Let’s just take a minute to appreciate how much I love pizza.
Although, ironically, I didn’t like pizza so much when I was growing up. The irony here is that when I was growing up, my father owned a pizza restaurant.
When I was about 8 or 9, my parents hauled myself and my younger brother out to this small university town in Kansas. My father was going to open a pizza place. He bought a space from another pizza place that was going out of business. The place was located across the street from campus, and the previous owners had hoped to cash in on all the hungry college students. The problem was, they didn’t offer delivery. They didn’t think this would be a problem, seeing as how one of the main campus dorms was right across the street. Newsflash: college students are lazy. Why would you walk across the street when you can pick up the phone? Duh.
Here are the three elements for a successful pizza restaurant in a college town:
- Be inexpensive
- Be open late
- Offer delivery
My father opened a business that offered cheap, tasty pizza, and on the weekends you could even get delivery as late as 2am.
Also there was an often played radio advertisement involving the phone number that was so catchy, pretty much everyone in town had the phone number memorized.
(Oh yeah, if you know what song I’m talking about I bet you’re singing it in your head right now.)
And there you have it. Ten years later, and I was that college student, living in the dorm across the street and calling in my order for delivery. You see, sometime between 8 and 18 I had fostered a serious fondness for pizza.
After my brother and I had both graduated from high school and my parents became empty-nesters, my father sold the business to a long-time employee and my parents moved to Michigan.
The business is still there, and although competition has diminished its popularity from what it once was, it’s still selling pizzas to college students, living on in moderate obscurity.
That is, until Web Soup got a hold of one of their super cheesy (no pun intended) television commercials:
Ah, pizza of my childhood. May you live on in infamy.
