memes

Papa John is technically a pizza crime.

"You think you're better than me? You're not! You've all reposted my drool memes!"

I remember having one in Norway, where the location was at a waterfront. Their dough tasted like it was bathed in saltwater 🤮

It’s the same in Japan! Smallest pizza you can imagine at 3-5x the price

Straight up, dominoes has the cheapest pizza deals of any pizza chain in the state in my area. Not by a lot. Their quality is like C-tier, but I don't give a shit, it's pizza, it's still decent.

I can get a large three topping pizza for $8 USD compared to $10 at Pizza Hut or $11 at Papa John's.

They're perfectly low-cost for some mid pizza but state-side.

Yea, that's a common thing with American fast food joints overseas IME. Whenever I've gone to another country and visited the local McDs or whatever it's always so expensive compared to the states.

Here dominos with coupon is often the cheapest around, not the greatest, but decent enough especially with one of those 50% off coupons

Almost all the fast food ive had in europe (France, Spain, UK, Italy, Germany etc..). was better than here (Canada), except for Domino's. It's always bad pizza and really overpriced.

Here it's not the best pizza, but super consistent and the cheapest around with those coupons.

They make money from people's mistakes and/or desperate situations.

As in: if a customer doesn't pay one of the payments exactly on time they turn into loan sharks with "penalties" vastly exceeding the loan price.

They're not "hoping the customers pay it back", it's almost the opposite - they want people to miss a payment or two and end up paying way more than the actual loan.

This is how they make money. It's the only way they make money. The Maths of their business model don't work out if people don't make mistakes and thus don't end up paying penalties.

So they have a huge incentive to do everything they can to make it easy to get into their scheme (hence they treat sellers well so that going through them as a payment option is as seamless as possible), to make it more likely that customers make mistakes and to make it hard or even impossible for customers to leave that scheme without going through the full minefield: they're basically enshittifying the seller's website, making it similar to providers with subscriptions who make it hard for people to cancel those subscriptions.

It's really not worth it to get into that shit as a customer and, if people who get stung by those practices also blame the seller, it's probably not also not worth it for a seller selling low value items as it might add but a handful of sales from the few customers that do need a loan for that, whilst damaging their own brand name by being associated with what are basically modern loan sharks.

This reminds me of PayPal from 25ish years ago. There wasn't a convenient way to transfer money online and they built a solution. To achieve critical mass, they offered people $10 to sign up and a $10 referral bonus (if your friend get $10 and you get $10). PayPal burned a lot of investor money to do this, but it paid off when they became the dominant payment method for eBay auctions. In short, it was a costly investment that paid off.

Klarna is trying to become the PayPal of e-commerce, displacing credit cards (and PayPal) and becoming the default means of paying online. Once they start to slow in their growth, they can do the following:

• Charge merchant fees.
• Charge service fees.
• Charge interest, (waiving it for debit-like transactions).
• Offer purchaser subscriptions with enhanced features and reduced costs.
• Push exclusivity agreements by offering discounts against steep fees.
• Sell data.

This last point is particularly powerful because they also have the bill of sale, which most payment options don't. If they offer point-of-sale systems that also collect detailed data, it would further allow them to track people.

I suspect that they are classified in a way that existing restrictions on payment networks do not apply to them. E.g., they may technically be a lending company but act as a payment network; they may be considered the customer in a transaction, that resells the item to the purchaser, etc. Lending companies aren't expected to work with the copious amounts of detailed data that stores and payment processors do (e.g., Payday Loan doesn't know I spent part of my loan on a suitcase of Bud Light). Imagine an insurance company knowing how many drinks your table bought at a restaurant, then holding it against you when you make a claim. Or having a job offer revoked because you bought a copy of the Communist Manifesto to see what all the hubbub is about.

Sounds to me like they’re waiting for people to get used to this model for every purchase before they quietly add interest.

Oh it's well hidden in the details, but the interest gets paid. In fact, if you miss a single payment, you pay everyones interest. And they will absolutely come after you for an originally tiny amount of money.

That company and business model is shaddy as hell, although I've met some engineers some years ago that seemed pretty competent, but I've suffered and learned enough over the years to know that it doesn't matter if the c-level ppl is all bullshit.

https://chaos.social/@leyrer/113667064197803074

Here's the thing, though. There's no interest charged to the customer. I think Klarna makes its money just because companies pay them money for integrations and for the ability to advertise that customers can buy now pay later and such. And at least in the case of my company's integration with Klarna, Klarna takes all the risk. They're lending customers money and hoping the customers pay it back. My employer gets the money up front and isn't out any money if the customer doesn't pay.

Your company pays a transaction fee just like with a credit card. Except it's usually roughly twice as expensive as a credit card. This is what allows Klarna to take on all that risk, generally. For your company this is essentially a marketing expense. Offer a convenient way to pay in return for a few percent of the transaction (3-6% + a fixed fee, $0.30 perhaps).

Klarna generally partners with some financial firm to finance these short term loans, and they use the merchant fee to pay interest. These can be as high as 25% APR. It's a high risk loan.

As for the latter, sometimes you have no other options, so you do things that you know are financially bad decisions because otherwise you starve. When I was younger I'd knowingly write bad checks at the grocery store because I needed food and couldn't get it any other way. I'd have a paycheck coming in a few days, and knew I'd have to pay the fee, but it was that or starve. That's not an option these days, since they verify checks immediately now.

Por qué no los tres?

Could be risky - you don’t want to end up upside-down on your pizza mortgage

Fintechs are trying to get their grubby little claws into everyone who's desperate or stupid enough, so wouldn't surprise me at all if BNPL* companies are doing deals with takeaway places.

I genuinely pity anyone using this because they need to. 😬

*Not sure about elsewhere, but in the UK this legal predatory practice is called Buy Now Pay Later. Online loan sharking without the broken kneecaps.