The Domino’s Pizza Tracker Theory of Everything

Did a pizza restaurant’s humble status page change how we wait forever? When you order a Lyft or Uber, you get texts every few minutes about your car approaching and arriving. When you have a package coming, you get a notification when it’s shipped, when it’s en route, and when it’s out for delivery. Why do so many companies send these constant updates? We have a theory: It’s because of Domino’s. In 2008, Domino’s launched the Pizza Tracker, a novel tool that delighted customers by allowing them to obsessively monitor their pizza’s progress from order to oven to delivery. The Pizza Tracker became a canonical model for other companies trying to improve their customers’ experiences of waiting for all kinds of products and services. And now? Pizza Trackers are everywhere. On today’s show: how the Domino’s Pizza Tracker shaped the internet, and how trackers went from transparently sharing information with consumers to — in some cases — actively deceiving us. Support: — Planet Money+ https://n.pr/3HlREPz Read: — Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life https://lnk.to/i3AukBdD — Our weekly longform Planet Money newsletter https://n.pr/3zrFvUB — Our weekly Indicator round-up newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/indicator Follow: — Instagram https://n.pr/3FqLuws — TikTok https://n.pr/3sGZdrq — YouTube https://lnk.to/iCVDaW3C — Facebook https://n.pr/3h92GwS This episode was hosted by Nick Fountain and Alex Mayyasi. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler, edited by Liza Yeager, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Cena Loffredo and Jimmy Keeley. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 1:43Speaker 02

  This is Planet Money from NPR.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  I hate waiting. I think we all do. But recently, I heard a theory about how our relationship with waiting has been totally transformed in the last 20 years. It was a story about how an IT department of a pizza restaurant completely changed how we wait and how we feel when we wait. I heard it from none other than Alex Mayyasi. Take it away, Alex.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  OK, for all intents and purposes, the story starts when David Halbin Stricker got a job at Domino's in IT. And at the time, the company was in a kind of crisis. See, for a long time, Domino's was known for one thing.

• 2:28Speaker 04

  They were known for their fast delivery. It was like, if you wanted your pizza fast, you ordered it from Domino's.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  If you want a good pizza.

• 2:38Speaker 04

  If you wanted good pizza, there were other places you would go.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  They were so into their speedy delivery thing that for many years, they even guaranteed it.

• 2:48Speaker 04

  If they didn't get the pizza to your door in 30 minutes, you'd get it free.

• 2:52Speaker 03

  But the guarantee led to problems. It pushed delivery drivers to be reckless. People died. There were lawsuits. And eventually, Domino's had to give up on the guarantee.

• 3:03Speaker 04

  And all the industry pundits said, Domino's is now dead.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  They were basically saying, without the guarantee, who's going to order Domino's pizza?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  You know?

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, David says losing the guarantee was bad. They were ceding market share to the likes of Papa John's and Pizza Hut. And David had this theory of the 30-minute guarantee, which is that it wasn't just popular because it got people their pizzas fast. It was popular for a slightly squishier reason. It had given people a sense of control.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  This idea was backed up by evidence. Around this time, in the early 2000s, Domino's had actually commissioned a study that mapped the way people felt when they ordered a pizza. And what they learned was it was a psychological roller coaster.

• 3:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. You're desperately hungry. And so you're like, I want pizza. I want pizza. And so you go and you place your order. And it's like, oh, yes, I've got pizza coming. And you're excited. I've done it. I've ordered pizza.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  This was the top of the roller coaster. And things really went downhill after that.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  It's completely out of your control at this point. You're like, where is it? Where is it? I'm hungry. Where is it? Especially with kids, you know? Where is it, Mom? Where is it, Mom? Where is it, Mom? You know, it's coming. It's coming. You have no idea where it is. Have they lost my order? You know?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Regardless of how long getting a pizza actually took, customers just hated the process, the experience of waiting. To solve this problem and to stand out in a crowded pizza market, David and his IT colleagues cooked up a tool that would help Domino's beat their competitors on a kind of novel front, managing their customers' emotional journeys.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  This tool would allow their customers to obsessively monitor their pizza's progress. It would come to be called the Domino's Pizza Tracker. And this humble pizza tracker, some would argue, and I am arguing, became way more influential than you might expect.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Did you know that it would go on to change the world?

