by Kevin D. Williamson
How many different ways are there to make a Domino’s pizza? The
answer might interest you.
It might also interest the Food and Drug Administration — at least, it
should.
The nation’s franchise restaurants are about one month away from the
imposition of new nutritional-labeling rules dreamed up by the Obama
administration, another gift of the grievously misnamed Affordable Care
Act. For outlets of brands with 20 or more locations, that means posting
signs in the shop with calorie counts for every item on the menu and
for every variation on that item.
That’s probably not such a big deal if you are, say, Raising Cane’s, and
your menu ranges from one chicken finger to 100 chicken fingers. It’s a
little different if you are a pizza shop, because pizza has a lot of
variables.
A lot.
“We did the math,” says Tim McIntyre, an executive at Domino’s and
chairman of (not making this up) the American Pizza Community, a thing
that exists. “With gluten-free crusts to thick to hand-tossed to pan
pizza, multiple sizes, cheeses, toppings . . . there are about 34
million possible combinations.” He does a pretty good deadpan delivery:
“That is difficult to put on a menu.”
That’s going to be a big sign.
Not that anybody is ever going to use it. The great majority of Domino’s
orders are placed over the Internet and almost all the rest are placed
by phone. The number of people who walk into a Domino’s outlet, look at a
menu, and order a pizza is relatively small, representing only a few
percentage points of Domino’s customers. Other pizza chains see roughly
the same thing.
So the signs are going to be largely useless, but they’re also kind of
expensive,
“Useless + Expensive” being the classic federal regulatory
equation.
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