Okay, so it’s Friday. It’s beer night. Beer and junk food night. So, we phone up our local Pizza Hut - a rare junk food “treat” (which is always disappointing) to order out so for once we don’t have to cook. I don’t expect much from Pizza Hut other than a happy feeling of stodge for my beer to fall on, but I do expect a little more than the response we got - we could not order a pizza. Why?
“We’ve run out of dough.”
Now, I’m no expert when it comes to the fast food industry or bread products, but for myself, I would think that when deciding on what stock to buy in for your pizza restaurant’s Friday night orders, dough would be pretty high on my list.
I mean… What, the…?
So, are we in Britain especially bad at customer service, or is this the standard I should expect from the rest of the world, too?
Ah well, I’m off to put some fake chicken nuggets in the oven now…
This is what is known as “lowering the world to your standards”. Kind of like when McDonald’s down the road ran out of hamburgers. And the chicken BBQ ran out of chicken. Happens all the time.
It does happen. I’ve got two years’ experience as a doughmaker for a small pizza place. We produced daily dough based on a moving average, determined by the previous four weeks of sales for a given day of the week. If they had a busy Friday night, even a chain pizza place could run out of dough.
A local pizza chain promised to donate a day of profits to the memorial fund for some police officers killed in the line of duty. They were out of everything by 9PM or so.
That was an unusual situation, but anything that produces unusually high sales will do it.
As will management incompetence, like (say) ordering as if Super Bowl Sunday (US football championship) were just an average day.
Happens here too … Taoranju, a national chain of Sichuan-style restaurants, origins in Chengdu. I went there one evening, invited to meet the boyfriend of one of my best students (he had flown up from S’pore). For various reasons it was just before 8 p.m. which I admit is a bit late to start dinner for the Chinese – 6:30 is more like the mark – but hey, this was a big restaurant with seating for maybe 200 and was not very full … anyway, it turned out that the kitchen could not produce one single one of the pretty standard dishes we ordered! We had to have alternatives much less to our taste.
We had the misfortune to travel in England in the fall of 2000, during a “national petrol strike.” They had loads of petrol, but the truck/lorry drivers wouldn’t haul it. In two days, the national cupboards were bare.
I was told there’s a practice known as Just In Time Delivery, meaning most stores keep on hand only two days worth of bread, milk, meat, produce or other perishables.
It’s probably a sensible custom, until a small group wants to give the country an economic heart attack. Don’t know if that’s the problem with Pizza Hut, though. Glitches happen, everywhere.
It happens very often at a small pizzeria where I like to go, on the nearby mountains. They have a very limited number of clients during winter, so if some more people arrives for a week-end, they run out of dough quickly. Making more than expected would mean wasting the fresh dough.
The last time it happened, I had to be happy eating home-made pappardelle with wild boar sauce. Sometimes, you must do a sacrifice.
At least, you know they use dough and not something else!
I thought the chain pizza places used frozen dough so running out should not be a problem just defrosting.
If it was a bespoke pizza place whats so hard about putting flour, oil and water into the industrial blender ?
Its not like you need yeast to rise then knock back the risen dough to rise again.
I was in a pub with no beer last week. I blame it on the Con-Dem government.
I can see how that might seem the case, given the latest trend in the U.S. (and who knows elsewhere) of using a sheet of waxpaper beneath the toppings and calling it dough.
I can honestly say I’ve never experienced this problem. And I lived for 12 years in the five-college town of Burlington, Vermont, where there seemed to be a pizza joint on every block! I did one time find a Band Aid in my pizza – needless to say I didn’t order from that place again. Maybe that’s why they didn’t run out of dough.
Thats going back a bit, init? :open_mouth: Obviously, that was before the rolling out of the, "Lets keep sex sex safe!! Wear a condom!!" bandwagon.
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