think not having it would be somewhat of an accessibility barrier for some users.
It also could allow you to do things not normally possibly like 2/3 pepperoni to 1/3 cheese vs halves. Or a design like a flag made out of pepperonis or a heart on Valentine's Day. I would pay more for the ability to make custom designs.
I mostly like being able to see the price calculations as I order. In the restaurant it’s always unclear if the extra cheese or whatever is going to cost you.
I think order accuracy is an advantage of online ordering as well. It removes the chance that somebody mishears you, etc.
There’s this deli we sometimes order bagels and bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches on weekends we are feeling lazy and want to sleep in. Often I’ll order a “Starbucks Frappuccino” with it. About 30% of the time lately my bag has a pack of “Starburst” in it. We have a few packs in the cupboard just sitting there as a reminder of the illiterate person who happens to pack our breakfast here and there.
UberEats is maybe a good confirmation of this. Their interface for options like toppings is pretty shit, but nobody seems to care. They just figure it out.
Tony and Alba's Pizza in Mountain View had various specials with discounted prices like "Ala Gilroy" with pepperoni, garlic, jalapenos, and bacon, and then you could add extra individual toppings on any pizza at a flat rate. (Their menu and pricing model may have changed since 1990.)
https://www.yelp.com/biz/tony-and-albas-pizza-and-pasta-moun...
Ben Stoltz's original DevGuide/XView/X11 version of PizzaTool and also my TNT/NeWS version both had pizza order optimizers, so if you put together a basic "Cheese" pizza with individual toppings clams, pepperoni, garlic, jalapenos, and bacon, it would optimize it to an "Ala Gilroy" with extra clams, which saved you money.
There was nothing special users had to do (or even know about) to optimize the order: You could just select a pre-configured style or basic "Cheese" from the style drop-down, then click on and off the checkboxes to toggle toppings, and it would automatically reselect the most efficient base pizza style in the style drop-down, to automatically minimize the price.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...
Date: Tue, 28 May 91 19:25:45 PDT From: Paul Simons To: UNIX Today Subject: Pizzatool 4/29/91
Editor UNIX Today:
We the following Sun engineers would like to make a historical clarification regarding the article entitled, “Any Way You Slice It, Sun’s Pizzatool Is Food For Thought” in the April 15 issue of UNIX Today. The original idea of ordering food from the workstation was conceived way back in 1989 by David LaValle who is now at NeXT. The original fully functional implementation of ordering food thru the workstation was “Pizzatool” developed by Ben Stoltz using Sun’s DevGuide. The features that were present in that original version included price optimization, pop-up preconfigured pizza menu, fully selectable ingredients, as well as the fax hook-in to fax an order to Tony and Alba’s. Fax capability courteousy of Ed Un. Don Hopkins subsequently reimplemented this original version of pizzatool in PostScript for the NeWS toolkit and added the WYSIWYG spinning popup pizza which provided a preview of the final cooked pizza.
This letter in no way represents the views, product plans, or announcements of Sun Microsystems and is only the opinions of the engineers who witnessed this historic event. :-)
Sean English, Dave Evans, Don Hopkins, Paul Simons, Ben Stoltz, Ed Un.
Any Way You Slice It, Sun's PizzaTool Is Food For Thought
https://spaf.cerias.purdue.edu/Yucks/V1/msg00044.html
>And in yet another advancement for the free exchange of software, Sun is offering PizzaTool source without charge. [...]
>He said the PizzaTool even has a built-in cost-cutting feature that allows it to chec prices of the toppings you have selected, and try to build a cheaper pizza using a price list from your local pizza parlor. In its current incarnation, the PizzaTool will take an order and send it via E-mail to an address on the Pizza Server. At Sun, the server then sends a fax order to Tony and Alba's pizza place in Mountain View.
https://www.yelp.com/biz/tony-and-albas-pizza-and-pasta-moun...
Ben Stoltz's original DevGuide/XView/X11 version of PizzaTool and also my TNT/NeWS version both had pizza order optimizers, so if you put together a basic "Cheese" pizza with individual toppings clams, pepperoni, garlic, jalapenos, and bacon, it would optimize it to an "Ala Gilroy" with extra clams, which saved you money.
There was nothing special users had to do (or even know about) to optimize the order: You could just select a pre-configured style or basic "Cheese" from the style drop-down, then click on and off the checkboxes to toggle toppings, and it would automatically reselect the most efficient base pizza style in the style drop-down, to automatically minimize the price.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...
Date: Tue, 28 May 91 19:25:45 PDT From: Paul Simons To: UNIX Today Subject: Pizzatool 4/29/91
Editor UNIX Today:
We the following Sun engineers would like to make a historical clarification regarding the article entitled, “Any Way You Slice It, Sun’s Pizzatool Is Food For Thought” in the April 15 issue of UNIX Today. The original idea of ordering food from the workstation was conceived way back in 1989 by David LaValle who is now at NeXT. The original fully functional implementation of ordering food thru the workstation was “Pizzatool” developed by Ben Stoltz using Sun’s DevGuide. The features that were present in that original version included price optimization, pop-up preconfigured pizza menu, fully selectable ingredients, as well as the fax hook-in to fax an order to Tony and Alba’s. Fax capability courteousy of Ed Un. Don Hopkins subsequently reimplemented this original version of pizzatool in PostScript for the NeWS toolkit and added the WYSIWYG spinning popup pizza which provided a preview of the final cooked pizza.
