The Perils of Pizza

Last night, I had a hankering for pizza. Being one of my favorite food groups, any excuse to shovel a cheese and carb delivery mechanism directly into my mouth is good enough for me. Last night, the excuse was "Tuesday".

As is tradition in the household, the missus started flipping through the various pizza chains around here. Big chains, medium chains, specialty pizzas, and single-store joints are all possibilities.

Ah, we haven't had Hello Faz in a while!

Well, there's a reason for that. In the time we've lived here, the number of successful pie transactions with them - "successful" being defined as a problem-free, accurate order from them - has been well south of 50%. We've ordered a pie and had it disappear in their system because they were late in opening the store. We've had meat pizzas delivered instead of vegetarian; we've had missing orders. We've had delivery turn into pickups at the last minute.

Now, to be very clear, I still have a soft spot for them: The family that runs it are a bunch of super sweet folks (they often ply us with extra food when fixing their mistakes); the original owner was a local character (the joint is overflowing with film prints of the owner with about 2,302 celebrities); and, most importantly, the pizza is the best in town (the toppings are overflowing, it's halal, and the sauce is homemade and good enough to drink). In other words, 40% of the time, it works every time.

So we chance it. Being shy millennials, we prefer ordering online. And here's where the perils begin.

With the knowledge that this is a small, family-run business that focuses more on delivering tasty pizza than running an e-commerce empire, which of these websites would you order from?

Here? Here? How about here? What about here? Maybe here? Gosh, perhaps here? Or here? Here? Thermos H Christ, here? Maybe here? I dunno, here? Orrrrrr, maybe here?

At first glance, a hungry potential pizza patron has a DOZEN selections to choose from in order to get a pie. Being somewhat savvy online orderers, we went with the address listed on their Google Maps listing, because surely, SURELY, that is the official website, and thus a safe choice to rocket mozzarella into my mouth.

BUT WOE, reader, WOE, it was not to be - for the site blocked our order, because no matter how many pies we theoretically wanted, "minimum delivery order not reached" on my wife's phone.

Mildly annoyed, increasingly hungry, and with memories of previous Faz faux pas seared into my noggin, I went online and googled their website. I found a completely different website for them than my wife's phone did, along with the aforementioned 11 others.

Each of these sites goes through a different ordering backend. Some of them might be legit? Some of them might not be? After all, it's not unheard of for scammers to put up fake websites for popular restaurants, crank the price up, and pocket the difference after "helpfully" placing your order through Doordash or Grubhub. If you weren't paying attention, you wouldn't notice.

Even "legitimate" restaurant chains are getting in on it, sneaking in "ghost kitchens" with baloney generic names like Chicken Sammy's or Wing Place to get your business on DoorDash, only for you to learn that your theoretically delicious wings order came from a bank-owned Olive Garden. Both the scams and the ghost kitchen setups can be automated, meaning no restaurant is too small for this type of scam, and no rural hamlet is too tiny to get roped into ordering all their food from a rickety Red Lobster wearing several disguises.

Now, by this point I am sure you may have muttered to yourself, "but surely you could have just, I dunno, called them?"

And you would be correct, although my counterpoints would be "ew, talking on the phone, who does that?", and also "I have called them in the past and gotten naught but a voicemail", and also "the entire point of a website is I don't have to talk to a person and give them my credit card information, and a series of computers connected via a series of tubes is supposed to take my hard-earned money and convert it into delicious pizza, securely and efficiently. That's why we invented computers! Now please move out of the way, I need this pizza more than I need this conversation."

I am more alarmed by this being yet another symptom of the broader utility of the internet dying and rotting away; for someone like myself, tech-savvy enough to know of this net necrosis happening, it's one thing; for someone like my Boomer-aged family members just trying to order take-out, it's wholly another. Ordering food online should not be a series of Three Card Monte scams.

Ordering ANYTHING online shouldn't be difficult; this was a problem we solved during the last dot com bubble, and yet even ostensibly legitimate brands we have been convinced to trust over the years are slowly giving in to things like "marketplace sellers", where some yahoo from God knows where can trade on, say, Best Buy's good name and sell you a barely working TV that fell off the truck in Des Moines, all under the guise of it being a "Best Buy purchasing experience" unless you're actually paying attention - and how many of us are always, always paying attention to every website we visit? Heck, how would one even verify, when Google Maps entries can be hijacked and fake websites can rank higher than the real deal?

This internet rot type problem is becoming pervasive, and is going to get much, much worse over the next decade. It's worth thinking about how to navigate the coming decrepitude.

And for those of you wondering which website got us our pizza, it was this one, through Slice; although in all fairness, I chose to trust Slice primarily because I know people who work there, so I know it's a real point of sale system for real pizza joints, including Hello Faz.

And by the way... the pizza was delicious. So delicious. In fact, I ate the leftovers while writing this. Get the Mexican Fiesta and thank me later.