Facebook and Twitter


and follow my blog on Twitter @pharmacynic to receive notifications on new posts.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Pizza! Pizza!

Pharmacies have done a great job of copying other retail establishments in an effort to become more customer friendly. I am surprised this has not worked in reverse. Imagine all the things businesses could learn from the pharmacy world. Today I'd like to focus on one of those: Automatic Refills.
Why don't pizza joints offer this service? Customers could sign up for a daily, weekly, or monthly pie.  During football season you'd get your pizza delivered every Sunday at 1pm. Imagine all possibilities with this service. The Pizza Parlour calls you and tells you when you need to eat. They phill your phood order phast and have it delivered before you realise you are even hungry.

Problems with this service:
1. Customers would call asking why they had been out of pizza for 5 days and were starving. They'd been standing at the door withering away and no pizza had arrived.
2. They would complain that they changed their order from half-pepperoni, half-mushroom, and extra cheese to bacon and green olives because they just found out mushrooms are a fungus, yet the pizza keeps getting delivered as originally ordered.
3. They would complain that they needed more pizza during their Netflix and LOTR marathons and the computer should just know to send more.
4. They'd be upset that their team plays Monday Night Football this week and their pizza arrived early on Sunday.
5. They keep getting text alerts that their pizza order is due, but they don't read them and end up calling the wrong pizza place because they get pizzas from multiple places on different days.
6. You forgot to discontinue the service now that you're on a diet or gave up pizza for Lent, yet they still call you and try to deliver pizza to your door. Stop. Calling. Me!

If customers are not signed up for delivery, pizza places would have a stockpile of hot pizzas and wasted ingredients that they cannot return to stock. They'd waste so much time cooking the pizzas and making phone calls to come pick up the orders and then throwing away the pizzas for these automatic refills that they'd be so far behind on walk-in and phone-in orders which would lead to longer wait times. They'd have to cut employee hours and staffing and drop delivery service as a result. Wait, what? That doesn't make sense...Oh, maybe that's why other places haven't adopted pharmacy practices. Think I'll just go back to my marathon of OITNB.

No comments:

Post a Comment