This letter in no way represents the views, product plans, or announcements of Sun Microsystems and is only the opinions of the engineers who witnessed this historic event. :-)
Sean English, Dave Evans, Don Hopkins, Paul Simons, Ben Stoltz, Ed Un.
Any Way You Slice It, Sun's PizzaTool Is Food For Thought
https://spaf.cerias.purdue.edu/Yucks/V1/msg00044.html
>And in yet another advancement for the free exchange of software, Sun is offering PizzaTool source without charge. [...]
>He said the PizzaTool even has a built-in cost-cutting feature that allows it to chec prices of the toppings you have selected, and try to build a cheaper pizza using a price list from your local pizza parlor. In its current incarnation, the PizzaTool will take an order and send it via E-mail to an address on the Pizza Server. At Sun, the server then sends a fax order to Tony and Alba's pizza place in Mountain View.
I’d rather order by command line. But more seriously, if I could have minimized order interface that’d be best. I want speed and ease.
How much would you be willing to pay for a CLI to Pizza Hut or Dominoes? Its obvious that they will never implement that, so the only way would be a 3rd party and they would probably have to charge on top.
I could see this as some sort of cash-back arbitrage business, where the vendor charges a 5% premium, plus use a 3% cash-back card to cover any remainder of the processing/interchange fees.
I could see this as some sort of cash-back arbitrage business, where the vendor charges a 5% premium, plus use a 3% cash-back card to cover any remainder of the processing/interchange fees.
My issue isn't where my topping goes, it's how much of that topping is on the pizza. In my experience, when they get to choose, they can be surprisingly reluctant to literally double the amount of a given topping, no matter how much you push them. They'll put a ton more if it's a different topping, but not if it's the same one.
At Domino's, there is a sliding scale of topping amounts. As the total number of toppings go up, the amount per topping goes down.
Large 1-topping has 48 pepperoni Large 2-topping has 30 (from memory, many years ago)
So a double pepperoni pizza has 60, not 96 slices.
Large 1-topping has 48 pepperoni Large 2-topping has 30 (from memory, many years ago)
So a double pepperoni pizza has 60, not 96 slices.
Does this apply across toppings too?
Like if a large has 48 pepperoni, but I get it with pepperoni and sausage, do I get 48x pepperoni + 48x sausage, 24x each, or something else?
Like if a large has 48 pepperoni, but I get it with pepperoni and sausage, do I get 48x pepperoni + 48x sausage, 24x each, or something else?
It would be a 2-topping pizza so that means you would get 30 pepperoni (and 30 sausage?) according to what they are saying.
So it costs the same upcharge to go from 0 to 48 and from 48 to 60? That's pretty weird.
It's less about food costs and more about the complexity and resultant labor costs, I think.
If that was the case then the first pepperoni slices would cost more, not the last ones. It's obviously market segmentation: somebody who really loves pepperoni will be willing to pay more per slice.
The cook time may go up since there is more mass.
Thick/dense components like dough/sauce/cheese I could see how the cook time increases more than linearly as the mass increases linearly. But with other toppings, there's no way the cook time goes up more from 48 to the hypothetical 96 than it does from 0 to 48.
It does affect the way it bakes and the texture, though, and can affect the way it browns. Vegetables have water. Meats have fat.
It's surreal seeing an article that actually differentiates between the Internet and the World Wide Web.
At this point, given all the apps, IoT devices, etc. I feel like people know that there is more to the internet than what they can get to in their web browser. Go back 10 years or so and the browser totally dominated (aside from email and gaming perhaps), leading to the lack of differentiation you are referring to.
On the other hand, these non-browser communications I'm referring to almost always use HTTP APIs (a.k.a. web services) these days, whereas in the past they would use raw sockets or whatever else, so you could argue that even these comprise the web.
On the other hand, these non-browser communications I'm referring to almost always use HTTP APIs (a.k.a. web services) these days, whereas in the past they would use raw sockets or whatever else, so you could argue that even these comprise the web.
It was written by an MIT dude
That first paragraph you quoted is certainly prophetic but it also feels like it's dripping in bemused sarcasm at the novelty of the internet.
PizzaTool (which I wrote in 1990 and shipped with Solaris 2.0) not only let you interactively design your own pizza, and create and name your own custom pizza styles, and order them via Sun's Email=>FAX server, but it also drew an image of the pizza (with PostScript), which you could then spin to "cook" it by repeatedly rotating the pixels to make it look like it cooked and melted the cheese.
The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...
PostScript PizzaTool source code:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt
You could also drag and drop images into your pizza! Here's a video and transcript of a demo I gave at the Exploratorium (which explains all the kids screaming in the background).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avJnpDKHxPY&t=21m43s
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-simcity-demo-transc...
So this is PizzaTool and RasterRap, and these are written in The NeWS Toolkit, not HyperLook. But HyperLook is layered on top of The NeWS Toolkit, or sort of on top and in between The NeWS Toolkit. But this is pure TNT.
Now these are, umm. PizzaTool: I’ll do PizzaTool first.
PizzaTool lets you order pizzas with a GUI. And we can select which pizza parlor. Tony & Alba’s is the nice one in Mountain View. They support ordering pizzas via FAX.
