This essay is based on an episode of my podcast, Gastronomics. You can listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

I enjoy learning about the world through books, podcasts, and articles. And by interviewing experts and people with first-hand experience. It’s a journalistic approach. A scholarly approach.

Another approach is to learn by doing. Planet Money does this cleverly. To learn about various industries, the hosts have bought and sold a barrel of oil, created a shell company, and shot a satellite into space.

Many historians do this, too. I’m especially enamored of reenactors like Farrell Monaco, who method-cooks ancient Roman foods, and “beer archaeologist” Patrick McGovern, whose research inspired Dogfish Head Brewery’s Midas Touch beer.

And my favorite learning-by-doing example is Jack Fisk—the production designer who made sets for movies like Killers of the Flower Moon, There Will Be Blood, and The New World. And who insists on building sets for period pieces with the tools and methods of the relevant time period.

So when Fisk built a replica of the Jamestown Settlement for a movie about Pocahontas, he disagreed with historic renderings that showed a well-built fort of carefully sawed planks. Putting himself in the mindset of exhausted and wary colonists, he instead built a rough, hastily assembled structure. When archaeologists visited the set, they were astonished: Fisk had intuited designs and features of Jamestown that they were just discovering.

When I was piloting my food-and-economics podcast, Gastronomics, I interviewed an old college friend, Josh Freedman, who was doing some learning-by-doing of his own. I enjoyed the conversation so much that I spent the past week making our test episode into a full episode. You can listen on Spotify, YouTube, etc.

Josh is a China scholar who started a tea business. He started the business, in part, because most tea in America is mediocre or bad, and his friends kept asking to try the good tea he’d bring back from China and Taiwan.

But his main motivation was that learning about China’s tea industry—and then starting a tea business—helped him get beyond Beijing and Shanghai and better understand the Chinese economy.

I’d like to better understand China, and I often hear about big ideas like China’s incredible supply chains or how the government plays the starring role in China’s economy. But it can feel abstract. So I really appreciated Josh’s approach of understanding China through specific examples from its tea industry.

Subscribe now

In the episode, we discussed three insights from his tea explorations:

1. Entrepreneurial bureaucrats: During Josh’s time in China, white tea exploded in popularity. Most of that white tea came from a specific region of China, and not from other regions with an equally long history of growing white tea. Why? Josh traced the trend back to a few bureaucrats—deputy party secretaries in that region who’d sensed a market opportunity, mobilized local white-tea farmers, and marketed their white tea through expos and partnerships, all while branding the tea under the region’s name.

2. Can China just do things? In rural China, the farmers were “pretty blunt.” And they’d tell Josh how government officials were pressuring them to switch from growing tea (or fruits or nuts) to growing rice and wheat. The local bureaucrats were trying to follow a mandate from the central government: Grow more grains! That way China will be less dependent on foreigners for food if war breaks out. But growing grains is harder and less profitable. Farmers didn’t want to do it. My sense is that many Americans worry that in the time California builds ~10 miles of high-speed rail, China’s authoritarian state builds an entire high-speed rail network. And while Americans stupidly yell “Drill, baby, drill!” at each other, the Chinese have made a five-year plan to dominate the global electric vehicle market and followed through. But at those tea farms, Josh saw one of many examples of how Chinese officials have to cajole and incentivize people and businesses to follow their plans. They face fewer checks on their power, but the state is far from all-powerful.

3. An entire supply chain in a giant city block: Over the past few decades, trade with China exploded, and China manufactured more and more of the world’s goods. Initially, this was powered by one of the largest migrations in human history: Chinese villagers moving to coastal cities like Guangzhou and Shenzhen to work in large factories for low wages. But China is no longer a poor country; its labor is no longer so cheap. So how does China continue to dominate global manufacturing? What is its comparative advantage? In some industries, government subsidies make Chinese goods cheaper. But in many cases, the answer is China’s supply chains, which are superior thanks to China’s huge size and organized efforts to develop and co-locate all the parts of each industry’s supply chain. Josh experienced this with his tea business: At Beijing’s sprawling Maliandao tea market, he easily and cheaply got the exact packaging and labels he needed, customized for tea and at a very cheap price. If he wanted, he could have bought tea from all over China there, too, by walking a few steps to stalls and shops competing for his business. But back in the U.S., finding each item was difficult, frustrating, and expensive. This is why entrepreneurs from around the world go to China to mass produce their products—they know everything they need is there, in one place.

