Saturday, September 3, 2011

Dominos Pizza on the Moon...No Seriously!


From the corner of my ear I heard the most amazing news blurb this evening, as I was lazily swiping away at the iThing. Dominos pizza will be building a space pizza restaurant. A pizza restaurant- on the moon.


I know I haven't written on this thing much lately, there has been a lot of crap going down, but frankly this, this dear readers, is enough of a free jolt of electricity to free me from sloth!

I haven't done any of the research yet, haven't checked CNN, or Snopes, or any of the usual suspects. No, I plan to type this gem up without the benefit of actual knowledge of the situation. That kind of advantage would remove the spontaneity, the thirst for truth. I'm just going to assume that the anchorwoman on Bay News 9 was reporting a factual story. That Dominos Pizza is going to make good on a promise to spend in the neighborhood of $22 Billion and 15 liquid fuel launches to put a sit down restaurant on the surface of the moon. The Moon. Yes, that one.


I mean, who wouldn't want to know more about the first permanent, habitable structure on the surface of the moon, arguably the single most pivotal occurence in the long and storied rise of mankind? Especially if it turned out to be a franchise serving both Pepsi and Budweiser? Wait I was thinking of Pizza Hut, they're a strictly terrestrial outfit. Forgive my old fashioned, Earth-centric thinking. You can almost sympathize with the church for the whole Gallileo thing right now.


It's like the cheesiest parts of Space Mountain are about to come true. Daddy actually WOULD be able to swoop by a pizza joint on his way home from his work on Mars or wherever that creepy little animatronic figure mentioned as you were leaving the ride. Or was that Spaceship Earth? Who the fuck cares, they're building a Dominos on the Moon!


This is what happens when your government is starved of cash, but your gluttonous populace continue to gorge themselves on the cheapest nutrition available with the mere touch of 7 digits and a button labeled in friendly green font: TALK. Or one button for the serous repeat customer. How many of these goddamn things are you folks buying that they can spend $22 Billion with a B dollars firing more than a dozen rockets into the depths of space to spend untold man-hours clearing moon rock, attaching some sort of sturdy foundation, fortifying air tight walls and roof, providing shielding from cosmic rays and micro asteroids, constructing double failsafe life support systems, assembling housing for your workers, designing a system for surface travel to pick up your hoped for customers because you can't just land a spaceship right on top of a pizza restaurant now can you? Can you?! Or have these clever bastards at Dominos got their hands into more pies than we've ever even dreamed of?


All of this gives me a funny kind of 'did some spoiled idiot just inherit Dominos Pizza?' vibe. Strikes me as something Gob Bluth would have dreamed up in a brainstorming session, just before having to issue an emergency press release to appease the shareholders. He was probably staring out the window at the time and they had asked him for the third time what their advertising salvation was going to be. We're in a waxing crescent about now I believe.


Again, I do this without the benefit of Internet research. Its more fun to just pick this silly idea apart on merit, on simply hearing the barest summary snippet. I mean my God, more power to them. Who wouldn't want to eat pizza on the moon? Sounds like a blast. But I believe they misread their target market. What is the typical income of your average hypothetical-no-more moon tourist? How many 7-series sedans could they have traded for this nearly interplanetary dinner? Granted you can have cold leftovers on the way home, but I'm imagining someone should have opened a foie gras and caviar bistro instead. That and a fine whorehouse.


The funny thing is, I can't see how supply or demand would work here. I can see customers demanding free toppings, pointing around to the noticeable dearth of street traffic at this little food stand. But likewise I can see the owner surveying the utter lack of competition and not even bothering to list prices on the menu board. The field is wide open, this is new ground to cover.  It's stuff that would drive economists silly with glee.


Now I must admit I've had a few: it's Friday night on a Labor Day weekend. So maybe I just heard something that sounded like "Dominos is building a restaurant on the moon" you ask? But they said it again after I rewound the DVR. So I can stand it no more, I really need to get to the bottom of this and read at least one story telling me this is but a guerilla marketing scheme gone viral.




P.S. I looked it up and it's actually the Japanese wing of Dominos Pizza. And the spokesman in their introductory video is creepier and more cheesetastic than any creature dreamed up by the imagineers of Walt Disney: http://moon.dominos.jp/


P.P.S. Will they sell slices?


1 comment:

  1. As for me it sounds too funny to be true. There wasn't even so much people going into space so building a space pizza coffee seems like a fantastic for now. In future I think it is real.

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