• 5:19Speaker 04

  No. I'm still somewhat amazed that it changed. That it changed lives. I mean, that's weird. A status page that changed lives. I mean, that's kind of crazy.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Nick Fountain.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  And I'm Alex Mayyasi.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yes, many of you will recognize Alex's voice from some classic Planet Money episodes or his name because he wrote the Planet Money book. Or maybe you're a listener to Alex's new food and economics show. It's called Gastronomics. It is there that Alex laid out this theory that I kind of love. Alex, you call it the Domino's Pizza Tracker Theory of Everything.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Yes, and here's the theory. The Domino's Pizza Tracker would become the canonical model for every website or app that maps out how long a purchase or delivery or service is going to take. And it created a completely new norm for how we expect to feel when we buy stuff.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  We're talking banking, car repair, tax prep, waiting for an Uber. Your theory is it all started with the pizza tracker. So today on the show, we're going to drill down on this theory, hear how the pizza tracker was made, how it spread, how it's been manipulated, and what it tells us about human nature. Also, we hit the streets and do some hard-hitting pizza journalism. Got a hidden mic right here. We're about to go do investigative journalism.

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• 8:07Speaker 01

  We're back. It's Planet Money. We're tracing the history of the Domino's Pizza Tracker and how it's changed consumer culture. Where we left off, it's the mid 2000s. And Domino's knew they had this problem, where people hated waiting for pizza.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  And without their 30-minute guarantee, they were losing their edge in the pizza game.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  So Domino's reputation was a rather mediocre pizza. And now we've lost our delivery time, we're starting to struggle. It's not like the company was shrinking, but compared to the overall industry, we're not doing that great.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  David says, once Domino's learned about the emotional pizza roller coaster, lots of people at the company had a sense that they should build something like a pizza tracker. But they also knew that corporate would never go for it because it would be really time-consuming to build something that would track literally every pizza at every single Domino's. Plus, was it really worth it, spending so much effort on basically a gimmick to maybe make some customers a wee bit less anxious?

• 9:10Speaker 03

  So instead, at the time, corporate was focused on the tried and true Domino's way, beating their competitors on speed, even without the guarantee. They became obsessed with a metric they called out-the-door time, as in pizza out the door.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  And word gets out that the UK franchisee has figured out how to improve these out-the-door times. And he somehow cracked the nut.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  So Domino's dispatches David's boss to go across the pond to figure out what the UK stores are doing. When he's back, he summoned David and the rest of the technology team.

• 9:48Speaker 04

  And said, let me tell you about what I saw. You would go into a store, and they would have a dedicated monitor that would show nothing but that store's out-the-door times, along with five to 10 other stores.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 10:05Speaker 04

  And what this franchisee did was is he had them compete against each other.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  On out-the-door time?

• 10:11Speaker 04

  On out-the-door time. And then he would pay cash bonuses to, you know, the store that was at the top, stuff like that.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  David's boss said, we need to do this here in the US.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  And did he look at you and say, David, you're on this?

• 10:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was basically the guy who had to make it happen.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  David knew how we'd build it. Every Domino's had computers where workers would register when an order came in, when a pizza went in the oven, and when it went out for delivery.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  So David took that information and connected it to a centralized system that broadcast out-the-door times from each Domino's to the other competitor stores nearby. The out-the-door times were on live dashboards for every teenage worker to see.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  Shortly after it's rolling out, maybe a week or two, the CEO comes to my cube and says, you know, you worked on that? He goes, there has been nothing in my tenure that has moved the needle as much as that.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  Good job, guys.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  And here's your bonus, David.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  No.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  I'm in IT. The best you do is you get a thank you.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  So pizza out the door times were getting faster, but they still hadn't solved that other issue, the existential dread of having to wait a whole 30 minutes in pizza purgatory.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Except then at some point, David and his colleagues stepped back, looked around and were like, wait, you know what? We already have a system tracking every single pizza in every single Domino's.