The full episode is up now, and it includes Josh recounting his experience doing stand-up comedy in Beijing during his first year of learning Chinese, as well as the amazing put-down people in great tea countries have of tea in America. You can also find and follow Josh’s tea business, Ph.Tea, on Substack or Instagram.

American tea is something of a national embarrassment. Be part of the solution!

This essay is based on an episode of my podcast, Gastronomics. You can listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

In the summer of 2020, I lived briefly in Ithaca, New York. It’s the only time I’ve lived near Aldi, the grocery store known for low prices. I went twice, and I thought it was fine, but underwhelming. I appreciated the low prices, but it didn’t have everything I needed. The store was small and a bit shabby.

I didn’t know it yet, but those are the exact ingredients that have made Aldi the fastest-growing grocery chain in America. Per Bloomberg, Aldi plans to have more than 3,000 American locations by the end of 2028, which would be more than any other chain but Walmart. In 2024, Aldi generated some $29 billion in U.S. sales, which is more than Trader Joe’s.

Aldi is known for having low, low prices, and it deserves that reputation. Food reporter Deena Shanker told me that her experience comparison shopping over many months was that Aldi either matched Walmart on price or was a bit cheaper. Grocers like Wegmans and Kroger have announced defensive price reductions, and an analysis published in late 2023 found that grocery chains reduced their markups ~7 percent in areas where Aldi stores opened.1

All to say: Aldi is disrupting the grocery business and actually lowering prices even as the cost of food—at restaurants and other grocery stores—goes up and up.

Maybe this sounds a bit humdrum. But I found it totally intriguing and perplexing, because…

1. Walmart and Costco’s business model is all about low prices, too, and they can offer low prices by having huge stores, giant warehouses, and incredible economies of scale that allow them to pay less for Oreo’s, baby carrots, and Jif peanut butter than other grocers. So how the heck is Aldi matching or beating them on price?

2. When a company disrupts a longstanding industry, it’s typically a startup enabled by new technology—like Netflix using online streaming to disrupt Blockbuster and video rental. But Aldi is not staffed by futuristic robots. Its stores just look like grocery stores, and Aldi was founded 80 years ago, in post-war Germany. So what’s going on?

3. One of the proudest achievements of America’s capitalistic market economy is providing its citizens an abundance of increasingly affordable food. Somewhat famously, Soviet leader Boris Yeltsin toured a grocery store in Houston during the Cold War and was amazed that the average American enjoyed more variety than top Soviet politicians. From 1960 to 2019, Americans spent less and less of their income on food each year, even as they enjoyed more frequent restaurant meals, more sushi, and far better beer. But since the pandemic, food has become less affordable. Can American markets no longer provide cheap groceries? Did something break?

One necessary but not sufficient explanation for Aldi’s low prices is that management is obsessed with efficiency and cutting unnecessary costs. There’s no music in stores, because speakers (and licensing fees for muzak) cost money. The staff places product on shelves still in the cardboard boxes they were trucked in on, because artfully unpacking fruits, bread, and jerky sticks would mean higher labor costs. The shabbiness is intentional—it’s the cost of cheaper groceries.

Subscribe now

But other grocery chains are similarly obsessed with efficiency. Here’s one of my favorite examples about Costco, courtesy of Zachary Crockett and The Hustle:

In another instance, reengineering a container of cashews from a circle to a square shape allowed Costco to stack more items in a single truck, reducing the number of shipments by 24,000 pallets per year. For shoppers, this meant cheaper nuts.

Instead, Aldi’s disruptively low prices rely on two primary tactics:

1. Private label products: On Aldi shelves, you can find cookies that look a heck of a lot like Oreos and boxes of what sure seem like Ritz crackers. But they are “Benton’s Chocolate Sandwich Cookies with Vanilla Filling” and “Savoritz Golden Round crackers.”2 Both are made by Aldi, and therefore cost less, since Aldi doesn’t have to pay Nabisco’s markup and then add their own. More than 80 percent of Aldi products are these store-brand versions—aka private-label products or, in the case of look-alike Oreos, dupes.

