Little Caesars “Hot”-N-“Ready”
Mar 11, 2024 • Extra Ordinary
Little Caesars is an unfortunate American pizza chain. Its flagship product is the Hot-N-Ready pizza, often marketed in the uncharacteristically self-aware fashion of advertising its price and perpetual availability above any and all claims of taste.
The Hot-N-Ready product “is known for being the nation’s best price,” according to a Little Caesars press release which references its low cost, convenience and popularity in just about every sentence and includes the word “quality” only twice.
Its name is as much a travesty as the pie itself. Odds that you will receive a pizza that is both ready for purchase and hot on delivery are slim to none.
The pizzas are made perpetually in the store independently of demand so that anyone can enter the drive-thru and be handed a pizza immediately after it is paid for.
In reality, one of two things happens:
- There is a sufficient backlog of pizzas that are Ready, so that as soon as you pay, you are immediately handed one. But the pizza has been sitting on a shelf since it was made, so it is no longer Hot.
- The store has run out of pizzas, so you get a pizza that is fresh out of the oven and Hot. But you need to wait — in the worst case scenario, up to the full length of time it takes to prepare a pizza from scratch. There were no pizzas Ready.
Promising hot and ready is promising that a batch of pizzas will come fresh out of the oven, without a line of people waiting to receive them, moments before the customer arrives. I have yet to see evidence of that ever happening.
A more accurate name for the product would be Little Caesars Cheap-N-Hot-Or-Ready.