pizza – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "pizza"

How The Internet Enabled A Mariners Fan And DoorDash Driver To Connect And Do Something Cool

from the faith-restored dept

The world can be an awful, horrible place. Lately, it feels like, in America, things are only getting more difficult. And, because my country loves its scapegoats, the internet has been routinely blamed for all the country’s, perhaps the world’s, ills. Insurrections, political radicalization, obesity, poor socialization, literally any sub-optimal thing to do with children: blame the internet.

But that’s obviously stupid. The internet is responsible for both good and bad outcomes in society, as is pretty much everything else. But the internet also is only as good or bad as those that make use of it. And sometimes, the internet enables really awesome stuff.

Take the story of Sofie Dill, Seattle Mariners fan, and Simranjeet Singh, a DoorDash driver. This past weekend, without getting into too much detail, Jesse Winker was hit by a pitch while playing the L.A. Angels and a brawl between the teams ensued. Baseball fights are plainly dumb, but some fans enjoy them, or at least root for their players in the fight. To that end, Dill, from her home in Arkansas, decided to send Winker a pizza from a local Anaheim parlor to be delivered directly to the stadium. And, for added measure, she live-tweeted her DoorDash experience for everyone to follow along.

Baseball fan or not, you should go check out the full thread. It’s a harrowing journey to see if she could in fact deliver a pizza to a professional baseball player in a visiting Major League clubhouse to express her support. The spoiler here is that the pizza did in fact get delivered, Winker reached out to her on Twitter to say thanks, and a whole bunch of people were cheering on the DoorDash driver, Singh, as he went on his dutiful journey.

As a result, Dill managed to get Singh to share his Venmo QR code and shared it out to Twitter.

And from there, the internet did its thing. Plenty of folks started sending money to Singh’s Venmo. Other’s asked they could send him money via another platform. Singh himself started sending out tweets thanking everyone, clearly overjoyed at everyone’s generosity. Then, were that not enough, two other awesome outcomes happened, just to restore your faith in humanity.

While I can’t be sure how much was donated to Singh, he certainly didn’t keep all of it for himself.

There are good people in this world. Paying it forward would have been the feel good coda to this story on its own, but then the Mariners decided to get in on the fun as well.

TONIGHT ONLY at T-Mobile Park! 🍕🍕

Get a FREE @Mariners pizza pin with purchase of a Jesse Winker player t-shirt or jersey!

*While supplies last. Available at select locations only. Cannot be combined with any other offer. pic.twitter.com/dVx3Z0Yvgj

— Mariners Team Store (@MarinersStore) June 27, 2022

Dill got herself a Winker jersey from the Mariners. Singh had what he describes as a life-changing event. Mariners fans got to have a ton of fun on Twitter with all of this. St. Jude’s got a donation.

If there’s a loser in this story, I can’t find one. And all of this made possible by the evil, vile internet that too many people blame for every last thing.

Filed Under: baseball, fandom, internet, jesse winker, pizza, sharing, simrajeet singh, sofie dill
Companies: doordash, seattle mariners

Broadband Provider Wide Open West Tries To Justify Unnecessary Broadband Caps Using… Pizza?

from the monopolies-are-like-pepperoni dept

Tue, Apr 6th 2021 06:31am - Karl Bode

For a long time now, we’ve explained how broadband usage caps are bullshit. They serve no technical purpose on the network, and aren’t genuinely helpful in managing congestion. Their real role is several fold: one, they let ISPs charge US consumers (who already pay some of the highest prices in the developed world) even higher rates; two, they let ISPs falsely advertise a lower price than they actually charge; and three, they can be abused anticompetitively (exempting an ISP’s own streaming content from caps while still penalizing a competitor like Netflix).

Despite this, regulators historically haven’t much cared, even during a pandemic showcasing how affordable broadband is essential for survival. And ISPs keep slowly expanding the adoption of such caps across the states in the hopes nobody will notice (think of the boiling frog metaphor with you as the frog).