2. Limited selection: When the Albrecht brothers took over their family’s grocery store in 1946, they had a small store and limited funds for stocking the shelves. But this became their secret sauce: Stocking a very limited selection of items—just essentials like rice and eggs, and just one of each rather than a variety of brands, sizes, and versions—allowed them to keep prices low. They could buy in bulk, which is cheaper, and by not stocking niche products that sit on shelves for weeks or days, they saved even more by avoiding spoilage and limiting shelf space, storage areas, and rent or real-estate costs. Even as the brothers grew rich, they kept stores small and selection limited. This is less convenient—shoppers often have to visit another grocery store to grab things like white pepper that Aldi doesn’t stock. But what Aldi does stock is cheaper.

Aldi’s low prices made their stores very attractive during periods like the Great Recession and today’s inflationary era. The Great Recession, especially, enabled their current growth. But if all Aldi offered was bargain prices in shabby stores, customers might flee to Costco, Kroger, or Whole Foods when the economy recovered.

So another key to Aldi’s success is that it’s fun. Aldi has a famously chaotic-good middle aisle with rotating buys like fun toys, German spätzle, and advent calendars that contain 24 festive cheeses. And its U.S. stores have expanded their offerings (a bit) to attract higher-income customers: Aldi doesn’t just have the cheapest apples, but the cheapest honey crisp apples. Not just super-duper cheap wine but well-priced “premium” wine.

Instead of being a sad place to shop when you’re low on cash, Aldi has more flea-market energy: a place anyone might go to hunt for good deals and fun finds. Aldi is beloved; many customers are cult-like in their devotion. In some cases, customers line up for new store openings like early iPhone releases.

My main takeaway from researching and analyzing Aldi for several weeks (for an episode of Gastronomics!) is that there’s always something new under the sun. American grocery stores are a mature market. They seem pretty stable equilibrium-y. But they are dynamic and always changing. Aldi didn’t need futuristic tech to disrupt the industry; just a strategy developed 80 years ago, then tweaked for the American market. In healthy markets, there’s always a way in for new competitors.

My other takeaway is greater appreciation for the famous business idiom: “There are only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is to unbundle.”

The clearest example of bundling and unbundling is probably television. Cable companies bundled hundreds of TV channels together and charged one high fee for all of them. Then streaming services like Netflix made money by unbundling television—by allowing people to pay for just Netflix. Which felt liberating! For a few years. But now customers are annoyed about subscribing to so many streaming services. So streamers are teaming up to form bundles, like getting Disney, Hulu, and HBO Max all for one reduced price. Now, to make money, you gotta bundle.

(One thing Substack did is unbundle popular writers, especially op-ed columnists and purveyors of hot takes, from the newspapers and magazines that previously employed them.)

Even the person who coined the phrase about bundling and unbundling didn’t think it’s literally the only way to make money. Still, I often failed to see (un)bundling as a powerful framework outside of the media industry. Until I realized that Aldi is unbundling the grocery store.

For a long time, grocery stores got more bundled. People once went to the baker, the butcher, and the greengrocer. Then the super market put all those things under one roof. And then Walmart, Target, and Costco created superstores where you could buy groceries and clothes and big-screen TVs.

Now Aldi is reversing this process by unbundling the grocery store. Not only does Aldi not have the big-screen TVs and dupes of Lululemon hoodies and pants, it doesn’t even have everything on your grocery list. Aldi unbundled the part of the grocery business it can do super cheaply, and it intentionally locates Aldi stores near competitor grocery stores so shoppers can easily go grab the last few things on their list (the rest of the bundle).

With this in mind, I’ve started seeing bundling and unbundling at work in more and more industries. If you look closely at your own, I suspect you will, too.

My third takeaway is that I just didn’t live in Ithaca long enough to grok Aldi. If I’d been there longer, I bet I would have made Aldi part of a multi-store strategy. I get it now! Aldi, please come to Colorado!

