MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Juana, I don't know if you know this about me, but I hate waiting.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
This is something you and I actually have in common.
KELLY: Well, here's where I'm going with this. I heard a story the other day about how our relationship with waiting has changed quite dramatically in the last 20 years. The story was from Nick Fountain from our Planet Money podcast, and he says the spark that led to this change weirdly came from a pizza restaurant.
NICK FOUNTAIN, BYLINE: Yeah, Domino's. The story goes that in the early 2000s, Domino's was in a bit of a crisis. See, for a long time, they'd been known for one thing, their 30-minute guarantee.
DAVID HAUBENSTRICKER: They were known for their fast delivery.
FOUNTAIN: This is former Domino's software engineer David Haubenstricker.
HAUBENSTRICKER: It was like, if you wanted your pizza fast, you ordered it from Domino's.
FOUNTAIN: If you wanted good pizza...
HAUBENSTRICKER: If you wanted good pizza, there were other places you would go.
FOUNTAIN: (Laughter).
But as one might imagine, there were many crashes involving delivery drivers. People died. There were lawsuits. Domino's gave up on their 30-minute guarantee. And Haubenstricker says, what Domino's found is that without the certainty of the 30-minute guarantee, for customers, ordering pizza became, like, an emotional roller coaster. Waiting was stressful. Once you order...
HAUBENSTRICKER: It's completely out of your control. You're like, where is it? Where is it? I'm hungry. Where is it? You have no idea where it is. Have they lost my order? You know...
FOUNTAIN: So Haubenstricker and his colleagues cooked up a status page, the Domino's Pizza Tracker, which helped stressed-out customers by showing them their very own pizza's little pizza journey from prep to bake to box to delivery. It was a hit - especially, he says, with moms.
HAUBENSTRICKER: Basically, this has gotten my kids off my back. I order the pizza, and then I have my kids sit in front of the computer...
FOUNTAIN: Amazing.
HAUBENSTRICKER: ...Watching the little flashing lights.
FOUNTAIN: Yeah.
HAUBENSTRICKER: 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. You've got to get ready. It's out for delivery.
FOUNTAIN: Pretty soon, Pizza Tracker-like trackers started popping up everywhere - in your Uber app or from your car mechanic while you wait. Shuya Gong is a designer who consulted for many Fortune 500 companies and spread the Pizza Tracker gospel. She says pizza trackers became sort of a shorthand for her. She'd be in a meeting helping a company design an app or website. And if the company's customers had to wait at all, she'd turn to her colleagues and say, oh, easy.
SHUYA GONG: They need the Pizza Tracker.
FOUNTAIN: But then, over time, something weird started happening. The trackers started getting less truthful. Gong has an example. Banks and fintech companies would come to her with kind of the opposite problem from Domino's. Their customers were freaked out at just how fast digital transactions were happening as compared to the old analog ways of moving money. So Gong would recommend slowing their tracker down.
GONG: And instead of giving you a real-time reflection, we might actually give it a little bit of a buffer and make you wait.
FOUNTAIN: This was weirdly less stressful. This is the thing about pizza trackers. They're ubiquitous because we love them, and companies know we love them so much that they've started to embellish them. So think about that next time you see a status update page. It might be the update the company thinks you want. Nick Fountain, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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