Now you can write you name, and your phone, and all this, and you can have a “Take and Bake” or “Please Deliver”. You say Please Deliver: “They probably won’t deliver unless you make it worth their while by ordering lots of pizzas!” It gives you those “affordances”, I mean, ahem, right, I was trying to work that word in.
So ok, hit Toppings, you get this lovely topping dialog. And you can pop up a menu of common pizza styles, pinning it in the Open Look tradition. And, you know, it sets up the check boxes for you. And then you can add other toppings.
And then see, when you’ve added a bunch of things, it actually changes your category of pizza. I might get, like, it will flip to “Everything” pretty soon or something.
Well anyway, yeah, let’s do “Cheese”, and then if I were to add all these crazy things, it will realize that it can actually get a better deal by upgrading me to an “All Meat Combo” with 10 extra toppings.
It’s your little “pizza guide”, you know.
And once you’ve selected all your toppings, and how big you want your pizza, you hit “Preview”, so that you can make sure that this is the pizza you really want.
And then it just does this, makes a little window, see this is a neat window here. It’s cut out, so that your pizza is just floating within the frame.
And now, whoop, ok. And then you can add more toppings, and it forks off a lightweight PostScript to sprinkle toppings. And it’s totally object oriented, I swear.
Now that you have a preview, and you want to see what it’s like when you cook it, you can just use direct manipulation, and just sort of spin it around with the mouse, and then let it go.
That actually has a pretty good effect of cooking the toppings, because you get all this nice noise from the rotation, you know. It’s just… It’s all written in PostScript.
“Camera person is now laughing!”
(Camera lurches around violently!)
You know, and then you got your pizza right the way you want it, and then you can hit “Order”.
It goes “Do you really want to order a pizza from Tony & Alba’s? This will cost real money and make you want to drink beer!” Then you say “Yes!”
And then, you know, when you’re on the right network and everything, what it does, it faxes the order there, and… Oh! “Yer pizza is being held hostage until ya payz off yer tab, chump! Yer tab’s presently $1212.64.”
I guess Sun hasn’t been paying off my account since I left. Oh well…
Umm, yes, right. So, now, this has, PizzaTool has some other useful features. You can, go into pizza authoring mode, and edit your pizza toppings.
Or, you know, say you have a favorite kind of pizza, you can just make a new style, “Don’s Fave”, and save, and say, “New Style”. It just adds it there, dynamically updates, so — this is basically a test that I made for the — you know, and it copies its state onto — you know, so, this is a test I made for the toolkit that used every bit of the toolkit that’s possible, and is as dynamic as it could be.
Anyway, the other thing we had to test was drag and drop.
Now there’s this other program here, it’s RasterRap, and it allows you to drag this image and drop it into that, or you can drag it from here and drop it into the other. So these guys will talk to each other through drag and drop, and give you the lovely feedback.
And then you can also — PizzaTool also supports drag and drop. So BLOOP! You can put a little Mona Lisa in your pizza, and then spin her, and put some bell peppers down, and maybe some turkey.
(Camera person laughs and shakes camera.)
This is all in the name of progress! Ha ha ha!
(Confused muttering in the background!)
Oh, and if you make the pizza small, it goes really fast!
So once you’re done doing all this crazy stuff, you can wash it out.
By, see, we have this nice beautiful painting of a wave here, put the wave in there, and go whooooosh.
What’s really neat is when you make it spin really fast, really really fast — we’ll put the butterfly in for that for that — you go BOOM! Well now, that’s not fast. Boom.
Yeah, ok. Ahh, oh yeah, you get these really great —I can’t really explain it very easily, but let’s add some artichoke hearts. (chuckle)
Yeah, so, yeah, mathematical imprecision, or something like that.
This is just sort of a food processor.
I left it spinning over Christmas to see what happens and it was really a mess when I came back.
Ok, well any way, that’s just what PizzaTool does.
The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...
PostScript PizzaTool source code:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt
You could also drag and drop images into your pizza! Here's a video and transcript of a demo I gave at the Exploratorium (which explains all the kids screaming in the background).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avJnpDKHxPY&t=21m43s
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-simcity-demo-transc...
So this is PizzaTool and RasterRap, and these are written in The NeWS Toolkit, not HyperLook. But HyperLook is layered on top of The NeWS Toolkit, or sort of on top and in between The NeWS Toolkit. But this is pure TNT.
Now these are, umm. PizzaTool: I’ll do PizzaTool first.
PizzaTool lets you order pizzas with a GUI. And we can select which pizza parlor. Tony & Alba’s is the nice one in Mountain View. They support ordering pizzas via FAX.
Now you can write you name, and your phone, and all this, and you can have a “Take and Bake” or “Please Deliver”. You say Please Deliver: “They probably won’t deliver unless you make it worth their while by ordering lots of pizzas!” It gives you those “affordances”, I mean, ahem, right, I was trying to work that word in.
So ok, hit Toppings, you get this lovely topping dialog. And you can pop up a menu of common pizza styles, pinning it in the Open Look tradition. And, you know, it sets up the check boxes for you. And then you can add other toppings.
And then see, when you’ve added a bunch of things, it actually changes your category of pizza. I might get, like, it will flip to “Everything” pretty soon or something.