At the start of this post, I asked three questions inspired by Aldi’s expansion. The first two, which are about how Aldi achieved a comparative advantage, I feel like I’ve answered.

The third was whether the American economy can still deliver a bounty of affordable food. I think the way Aldi’s growth has put pressure on competitors to keep prices low shows that grocers are not the right target of our ire over food prices. But grocery stores are just one slice of the food world. In an upcoming post—and episode of Gastronomics—I’ll explore the ways big companies have managed to make their industries less competitive and the food they provide scarcer and pricier.

I just launched the first episode of Gastronomics, my new video podcast about the business of food and how economics shapes the modern menu. You can find it on Spotify, YouTube, etc.

The episode is about the secret life of the Domino’s pizza tracker. Today’s post is a darling I had to kill while making the episode.

Domino’s launched its iconic pizza tracker in 2008. (After a trial run over Christmas in 2007.) The tracker is still updating people on the status of their pizza today, 18 years later.

For approximately 18 years of those years, a subset of Domino’s customers have had doubts about the pizza tracker.

Are Domino’s employees really hitting a button every time the tracker updates? Or is it all smoke and mirrors: a rough time estimate dressed up as a precise tracker?

Skeptics share anecdotes like seeing their pizza in the “Quality Check” stage for a long, long time only to show up missing an ingredient. They share their suspicions on Reddit; they share them with the Wall Street Journal. Many, many people have ordered a pie and then staked out their local Domino’s. Pizza tracker trutherism is an eternal source of pan-pizza investigative journalism.

For a long time, I’ve wondered myself. Thanks to my recent reporting on the pizza tracker, I think I can resolve the mystery.

The case for pizza tracker skepticism

A year ago, if forced to bet on whether the pizza tracker is “real,” I’d go with “kinda.”

Not in a malicious or scandalous way. I’d find it reasonable and understandable if the tracker was a good-enough estimate of where in the process your pizza likely is per Domino’s data on millions of orders.

For Gastronomics, I interviewed Shuya Gong, a former design director at IDEO, about the pizza tracker’s subtle but powerful effect on customer behavior and psychology—and why it’s one of the most influential design innovations of all time.

As a side dish, I asked if she thought the pizza tracker was real. She felt similarly to me, although she added that the “internet of things” and wifi-connected appliances may have made the pizza tracker more real (and less of an estimate) over time.

I based my low-conviction “not real” answer on three pillars:

1. The many anecdotes of customers’ personal experiences contradicting the pizza tracker’s status updates

2. Domino’s is all about efficiency. Why would they distract or burden busy employees with updating the tracker?

3. Lots of websites and apps have intentionally fake progress bars. Intriguingly, some websites fake progress bars to make their website seem slower, since this “illusion of labor” can boost customers’ confidence in the accuracy of their tax return or quality of their travel searches. Computers are fast, but instant results don’t feel rigorous.

So I was a truther. But I’ve since learned the truth.

The pizza tracker according to Domino’s

Last month, I spoke with Mark Messing, who is VP of Global Digital Marketing and just oversaw a redesign of the Domino’s app and website, including the pizza tracker. He has been at Domino’s since 2013.

I also spoke with two people directly involved in the pizza tracker’s early years.

All of them were familiar with pizza tracker skepticism. But, they say, the pizza tracker is real, and it has been since the day of conception.

Steps like putting the pizza in the oven or dispatching a pie for delivery, they say, do involve an employee pushing a button that updates the tracker. Historically the pizza tracker has gone from “Baking” to “Quality Check” based on a timer. But that’s because Domino’s ovens have a conveyor belt that conveys pies from one end to the other. So Domino’s knows exactly how long the bake takes, and it doesn’t change.

Maybe I should station myself inside randomly selected Domino’s at unannounced times to verify all this. But I haven’t felt the need to. (Yet!) I believe Domino’s explanation because…

1. The past employees have no incentive to lie!

2. Domino’s was already collecting and tracking this data before the pizza tracker. After all, the executives can’t regularly visit every location. They have to manage by metrics, which means collecting data. As a professor who studies “operational transparency” pointed out to me, and as Mark and others confirmed, Domino’s didn’t have to set up a pizza-tracker infrastructure from scratch. They just shared with customers the data they were already collecting to manage and optimize their operations.

