TIL That Chuck E. Cheese Secretly Sold Pizzas on Delivery Apps During the Pandemic Under the Name “Pasqually Pizza”

Pretty much, yeah. Or are thinking, “I’ll give a new business a try today.”

There’s a certain subset of consumers for whom price is the most important deciding factor in where and what to buy. No surprise - an assembly line shoveling Sysco is priced pretty competitively.

DoorDash, Uber Eats and all their ilk are awf for other reasons anyways. If you want pizza, call the pizza place directly.

I mean, Chuckies pizza is slightly better than Domino's pre-recipe change, and that went on for decades. It's not like there's a high bar for selling pizza. You can sell a stale cracker, with tomato sauce on it, for a long time before going bankrupt. If the crackers are cheap enough.

Also my bet is that it was just a way for them to keep some revenue flowing, keep people employed, and not have to shutter their entire business. I mean lets face it, their business model is spreading diseases while, entertaining children whose parents are ordering beer by the pitcher. Not exactly a winning model during a pandemic. They had to do something.

There is a 0% chance of me ordering Chuckie Cheese pizza. There is a non-zero chance of me ordering pizza from a random restaurant. So in that regard, even with me they'd improve their odds, although still slim.

In the pandemic, I wanted to support struggling mom-and-pop restaurants instead of big conglomerates. So I went out of my way to order from places with names I didn't recognize, both to try them out (you never know if "Alberto's Tacos" has the best taco you've ever had in your life) and to make sure that tiny places could stay afloat.

I still remember the first time this came to bite us in the ass. We ordered from this cute little shop called Thrilled Cheese. They had cute little sandwiches... that both looked and tasted horrible. I was wondering how on earth they had stayed in business with food like that and so I looked up their address from the app.

It was an IHOP. Specifically, an IHOP that we purposely avoid because it's a terrible IHOP that got a "B" from the health inspector and once gave us food poisoning.

Now we have to triple-check that the little family-owned place is really a little family-owned place. Too often it turns out that it's an Applebee's or an IHOP or a Denny's or something. (We did discover some great local restaurants though. Shout-out to "I Heart Pancakes" in Santa Ana, CA - best pancake place ever.)