Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Little Caesar's Hot N (Hardly Ever) Ready Pizza


I may come across as a bit of a pizza snob, and I do confess that I do have strong preferences, but I understand that part of the appeal of pizza is its convenience. There are some nights when you just want to get everyone fed in a timely manner. This need is answered by Little Caesar's Hot-N-Ready pizza, guaranteed to be ready for pick up.

But when it's not ready, it starts to lose its appeal. Little Caesar's has an adequate taste, but it's only really worth eating because it's cheap and fast. When it's not fast, then what's the point?

AnneMarie says that there has always been pizza ready whenever she has gone--except for the time she went with me. Perhaps I'm the problem. Tonight I only had to wait about ten minutes (someone had just come in and bought 17 pizzas for a Church youth night activity. It does say "no limit.").
Once I made the mistake of going in on a Friday night, when it was raining hard, and there was football on TV. That all adds up to no pizza. They told me I would wait for 20 minutes, but it ended up being 1 1/2 hours. (I stuck around because I had already paid. I was trapped.)
Part of the problem (apparently) is that some people confuse the Little Caesar stores in American Fork and Lehi. They'll call in one place but try to pick up in the other. I imagined on this night stacks and stacks of pizzas at the Lehi store with a bewildered crew wondering where all the customers were. It's Friday. Raining. Football. Why not make a whole bunch more pizzas? Although the service at LC's is usually adequate, this night it wasn't exactly the "A Team."
Let me try to explain this. They would run out of cheese pizzas, so they would start cooking a bunch of cheese pizzas. Then they would run out of pepperoni, so they would start cooking more pepperoni. They never seemed to have both cheese and pepperoni at the same time. I like cheese, and my kids say they like pepperoni (but then sometimes they eat my cheese pizza). On top of this, if someone came in just wanting cheese or just wanting pepperoni, the LC's crew would move them ahead in the line, ensuring that those of us who wanted both would never get our pizza. (While you're making all them there pepperoni pizzas, would it hurt anything to throw in a cheese pizza or two? Just in case? I only need one.)
So although the pizza is never ready on time, at least it's always hot.

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