Journalism Isn't Dead - Dude Stakes Out A Domino's And Follows The Delivery Drivers To Investigate If The "Domino's Tracker Bar" Is Accurate
It wasn’t that long ago that I stumbled across a piece in The Atlantic about how TurboTax uses bogus progress bars when completing a tax return. Since reading this, I got to thinking about the most important progress bar in my life — the Domino’s Pizza Tracker. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the Domino’s Pizza Tracker is the colorful, light-up progress bar in the Domino’s app that tracks each step of your pizza’s progress, from when it’s first being prepared until it arrives at your home.
Curious about its accuracy, I decided to stake out my local Domino’s. The plan is as follows: I’m going to place an order for delivery while hanging out in the restaurant, then compare each progress mark on the tracker with what’s actually happening with my pizza. Then I’m going to follow the delivery guy in my car until he arrives at my house, where my wife will be ready to receive him. For the record, I’m going into this hoping that the pizza tracker is not in fact a lie, but I’ll be honest, I do have my suspicions, so I plan to get to the bottom of this hunch.
I don’t want to repost all of this guy’s research and his conclusions because I don’t want to take the food (even if it is Domino’s pizza) out of his family’s mouth. I will just give this commentary: I respect and appreciate what he did there. Too many journalists are wrapped up in the Trump administration these days to remember why they got into the business in the first place – to shine a light on corruption EVERYWHERE, not just Washington. So when there is something out there that may be conning and taking advantage of every-day citizens, SOMEBODY has to pick up the mantle and carry the cross for us. This guy now joins the pantheon of heroes for the common man right next to the dude who researched all those Subway foot-long subs to see if they were actually a foot long.
Does Domino’s pizza tracker actually work? Are they being honest with their consumer base?
Is our pizza really being “fired up” and “professionally inspected” and sent out for delivery at the moment they say it is? Or are they playing fast and loose with their own software to pull the wool over our eyes and keep us blissfully unaware that our thin crust pizzas and molten lava cakes are actually much farther behind schedule than they promise?
Remember that this question was raised in the late 2017s by what Fox News called “the Dominos app truthers,” although it doesn’t look like any of them put the work in to investigate like Brian VanHooker did. Kudos to him for stepping up while the rest of us just sat on our fat asses complaining.
Short answer: it’s not really accurate, but it’s not that far off, pretty close actually, despite the fact they take a few liberties with their timing, they still get it done pretty fast. So yeah, the Domino’s Tracker works: kind of well but not perfectly well. In conclusion.
So sure, the Domino’s Pizza Tracker was only off by a few minutes, but it was pretty clear that the progress bar was in no way related to what was actually going on. Instead, it seems like it’s just a pre-timed estimate of how long each step should take, but in no way is it customized for your order.
In short, I totally blew the lid off this whole pizza tracker thing, man. I don’t want to compare myself to Woodward and Bernstein or anything, but I’m pretty sure they never stalked a pizza man on a rainy evening to expose the truths that will haunt a generation. After all, they had Deep Throat to spoon-feed them what they needed to know, whereas I only had my notebook, my Domino’s app and my undying dedication to the truth. And to pineapple on pizza. (MEL Magazine)
PS,
Before you ever get too critical, remember this delivery man so dedicated to the art of delivery that he was out there slinging pizzas in the middle of Typhoon Jebi.