Well anyway, yeah, let’s do “Cheese”, and then if I were to add all these crazy things, it will realize that it can actually get a better deal by upgrading me to an “All Meat Combo” with 10 extra toppings.
It’s your little “pizza guide”, you know.
And once you’ve selected all your toppings, and how big you want your pizza, you hit “Preview”, so that you can make sure that this is the pizza you really want.
And then it just does this, makes a little window, see this is a neat window here. It’s cut out, so that your pizza is just floating within the frame.
And now, whoop, ok. And then you can add more toppings, and it forks off a lightweight PostScript to sprinkle toppings. And it’s totally object oriented, I swear.
Now that you have a preview, and you want to see what it’s like when you cook it, you can just use direct manipulation, and just sort of spin it around with the mouse, and then let it go.
That actually has a pretty good effect of cooking the toppings, because you get all this nice noise from the rotation, you know. It’s just… It’s all written in PostScript.
“Camera person is now laughing!”
(Camera lurches around violently!)
You know, and then you got your pizza right the way you want it, and then you can hit “Order”.
It goes “Do you really want to order a pizza from Tony & Alba’s? This will cost real money and make you want to drink beer!” Then you say “Yes!”
And then, you know, when you’re on the right network and everything, what it does, it faxes the order there, and… Oh! “Yer pizza is being held hostage until ya payz off yer tab, chump! Yer tab’s presently $1212.64.”
I guess Sun hasn’t been paying off my account since I left. Oh well…
Umm, yes, right. So, now, this has, PizzaTool has some other useful features. You can, go into pizza authoring mode, and edit your pizza toppings.
Or, you know, say you have a favorite kind of pizza, you can just make a new style, “Don’s Fave”, and save, and say, “New Style”. It just adds it there, dynamically updates, so — this is basically a test that I made for the — you know, and it copies its state onto — you know, so, this is a test I made for the toolkit that used every bit of the toolkit that’s possible, and is as dynamic as it could be.
Anyway, the other thing we had to test was drag and drop.
Now there’s this other program here, it’s RasterRap, and it allows you to drag this image and drop it into that, or you can drag it from here and drop it into the other. So these guys will talk to each other through drag and drop, and give you the lovely feedback.
And then you can also — PizzaTool also supports drag and drop. So BLOOP! You can put a little Mona Lisa in your pizza, and then spin her, and put some bell peppers down, and maybe some turkey.
(Camera person laughs and shakes camera.)
This is all in the name of progress! Ha ha ha!
(Confused muttering in the background!)
Oh, and if you make the pizza small, it goes really fast!
So once you’re done doing all this crazy stuff, you can wash it out.
By, see, we have this nice beautiful painting of a wave here, put the wave in there, and go whooooosh.
What’s really neat is when you make it spin really fast, really really fast — we’ll put the butterfly in for that for that — you go BOOM! Well now, that’s not fast. Boom.
Yeah, ok. Ahh, oh yeah, you get these really great —I can’t really explain it very easily, but let’s add some artichoke hearts. (chuckle)
Yeah, so, yeah, mathematical imprecision, or something like that.
This is just sort of a food processor.
I left it spinning over Christmas to see what happens and it was really a mess when I came back.
Ok, well any way, that’s just what PizzaTool does.
I write these sort of articles too, they are educational and detail user experiences and how they can be better while having click bait titles to attract people that have already made a negative conclusion of the technology. In the present they also turn off people that are obsessed with the technology.
They both read it and as the hype dies down ideally they stand the test of time and are equally as insightful or visionary like.
It gets me the support and attention I aim for though. Like being a goto for advisory or an expert in a trial.
They both read it and as the hype dies down ideally they stand the test of time and are equally as insightful or visionary like.
It gets me the support and attention I aim for though. Like being a goto for advisory or an expert in a trial.
It's funny they mentioned flowers, when today most online flower delivery services deliver bouquets that are often don't even look inspired by or related to the picture they put online.
This is true. It's gotten so bad that I don't order flowers online anymore. I can't count the number of times I've ordered flowers online and the bouquet showed up frozen, freezer burned, or dead in a FedEx tube mailed from the other side of the country.
Now I phone (yes, phone) the local hospital near the recipient and ask them what florist they use (often it's contracted to a mom-and-pop store down the street). Then I call (yes, call) that place on the phone and order.
I've never been disappointed this way.
Now I phone (yes, phone) the local hospital near the recipient and ask them what florist they use (often it's contracted to a mom-and-pop store down the street). Then I call (yes, call) that place on the phone and order.
I've never been disappointed this way.
I've never been disappointed with flower delivery! Keeping my fingers crossed after reading your experiences.
You mean like the hamburger shown at the menu and the hamburger you get for real.
This gets awkward when you would have to distribute unequal pieces of e.g. chicken. Although I guess you could make a live "reverse claw machine" for added entertainment...
This could get pretty cool with a webcam in there and live remote control of the "reverse claw" to deploy toppings...
Ye gods this is a horrible concept, so let's develop it further.
After you've assembled your pizza with the reverse claw machine, you need to direct a spatula under the pizza, and into an oven. When your pizza is done enough, you use the spatula again to drop it into a box. Then you get a box-claw machine which you use to place your fresh pizza-in-box onto a delivery drone. Make sure it's balanced! Finally, you're granted control of the delivery drone, which you can fly to your house.
What could possibly go wrong?
