UKC

So, the wee man has been at me to get a pizza from Dominos for years. I have so far resisted. So, tonight for a special reason, I thought, ok then, I have to drive to the next village, etc. I looked up the  price and for a normal pizza it is 19.99. Are they bonkers?

You need look for the deals. They’re pretty good IMO. But yes, if you Google, you’ll find loads of discussion on how expensive they’re thought to be.

The thing to remember about Domino's and Papa John's is that they don't expect anyone to pay full price. :-P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xUqbf5hCPs&ab_channel=ThrillistThrilli...

For a philosophical analysis of this work, see 'What's Wrong With Capitalism' by ContraPoints, which is genius.

It is Tuesday - you get two for that price

Chris

Papa John's doesn't expect to pay full wages to its staff either iirc (plus other sketchy management practices...)

Genuinly not surprised.

Don't buy the cookies. Kids love them but there the biggest RIP off. Last time I paid that much for a cookie was at Glastonbury festival and they were definitely not of the same standard as them. 

£19.99 for a pizza that feeds 3 people. What's so awful about that?

Indeed! That made my waiting for my first vaccine shot actually enjoyable!

They have some pretty clever price differentiation going on.  Drunk people will pay full price as they don't care.  Sober people look at the "deals" which reduce the price considerably.

Thing is I only need one. My husband hates pizza and my son and I would only eat one between us. So, I don't need two, but really I  don't want to pay 20 quid for a pizza! They must be joking???

Pizza crops up at evening meetings from time to time. Domino’s pizzas are so salty that unless I want to be drinking water all night they are an avoid. The heart of pizza is a good base and a ‘less is more’ approach to toppings. None of the delivery chains get this.

I often do pizza myself which is great. I really don't think 20 quid for a pizza is justifieable. A bit of dough, a couple slices of meat if so inclined or a few bits of veg, garlic,etc

ContraPoints? The entire channel is a work of unadulterated brilliance.

Are there no local ones? We found one in the village we moved into after looking at the local Facebook page. It's great, cheaper than the big chains, and it's walking distance too. Although we have had it delivered if we're feeling fat. 

That is what we did in the end, Got nice chips and garlic bread, too, for the pizza hater . Was really nice and a lot less than 20 quid. Still, I  think they are taking the mickey 20 quid for one pizza. I don't even know if it tastes nice...

It's justifiable if people will pay it, same goes for the rip off that is the price of coffee at Costs and the like or paying £70 for a plain white cotton tee-shirt because it has the correct logo on it.

As long as enough people will pay silly money for an item other people will charge them that silly price. 

Just took me back to my first ever job. Pizza counter in asda in grangetown. Feeling hungry was a cue to make a pizza for "customer samples", cook it and slice it up in the back, eat several slices, then fan out the remaining bits and place it on the counter for shoppers. 

Wow, is that really what they cost? I've never bought a Dominos pizza due to them being utter shite and by a long way the worst pizza I've ever eaten, but I have had the misfortune to have been given a few.

Buy one ( or a couple if on offer) and save the box they come in. 
 

When the wee man is not looking cook an supermarket £4 pizza 🍕 and stick it in the box, if you can get away with it.

Did the same with a cereals, cornflakes in a Frosties box, worked with my kids for years.

No, I’m not a tight ba**ard, , just saved the dental decay. 

Having now eaten pizza from literally everywhere else since I fell out with my local Domino's I can vouch for them being "utter shite" and "the worst pizza I've ever eaten".

I actually look back on the 3-hour-wait-for-a-cold-pizza-delivery incident when I refused to pay and vowed never to order from them again with gratitude as I've now realised how much better everyone else's pizzas are.

I'd hope that cookie had a special ingredient...

I don’t understand at all why anyone pays the price pizza chains charge for mediocre to poor quality, cheap to produce junk food in a box.

We don’t have any fast food chains where I live, so anytime we are away as a family group, my kids always want the pizza chains and the burger joints because they feel they are missing out.  It’s almost always disappointing.

I’d have been horrified at £19.99 for a pizza as well but am happy to admit to being grippy!

Ye 3 people...... *cough* ahem.....

Family sized pizzas have always been the price of two grams of weed

No, they are astute 

£19.99 isn't the main issue. It's Domino's calling their flabby dough and synthetic cheese lard bombs a "pizza".

Pizzas I think are best just bought local. 

We all know what we're getting. At least you feel better about if you're not funding faceless corporation s too. 

Its about £5.99 if you collect. Have a look in the deals.
 

Collection Perfection Deal

Any 2 topping medium pizza to collect in store for just £5.99 (premium crusts charged as extra)

I assume people think they are getting a Pizza worth £19.99 for £5.99.

I really like Dominoes Pizza, but I have now started making my own, which seem to work out at about £1 - £1.30.

For £19.99, I'd expect it to be delivered by a bewigged flunkey, not the usual spotty youth on a moped!

I agree completely based on what I have seen so far! Never heard of it before, so thanks again!

