Amongst the obvious boredom and isolation, I must make the dumbest thread of all time on my frustration and confusion with chain pizza box culture. (1) https://twitter.com/espn/status/1241810495717486596

I worked at Little Caesars for 13 months in high school, and while I hated most of it, it allowed some fulfillment in regards to my lifelong skill/desire to take monotonous tasks and find out how to do them efficiently. (a very "a lazy scientist is a good scientist" situation.)

my favorite thing was making crazy breads when they were a dollar on Tuesday. I got to the point where I could take 4 crazy breads from the oven, to a tray, add butter, parmasean cheese, roll them up, put them in a bag, and put the bag under a warmer in 12 seconds.

My second favorite thing was folding boxes. Little Caesars pizza boxes came in packages of 50, placed on top of each-other as shown in the above video.

Retrospectively, in seems obvious, and I don't know if this is a design flaw or a feature of Little Caesars boxes, but dotted "rip here line that separated the top sides and the bottom sides on Little Caesars boxes would not break apart the easily.

That meant, at LC's, when I folded the sides of the box up (to give the box it's 2-3 inch height) I wouldn't be only folding the bottom sides up, but the bottom sides (the ones that come together like teeth) down. (because they would now both be facing the ceiling.)

So after, folding the sides up to start, the bottom of the box was completely done. But instead of finishing the box, we left them nested in each other with an unfinished top.

Like so (with the dotted lines representing the folds that still needed to be made post-pizza)

We then put the nested stack of 50 at the "receiving end" of the oven, so when a pizza came out, we would put the pizza in the top box, cut it, and close the box. The remaining folds that needed to be folded added MAYBE 1.5-2 seconds to the time it would take to just close a box

This didn't seem remarkable to me until my first day of college. I walked into the Papa Johns on campus at Grand Valley and saw closed, finished boxes piled up in EVER corner of the store, in every nook and cranny.

So you're telling me, Papa Johns people have a stack of CLOSED, FOLDED boxes that they have at their receiving station. Where they can probably only fit stacks of 10-12 of at a time?

So in the lifespan of a box in store it goes.

Papa Johns/Dominoes/Others I've seen:

fold
close
stack
find space
found
walked to station
opened
pizza put in/cut
closed
out-the-door
new stack every 10-12 pizzas.

vs Little Caesars

-fold (you fold them WHILE THEYRE IN THE STACK. THEY LITERALLY STAY THERE.)
-move stack to under station
-grab from under
-put/cut pizza
-fold/close
-out the door

It just makes no sense to me. I will never understand why pizza places waste so much time and so many cubic feet of space storing already folded boxes.

There's the end of my pizza box thread. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.