After you've assembled your pizza with the reverse claw machine, you need to direct a spatula under the pizza, and into an oven. When your pizza is done enough, you use the spatula again to drop it into a box. Then you get a box-claw machine which you use to place your fresh pizza-in-box onto a delivery drone. Make sure it's balanced! Finally, you're granted control of the delivery drone, which you can fly to your house.
What could possibly go wrong?
Pizza is being forged. 12 hrs remaining.
Get it right now! Cost: 400 Gems
Get it right now! Cost: 400 Gems
Really?
If I only got the option to "design" the pizza visually you better hope that the pizza is best in class. Because that seriously sounds pretty miserable, even in 2019 and I can't imagine it being done well in the near future either.
If I only got the option to "design" the pizza visually you better hope that the pizza is best in class. Because that seriously sounds pretty miserable, even in 2019 and I can't imagine it being done well in the near future either.
[deleted]
Kind of hard to do that well without xmlhttprequest. It would be a slow flow through a maze of possible pages. That time period had a lot less to work with.
XHR made more things possible but before that had JavaScript made what was then called DHTML possible. You could do things like swap images and shift positions, etc. to prepare a form to post since that kind of application isn’t dependent on bidirectional communication, latency, or a huge problem space.
Back around 1998 we built a custom product selector for a popular knife manufacturer which basically did that: you had choices for three components – base, blade, and handle — and a couple other options, but unlike something like Google Maps the list of possible images to load and all of their metadata easily fit in memory and they didn’t take terribly long to download so you could have a nice interactive visual display which was basically a form with a few selects and checkboxes.
Back around 1998 we built a custom product selector for a popular knife manufacturer which basically did that: you had choices for three components – base, blade, and handle — and a couple other options, but unlike something like Google Maps the list of possible images to load and all of their metadata easily fit in memory and they didn’t take terribly long to download so you could have a nice interactive visual display which was basically a form with a few selects and checkboxes.
The article was written in 1994. DHTML didn't exist. I'm pretty familiar with the state of the state in '94. The web was a pretty limited platform. Also, don't forget, still mostly dialup. Additional web requests were expensive, user experience wise. This was the AOL heyday.
I’m aware of that: I was specifically responding to the XHR reference, since the “maze of possible pages” part had been avoidable for years before IE5 introduced XHR.
Similarly, yes, we used dialup back then but we also were using small images with much less color depth and people were more accustomed to pages taking longer to load. Some optimized images could easily have made a basic pizza designer possible in that era - probably with cartoonish 16-color GIF graphics but a good designer could do a surprising amount with a little creativity.
Similarly, yes, we used dialup back then but we also were using small images with much less color depth and people were more accustomed to pages taking longer to load. Some optimized images could easily have made a basic pizza designer possible in that era - probably with cartoonish 16-color GIF graphics but a good designer could do a surprising amount with a little creativity.
"Hey reporter, check this out. Order pizza online."
"Yes, but why isn't it doing what I think it should be doing!?"
"Yes, but why isn't it doing what I think it should be doing!?"
Sorry, none pizza left beef is not in uncle enzo's three ring binder. La cosa nostra pizza regrets the inconvenience, but your order cannot be completed at this time.
I'd feel remiss in not mentioning that Hashicorp's Terraform infrastructure-as-code tool has a provider for Domino's Pizza
https://ndmckinley.github.io/terraform-provider-dominos/
https://ndmckinley.github.io/terraform-provider-dominos/
This one's going to require some serious QA testing.
Just ordered Deliveroo. Currently they are still a marketplace, but I wonder when they will go full "Amazon Basics"? They know what people want when, what prices they want to pay, what quality they expect, how long they are ready to wait.
with all this data its just a matter of time they offer they own kitchens that create 20% of the products that fullfil 80% of the market need for 60% of the market price.
wonder why no delivery company has done this yet?
with all this data its just a matter of time they offer they own kitchens that create 20% of the products that fullfil 80% of the market need for 60% of the market price.
wonder why no delivery company has done this yet?
DoorDash [1][2] and UberEats [3][4] now both have "ghost restaurants" (virtual restaurants) as well as "ghost kitchens", which are kinda the next evolution of shared / incubator kitchens but particularly focused on preparing a small amount of dishes mostly for delivery. Most recently it seems they're also starting to pay attention to the carryout market as well, but I think that's a small slice.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/14/doordash-kitchens/
[2]: https://www.eater.com/2017/10/31/16580814/doordash-kitchens-...
[3]: https://www.eater.com/2018/10/24/18018334/uber-eats-virtual-...
[4]: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/entertainment/restaurants-and-b...
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/14/doordash-kitchens/
[2]: https://www.eater.com/2017/10/31/16580814/doordash-kitchens-...
[3]: https://www.eater.com/2018/10/24/18018334/uber-eats-virtual-...
[4]: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/entertainment/restaurants-and-b...
With the increase in dark patterns to hide delivery fees and sneakily increasing the tip at the end, I'm predicting carryout to become increasingly more prevalent when people get sick of companies trying to force them to pay $10 for delivering $20 worth of food
I think so too. I live in an area where carryout is very easy and the apps make payment and timing super convenient vs ordering over the phone or walking in and waiting an unknown amount of time.
As far as I can tell, none of the apps are marking up menu item prices for pickup today the way they do for delivery. I hope that keeps up.
