And here we’ve been trying to keep things simple and straight forward.
I suppose there’s no harm in spelling out the details of the Special, I just wanted to encourage everyone to use their imagination to come up with their own ideas. (copying is too easy). So here goes: We run a special based on the first letter of your last name. “A” is the first day of every month, “B” the second, etc. After “Z” on the 26th, we have no “letters” until the first day of the next month, which is “A” again. This means that everyone knows what day their name will be, it’s the same date every month. On your “initial day” you can buy any number of Pepperoni Pizzas, Canadian Bacon Pizzas, or Canadian Bacon and Pineapple Pizzas, or half and half of those three choices, for half price, (which is ten dollars for a large pepperoni). We used to allow Tomatoes on the Bacon Pizza, but the price is too inconsistent. A side order of Tomatoes is only 1.50, but we WON’T put them ON the Pizza. (see following rules), If you want to order a Special Pizza “to go” you must purchase two large pops, per large pizza. “Eat in” orders have NO drink requirement, so, if someone wants to be REAL cheap, they are welcome to have water for free. On Special Pizzas, you CANNOT get: Extra cheese, extra sauce or extra (or lite) ingredients. This is because, with twenty large pepperonis in the oven at one time, there’s no way we could keep track of the one with extra sauce, etc. Also, on Special Pizzas you CANNOT add ingredients, like add olives and get a Pepperoni and Olive. This is because we are running a Special on Pepperoni Pizzas, NOT Pepperoni and Olive. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this means that the guy who loves Pepperoni and Olives will still hunger for their favorite, even after coming in on the Special.
There is NO regular customer vs Special customer “discrimination”; if you order on “your” day, you can get the Special, Period. The easiest way to explain the Special to a new person is to simply ask what the first letter of their last name is, then tell them which is “their” day, and what they can get. Monster days are B,C,H,M,P,S, and W. Wussy days are I,O,Q,U,V,X,Y and Z. The beauty of the Special, in addition to the sheer volume it generates, is that you can look at a calender three months in advance and say, “Hmm, in July, B day will be on Tuesday, gonna be a busy day.” And order and schedule with that in mind.
I choose those specific pizzas for the Special because they are both popular AND easy to make and cook. Trust me, you don’t want to have to make a hundred Combo’s every nite. We put the Initial of The Day on our Reader Board out front, and once, when I first started the Special, put a calender-like ad in our local paper. We have never done, or needed to do, any other promoting of the Special. And lastly, since there is NO restriction on how many Specials you can order, people bring all their friends to eat with them, and also actively recruit new customers for us. “You say your name is Yettteivich? Let’s go out for pizza on the 25th!”
Ok, makes better sense now. Sounds like an interesting idea that you could make variations of. I don’t think it makes sense to limit people from adding extras, however. Twist the crust once to signify extra sauce, twice for easy sauce, three times for extra cheese. If your tickets are in order, you should know which ones are coming out first anyway for the most part. I’m sure there are more things you could do but limiting your ticket total when you are already discounting it so much just seems crazy to me. And no offense, but it just seems silly to me to deny them olives so they hunger for it later.
I assume this is pick-up/dine-in only since it would be a real pain to deliver a pizza to someone who says they can’t find their id. Plus, I would think it would not be long for people to figure out to have several last names to deliver to.
How has it been with people who show up without id’s and no one knows them? I suppose you just chauk it up to the cost of doing business? Doesn’t happen enough to worry about it?
Really sounds like a great idea (save the limitations) – just trying to find the holes in it because customers always do 
Uh, actually I would love to. Not at ten bucks, but . . .
People occasionally show up without ID, (we will accept ANYTHING with the name on it - if people want to go to the effort of faking the name, that’s fine), if they have already called the order in, we let them know we are doing them a BIG favor by letting the ID slide - since we already made the pizza. If they are trying to order, at the counter - no ID, no deal. Seriously, who doesn’t have ANY ID? We often get, “My four year old has his dad’s last name, but he doesn’t have ID”, and we accept it - if you are willing to use your kid for a lie, I guess you really want that pizza. You have to make an attempt at enforcing the rules, but, in reality, if you are trying to get a special pizza, and you wouldn’t be in my place otherwise, it’s all good. All the restrictions on ingredients are an attempt to make the special pizza an additional pizza, not a replacement pizza. One people learn that’s the way it is, period, they accept it. And we don’t deliver, so that’s not as issue.