3. The Domino’s staffers have good explanations for skeptics’ experiences. Why might a pie spend a suspiciously long time in the Quality Check stage? Well, if a pizza fails quality check (not enough cheese, perhaps), or all the drivers are busy, the tracker doesn’t provide that additional detail and context. The tracker just keeps saying Quality Check as the pizza gets re-made or sits on the counter. Why might the tracker say “out for delivery” for implausibly long? Maybe someone hit the button too early on accident—or because Domino’s employees know they are judged by these metrics, and therefore have an incentive to update the tracker to Delivery before a driver actually grabs the pie.

4. These explanations do not contradict customers accounts, and they are not necessarily flattering to Domino’s. They are acknowledging the messiness of the world and human foibles.

Pizza tracker truthism reflects a tension: Too much transparency and detail can be overwhelming, or an unwelcome glimpse of how the sausage gets made. Too little, though, undermines the tracker’s goal of giving a reassuring sense of progress and the potential confidence-enhancing benefits of transparency.

In fact, Messing says a big motivation of refreshing the pizza tracker was abstracting away some details (the “Check” stage that seemed to cause so much confusion is now gone) while highlighting others (many customers were unaware the tracker had GPS tracking of delivery drivers, so they made it more clear by replacing a big, screen-hogging map with a simple progress bar of the driver progressing toward their destination).

When I brought up pizza-tracker skeptics staking out Domino’s locations, Mark grinned and told me that he “loves a good true crime documentary,” and so can understand people going “full detective on something fun like this.”

“Team members are hitting buttons in the store at each progression stage of our product,” Mark added. “This is just sort of the pizza obsession that we have: to really compartmentalize the assembly line process and then fine tune it.”

Want more pizza tracker? You can listen to “The secret life of the pizza tracker” (about how and why the tracker has been hugely influential across the business world) on Spotify, YouTube, etc.

I originally wrote this post for the Planet Money newsletter. It’s based in part on a chapter of the Planet Money book, which I’d love you to check out!

Last October, I had a decision to make. Did I want to spend around $775 on World Cup tickets? For the first time since 1994, the men’s World Cup is being held in the U.S., as well as in Mexico and Canada. I had just hours to decide.

At this point, I also began to question the economic logic of FIFA’s approach to World Cup tickets. Was FIFA, as soccer’s governing body and the guardian of the beautiful game, bungling the ticket sales?

For millions of soccer fans, buying World Cup tickets has been an ordeal. My friends and I had signed up for updates from soccer’s governing body, FIFA, and their emails about how to buy tickets felt a bit like receiving the fine print of an insurance policy in monthly digests.

First there was a presale—but it was sponsored by Visa and only for people with Visa cards, and it was a lottery. Winning the lottery didn’t get you a ticket, though. You won the chance to buy a ticket. If you missed the presale, more lotteries followed. Winning one earned you the right to buy tickets. Another involved submitting an application for certain types of matches and then having your credit card charged automatically (how much exactly?) if you won and if your application was accepted. (Accepted?)

You could just browse and buy tickets on the FIFA website, but only expensive “hospitality packages” that included VIP perks. Or you could buy “special digital assets” (NFTs? really?) that resembled trading cards and could potentially earn you the right to buy tickets to certain matches.

I had won one of the first lotteries. Huzzah! I could buy tickets. But tickets weren’t cheap. A package of three matches for $775 was among the cheapest I saw, and not for Team USA or elite matchups like Brazil vs Morocco. If buying a ticket to a single group-stage game was an option, I didn’t see it. Plus I had to coordinate with friends and look up the cost of flights and hotels in cities hosting matches—all before an imminent deadline. I decided not to buy myself a ticket.

The best moments of World Cup soccer bring joy to millions. But for most fans not wealthy enough to buy VIP ticket packages, catching a glimpse in-person required navigating a complicated and convoluted system just for the chance to pay high prices.

