We love pizza. We can talk about it all day. We can eat it almost every night. It’s part of our childhoods. It’s part of our food zeitgeist. There are endless variations to this amazing food to tempt anyone. And it turns out you can make a hell of a lot of money investing in it.
Around 2009, Domino’s Pizza started listening to their customer’s complaints about their pizza’s subpar quality. Even if it did arrive in 30 minutes or less, no one liked their cardboard crust, ketchup-y sauce, and processed cheese. It was also around this time that if you bought stock in Domino’s, you’d be looking at a huge return on that investment. How big you ask? Well, since 2010 stocks of Domino’s Pizza have grown 2,092 percent. That’s a lot of extra ham and pineapple on your pizza.
Domino’s growth means its stock beat out all but three other companies on the New York Stock Exchange over the same period. The next nearest fast food chain is Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen way down on the list with a measly 868 percent growth. Which, let’s be honest, also would have been a great investment over the last seven years. Both of those companies’ growth may seem a bit shocking given that tech behemoths like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google all had 500 percent or lower stock growth, meaning they didn’t even break the top 50 best stocks.
The analysis at Quartz cites Domino’s 2009 turn around as a huge selling point for the company to rebound and grow at such an insane rate. They say that Domino’s had to admit “to itself—and the world—that it was guilty of selling a bad product.” Once they did that, and started cooking better food, it was all up and up for their stock. It probably helps that we’re all pretty obsessed with pizza too.
Curiously another stock performed very similarly to Domino’s on it’s meteortic trajectory over the last seven years — Netflix. Is there a correlation between all of us staying home to binge watch the ‘Flix and ordering pizzas delivered straight to our door? You can do the math on that one.
(Via Quartz)