As far as I can tell, none of the apps are marking up menu item prices for pickup today the way they do for delivery. I hope that keeps up.
They already do have a portion of the business that does that.
I worked for them for a few weeks in London as a way to get paid to work out. There was a sort of container warehouse in Battersea - basically food trucks that you're ordering from.
You might also appreciate this:
> I Sold Microwave Meals On Deliveroo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k47u9tduwb8
I worked for them for a few weeks in London as a way to get paid to work out. There was a sort of container warehouse in Battersea - basically food trucks that you're ordering from.
You might also appreciate this:
> I Sold Microwave Meals On Deliveroo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k47u9tduwb8
do they market it / present it that way on their website?
Yes, they call it 'Deliveroo Editions'. They sometimes waive the delivery fee, has its own logo/category and you can mix the delivery from various restaurants
I’m waiting for “street deals” where you get prompted to buy a discounted offering of the same thing/provider/time as someone nearby.
I don't think I've ever actually ordered from them, I'm not in the market for 20 quid takeaways.
When I had a look a few years back basically everywhere looked the same with stock professional photos. You wouldn't know that your fancy-looking Indian came from a grimy backstreet shop or container or whatever else.
When I had a look a few years back basically everywhere looked the same with stock professional photos. You wouldn't know that your fancy-looking Indian came from a grimy backstreet shop or container or whatever else.
That’s why you should order from places you have actually been to. I wouldn’t say the service is any different then.
But again, you say you’re not in the market for 20 quid takeaways - then how much are you willing to pay for food?
That’s how much it costs to eat in London unless you’re going for cheapish fried chicken or a really bad pizza.
But again, you say you’re not in the market for 20 quid takeaways - then how much are you willing to pay for food?
That’s how much it costs to eat in London unless you’re going for cheapish fried chicken or a really bad pizza.
I cook for myself and get higher quality food at a fraction of the price.
I generally reserve eating out for when I'm on the go or want to have a night out with friends. It's very rare that I buy takeaway food to eat at home. One of the best parts about being at home is having a kitchen.
Decent quality prepared food is expensive in a ton of places, this isn't an exclusively London thing by any stretch of the imagination.
I generally reserve eating out for when I'm on the go or want to have a night out with friends. It's very rare that I buy takeaway food to eat at home. One of the best parts about being at home is having a kitchen.
Decent quality prepared food is expensive in a ton of places, this isn't an exclusively London thing by any stretch of the imagination.
For a lot of people assigning a "reasonable" cost per hour spent cooking results in cooking for yourself being more expensive.
Yeah yeah, I've been through this a million times on here.
Cooking is one of the pleasures of life, it ain't all about the grind.
Cooking is one of the pleasures of life, it ain't all about the grind.
One of your pleasures, which is awesome for you. I wish I enjoyed cooking, but I don't, so if you've been through this a million times maybe it's time to stop assuming it's some universal joy?
I honestly couldn't care less whether it's a universal joy. Specialization is for insects. You do you. :)
Absolutely does not cost £20 to eat in London, unless you live somewhere upmarket but in that case you can probably afford it. I can get good pizza for ~£7.
I graduated high school in 1996. I really wanted a computer. This was around the time where there were Power Computing clones that were licensed from Apple.
But my buddy just started college at the University of Oregon. They had a computing center that was this tiny little store that was on the second floor above all the big rack-mounted computers. I thought it was beautiful. I still love seeing walls of servers.
But Apple used to give massive discounts to University students. I was not one, but my friend was. So I gave him $1,400 in cash for a Performa 6214, a Apple Multiple Scan 14 Display, and a StyleWriter 1200. It was around a 50% discount for being a student at the university. I spent two months gutting and rebuilding my friends parents RV for the money.
I hate cryptocurrencies.. For some meandering reason my point is this.
Computers were expensive in 1996. Some internet providers still charged by the hour.. I got a 14.4 connection using my friends dial-up info from the university. I paid 200 dollars for my modem.
So the barrier to entry to the internet was steep back then. So ordering pizza was a novelty. Computers were wildly expensive, internet was by the hour, and slow.
So might as well just pick up the phone and be done with it in two minutes.
Back to Bitcoin.. Don't say it is just like the internet. The internet was hard in 1996. I can drop a five on Coinbase and get Bitcoin, but I don't want to because it is stupid.
But my buddy just started college at the University of Oregon. They had a computing center that was this tiny little store that was on the second floor above all the big rack-mounted computers. I thought it was beautiful. I still love seeing walls of servers.
But Apple used to give massive discounts to University students. I was not one, but my friend was. So I gave him $1,400 in cash for a Performa 6214, a Apple Multiple Scan 14 Display, and a StyleWriter 1200. It was around a 50% discount for being a student at the university. I spent two months gutting and rebuilding my friends parents RV for the money.
I hate cryptocurrencies.. For some meandering reason my point is this.
Computers were expensive in 1996. Some internet providers still charged by the hour.. I got a 14.4 connection using my friends dial-up info from the university. I paid 200 dollars for my modem.
So the barrier to entry to the internet was steep back then. So ordering pizza was a novelty. Computers were wildly expensive, internet was by the hour, and slow.
So might as well just pick up the phone and be done with it in two minutes.
