Let’s all Trade Pizza Futures

The new pizza peels I ordered for the church arrived. I was amazed to learn that you can’t buy a 9″ wide aluminum peel anywhere in Miami, but there it is. I got two for the church and one for me.

I’ve been getting info on the pizza business. I talked to some people on a forum for pizzeria owners. What a downer. They say quality pizza won’t bring you business. They say it’s just your ticket into the game, and that marketing is all that really matters.

The places near me that do well do almost no marketing that I’m aware of. The thing that sets them apart is their pizza. Bad pizzerias (except for the big chains) almost invariably go out of business, while the few pizzerias that serve good stuff do well. But that doesn’t mean the forum people are wrong.

I do take issue with the claim that you have to have good pizza to get into the game. Here, the overwhelming majority of pizzerias are bad. All you need to get into the game is money. You need good pizza to stay in the game, however. Unless you have megacorporation backing that enables you to sell bad pizza at such a low price no one cares about the quality.

The forum guys say it’s a mistake to call anyone’s pizza “bad.” I don’t buy that, either. When you get together with people and talk about local pizzerias, you’ll find that there is a high degree of agreement on which pizzas are good and which are bad.

I’m trying to figure this out. It could be that the majority of these guys are hacks who have no idea what good food is. That’s pretty likely, actually. I wouldn’t say that to them, but if you’ve been around a while and you’ve eaten pizza at many restaurants, you know there is a lot of bad pizza out there. And no pizzeria owner thinks his own pizza is bad. They all think they’ve got the best pizza on earth. If these guys are hacks who put out a mediocre product (and think it’s wonderful), then it’s only natural that their perception would be warped. If you can’t make good pizza, the only changes you’ll see in your profits will be due to marketing and cost-cutting, so you’ll tend to assume those are the only things that matter.

On the other hand, look at Budweiser. Every time you take a swallow, you get just a little bit of a gag reflex, because the beer tastes soapy and sweet and stale, and there is virtually no hop taste to balance it. It’s barely beer. But Bud is the biggest-selling beer in America, because they have great commercials. That thing about the gag reflex is absolutely true; it’s why people insist on keeping their Budweiser extremely cold. When it warms up, you can taste it, and that’s a problem. Bud is a giant, even though every sip gives you a slight urge to vomit.

Some business fields are meritocracies, and others are not. Law tends to be a meritocracy. If you beat other lawyers, you’ll get clients. You just have to avoid making incredibly dumb business decisions. You have to have a real office, you have to return phone calls, and you need an ad in the yellow pages. You have to have a filing system and maybe a clerical. If you do those things, you’ll be okay. If you’re a good lawyer and you fail, it will probably be because you’re not capable of running a business. If you’re a bad lawyer and you succeed, it will be because you know how to manage a law office (where other people do the work) or because you know how to promote yourself in a way that compensates for your incompetence.

Medicine is not a meritocracy. Patients have no idea whether they’re getting good care or not. We lack the education required to make an intelligent evaluation. We have to guess. Doctors get business by giving comfort and refraining from offending people. When a person says he has a good doctor, he usually means the doctor is polite and helpful and doesn’t overcharge or overtreat. The last two doctors I went to will have my business for the foreseeable future, simply because they were courteous and quick and professional. Are they good at curing people? How would I know?

I haven’t seen my urologist for a long time. He’s a nice guy. But I don’t plan to go back to him. First of all, he went to college on a basketball scholarship, and his fingers are the size of bananas. Don’t make me draw you a picture. This is not a quality you want in a urologist. Next time, I want an Asian or a dwarf. Second, his receptionist is so rude, she seems to be mentally ill. When I had my second kidney stone, I called for an emergency appointment, and she was so snotty, I decided to stay home and do nothing.

In some businesses, promotion and customer relations are everything. In others, you can be a complete jerk who lives in a mine shaft, and if your work is good, people will beg you to take their money.

Writing, surprisingly, is something of a commodity. By that I mean marketing is more important than having a unique and valuable product. Everyone in the universe thinks he can write, so the applicant pool is so big, marketing is the only way to get noticed. This is even true of niches, such as humor. There are probably fewer than five really good print humorists working in the US today, but many untalented people make a good living writing low-quality humor, simply because they found the right hookups.

Actually, I can’t think of five really good print humorists.

I’m inclined to think the forum guys are wrong. If they were talking about burgers, which a monkey can make, I’d say they were right on target. Burgers are a commodity. Buy five ingredients and a gas griddle, and you’re a chef. That’s not true of pizza. Buy the best ingredients, go to pizza trade shows, talk to experts all day, do exactly as you’re told, and you will still probably make bad pizza, unless someone else writes your recipe. And you have to have a little talent just to recognize a good recipe.

To make burgers, all you need is a strong back. Pizza takes talent and a watchful eye.

If you make bad pizza, you’re competing with Domino’s and Papa John’s, and they’re going to kill you with low prices. If you make good pizza in South Florida, you’re competing with maybe twenty restaurants spread out over two counties. That’s how it seems to me, anyway.

Nonetheless, I am not so confident in my assessment that I’ll run out and sign a lease. My plan is to see what happens at church. If neighborhood people start showing up for pizza and we have to upgrade the production methods, I’ll know I’m onto something. If not, I’ll type out my recipes, turn them over to other people, and find something else to do.