Please Explain Pizza Delivery Economics

Can anyone explain the economics of Pizza delivery to me please. Every single company seems to use the same method of setting ridiculously high list prices for their pizzas and then flooding the neighbourhood with discount vouchers (or in more recent times giving generous discounts for internet orders). The net effect of the discounts is to bring the price back to a reasonable level.

Today we had a kids birthday party and I ordered a bunch of pizzas for delivery. Unfortunately it turned out that we had discount vouchers for every pizza parlour except for the one I wanted to order from. These guys are just down the road from us and I trusted them to deliver on time. Timing is everything at a kids birthday party so I rang them anyway. The guy asked me if I had any vouchers and I said no so he proceeded to quote me the full outrageous menu price (€65 if I recall). I protested that he could surely do better than that and he hummed and hawed a bit. Eventually I shamed him into going off to speak to someone (a manager I guess). He came back and told me in hushed tones that he would slip a menu to the delivery man and if I tore off the voucher at the back of that menu and gave it to the delivery me he would only charge me €45.

I was pleased with myself for having gotten some discount and it was only later I realised that they always give you a fresh menu with every delivery so any customer could do exactly the same. Why would any one ever pay full price? Bizarre.

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