• 11:56Speaker 04

  We went, ah, we can piggyback on that and do pizza tracker.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Pizza tracker. The way the pizza tracker would work was people would call in their orders, then go online, maybe dial up.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  That's not a great impression. And see a little animation of their very own pizzas progress in real time.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Now, this was 2006. Most people didn't have smartphones yet. They were not using apps. At the time FedEx, UPS and Amazon were tracking packages, but those were generally on the timeline of days, not minutes. A tool to track real time pizza progress would be completely novel.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  David set out to work on the backend and some designers figured out what the tracker would look like. Kind of like a thermometer on its side, a long tube with rounded ends. As the pizza went through each step of the process, from order placed to prep to bake to box to delivery, the next chunk of the thermometer turned bright red.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  When David saw the mockup for the first time, he was not impressed.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  I go, it's a hot dog.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  It does kind of look like a hot dog.

• 13:10Speaker 04

  It's a hot dog. We're a pizza company. Why have you put a hot dog on, on the pizza tracker? So I'm there kind of going, well, this is, this is the dumbest thing ever.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  But the big dogs of the company liked it. In fact, they wanted to roll out the pizza tracker right before the craziest day in pizza, the Super Bowl of pizza, one might say.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, the actual Super Bowl.

• 13:35Speaker 04

  Because the Super Bowl is not necessarily the absolute busiest day, but all four time zones for Domino's synchronize. Everybody's ordering right before the game.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 13:51Speaker 04

  Everybody's ordering at halftime.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  The Super Bowl was stressful enough in a normal year. They'd set up a war room with screens showing website traffic, server capacity, and you know, also the Super Bowl broadcast.

• 14:03Speaker 04

  We'd have like 50 people.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  We'd be monitoring networks. We'd be looking at our competitors. Hey Papa John's, they're slowing down, you know? And we're saying, we're still good. We're still good.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  So maybe not the best time to roll out a totally new piece of pizza technology, but the brass are like, are you kidding?

• 14:26Speaker 04

  This is going to be awesome.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  The day comes, all eyes are on David and his tracker. Would it work? Would people look at it? Would they like it?

• 14:35Speaker 04

  The spotlight is on us and we're basically in there watching the pizza tracker. And if this crashes, then we're going to launch this and we're going to do this. And so we have all these plans. And it basically fortunately went off without a hitch.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Not only did it go off without a hitch, it actually blew up. Over the next months and years, it became a cultural phenomenon. Tracking your pizza became not just a tool, but an event. People blogged about it. A CNN morning show tested it out on live TV.

• 15:08Speaker 05

  And we are awaiting that pizza delivery. Will the Domino's man make it in time?

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Customers flooded the Domino's comment box with comments.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  Oh, this is the best thing ever. It was mainly from like, the main commenters were moms. Basically, this has gotten my kids off my back. I ordered the pizza and then I have my kids sit in front of the computer, watching the little flashing lights.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  And the kids would like, would turn around and go, mom, mom, mom, it's in the oven. You know, hey, mom, mom, mom, it's being prepared. It's out for delivery. You gotta get ready. It's out for delivery.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, the pizza tracker actually made the pizza waiting experience kind of fun.

• 15:50Speaker 05

  I remember actually being more fascinated with the tracker than actually interested in the pizza. Like a thing where I was like, refreshing constantly to be like, what is it going to look like now?

• 16:02Speaker 03

  This is Shuya Gong. She teaches design at Harvard and she was previously a design director at IDEO, the design firm famous for, among other things, the original Apple mouse. We called Shuya to talk about why the pizza tracker works and how it ended up getting way bigger than pizza.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Shuya came up as a designer in the mid 2010s. So several important years after the pizza tracker was launched. Important because more and more people had smartphones and every company needed an app.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  Many of these companies were Shuya's clients. And in meetings where they'd be sitting around saying, what is our app? Shuya found that she kept referencing the same excellent model.

• 16:44Speaker 05

  One of the most effective meetings I had was actually like ordering pizza and just putting the tracker on the big screen in the room and being like, so how are you feeling right now? Like, let's experience this together because you are able to, in your body, very viscerally understand how much anxiety is going up or down, how much you feel reassurance, how much you feel groundedness, and then be able to say like, okay, what parts of that do you want people, do you want your customers to feel when they are using your product?