That includes Colorado-based Wide Open West (WOW), which recently announced it would be implementing new usage caps and overage fees for its subscribers starting June 1, 2021. Utterly tone deaf to the fact there’s a pandemic and economic crisis going on, the ISP attempts to soften the blow by pretending that costly, confusing broadband caps and overage fees are akin to delicious pizza:

“What’s a monthly data usage plan? Let us illustrate ?

Imagine that the WOW! network is a pizza. Piping hot. Toppings galore. Every WOW! customer gets their own slice of pizza, but the size of their slice is dependent on their Internet service plan. While customers who subscribe to 1 Gig get the largest slices, those with Internet 500 get a slightly smaller piece, and so on. But, it’s all the same delicious, high-speed pizza that you know and love.”

To be clear, broadband is not remotely comparable to pizza. On a properly constructed and funded network you don’t just suddenly run out of “pizza” because there’s a few gluttons about. Smart network optimization technology is routinely used to ensure that doesn’t happen. Also note that while WOW is busy talking about pizza, at no point can they be bothered to clearly state what their new, arbitrary usage limit is (1 to 3 terabytes depending on your plan):

“Now, say you’re not full after your slice and you grab another. That extra slice is like a data overage. Don’t worry?we got extra pizza… umm, data… just in case. If you exceed your data allowance, we’ll automatically apply increments of 50GB for 10toyouraccountfortheremainderofthecurrentcalendarmonth.Totaloveragechargeswillnotexceed10 to your account for the remainder of the current calendar month. Total overage charges will not exceed 10toyouraccountfortheremainderofthecurrentcalendarmonth.Totaloveragechargeswillnotexceed50 per billing statement no matter how much data you use. Even better?the first time you experience a data overage, we’ll proactively waive fees.”

How nice of you to “proactively waive fees” from arbitrary and unnecessary restrictions (WOW used to use a lack of a cap as marketing bragging rights). Again, there’s no reason for these restrictions to exist outside of boosting revenues. And it’s a tactic that only works thanks to limited competition, as many of these customers will have no alternative ISP to switch to. ISPs also know people get bogged down in conversations about whether “one terabyte is generous,” which distracts from the reality that these limits shouldn’t exist at all on a properly built network.

ISPs spent many years trying to pretend that usage caps were necessary due to congestion. But after data scientists, network engineers, and even the industry’s own leaked memos repeatedly proved that wasn’t true, the industry finally stopped. These days, ISPs will usually just implement the restrictions without bothering to justify them, knowing there’s no regulatory or competitive penalty. But if you’re “lucky,” you’ll get an ISP which feels inclined to get creative as they try to pretend that screwing you over is something you should actively enjoy.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband caps, data caps, pizza
Companies: wide open west, wow

The Great Pizza Arbitrage Scheme Of 2020 Is Spotlighting The Strangeness Of Food Delivery Services

from the supply-and-gourmand dept

Food delivery services always felt a bit wonky to me. I’m usually not terribly old fashioned about most things, but I generally understood that some restaurants delivered and some did not and that that was mostly fine. Along came food delivery services to bring us food from places that didn’t deliver and that was mostly fine, too. But lately it’s starting to become clear that somewhere in the ecosystem of venture capitalist funding and food delivery services, something is broken. We’ll explore the larger issues in a separate post, but one great example of how janky this is getting is how one pizzeria owner managed to make a nice profit by buying his own pizzas from DoorDash. Confused? Well, buckle up.

Yesterday, Ranjan Roy, a content strategist and writer, wrote about the latter in his newsletter The Margins; one of his friends who owns a few pizza restaurants suddenly got an influx of customers complaining about delivery when the restaurants didn’t offer delivery. “He realized that a delivery option had mysteriously appeared on their company’s Google Listing. The delivery option was created by Doordash,” Roy wrote.

Apparently, this is one way that DoorDash does customer acquisition — by bullying restaurants. But what’s funnier about Roy’s friend’s problem (and it was a real problem because of Yelp reviews and angry customers) is that DoorDash priced the pizzas incorrectly. “A pizza that he charged 24forwaslistedas24 for was listed as 24forwaslistedas16 by Doordash,” emphasis Roy’s. And then: “My third thought: Cue the Wall Street trader in me…..ARBITRAGE!!!!”

