Going Down The Superhighway For Pizza
The Age
Wednesday August 24, 1994
AT 11am Monday, Americans lost their last reason to leave their computer keyboards, ever.
In Santa Cruz, California, Pizza Hut logged on the first outlet accepting orders over the information highway.
That's right, PizzaNet was born. Car culture officially caved in to computer culture with this test run of the world's first Internet pizza delivery system. Goodbye drive-ins, hello keyboard-ins. You don't even have to lift your eyes from the screen.
Internet deliveries are electronic light-years ahead of telephone ordering. Nobody's going to put you on hold. You can have your personal finance program print out the check for the triple anchovies while you consult your nutrition program about the fat content of pepperoni versus sausage at the same time you're consulting Pizza Hut's product descriptions on your screen. It's as easy as typing http:www.pizzahut.con.
If you live in Santa Cruz.
Pizza Hut chose Santa Cruz, near Silicon Valley, for its 90-day test because of its large number of Internet users. It had nothing to do, a Pizza Hut spokesman said, with Santa Cruz being so insufferably trendy that you can order dough as a late-night snack - at the Saturn Cafe - and so culinarily devoted that people wait in line early in the morning for unbeatable roast pork tacos - at Tacos Morenos. It's also where a chef - Joe Schultz of India Joze restaurant - once was arrested for giving away food to the homeless.
No, the issue is not food, it's entertainment. Besides being on the culinary cusp, Santa Cruz is a hotbed of music transmitted over the Internet - just the thing to set the scene for a pizza a deux by the flickering light of a screen running a compact-disc, read-only-memory multimedia rendition of candles.
Those of us who live in more ordinary exits off the electronic highway, such as Washington, will have to wait for PizzaNet until after this test run, and until the company senses a groundswell of demand.
A groundswell didn't seem imminent by the end of lunchtime Monday, when not a single Internet order had been logged at the Santa Cruz Pizza Hut.
Once the orders do come in, there are bound to be some bugs. For the hungry nerd at the keyboard, PizzaNet may look easy. But at the Pizza Hut end, the system is more complicated. Internet orders are sent to the company's Wichita, Kansas, headquarters, whereupon the customer's address is electronically verified. Then the company identifies the Pizza Hut closest to the customer and electronically dispatches the order to it. Filling an Internet order should take the same amount of time that a telephone order would take, said Rob Doughty, Pizza Hut's vice-president of public relations. That's if the computer knows the difference between Washington, DC, and Washington state. And if the computer is not down.
Geography aside, PizzaNet is not all that paradigm-busting. It's not as if Pizza Hut has figured out how to deliver pizzas by the Internet.
If it is expanded nationwide, PizzaNet will still be limited to people within eight minutes' drive time - in rush hour - of a Pizza Hut. So even if you can take your Powerbook into the wilderness, a pizza can't follow. Nor can you send a pizza instead of flowers for Mother's Day, since payment is still made at the door.
PizzaNet will need work. Pizza Hut prices vary around the country, and somehow the menus will have to account for those differences. The electronic menu doesn't include pictures, so you can't preview if there are enough mushrooms or see the thickness of the cheese. -- LA Times
© 1994 The Age