Contrapoints is good stuff

Great, a convert! There's loads of injokes for those deeply into youtube/internet culture. The Freedom Report (features in a couple of different videos) is a pisstake of Dave Rubin specifically (and my god it's funny), and the character Tiffany Tumbles is the MAGA trans youtuber Blair White. So some of the jokes are funnier if you know exactly who's having the piss ripped out of them. In the Jordan Peterson one, it is fairly obvious...

Much influenced by ContraPoints is a British lad who calls himself LonerBox, who's pretty good too. Not as aesthetically outrageous and hilarious, but he's good at putting forward a well-justified argument in video essay format. Much drier and literally academic is, Carefree Wandering for philosophical critique of modern stuff.

(Like, Comment, Subscribe as they say.)

Do you take the view that all products should be produced by slave labour? Or just pizza? After all, the cost of a product includes more than just the cost of the ingredients.

Totally agree. I have never bought one in my life from them and persuaded the wee man yesterday to have the nice one from the local Italian instead ! Happy people all around. Very tasty, too.

In my bachelor days I used to order Domino's on a Friday after a game of squash. Stopped in a hurry when I realised I had a completely unquenchable thirst afterwards due to the amount of salt. Terrifying. Thought I had diabetes.

Domino's, Pizza Hut, and all the other places peddling American style perversions of a classic European dish should be burned to the ground for crimes against food. "Thick crust" or "Deep Pan" pizzas, WTF? Actually, even offering to put pineapple on a regular Italian dough is borderline criminal, too.

Anyway, I never found a good Italian restaurant or pizza place in the UK, at least not in the Cambridge area. That may have changed since, but in the early 2000s you would immediately know you were in a UK pizzeria, not somewhere on the continent!

The inverse, of course, is still true today for Indian or Caribean food.

CB

Where did she suggest that? You're not making things up again are you, Sean? 

She's (not unreasonably imo) complaining about paying £20 for cheese on toast ffs! 

A local pub (the Haymakers, in fact, if you know Cambridge) had a suggestion from a slightly pissed regular that they should make a sort of pizza / chip butty hybrid - a margherita pizza, stuffed with chips and cooked calzone style. Apparently the kitchen staff, mostly Sicilians, had a bit of a conference before announcing that they were okay with that but they still weren't putting pineapple on anything. 

Never been there, wrong end of town. My pubs were the Empress, Cambridge Blue and Salisbury Arms down the Mill Road area.

Chip butties by themselves are vile, like the Swabian recipes mixing cabbage, pasta and potatoes: One source of carbohydrates should suffice!

Still, the customer is king, but you have to draw a line somewhere, preferably before the pineapples!

CB

My suggestion: make one yourself (they're very easy), and then present it to your kid in a box on which you have written 'Dominos.'

Next!

The OP said: I really don't think 20 quid for a pizza is justifieable. A bit of dough, a couple slices of meat if so inclined or a few bits of veg, garlic,etc

She's saying the ingredients are cheap. Which they are, even if perhaps they shouldn't be - who wants to eat cheap meat? But ingredients aren't the whole story in "justifying" the price of a pizza - or any product. See also moans about the cost of a beer in London, which forget you're essentially "renting" some floor space in a city with very expensive real estate.

The reason much British food is crap is because we think in terms such as pizza is "cheese on toast".

How many hours does it take to make one pizza Sean? Of course there are other costs than ingredients but you could still say that at £30, £50, or £1,000. Recognising something as poor value =/= advocating for slavery or indentured servants.

These days the main cost component of most things is taxes, interest and rent.  It's the people with the monopoly that make the money.  If you provide a successful and useful service but don't have a monopoly you end up having others copy it and compete with you on price and the price competition eventually forces you to provide the service not far above cost.

The pizza chains will have forced their costs for wages and ingredients way down but they are f*cked when it comes to rent on their premises, tax on fuel for their delivery vehicles, rates, VAT and so on.  It isn't Dominos ripping off the customer it is the government, bankers and landlords.

Amusingly, the best deep pan pizza in my area is made by an Italian guy called Poppa. Poppa has been there for decades and just says that's how they made pizza at home. It's excellent for when I feel like having something utterly sinful.

Sarti is an Italian chain based in Glasgow. Their food is stunning. Takeaway pizza is £10.

As much as I quite like Domino’s, I know where I’d prefer to spend my £20.

Indeed. For sure I believe that £20 is overpriced for a Domino's pizza, but also the statement "it's just a few cheap ingredients, why so expensive" is silly. I'm guessing that the various offers that posters above have mentioned mean that Dominos is engaging in price discrimination, ie selling at higher prices to customers willing to pay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

It was more a piece of rhetoric to make a point - the cost of ingredients isn't everything, labour, rental of capital, etc, all add up.

Alas, I forgot that UKC is full of rather stodgy men - deep pans rather than thin crusts - who take things a little too literally.