And so began the dumbest transaction plan in the modern history of business. The pizzeria owner placed some DoorDash orders, expecting that eventually DoorDash would catch on. It didn’t. To date, even with journalists now asking the company direct questions, DoorDash hasn’t commented as of the time of this writing. At 8perpizzainpureprofit,theownerwentaheadandorderedanindeterminate,butmorethan10,numberofpizzas.ItgotfunenoughasanexperimentthateventuallytheownerjustorderedpizzadoughthroughDoorDash,alleviatingtheneedtoeventurnontheovens,at8 per pizza in pure profit, the owner went ahead and ordered an indeterminate, but more than 10, number of pizzas. It got fun enough as an experiment that eventually the owner just ordered pizza dough through DoorDash, alleviating the need to even turn on the ovens, at 8perpizzainpureprofit,theownerwentaheadandorderedanindeterminate,butmorethan10,numberofpizzas.ItgotfunenoughasanexperimentthateventuallytheownerjustorderedpizzadoughthroughDoorDash,alleviatingtheneedtoeventurnontheovens,at75 in pure profit.

Are these huge numbers? No, except that when this sort of thing happens to the restaurant rather than the delivery service, the former operating under much smaller margins with real hard costs, it’s a problem. Those problems mostly being what happens when DoorDash delivers crappy service that the customer thinks is from the restaurant as well as customers getting used to these very low prices when the owners of the business actually charge more for the product.

The answer isn’t clear because we’re very far from the old ways. By the magic of venture capital, some businesses don’t have to make money to survive. And that’s upended things for everyone. “Third-party delivery platforms, as they’ve been built, just seem like the wrong model, but instead of testing, failing, and evolving, they’ve been subsidized into market dominance,” as Roy puts it. “The more I learn about food delivery platforms, as they exist today, I wonder if we’ve managed to watch an entire industry evolve artificially and incorrectly.”

As Bloomberg put it last Halloween: “GrubHub Inc. just announced disappointing quarterly results and said that food delivery is only a means to an end, unlikely to ever be profitable on its own. The risk heading into 2020 is that the inevitable reckoning for the food-delivery businesses will spread to the broader restaurant industry.” And at the end of the first quarter of 2020, that looks more prescient than ever. According to its first quarter report, GrubHub, the only profitable restaurant delivery business, lost $33.4 million over the last 3 months. (In fairness: COVID-19.)

Yeah, but in other fairness, companies that cannot make a profit aren’t supposed to survive in capitalist societies. That’s sort of a cultural lodestone in our economy. And while venture capital can certainly prop up emerging businesses that otherwise would never launch into real profitability, it’s worth considering whether the food delivery business has run out of runway.

On the question of why these food delivery service companies seem to almost universally lose money, more to come.

Filed Under: arbitrage, food delivery, pizza
Companies: doordash

from the happy-endings dept

You may recall that way back in early 2015, we discussed the absurd story of the New Jersey Turnpike Authority suing Jersey Boardwalk Pizza for trademark infringement. At issue was that the pizza joint’s owners, both from New Jersey, had crafted a clever logo that mimicked the logo for the Garden State Parkway, except it altered all the words to be the parlor’s name and the food it served. It was a clear homage. Nobody denied it. That didn’t change the fact, however, that the NJ Turnpike Authority is both not in the business of selling pizza, nor is it in the business of being in Florida. As such, there was zero potential for customer confusion, and the court dismissed the case.

You would have thought that would be the end of this story. But, no, the NJTPA decided to go the trademark office and try to have the pizza parlor’s trademark invalidated. Why in the hell it bothered doing so is anyone’s guess. Regardless, it didn’t work out well for the Garden State.

Three administrative judges with the United States Patent and Trademark Office ruled Monday that Jersey Boardwalk Pizza can continue to use its logo, which the New Jersey Turnpike Authority argued was confusingly similar to the Parkway logo.

In dismissing the authority’s claims, the patent office’s governing board noted the similarities, but the restaurant’s business is unrelated to the roadway. The case was heard in February and took three months to decide.