Still, I have some sympathy for the challenge FIFA faced. And if I squint, their system almost resembles a smart and fair approach to ticket sales.

That’s because I spent years writing a book about how economic thinking can improve our lives. (It’s called Planet Money: A Guide To The Economic Forces That Shape Your Life. You can order it now!) During that time, I talked to economists about when high prices mean that something has gone wrong (perhaps due to a monopoly) vs when high prices are a smart method for allocating scarce resources. And about cases when prices alone fail to achieve fair or efficient outcomes.

Based on these conversations, I suspect that me staying home is a good outcome for society. I could have afforded the World Cup tickets, but I’m a bandwagon fan. So the high price nudged me toward instead spending my time and money on something I’d enjoy more. That’s good!

But selling tickets to unique, uber-popular events like the World Cup is a profound economic challenge—it’s one of those exceptions to the otherwise incredible ability of prices to coordinate economic activity.

World Cup tickets are incredibly popular and in short supply, so they should be expensive. But World Cup tickets shouldn’t just be for rich people, so they should be affordable. How do you square that circle?

We at Planet Money have a modest proposal: FIFA should learn from other organizations that have faced this dilemma and triumphed. Among others, the team behind Hamilton the musical, the National Park system, and the NYC Marathon have developed clever ways to fairly distribute tickets, hiking permits, and marathon bibs despite overwhelming demand.

Subscribe now

The case for high prices

What would have happened if FIFA sold every World Cup ticket for just $20?

In some ways, this would be more “fair” and pro-fan. But low prices can backfire. Instead of tickets going to true fans, they’d get scooped up by resellers—or by bots and whoever happens to have enough schedule flexibility to buy tickets the second that sales start.

Plus, if tickets were only $20, some people with only mild interest in soccer would buy tickets. You could end up with empty seats at a Brazil–Argentina match because they saw rain in the forecast and skipped the game.

Alternatively, FIFA could sell every ticket for $20, but only to superfans. But how do you identify the superfans? Or the working-class octogenarian whose last wish is to see a World Cup game?

Do you make everyone write a personal essay? Ask people to rate their obsession with soccer from 1 to 10—and hope they don’t lie?

Figuring out who most values World Cup tickets, or any scarce resource, is a hard problem, and high prices are often an elegant solution. Want World Cup tickets? Then prove how much you value them by paying the high ticket price.

This system works perfectly if everyone has the same amount of money. And it works well for goods that can be mass produced, like smartphones, or that only some people need or want, like Pokemon cards or Aspirin. But we live in a world where mildly interested millionaires can pay more for World Cup tickets than working-class families that live for soccer. That’s probably why FIFA announced in December that it would sell some additional tickets for just $60—a move likely prompted by complaints from soccer fans.

So what should FIFA do instead?

Listen to my new podcast!

A masterclass in fairness

FIFA could learn from another huge sporting event that we at Planet Money consider a master class in fairness: the New York City Marathon.

Watching the Marathon is free, but more people want to run than the course can accommodate. So New York Road Runners, the nonprofit that organizes the Marathon, has to sell or allocate spots.

In fact, NYRR faces a similar mismatch of supply and demand. In December, FIFA announced that demand for World Cup tickets—in terms of the number of people entering its drawings—outstripped supply 30 to 1. In 2025, meanwhile, NYRR reported that around 200,000 hopeful runners entered a drawing for ~6,000 spots. That’s also a ratio of around 30 to 1!

NYRR could simply charge high prices and maximize their profits. But it’s a nonprofit that relies on the goodwill of New Yorkers—the race shuts down dozens of busy streets across all five boroughs of New York.

The same is true of FIFA. It is, officially, a nonprofit—a FIFA spokesperson stressed to us that “the revenue FIFA generates from the World Cup is reinvested to fuel the growth of the game (men, women, youth).” And FIFA relies on the goodwill of the host country or countries, which shoulder the cost of building soccer stadiums and endure extra noise and traffic.

