The tech industry is very fond of “disrupting” established services. Typically what this means is they try to provide an alternative that is simpler or more efficient (or both) than what already exists. For example, trying to get a taxi in the city can be as frustrating as finding a joke in a Jeff Dunham routine. Wouldn’t it be better if you could order a taxi through an app?! Thus, Uber was born, and there were never any problems ever again.
Unfortunately, it seems the tech industry is running out of things to disrupt and is now turning its attention to more mundane activities. And they have decided that ordering pizza is just too damn hard and we simple-minded consumers need help getting our mouths stuffed with gooey deliciousness.
Apps are now coming out designed to make ordering a pizza as simple as possible, which is a tall order considering it’s a process that can be completed sprawled out on your couch in your underwear as is. But that doesn’t stop apps like the Pizza Counter from being created.
Remember the last time you tried to order pizza for your group of friends and how EXCRUCIATINGLY DIFFICULT it was to figure how many pizzas to get? Because I don’t. In all the many, many times I have been a part of ordering a pizza, the number of pizzas was probably the easiest part. Trying to figure out toppings was the part that led to bloodshed, but this app doesn’t address that particular problem.
What the app DOES do, is help you figure out how many pizzas to get, based on how many people you have and how hungry they are. Your choices for how hungry people are include: “chickadee,” “person,” and “a goddamn T-rex.” But what if you have five people, two of them have the appetite of a chickadee, two are as hungry as a person, and one is a rampaging dinosaur? This app doesn’t provide any nuanced selection options, leaving you to guess, which IS WHAT YOU WOULD BE DOING ANYWAY.
Somewhat more practical is the Push For Pizza app. Plug in your address and payment information when you download it, and all you need to do to order from local pizza places is press a button. Of course, you can only order cheese or pepperoni as toppings, because I guess the people behind the app hate freedom. My favorite pizza toppings are sausage and mushrooms, so this app is essentially worthless to me. One of the greatest things about pizza is how versatile it can be, all the various combinations of toppings you can select to make it your own. And what about specialty crusts? WHAT ABOUT SPECIALTY CRUSTS.
So yeah, these might not actually be the most helpful apps for ordering pizza. But I guess it’s nice to know that the startups of Silicon Valley are hard at work solving this pressing issue that has been the bane of the American public for the past decade. Wait, I’m thinking of obesity. Scratch that.