All sorts of questions leap to mind. What exactly did the folks at the NJTPA think was going to happen at the PTAB after a U.S. District Court refused to entertain this bullshit? Who exactly makes up the legal staff for the NJTPA and are they, or are they not, fully functioning human beings? Is there some kind of gas leak we should be aware of, or perhaps some sort of underground radiation resting just under this legal team’s offices?

The most important question, however, is this: how much taxpayer money was flushed down the litigious toilet, all because a couple of New Jersey transplants wanted a callback to their home state for a Florida pizza business? If the answer to that question is greater than zero, it sure feels like there should be exit interviews going on post-haste.

Filed Under: new jersey, new jersey turnpike authority, pizza, ptab, trademark
Companies: jersey boardwalk pizza

Sanity: Trademark Suit Rules That Florida Pizza Joints Don't Compete With The NJ Turnpike

from the baby-steps dept

While the trademark litigation landscape is littered with lame filings, lamentable rulings, and a litany of liberal interpretations of the law (alliteration!), it’s worth noting when we also see sane rulings on trademark lawsuits. So allow me to bring you the news of a federal ruling that acknowledges the fringe and controversial understanding of Florida and New Jersey being very separate and not two entities likely to be confused.

It all started, as most great things, with pizza. Two Florida residents, originally from New Jersey, decided to open up some pizza restaurants. With tastes harkening back to their Northeast roots, Jersey Boardwalk Pizza in Florida decided to play off the logo of the Garden State Parkway logo, as you can see below.

As you can see, the pizza place’s logo is a clear homage to that of the Garden State Parkway, which is managed by the NJ Turnupike Authority. There’s simply no disputing it. And, if you had only a minimal understanding of how trademark law works, you might not be surprised that the Turnpike filed a trademark suit against the pizza-slingers over the similarities.

The authority’s suit, filed last week, alleges service mark infringement, unfair competition and other claims against Jersey Boardwalk Pizza. The restaurant’s logo has the same green-and-yellow color scheme, including an outline of the state, as the Parkway sign. But on on the restaurant logo, “Garden State Parkway” has been replaced by “Jersey Boardwalk Pizza Co.” with the words “Subs. Cheesesteaks. Pasta” below that.

The suit claims the restaurant’s logo is so similar to the Parkway sign as to give the impression that the two are linked, the Journal said.

Regular readers here are probably already either laughing or shaking their heads. The New Jersey Turnpike is many things, and not all of them bad, but I’m having trouble thinking of a scenario in which someone thought it sold pizzas. Couple that with the fact that these pizza spots are located solely in Florida, which is demonstrably a different location and market than New Jersey, and the whole thing gets sillier.

Fortunately, the judge presiding over the federal case agrees, having recently dismissed the case completely.

Judge William Martini dismissed the suit filed by the New Jersey Turnpike Authority against Jersey Boardwalk Pizza, saying the Florida business had “minimum contacts” with state residents aside from online sales of branded merchandise.

“Although Plaintiff may have felt the brunt of harm in New Jersey, it could not be said that New Jersey is the focal point of the offending activity,” Martini wrote in his decision.

“The defendants are a Florida company that doesn’t do any business in New Jersey,” said Justin Klein, the attorney who represents Jersey Boardwalk Pizza. “We’re happy with the outcome and hopefully we can put this behind us and focus on our business.”

This would normally be the end of the matter, an end where one would hope the folks a the Turnpike Authority had learned their lesson, and perhaps a bit about how trademark law works. Not so, unfortunately, what with a spokesman for the Turnpike indicating that they would pursue the matter further and look for legal options outside of the Trademark Appeal Board.

Keep digging, I guess, but I’m still certain Florida and New Jersey ain’t the same place.

Filed Under: new jersey, new jersey turnpike, pizza, trademark
Companies: jersey boardwalk pizza

Pizzeria Attempts To Trademark The Flavor Of Pizza. Yes, Seriously.

from the savor-the-flavor dept

Trademark, while generally one of the better forms of intellectual property as used in practice and in purpose, can certainly still be abused. It can also fall victim to an ever-growing ownership culture that seems to have invaded the American mind like some kind of brain-eating amoeba. And that’s how we’ve arrived here today, a day in which I get to tell you about how there is currently a trademark dispute over the flavor of pizza. And no, I’m not joking.

