I realize it’s odd for an arts and culture business weblog to talk about pizza delivery, but Super Fast Pizza in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, deserves the nod. The company has radically rethought the pizza delivery process to connect with what customers want (fast, hot, tasty).
One if the biggest problems with that connection, they determined, was the required distance between a bricks-and-morter pizza kitchen/order center and the customer’s home. Solution? Move the kitchen onto the delivery truck, and receive the orders from the road. Says this MSNBC story on the company:
The company uses Mercedes-Benz Sprinters, high-roofed vehicles used as ambulances in Europe that cost about $32,000. For another $65,000 they were outfitted with coolers, five small pizza ovens and touch-screen monitors connected to an Internet-based ordering system staffed by a call center in Nebraska.
The lesson here is that sometimes it’s the production/delivery process, itself, that blocks effective connections with a customer base. And in the traditional performing arts, the production/delivery processes are particularly rigid (big box, quiet space, high technical requirements, raised stage, formal audience chamber, etc.).
While the storybook ballet experience couldn’t be crammed into a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, it’s worth wondering what other radical rethink might be available.
There are many artists out there exploring alternative spaces for creating and presenting their work — like the pizza company, they are playing with their production and delivery systems. Unlike the pizza company, however, by changing location these artists are often fundamentally changing not only the method of production but the product itself.
The pizza company is trying to deliver a consistent product whether you eat in the restaurant or order from home — same yummy pizza, same temperature, same time frame. Artists, however, must recognize that their products can’t be separated from the places where they happen. That’s why we build specialized spaces for our creations…because the theater is an integral part of the work that happens inside it. To leave the theater is to leave our assumptions about what makes a performance.
To use the pizza metaphor, when we re-locate our kitchen, the recipe must change as well, resulting in something with a new flavor that has to be digested in a new way.
I lead a community group that creates improvisational dances in public spaces. At the core of our process is an inquiry into what — if anything — makes what we do a performance. While many of us dance together in studios and on stages, when we meet at a park shelter or on a street corner, our whole approach to dance changes. We couldn’t do what we do on a proscenium stage any more than a ballet company could stage ”Coppelia” in a parking lot…or at any rate not without creating a fundamentally different experience for ourselves and our audiences.
Dance Fiend has a valid point, but perhaps not the answer. The performing space does indeed have a major effect on the ‘product’ and a performance of Coppelia will change radically if you move it from the parking garage to the New York State Theater a block away.
But it seems to me that the issue raised is the tremendous expense of creating one-off productions with very expensive talent (whether stagehands or dancers) in very expensive single-use real estate.
I read recently of home builders who are automating the construction of houses, and improving the quality, by prefabricating entire walls in a factory, then trucking them to the site, where much less skilled workers can assemble them in substantially less time. Much of the work in the factory is done by robots, working to a plan, who get the studs square every time, get the electrical outlet in the same place, etc.
It seems to me that thinking in this manner, of radically rethinking the way in which productions are mounted, could save enormous amounts of time, and therefore money. That could translate to lower ticket prices, hopefully encouraging either lower deficits or more patrons, or both.