Often small pizza restaurants in cities will be open 24 hours a day.
More and more pizza restaurants are opening 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which is good news if you have a craving for a late night snack. After the economic downturn in 2008, customers stopped eating at restaurants and several pizza chains such as Round Table Pizza, Sbarro's and Giordano's filed for bankruptcy. As a result many restaurants changed their strategy in order to appeal to more customers, which included staying open later and using the Internet for marketing.
24 Hour Pizza
Papa John's opened its first 24-hour delivery service in 2006. In 2010, Domino's Pizza opened its first 24-hour pizza restaurant in Southern Ohio. They were followed by other chain restaurants like Pizza Hut and Little Caesars. In addition to cooking up pizza pies 24 hours a day, these restaurants started marketing coupons to the demographic they had been targeting as well as marketing online to a younger crowd in order to boost sales.
Online Marketing
In order to reach a demographic that wanted to order pizza overnight, pizza restaurants had to market to Generations X and Y, which use technology for most communication. So Papa John's and Domino's started offering online ordering to consumers who prefer to use the web rather than the phone. The online option pushed sales up for both franchises. Domino's saw over 20 percent increase in profit from the online option in 2010, according to The Columbus Dispatch. The chain saw a 60 percent rise in online sales in March of 2011, according to Internet Retailing. Domino's also lets customers track their orders, using a Pizza Tracking system, according to its website. All you have to give is your phone number and it lets you know in how many minutes your pizza will be arriving.
Smart Phone Sales and Social Networking
Pizza not only became 24/7, it became social with Americans using smartphones more frequently than computers or cell phones. Pizza Hut also offers smartphone users an option to order pizza on their mobile device and through their Facebook pages. The restaurant made $1.3 million in sales through its iPhone app alone. Papa John's and several other restaurant chains have followed suit. Domino's and Papa John's also offer special discounts codes and coupons to users of their Facebook page or iPhone app.
Pizza Restaurants
Many smaller local pizza restaurants in cities are also open 24 hours a day to serve the late night crowds. In New York City there are over 100, according to Eat24hours.com. Most of these restaurants also offer delivery. Since most of them are local businesses you have to call instead of order online. Several of these smaller restaurants as well as the ones listed above are listed on and offer deals through Foursquare, a social network developed for smartphones.