Back to Bitcoin.. Don't say it is just like the internet. The internet was hard in 1996. I can drop a five on Coinbase and get Bitcoin, but I don't want to because it is stupid.
I wonder what the internet would look like if people still had the since of awe, wonder, and appreciation of what exactly is going on when we connect to the internet. I can remember being a small child, 6 or 7, and connecting to the internet in the 80's and joining a chat room full of adults who were professionals, talking about the problems of doctors, engineers and financiers. It was absolutely amazing and I couldn't get enough. And then I blew through my 30 minute allowance the first month and my parents cancelled "the internet" after a $500+ phone bill.
This article was already talked about six days ago here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21320814
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21320814
The link was even showing as visited. I kept refreshing my browser because I thought my cache was stuck!
I find what I like most about ordering pizza online is that you are looking at a menu that calculates the cost and lets you put together the order. Then instead of having to then call someone up and read it out to them, you click ORDER and you are done.
The bad bit about using DOMINOS website is the shitty popups and 'you want this?' 'you want that?' yum-cha style experience that wastes a lot of time.
The bad bit about using DOMINOS website is the shitty popups and 'you want this?' 'you want that?' yum-cha style experience that wastes a lot of time.
I like being able to google for coupon codes. Trial and error doesn't go over so well on the phone.
Now I'm wondering if the people that did the pizza ordering scene in _The Net_ read this article. It does the same thing with the pizza design and showing the toppings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CnWs8jDbXo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CnWs8jDbXo
The year before, I think just after we'd seen Mosaic / glimpsed the future, a colleague had observed that 'one day soon you won't have to hang up to order pizza'. (Most of us were on dial-up back then.)
Not flying-car level of techno-prophecy, but prescient in a way I didn't immediately pick up -- ADSL / cable improved our speed, but the significantly larger impact was from having always-on Internet access.
Not flying-car level of techno-prophecy, but prescient in a way I didn't immediately pick up -- ADSL / cable improved our speed, but the significantly larger impact was from having always-on Internet access.
[deleted]
When you see online written with a hyphen you know it's from the 90s.
Internet-interface-system -- took me little to figure out they are trying to say browser
Awesome UX for pizza ordering in Tomsk, Siberia http://www.xn--80aaa4abubjt5ea.xn--p1ai/
I remember buying a digital tablet of sorts at that time..I can't remember the name of it. It was a startup that sold them as a glorified web browser (and eventually went out of business because many hobbyists did just that and got rid of all the advertisements), but there was a way to root it and install Linux.
This device had the ability to order pizzas through Pizza Hut. I tried it once and it worked pretty well.
This device had the ability to order pizzas through Pizza Hut. I tried it once and it worked pretty well.
Perhaps you're thinking of the i-Opener?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener
We hyphenated "teen-agers" back then? It's well known that hyphenations tend to be temporary, but that one is news to me.
After thinking we were in the golden era of food delivery, getting food in 45-60 minutes, I was recently blown away.
In major cities like Tokyo and Osaka, I had food in my hands in as little as 18 minutes after pressing "order" with an average around 25 minutes.
The software (ubereats) is the same, the difference is in restaurant efficiency and cultural norms.
In major cities like Tokyo and Osaka, I had food in my hands in as little as 18 minutes after pressing "order" with an average around 25 minutes.
The software (ubereats) is the same, the difference is in restaurant efficiency and cultural norms.
Really makes you feel humble about anything you might say about emerging tech today.
Or the opposite of that, since so much of what was said in the article is basically true. Ordering pizza via the internet wasn't a big deal. Getting the customizations across correctly, OTOH, made a huge difference, and every pizza ordering site now uses interactive ordering processes similar to what the author described.
And yet I still end up just calling the pizza place by phone since it's easier than navigating a slow and awkward UI and having to enter my payment details rather than paying on pickup.
If you are just ordering a simple pepperoni or cheese or something that probably is easier. The payment part can generally be solved by just telling it "cash", though. Noone complains if you actually pay with a card at the store.
[deleted]
Where I live I stick to using one of the two dominant platforms for ordering food. The UI is half-decent, but more imporantly, it's the same no matter which restaurant you source the order from. That's a relief compared to the garbage individual pizza places put on-line.
Does it remember your payment details? That would make it a win all by itself.
AFAIK it can, though I don't use it - I don't trust these sites that much. Web flow of paying with my bank account is fast enough, and with recent popularization of a mobile payment system, the flow can be as fast as pulling out my phone, PIN-authing to my bank app, typing a six digit number shown on my phone into a web form, and confirming the purchase on the phone. Takes 30 seconds.
I'm glad there's a safe way to do it. But that honestly does sound pretty complicated...
Perhaps the fault of my description. It is really simple. They payment process with BLIK (the mobile payments system) boils down to: select you want to pay with BLIK on the merchant's site[0], type a six digit number into a box, press OK, press OK on the phone. An extra speed bump is involved with knowing what number to type - it's a randomly-generated token with 3-minute expiry time; to get it, you need to login to your bank's app. All the apps I use (perhaps all of them in Poland) offer a simplified login flow here anyway; for me, it's "click the bank icon, click BLIK, type 4 digit PIN, see the six-digit token".
