Papa John’s is promising to get your pizza to you in ten minutes or less. Granted, this is carry-out deliveries at lunch time only… but it raises the question: how soon until we see ten minute pizza deliveries, from telephone call to your door?

After all, the thirty minute guarantee has been around for decades. The pizza chain that can break that will have a serious edge over the competition. Unfortunately, there’s no real way to do it without sacrificing either quality (and there’s little enough of that to go around anyway) or safety.

Wat needs to happen to get a pizza to your door in ten minutes? As soon as you call, Papa John’s either need to have your specific pizza under a heat lamp, or they need to just blaze putting it together. Neither equates good pizza.

On the safety side of things, even a thirty minute guarantee encourages drivers to get reckless — their jobs are the ones on the line, after all. We don’t know what Papa John’s driver policy is (do you know? Send us an email!) but a lot of companies that promise a pizza to you in thirty minutes or less punish the driver if it doesn’t get there in time. Sometimes this can be pay docking (Domino’s famously used to do this) but even if it doesn’t become financially punitive, it looks bad if a driver continuously fails to meet the time limit imposed. Those precedents could eventually equal firing. Thirty minutes is already a slim wedge of time to get pizza to somebody’s door… does anyone really want to live in a Cryptonomicon Snowcrash-like world of samurai-sword wielding pizza deliverators boiling the asphalt at 200mph?

Scratch that last question: of course you do. Who doesn’t? So maybe Papa John’s is onto something here. Still, until a Papa John’s pizza chef can flip on a Cronenberg transportation device to beam a steaming pizza straight into your hands, we’d rather get a good pizza delivered to us in thirty than a heat-lamp pizza delivered in ten minutes by a bloody corpse who just crawled his way out of a car wreck.

Edit: Of course, it’s Snowcrash. Sorry, I spaced and confused it with one of Stephenson’s other books. Which is too bad, since Snowcrash is the only thing he’s ever written that doesn’t just suck.

Papa John’s 10-minute pizza [Food Facts]

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