I would imagine that the fact that all of us, including Heike's son, have heard of Domino's, and perhaps even thought "I wonder if they are any good?" is part of the high price? Lots of people are saying how great their local pizza is, but I've never heard of them before and if, say, they're based in Glasgow - that's not much use to me in Derbyshire. But oddly there is a Domino's in my town - so I've both heard of the company and get to a shop easily. Mental and physical omnipresence has gotta cost.

Yes, clearly it's expensive. But... If you've ever read "Fast Food Nation" you'll know that MacD's in the US makes a lot of money from real estate (it rents the land to its franchises apparently). And combining ubiquity with a super standardised product and insistent marketing, companies like MacDonalds and Coke can create very profitable monopoly positions. So although real estate - and marketing - are expensive, it can work both ways. By becoming a monopolist (or even a sort of monopolist) the firm can charge slightly higher prices and make higher-than-typical profits. That's without thinking about the possibility that Dominos and Pizza del Locale serve slightly different markets, and that consumers in Dominos' market may well be able to bear slightly higher costs.

Pricing - it's hard!

Spending far too much time for my own good with teenagers, I get the feeling Domino's clientele is mainly teenagers, or the sufficiently harangued parents of teenagers! Personally I don't get it myself, but that along with the love of KFC, the Domino's obsession remains a great mystery about the youth of today! I think it mainly has to simply be they know no better.

Yes, everyone understands that, and it's still overpriced and she's still fine to point that out.

You're a pretty weird person yourself.

I think we have a solution to this question.

It's actually a really good question of how teenagers' tastes are shaped and how salient those tastes remain into adult life. Is KFC like the Jesuits? I hope not, but I don't know; my family didn't eat junk food because we were poor and it wasn't so readily available, so I don't have the taste for it. One thing I find fascinating is changing fads around meat eating. Today's teens seem either to be all meat or totally vegan, neither of which are sustainable in my opinion, the former not for the planet, the later not for the individual.

I presume you mean poppa in Beeston. That pizza is kind of unique, tasty if you're hungry, but I don't think I've ever encountered anything like that in quite a few trips to Italy. Good on him for staying around so long, I'm glad he has a following, they are very friendly too. 

We're spoilt for choice with milano express, just been to the star beer garden, which has excellent pizza

Indeed! I suspect that "at home" in this context means "that's how mamma makes it!".

Milano Express is excellent too!

Christ, make your mind up.

Bit of putting words into peoples mouths there.

I suspect so was the OP's statement that appears to have caused you so much distress

Ah - a bit of self-awareness - finally!

"Bit of putting words into peoples mouths there."

It was a direct quote, Blanche.

"Ah - a bit of self-awareness - finally!"

1: speak for yourself

2: the irony...

Recently I picked up a cast iron skillet on marketplace for a £5. Make balls of dough, let it ferment a few hours. Get that cast iron red hot right under the element on full whack. Oil/salt/pepper the pan. You'll know it's hot enough when the pepper fries in the oil. Add dough, hear it sizzle in the oil. Add toppings, back under the element for 15 minutes. 🔥 🍕 💪

That was certainly the high-water mark of my Dominos-eating. Not sure I'd dare order one now for fear of spoiling the nostalgia

You can get 4 pizzas and still have change from £20 from panda pizzas…

When my wife and I moved to London in 2013, it took us only one trial of on of the big-city pizza purveyors to decide to learn to make our own and we quickly made a friendly competition out of it.

For years, I wore the crown but, when we moved to Nuremburg in 2015, perhaps baffled by the truly amazing number of different types of flour one can buy in a German supermarket, I lost my throne. She now leads but that's entirely irrelevant because, now eight years later, I'll happily claim that our pizzas are better than anything we've ordered outside of Italy and better than many we've ordered there, too.

One off acquisitions of a pizza stone (ours dates back from 2013, has been used in the oven and in the fire and is still going perfectly) and shovel (a more recent upgrade to the production of pizzas) make the making of pizza a joy. Particularly, the shovel is absolutely vital -- it reduces hassle far more markedly than I could ever have thought, before I tried it.

Plus, if you make them yourself, you can do ridiculous things like putting fresh, ripe avocado on them after taking them out the oven or just simply NOT using so much tomato paste that there's nothing else to taste.

Also, we buy real cheese!

We have a funky oven with a pizza setting. It heats the ovens base, so we can put a pizza directly on the bottom of the oven at 275C. It cooks quickly and gives a really good crust. Whilst the oven is getting hot, we put a pizza stone on the bottom, so that takes up the heat as well. I can then put the stone on the fist shelf, with the pizza on the bottom, so it gets heat from top and bottom. Or, I can bung a second pizza on the stone and move it to the top shelf, and do two full size pizzas at the same time.

I have a similar device, I use as a peel. (Its just a thin stainless sheet.) What I've found is that I can roll out the base, then put it onto greaseproof paper to build. I trim the paper down, so it doesn't burn, then I can slide the lot into the oven in one go. The paper comes off easily in one sheet, once cooked. Also protects the pizza from whatever crap is burnt on the bottom of the oven. (Dont try this with tin foil, as it sticks the the base and tears.)