New York Pizzeria, Inc. is the plaintiff in this case that was brought after its former president allegedly conspired to create a knockoff restaurant chain called Gina’s Italian Kitchen using NYPI’s recipes, suppliers and internal documents. The lawsuit includes an allegation of a computer hack, but we’ll focus on the judge’s analysis of the trademark claims.

“Intellectual property plays a prominent and growing role in our Information Age economy,” opens Texas judge Gregg Costa’s opinion this week. “In this case, though, the plaintiff seeks intellectual property protection for something quite traditional: the meal one might order at a neighborhood pizzeria.”

So, we have two pizza shops in a fight over ingredients and flavor. What NYPI is claiming is specifically centered around the resulting flavor of the two pizzas as a matter of trademark infringement. The claim is that their flavor is distinct. So distinct, in fact, that consumers would recognize it as solely NYPI’s, even if coming from Gina’s Italian Kitchen. The judge, as it turns out, was exceptionally good on this claim.

“As with colors, it is unlikely that flavors can ever be inherently distinctive, because they do not ‘automatically’ suggest a product’s source,” he writes. But even if pizza fans can close their eyes, bite into one, and recognize a slice of New York Pizzeria when they taste it, Judge Costa gives a second reason why trademark protection can’t extend to taste: “Functional product features are not protectable,” he writes.

The judge points to a prior decision at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board as precedent. a pharmaceutical company attempted to gain a trademark on the orange flavor of its medicine, but that was ruled out-of-bounds when the TTAB decided that by flavoring a disagreeable taste, the company merely “performs a utilitarian function that cannot be monopolized without hindering competition in the pharmaceutical trade.”

Judge Costa goes on to note that the scrutiny of trademark law applying to the flavor of pizza logically should be much greater than even the flavor of medicine. It’s a very nice way of calling this whole thing silly and telling everyone to go home. The case has been summarily dismissed, thankfully. Were this sort of dispute allowed to find any kind of foothold, a well-functioning foods industry could be tossed completely for a loop. The trademark-able flavor angle would essentially be an end-around the fact that copyright doesn’t apply to recipes. After all, if you can simply protect the end result of the recipe, what would be the difference?

Filed Under: flavor, pizza, recipes, trademark

DailyDirt: New-Fangled Pizza Making

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Pizza is a really popular menu item. Seriously. It’s everywhere. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that folks are trying to deliver pizza to people in new and better ways. While we probably won’t see pizzas delivered by drone anytime soon (thanks, FAA!), it looks like we can look forward to seeing pizzas in more and more vending machines.

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: automation, food, mre, packaging, pizza, robots, vending machine

DailyDirt: Food Plus…

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The world is full of restaurants and chefs striving to make a mark with a new culinary concoction, but centuries of everyone on the planet eating every day has largely covered all the bases. The easiest way to come up with something new is to take something popular and add something unexpected to it, like so:

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: bacon, food, ice cream, pizza, viagra, whiskey

DailyDirt: Believable Dieting

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Maybe you’re not eating meat today or perhaps planning to avoid various foods that aren’t kosher for Passover. (Or you’re blissfully eating whatever you want…) People follow a lot of eating guidelines based on all sorts of issues — religious, ethical or other. There are all kinds of diets: to lose weight, to prevent high blood pressure, to save animals’ lives, to kill fruits. Whatever diet suits your fancy, you might want to check out some of these stories on dietary restrictions and food beliefs.

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: diet, dietary restrictions, food, ghrelin, ice cream, metabolism, pizza, placebo

DailyDirt: Tips For Optimal Pizza Eating

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are a lot of different kinds of pizza, and it’s a food that is often mentioned here on Techdirt — often as the example of how giving away free samples can drive greater business. But if you just like to eat pizza, and don’t care about any other aspects of the pizza business (or any other business), here are just a few tips for you.

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: bill de blasio, cooking, etiquette, food, pizza, pizza box design, re-heating, utensils