It really is fast and easy[2] enough that it's become my default payment method in Poland, but honestly, prior to that, I kept going through the slightly more involved flow described in [0]. I really don't like giving my card details out, especially that at least three large e-commerce sites I did give those details to can pull money out of my account with zero confirmation or notice beyond me clicking the "buy!" button on the site, so I assume a criminal with access to that data could do it too (and it's a debit card, so I can't exactly do a chargeback).
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[0] - Or with one of the intermediaries[1] that you know handles it, which without mobile payments I'd be using anyway. The intermediary lets you turn what would be "give your card details to the merchant/payment processor" flow into "login to your bank directly through your bank's login page to just authorize a transfer request from one of your accounts" one. The nice thing about it is that a) it's faster (I remember my bank credentials, not my card number), b) the whole is is PUSH, not PULL - I send them money, c) it's not tied to a card; I can pay from cardless accounts, and d) the merchant doesn't get my card number or account details. The UI flow is simple too, there's a string of redirects and prefills that make a payment with the intermediary just a few clicks, a login, and some 2FA thrown in the middle.
[1] - Like these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayU.
[2] - And safe! When you can get improvement on all three of the trade-off triangle, it only shows how much the older system sucks.
It really is fast and easy[2] enough that it's become my default payment method in Poland, but honestly, prior to that, I kept going through the slightly more involved flow described in [0]. I really don't like giving my card details out, especially that at least three large e-commerce sites I did give those details to can pull money out of my account with zero confirmation or notice beyond me clicking the "buy!" button on the site, so I assume a criminal with access to that data could do it too (and it's a debit card, so I can't exactly do a chargeback).
--
[0] - Or with one of the intermediaries[1] that you know handles it, which without mobile payments I'd be using anyway. The intermediary lets you turn what would be "give your card details to the merchant/payment processor" flow into "login to your bank directly through your bank's login page to just authorize a transfer request from one of your accounts" one. The nice thing about it is that a) it's faster (I remember my bank credentials, not my card number), b) the whole is is PUSH, not PULL - I send them money, c) it's not tied to a card; I can pay from cardless accounts, and d) the merchant doesn't get my card number or account details. The UI flow is simple too, there's a string of redirects and prefills that make a payment with the intermediary just a few clicks, a login, and some 2FA thrown in the middle.
[1] - Like these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayU.
[2] - And safe! When you can get improvement on all three of the trade-off triangle, it only shows how much the older system sucks.
Apple Pay is what changes this equation. It has your payment details and address already queued up. So you can click the size, click the topping, tap order and you’re done. It can literally be a 10 second exercise, as fast as looming up the number and dialing.
Why they don’t all have Apple Pay as an option, I do not know.
More to the point, that the web didn’t standardize UIs for payment and address information is probably a $100 billion mistake at least - in terms of what it costs everyone to do it their own way, and in lost time in having to constantly fill in the same form again and again.
Why they don’t all have Apple Pay as an option, I do not know.
More to the point, that the web didn’t standardize UIs for payment and address information is probably a $100 billion mistake at least - in terms of what it costs everyone to do it their own way, and in lost time in having to constantly fill in the same form again and again.
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This would have been inherently inaccessible to people with visual disabilities.
Besides: 5 years later, I ordered the first pizza in my hometown. It never arrived. Gotta love the new trends of the Internet.
Being able to order a pizza via a new technology is a humorous benchmark. Reminds me of the first pizza ordered with bitcoin.
The next big one might be the first person to order a pizza with a brain implant.
The next big one might be the first person to order a pizza with a brain implant.
>"Fundamentally, there’s not much difference between ordering a pizza over the phone and ordering one on-line. "
Except for dealing with people, friction is constant
Except for dealing with people, friction is constant
Judging by the performance of Grubhub’s stock today, this headline was spot on, and seeing it here on HN is utterly ironic :)
Does anybody else still get 30 minute delivery guarantees? I haven’t seen one of those in 10 years
As I understand it, they were pulled because employees would drive in a very unsafe manner in order to meet the guarantee and not get penalized/chewed out by their boss. I think somebody died...?
Yes. There was a lawsuit after a fatality. The delivery driver was a witness against Domino's.
They now have a satisfaction guarantee. If you call and say it was too slow, you'll be calmly told they don't offer a time guarantee, but if you were, for example, dissatisfied with your oder, you get free pizza.
They now have a satisfaction guarantee. If you call and say it was too slow, you'll be calmly told they don't offer a time guarantee, but if you were, for example, dissatisfied with your oder, you get free pizza.
It is as good as a guarantee in Tokyo and Osaka. Unless you pick somewhere 10+ minutes away by bicycle, motorcycle and car. The restaurant leg is typically sub-10 minutes.
Some are including games and entertainment with their pizza buying experience ;) https://garfieldeats.com/
> Instead of simply letting people order a pizza, why not let them design it as well? Instead of showing an ordinary menu with a list of toppings, show a picture of a pizza with the toppings clustered on the side. Let teen-agers and college students build their own pizzas on-screen. Present a palette of toppings and let people place their mushrooms and green peppers and pepperoni anywhere on the pizza they want. The real pizza is customized accordingly. In other words, computer-aided pizza engineering.
> This is precisely the sort of interactivity that computers and networks are good at.
> [...]
> Of course, this network designability concept easily extends to bouquets of flowers, boxes of chocolates, fruit baskets and the $6.85-billion annual market in mail-order clothes shopping. It would be perfect for all kinds of gift giving.