It is like a pizza factory, but they don’t skip any steps. They make the dough each morning, they prep the sauce, and they have to physically sheet out and make 300 pizzas a day, twice that in busier stores. Each pizza gets 8 ounces of cheese and 30 pep. They pay roughly .20 over block price for cheese and it comes shredded.
When I ran a Caesars, we would occasionally have 1k hours on some Fridays. That’s a lot of 5.00 pizzas… it would be foolish to think you can sustain that type of business with only a couple of people working. The service would be atrocious. So they do save on labor, but that’s by having a GM that must work like a dog all day long and having very good employees and being well prepared to know when you will get busy. The Caesars I ran usually had two on counter, one cutting and boxing and taking care of breadsticks/cheese breads, and two people making pizzas… as well as someone constantly sheeting out pizzas. The turnover on pizzas during dinner would be so quick, even with 140 pans, we’d have to put some in the cooler to cool them before we could use them to sheet out again. Actually some of the warm pans were preferred to help with proofing. On slower nights we could 3-man it, but it wasn’t fun.
So total volume and efficiency is how they make the money. Low cost of goods (although aside from Cheese, you can find similarly priced items and sometimes lower, even higher quality… from your food vendor). Add-on items are important, breadsticks average 60-70 bags a day. Dip cups, cheese breads, $8 specialties which they’ve been pushing of late. Lets not forget Caesars skims 9% off the top… so everyone is still making money. It’s interesting to see what happens with the cheese crunch, obviously Caesars discourages it’s franchisees to raise costs, and publish lengthy reports about the harm of doing so… but others are still doing it (5.55, 5.99). I think the majority are still charging $5.