• 17:19Speaker 03

  This seems like a boss move that you would like, start your meeting with your important clients and be like, okay, I'll explain why later, but like, let's all order some pizza. Like hands up for cheese, hands up for pepperoni.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  In fact, the idea of the pizza tracker became kind of a shorthand in Shuya's design world. A client would come in, describe what their business did. And if it at all involved a customer doing any kind of waiting, she and her colleagues would look at each other and say, oh, easy.

• 17:46Speaker 05

  They need the pizza tracker.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Shuya says one reason pizza trackers were so popular was because as more and more shopping experiences became digital, a tracker replicated a really important part of paying for something in the real world. Watching people do the work.

• 18:04Speaker 05

  When you are having an online experience, you don't have that kind of visibility. And because you don't have that kind of visibility, it sometimes gets easier to be impatient.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Researchers have documented that this reminder of the work that goes into a product or service makes customers value it more. They call it the labor illusion.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  And Shuya said something else about why pizza trackers are so effective. It's a little bit trippy. She says, they change our perception of time.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Like, there's something that we have literally all experienced, which is a known phenomenon in psychology, where when people walk somewhere, they feel like the walk on the way back is shorter than the way there.

• 18:50Speaker 05

  Even though it might be the exact same minute by minute, second by second amount of time, it feels shorter.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Shuya says one explanation for the walk thing is that the way back is familiar. And that's actually kind of what happens with the pizza tracker too. It gives us a familiar route and shows us landmarks along the way.

• 19:07Speaker 05

  It's giving us wayfinding. It's giving us those familiar things to look out for that makes the journey feel shorter. And those familiar things are pizzas being made. It's on its way now. Pizza's being delivered.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  So all this is why many apps and websites now have pizza tracker like trackers. The most obvious ones are Uber and Lyft, but I've started seeing them everywhere. Like the other day, I'd dropped my car off at the mechanic and it was taking a while. I started getting nervous. Had they forgotten me? Should I call? Then I got a text with a link to a tracker, a little timeline that showed where my car was in its repair process. I felt calmed and reassured.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is why pizza trackers are everywhere now, because we as consumers love them. But as the whole economy has become more digital, more like ordering a pizza, something weird has started happening. Pizza trackers have become less honest.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. Shuya gave me a good example. In the mid 2010s, she was working with banks and fintech companies whose customers were transitioning from in-person, slow cash and check transactions to digital deposits and payments. And the companies were actually kind of having the opposite problem that Domino's had had. Because as their customers adapted to online banking, they were uncomfortable with just how fast transactions were happening.

• 20:33Speaker 05

  It doesn't actually take that much time for two computers to talk to each other and say like, is this the amount of money that we're sending over? Yes, this is the amount of money we're sending over. You've got that amount of money? Amazing. Now I've got this amount of money. Computers talking to each other, like, there are no roads that they are crossing. There is no cheese that is melting. It is, it's numbers on a spreadsheet moving back and forth.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  But for people who are used to money taking a while to transfer, money moving instantly, it feels sus.

• 21:02Speaker 05

  And so what we would do in that instance is actually slow down the pizza tracker, the money tracker. And instead of giving you a real time reflection, we might actually give it a little bit of a buffer and make you wait.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  So in the world of money apps, Shuya helped companies add pizza trackers that actually manufactured a fake waiting period, even though the work that was happening was instantaneous.

• 21:30Speaker 05

  In a context like that, slowing down the time and using that concept of a tracker to say, this is the step that's happening right now. It's getting sent to the other party. We're verifying it. Slowing down that time intentionally and adding some meaningful friction in there means that the experience of waiting is something that you actually want to have. And in that experience of waiting, you're feeling the gravitas and the seriousness of sending over hundreds of dollars to this like other magical space in the ether that now has your money.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Which seems reasonable enough, though there is another way of thinking about that.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  How do you feel about recommending, like, oh, you should do a status bar, but one that's like, not accurate? Like, is not real time accurate?

• 22:19Speaker 05

  Right, right, right. How much are we recommending lying to, to your customers?

