Is pizza your favorite food? Even if it's not you probably know someone who would answer yes to that question in about 0.3 seconds, but why is that? Why do so many people love pizza? Why is it so
popular?
Is it the cheese? The pepperoni? Is it the crust; the fact that it has a
convenient little handle for us to pick up and eat it? Is it nostalgia? Does it
remind us of childhood? Of Chuck E. Cheese? Of parties?
Also, if you haven't heard or are not familiar with the Chuck E. Cheese
lore I recommend looking it up. It's heartbreaking.
The reason pizza is so popular is not because it is so good, but because of how aggressively it is
marketed and how high the ROI is on pizza,not just for massive chains like Domino's Papa John's and Pizza Hut (and
for local favorite in my area, Cassano's) but also for mom-and-pop shops.
According to a forum on pizzamaking.com, and a post by lifetime member and global
moderator named Pete-zza (very clever): the question of ROI on pizza depends on
who is making the pizza, what the exact toppings are, and the quality and amount
of each topping. Obviously a chain like Papa John's or Domino's will get better pricing on a per unit basis than will a
mom-and-pop operator because of greater volume and bargaining power, but as a
typical example I have read that a 16 inch pizza with 10 ounces of mozzarella cheese sauce and 6 ounces of pepperoni will cost an operator around $2 for the ingredients. I would guess that adding an additional topping might increase the
cost by another 10 to 20 cents depending on the topping. The dough itself will typically cost 0.011 cents per ounce if
made from scratch. For a 16 inch size using about 21 ounces of dough that would come to about 23 cents. Generally
speaking, the most expensive pizza item is the cheese. Another example I saw was
170 to 180 for 16-inch pie with 12 ounces of mozzarella cheese and 8 ounces
of sauce.
Now, you can sell pizza by the slice or you can sell pizzas as a whole but it is undeniable how high this ROI
is, especially for chains who can charge pretty...well...regular prices for pizza I guess. I've never seen a substantial
difference in cost of pizza between mom-and-pop shops in my area and the chains. I think they're about the same, mostly because of the convenience of using a chain and the fact that some Pizza Huts have buffets and that you can have the food delivered to your house. I mean, you pay
for the experience, not for the pizza itself.
That's why pizza is so popular: because it is so cheap to make. The purpose of
thinking about this is that it's easy to assume that Pizza is so
popular because it is delicious and filling and a good party food, but
nothing is the way we think it is. That's something that I've been thinking
about a lot lately, and that needs to be a part of understanding ourselves.
Almost nothing about you is probably the way
you think it is.
That's how we hold ourselves back; by constructing
archetypal ideas about ourselves.
Rules that apply to the rest of the universe apply to us as well. In the Scientific
Revolution, we came to terms with the fact that nothing was the way we thought
it was, and now that is a universal rule for how we function today. We assume we are
ignorant and crave to learn and understand things, a mindset which leads to our exponential progress since the
Revolution.
This is the best thing that could have happened, but it also means we are not the way we think we are. We have
to understand our identities for what they are: stories we tell about ourselves.
If you enjoyed this piece, please check out my book Rattling Hi-Hats, in which I explore philosophical trends in hiphop music: http://bit.ly/rhhphilosophy