So what’s a fair way to decide who should get to run the NYC Marathon? (Or attend the World Cup?) Fairness is subjective and debatable. But the genius of the NYC Marathon is that NYRR’s system uses four main methods to allocate spots, each of which optimizes for a different form of fairness:

1. Luck. As the marathon’s popularity grew, the first tool NYRR reached for was a lottery, or random drawing. Aspiring marathoners mailed in a postcard with their name on it, and staff picked lucky winners who got to run 26.2 miles. Eventually an online form replaced the postcards. It’s brute-force fairness: straightforward and perfectly egalitarian.

2. Merit. If NYRR distributed every spot by luck of the draw, the Marathon would not be an elite athletic event. That’s why NYRR directly invites elite runners and Olympic-level marathoners to participate, and nonprofessionals can earn a spot by running another marathon or half-marathon extremely fast. (Qualifying times vary by age and gender.)

3. Prices. NYRR effectively allocates some spots through high prices. If you spend $5,000 or $10,000 a year for a charitable NYRR membership, rather than the standard $60, you’re guaranteed a Marathon bib. Or international runners can buy marathon packages that include a bib, hotel stay, and flights. (NYRR gives spots to tour operators to attract more international runners, support the city’s economy, and expand the Marathon’s TV audience.)

4. Effort. Another approach to fair allocation is to give marathon spots to people who value them highly, but measured in ways other than money. NYRR has developed a clever metric: People prove their enthusiasm by running nine of NYRR’s qualifying local races and volunteering at another. They effectively pay in time and effort for a Marathon spot. This 9+1 program helps local New Yorkers qualify and filters out wealthy people who have minimal free time—or can spend their free time on expensive diversions—all while helping new runners train and stay motivated. Or runners can earn a spot by fundraising for pre-approved charities.

The NYC Marathon offers a smattering of other ways to earn a spot. But most race bibs are allocated through these methods. Each method has ways they feel fair and unfair. Each method has flaws and leaves people out. Taken together, though, they give just about everyone a shot at running the Marathon.

With this framework in mind, you can spot organizations around the world allocating extremely popular tickets and permits using a portfolio of fair methods. Yosemite National Park, which only allows 300 hikers per day up to the summit of Half Dome, distributes permits via one main lottery and smaller, daily lotteries (that favor locals). Many popular musicians offer discounted tickets to their followers during presales. The team behind Hamilton generated plenty of revenue by selling expensive tickets, but also ran lotteries for $10 tickets and partnered with local public schools so students could see $10 matinees.

Scoring FIFA

Tickets to the World Cup are frustratingly expensive, and the system for buying FIFA’s mostly expensive tickets is complicated and exasperating. But there’s some method there. With the NYC Marathon’s example in mind, we can see FIFA using allocation methods that map to the four kinds of fairness:

1. Luck. FIFA’s random drawings allow them to sell tickets for less than the market-clearing price, but give everyone (or everyone with a Visa card, in the case of the presale) an equal shot at buying tickets that cost less than ticket reseller prices.

2. Merit. FIFA gives 16% of each match’s tickets to the competing country’s Member Associations. That way, the Canadian Soccer Association or Egyptian Football Association can come up with an application process or criteria to reward loyal fans with tickets. According to FIFA, 50% of the tickets sold by Member Associations are in the “most affordable range,” although only 10% are those budget, $60 tickets.

3. Prices. FIFA’s “hospitality packages” cost thousands of dollars and include VIP perks that allow people to claim a ticket via high prices. And the far-from-inexpensive prices for lottery winners mean prices still play an allocation role in the random drawings.

4. Effort. If I interpret FIFA’s digital collectibles program generously, I can see an attempt to allow fans to get access to tickets through the effort of figuring out the rules and collecting the right cards. A less generous interpretation is that it was a cash grab. Last year, The Athletic reported that FIFA made more than $10 million from the collectibles before ticket sales had even started, and collectors at best won the right to buy tickets at prices that had not yet been announced.

That said, FIFA could make its World Cup ticket sales much simpler. Complexity itself is a way to restrict access, and if not done carefully, it usually rewards those with more resources and time to navigate it. So why not have just one lottery? Or at least not have an extra lottery just for people with Visa cards?

And FIFA could make its ticket sales more fair in multiple senses.