• 22:23Speaker 03

  Yes, to put it more bluntly, yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  Right. So I would think about it less as lying to someone who's going through this experience and more about curating the experience.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  To put in the physics that have traditionally existed in these experiences to make people feel comfortable.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Sure, but at a certain point, this all gets more sinister, like TurboTax. TurboTax has these little status updates. As you go from section to section, an animation pops up where they say, we're checking to make sure you've got all your deductions or credits or whatever. But a few years back, someone looked into the code and found that the animation was the same for everyone, no matter what, took the same amount of time. And I guess the question is, is TurboTax trying to make us feel at ease during the frankly scary process of filing taxes? Or are they using the labor illusion to convince us that it's worth it to pay gobs of money for something we could do for free?

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, or like recently I was traveling and I had to use Uber a lot. And over and over, they sent me updated pickup times. And seemingly every time, the car arrived later than they promised. It felt like the tracker was part of an intentional deception to convince me to book with them instead of Lyft, to not cancel, to be on the streets so early, I'm anxiously watching for the car and hop right in.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  By the way, we reached out to TurboTax, asking if anything has changed or if they wanted to comment. They did not. And we asked Uber for an interview on how they calculated the pickup times. While they didn't make anyone available, they did share some stats that suggested that their pickup times are pretty accurate. But this is the weird final stage of pizza tracker history. Pizza trackers went from an internal tool to manage workers to an external experience, providing transparency for customers. Customers loved them so much that they were adopted by companies around the world. But then some companies at least twisted them to be less than accurate.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  These trackers sometimes have become tools of deception. And this brings us back to the OG pizza tracker, the Domino's pizza tracker. Because there's this whole world of people who think that the Domino's pizza tracker is also veering into deception. Some of these pizza tracker truthers think it's not real at all. After the break. Oh dude, this is like a spy movie. I'm right behind him. We hit the streets to investigate.

• 25:14Speaker 05

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• 26:40Speaker 01

  All right, test one, two. Oh. Last week, I got on my bike and rode the approximately three minutes to my local Domino's. I was there to put the Domino's pizza tracker through the wringer, to see if what it says on the app is actually what's happening in the store. Alex? Nick. Hello. I called Alex. All right. Did I ever tell you the joke? What's the difference between a podcaster and a large pizza?

• 27:14Speaker 03

  No, you have not told me this joke.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  A large pizza can feed a family of four.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Anyway, the plan was I was going to order a distinctive looking pizza.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  We decided on half Hawaiian, half pepperoni.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  And get it delivered to your house, Nick.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:31Speaker 03

  And then from my home computer, I'd monitor what the pizza tracker was saying was happening to this pizza while you staked out the joint.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  This is hard-hitting investigative journalism.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Okay, I am placing this order in three, two, one. Okay, I'm walking in.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  It's a tiny restaurant, fluorescent lighting, open kitchen. I see some screens in the back. Hello. So open, I realize I might get found out. So to make the employees less suspicious of me, I decide to order another pizza. A decoy while I wait and observe. A large pepperoni.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, at home, basically as soon as I clicked order on our half Hawaiian, half pepperoni pizza, the tracker moves from the ordered position to the make position.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and pretty quickly I see a guy start to put together what looks to be the pizza. Did somebody really order half Hawaiian, half pepperoni? Yep.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  That's a weird pizza.

• 28:38Speaker 03

  And the tracker doesn't just tell us that the pizza is being made. It tells us the name of the person supposedly making it.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  It's potentially Ivan who is making your order, if this pizza tracker is to be believed. Cool. Ivan finishes making the pizza, throws it onto the conveyor belt oven, goes back to the computer and presses a button. Oh, oh, I just got, uh, ordering the oven. Okay, okay, so far, so good. But then I try to suss out, is this really Ivan? Could I order a soda as well? You want a soda? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no problem. What's your name?

• 29:18Speaker 04

  My name's Alex.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Alex?

