Tag: pizza

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free trade & free markets ideological culture

Served and Disserved, New York Style

Pizza, DeBlasio, New York, New Year,

“Jacking up your prices on people trying to celebrate the holidays? Classy, @dominos,” tweeted former presidential aspirant and current New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

“To the thousands who came to Times Square last night to ring in 2020,” continued  Hizzoner’s New Year’s Day message from his official city Twitter account, “I’m sorry this corporate chain exploited you — stick it to them by patronizing one of our fantastic LOCAL pizzerias.”

Were you standing there in the Big Apple on New Year’s Eve getting “exploited”?

For the last 15 years, a Midtown Manhattan Domino’s franchise has been delivering hot pepperoni, cheese and onion pizzas for $30 each — “more than twice the regular $14.49 price of a large cheese pie” — to the “hungry tourists waiting in holding pens for the ball drop,” The New York Post reported.

“I have a lot of orders. I’m very busy,” remarked Ratan Banik, the Domino’s delivery man. The paper explained that he was “mobbed by starving tourists … many having camped out overnight.”

“He is our Santa,” offered one New Jersey man, who had not thought to bring any food with him into the city. “It’s absolutely worth it. It was hot. It seems like it just came out of the oven.

“If he comes back,” he added. “I will buy some more.”

“How is this different to a million other things? Airlines, Uber, property,” noted one of many tweets mocking the mayor’s. “It’s called supply and demand.”

If this be exploitation, make the most of it — with or without the extra toppings. 

Just hold the snipes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Pizza, DeBlasio, New York, New Year,

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Government Delivers Pizza

Pizza is popular. It hardly needs advertising, much less government subsidy.

And yet the federal government does, indeed, subsidize the promotion of pizza.

Apparently, our government wants us to eat more of the scrumptious (but fattening) stuff.

Has this has been cleared with Michelle Obama?Pie Chart

The program is the business of a much more power group, the USDA. In recent years, according to the U.S. Food Policy Blog,

USDA’s dairy checkoff program has spent many millions of dollars to increase pizza consumption among U.S. children and adults. Using the federal government’s taxation powers, the checkoff program collects a mandatory assessment of 15 cents on every hundredweight of milk that is sold for use as fluid milk or dairy products.

The goal is to promote cheese. (It promotes milk, too, but milk consumption is going down, steadily over the long term.) And, since the pizza industry is the biggest single user of cheese, those checkoff funds wind up in the advertising coffers of Domino’s Pizza, which soaks up about three-​quarters of the dough. Ahem.

The federal government seems especially concerned to promote the eating of cheap delivery pizza.

But, good or bad, just talking about pizza makes me hungry for pizza. And yet, to prevent my corporeal presence from ballooning into a behemoth approximating the dimensions of the U.S. national debt, I don’t eat pizza very often.

In view of both of these truths, the USDA could afford to stop promoting the nominally Italian (but actually very American) foodstuff.

Get the government out of food advertising. Particularly (but not limited to) pizza.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

*Pie chart not made from a pizza from Domino’s.