/PG/ Toronto, Ontario [Canada] (Signal High) for BadBusiness.Online —– Survival in the takeout food industry relies on four things: quality, price, speed and satisfaction. Fail consistently on any of those key deliverables and you may as well just pack it up. Competition is steep and there is always a new startup around the corner ready to fight trench warfare for a tiny sliver of market share. Successful operations have learned that to succeed you need not only a plan to get it right, but a plan for when things go wrong. More and more, our business desk is receiving reports about pizza shops, fast food outlets and other takeout food franchises that fail to deliver on their own guarantees and promises of “getting it right.”
In all fairness, you can’t just open a pizza shop and serve up food – you have to consider vegetarian and vegan alternatives, and we can’t forget about gluten free ingredients. Celiac disease is recognized as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, meaning restaurants and food chains have to offer non-gluten alternatives, prepared with non-contamination and other measures to ensure quality. Gluten can kill.
In Canada; however, regulations are lax and inspections are absent. Pizza shops like Domino’s Pizza [NASDAQ: DPZ], for example, take little effort to reduce cross-contamination and hide behind anonymity, cumbersome phone systems and a strict no refund policy to frustrate their customers into simply giving up.
This is exactly what happened to Christine, not her real name, an eighty-plus year old grandmother who made the mistake of trusting a Domino’s store in St. Catharines, Ontario, with preparing a meal for an informal family gathering not too long ago. She ordered several meal items, two of which were to be gluten-free, to accommodate the health requirements of her daughter. When the pizza arrived, it was standard crust. No problem, thought Christine, she would just call the store and have them replace the incorrect items.
But this is where Domino’s failed. The manager, who refused to give his name, would not replace the erroneous food, would not offer a refund and simply blamed her and their corporate online ordering system. Christine had her son call the store to complain about the lack of service, but the manager wouldn’t give him the phone number to customer service, nor would he connect him to the Canadian corporate headquarters. He simply said Christine and her son would have to call back another time and speak to the manager who handles complaints. So a hundred dollars worth of pizza went into the trash, and Christine had to fight with her bank to cancel the credit card transaction – not a simple task.
We now know that all three Domino’s Pizza franchises in St. Catharines are owned by a Mr. Waheem, but he could not be contacted. This writer reached out to Domino’s Canadian headquarters but was put through a complicated telephone maze of press one for nothing, press two for lacking accountability, and press three for no refunds. A complaint was filed online and an automatic response indicated Domino’s would get back within three or four days – likely too late for dinner.
Domino’s chief executive recently announced the closure of more then two hundred franchises in the U.S. [here] and a regional restructuring in Canada. We can only hope that the plan for doing so includes a better plan to respond when things go wrong, because as it is now, this writer is rating Domino’s an ‘F’ and the worst customer service model in the pizza industry. In this case, and many others, Domino’s has failed to deliver a quality product, doubled the price (no refund policy), blew time limits by not having a person in place to resolve the concerns and lost a family of customers.
Pubic investment is increasingly more difficult to solicit. We strongly suggest that those interested in investing into Domino’s, or any other franchise operation for that matter, start off as customers to see if the business is even remotely capable of living up to its own guarantees. And while doing that, closely examine the plans they have in place for when things go wrong. Christine has a loving and caring family, some of whom have political and business connections. Regardless, never mess with a senior citizen trying to feed her family. Its a plan to fail, just like Domino’s.