• 29:20Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Not Ivan. In other words, a pizza tracker lie.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, at home, I saw that our half Hawaiian, half pepperoni pizza was finished, out of the oven and headed to quality control for a check with a quality captain. Do you see any quality captains around?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  I do not, and I gotta tell you, the pizza is not off the oven yet.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  So pizza tracker lie number two, but this one has an asterisk. David, our pizza tracker co-inventor, told us that since Domino's ovens are the conveyor belt type, the bake takes pretty much exactly the same amount of time every time. So the tracker just automatically goes to the next step after a set amount of time.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Couple of minutes later, Alex, AKA Ivan, finally takes it out of the oven and puts it in a box, and then puts it on a rack to be picked up by a delivery driver.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Now, the tracker doesn't say waiting on a shelf getting colder while the delivery driver finishes up the previous job. It continues to say quality check, but it's not there for that long.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Now it says out for delivery. Your delivery expert Alex left the store. Sure enough, Alex, AKA Ivan, takes the pizza out of the restaurant, puts it into his car, and I jump on my bike and start following him, trying to beat him to my house. He's taking a left. Oh, I feel like a freaking creeper.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, I could see his every turn from my home computer. His phone's GPS is tracking him, and he actually arrives at Nick's house right around when the tracker estimated he would.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Which is exactly when I had to hop off my bike, give an apologetic wave and awkwardly explain what was going down. You following me? No, no, no, this is actually my house. I can show you my driver's license. Luckily, he does not take a baseball bat out of the trunk. So I'm a journalist.

• 31:12Speaker 04

  Oh, cool.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  My name is Nick.

• 31:14Speaker 04

  Nice to meet you, man.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  I work for NPR.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  I gotta say, he was surprisingly cool about this. I, of course, got his permission to use the recording. And he said he was actually curious to see how accurate the tracker was. We want to see what happens when you mark this as delivered, how quickly it updates on my buddy's computer.

• 31:31Speaker 04

  Oh, sure, okay.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Let's see it.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  He clicks the delivered button. Okay, and I just got, uh, pretty promptly the update that we just went from deliver to mm. Alex, thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  So time for a verdict. On the truth to lie scale, reflecting reality versus deceiving us, I was pretty impressed. The pizza tracker was mostly accurate. I'm not quite sure there was a real quality check. And the pizza wasn't made by Ivan, of course, though we later learned an Ivan was working that shift. But on the important stuff, I knew when the pizza went in the oven, when it left the store. And although I'm not quite sure I needed any notification for this part, when it was handed to Nick.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  As I stood there, pizza in hand, I started to realize. Pizza trackers are so ubiquitous because companies know we want them. And I think by and large, they know we want them even when they're telling us lies. Because we've gotten so used to these kinds of apps that helped us transition to the digital world, holding our hands step by step to show us that some work was really happening, that now in our totally digital lives, we want that feeling even when it's completely disconnected from reality, even when the information we're getting is a fabrication, which I find quite depressing.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know if I'm that depressed about it. The good version of a pizza tracker, I love. I like having more information. I like knowing I can take a quick run before I have to be home to take delivery of a pizza. Though it's true that now, after obsessively learning about pizza trackers, every time I see one, I question how real it is, whether it's empowering me or tricking me. And that just makes me anxious all over again. Oh, wait, wait, wait. How, how was the pie?

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you for asking. My family of four loved it. Can you say pizza for the radio? Pizza.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  Pizza.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Okay, see you, Alex. Talk soon.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  All right, take care.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  If you haven't heard, our friends over at The Indicator have a new newsletter. It comes out every Friday, and it's full of economics tidbits and recommendations from their staff. You can sign up at npr.org/indicatornewsletter. Speaking of tasty tidbits, Alex, you have this new show, Gastronomics, which is about food and economics. Give us the hard sell.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Gastronomics is about how economics shapes the modern menu. A recent episode was about how trend forecasters use data and some economics to predict the future popularity of foods like ube and hot honey. You can find the show on Spotify, YouTube, and all your normal spots.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kessler, edited by the great Liza Jaeger, backchecked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Sina LaFredo. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

• 34:51Speaker 03

  Special thanks to Jim Vittek, Marty Gage, The Hustle Newsletter, Tammy Kim, and Lauren Fries. I'm Alex Mayos.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  I'm Nick Fountain. This is NPR. Thank you for listening.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from NPR sponsor Charles Schwab. Financial decisions can be tricky. Your biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/financialdecoder.

• 35:34Speaker 05

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