It’s 2015 and you can get the cuisine of your choice delivered to your door with a few taps on your smartphone screen. But how much does quality matter to you when compared to convenience?
Pizza Hut is banking on many of their customers to answer that question with “not much.” The Yum! Brands chain has recently taken its focus off the quality of its product and put it on convenience instead. Companies like Uber and Amazon are often praised for their success because they’re easy for customers.
Pizza Hut wants to take a page out of their books. It’s unclear whether this means the quality of Pizza Hut will visibly suffer, but Pizza Hut and Yum! figure that customers will sacrifice meticulous attention to detail if it means getting your pie faster and easier.
What do you think of Pizza Hut’s ‘convenience over quality’ philosophy? Does it hold water when applied to other industries? Can a company survive in 2015 focusing on convenience over quality?
Guest:
Chris Muller, Professor of the Practice in the School of Hospitality Administration at Boston University and an expert on chain restaurant management and branding