Domino's Fixing The Roads Is So Ridiculous That It Just Might Work

CTZens, we’ve reached a landmark time in history. A time when a pizza company is using its own money – which is to say its customers’ money – to fix roads blighted by potholes. Yep: where local governments are saying that repairing the roads isn’t a high enough priority for them, or that they can’t spare the funds, Domino’s Pizza is stepping in.

Potential damage to your car isn’t, it seems, a good enough reason to compel the US authorities to act on the disintegrating roads. Potentially lethal consequences for motorbike riders and cyclists apparently isn’t a good enough argument, either. Nope, the one that’s got things moving is that people are receiving wonky pizzas.

It’s like the plot from a weird B-movie where corporations have taken over the world. Your rubbish/garbage collections are handled by a division of Krispy Kreme, maybe, while Walmart controls social housing and Domino’s fixes the roads. It’s bizarre, and would probably involve, ahem, cheesy billboard jokes about giving local roads extra toppings.

The state of the roads is a very real problem both across the US and in the UK. People like us have got to be among those who hate it most; the cruel slam of our wheels into potholes we simply can’t avoid is enough to make us want to insert a handbrake lever into the politicians that let it happen.

The main purpose behind the Domino’s manoeuvre, offering actual money to local authorities whose residents have nominated their roads as needing urgent repairs, is, of course, publicity. This story has gone all over the world and if you weren’t already thinking about getting a Domino’s, you probably are now. As marketing goes, it’s genius.

On the other hand it’s a total farce. We, as taxpayers – anyone young enough not to be paying tax yet, you can just sit back and enjoy the lols – are being told that our roads are so bad that private companies are now getting involved. It’s like Tesco not being able to stack its shelves properly and customers having to step in and do it themselves before they can even get around to shopping.

Where is this going? Either governments local and national will be shamed into doing something about the pothole nightmare (finally), or they’ll sneakily agree in some luxurious back room over an expensed dinner of caviar and quail’s eggs that it’s probably best to do nothing and hopefully force more private companies – or even individuals – to pay instead.

Any self-respecting politician who serves his or her people should find Domino’s new marketing campaign personally embarrassing. They, as our elected leaders, are failing us badly enough for this to have become a quasi-joke from a pizza brand. Let’s hope that, whatever happens to the roads on your local fast food delivery route, this snaps a few local government officials into gear.