On June 3, 1989, a 17-year-old in Indiana died while speeding to deliver a pizza for a Domino’s store. By mid-June, his family and friends were circulating petitions asking Indiana’s members of Congress to seek federal limits on the company’s best-known promise: your pizza in 30 minutes, or $3 off.
His mother called the guarantee “an invitation to break the law, to speed.”
Domino’s had built its name on that promise since 1984, and its officials said drivers did not have to speed to make the deadline. That July, the company announced that a letter from its president, Dave Black, would go out with some 20 million pizza deliveries. A pizza was usually ready in 12 minutes, he wrote, and delivery areas averaged two miles or less, which “leaves our drivers nearly 18 minutes to make it to your home. After millions of safe deliveries, we know that’s plenty of time.” The $3 for a late pizza came out of the company’s pocket, he added, not the driver’s. And if you saw a Domino’s driver driving carelessly, here was a toll-free number to call.
The guarantee stayed.
That same year in St. Louis, a Domino’s delivery car hit a woman’s car at an intersection. She was left with head and spinal injuries, and she sued. Her case was that the 30-minute promise had made the driver drive unsafely. At trial, she and the driver each testified that the other had run the red light.
In December 1993, a St. Louis jury found for her. It awarded $750,000 in actual damages and $78 million in punitive damages, nearly $79 million in all.
Four days later, Domino’s dropped the 30 minutes. The verdict, said its owner, Tom Monaghan, “was certainly the thing that put us over the edge.”
Monaghan did not blame the clock for how anyone drove. He defended the company’s record. All its drivers took defensive driving classes, he said, and more than two thirds of people who applied to drive were turned away. “We are the safest delivery company in the world,” he said. The problem, as his prepared statement put it, was what people believed:
“No matter what we do in the areas of safety and training for our drivers, some of the public still have a negative perception about us because of the guarantee, so we are eliminating the element that creates that negative perception.”
Its focus now, Monaghan said, would be its other guarantee: any unhappy customer gets a refund or a new pizza. Domino’s said it would appeal the verdict. In the spring of 1994 it settled instead, for an undisclosed sum that a company spokesman described as “far less” than what the jury had awarded.