FIFA’s random drawings introduce some fairness via luck, but since most winners still have to pay hundreds of dollars, it’s far from the shining example of Hamilton’s $10 lottery tickets. When we asked FIFA about $10 lottery tickets and fan criticism of FIFA’s high prices, they pointed to their $60 tickets, and also said, tellingly, “The pricing model adopted for FIFA World Cup 2026 reflects the existing market practice for major entertainment and sporting events within our hosts on a daily basis.”

FIFA could also offer would-be attendees a real path to earning tickets through effort. FIFA’s digital collectibles involve effort, but fans had to buy them just to pay again for a ticket. It was not a way to pay in time (instead of money) in exchange for discounted tickets.

The genius of NYRR’s 9+1 and fundraising programs is that marathoners pay for a spot with effort and time. But unlike standing in line or filling out tons of paperwork—which economists call “ordeals,” because they filter people out by forcing them to waste their time—the marathoners do useful things: train for the big race or raise money for charity.

For FIFA, a comparable approach could be partnering with host countries’ schools and soccer clubs, especially in low-income neighborhoods, to offer discount tickets to students who never miss a practice. Or rewarding fans who contribute to the growth of the game by coaching youth soccer or supporting women’s soccer clubs in countries where the women’s game is underfunded.

World Cup tickets are wildly popular, and there are only so many seats and matches. Not everyone will be able to see a World Cup match. Any approach to ticket sales, no matter how well-designed, will leave some fans disappointed.

But the incredible popularity of the tournament and people’s passion for soccer and its stars mean FIFA could choose to model fairness and thoughtfulness, too.

Special thanks and kudos to Planet Money’s Kenny Malone for his truly brilliant episode “Advanced Fairness at the Marathon.”

My new podcast, Gastronomics, launches on June 10. It’s about the business of food and how economics shapes the modern menu. You can listen on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

It’s especially relevant right now, because this committee (and the similar committee behind the Nasdaq 100) are deciding whether to add SpaceX to their lists (indexes) as soon as it goes public in June.

If they do, SpaceX will immediately become a huge part of millions of people’s investment portfolios and retirement savings. Even though many of those people hate Elon Musk!

Once a month, from 1989 to 2019, David Blitzer walked into a well-appointed conference room with a view of downtown Manhattan to discuss the 500 largest and most important public companies in the U.S., the ones whose stock just about any American can buy.

Blitzer was a member of, and then chair of, the committee that makes the S&P 500. It’s like the Billboard Hot 100, except instead of ranking the most popular songs in America, it lists the most valuable companies. Sabrina Carpenter wants to keep releasing pop anthems that keep her on the charts; Boeing wants to keep selling enough planes to stay in the S&P 500.

The S&P 500 is famous. It’s cited constantly in newspapers and on TV; it’s the basis of millions of investing-for-retirement plans. Less well-known is that S&P Global, the company that makes the S&P 500 and that employed Blitzer, is itself on the S&P 500 list.

One reason why is that S&P Global makes hundreds of millions of dollars every year in revenue just from the S&P 500. The company has other larger businesses, like rating bonds, but its indexing business is particularly lucrative and profitable.

How do you profit wildly from a list of stocks that seemingly anyone could make? And why don’t competitors erode those profits? Answering those questions requires a better understanding of the infrastructure behind Americans’ go-to investing plan. It also shows how millions of Americans have, often unknowingly, bet their life savings on a few tech giants and the hundreds of billions of dollars they’ve invested in artificial intelligence.

Keep reading on Planet Money »

In March, I flew to Vancouver, Canada, to see what may be the world’s most intriguing piece of land. As I drove through Vancouver’s leafy Kitsilano neighborhood and onto the Burrard Bridge, I realized I was about to pass right over it.

It wasn’t hard to spot. Three highrises towered above the bridge, and the foundations of eight more skyscrapers were being built.

When I visited the construction site, I could fully appreciate how the developer was squeezing this cluster of high-rises and skyscrapers between the bridge and the water, on one side, and neighboring parks and expensive single-family homes on the other. The towers looked like a second downtown packed into just four blocks. It felt distinct from the low-slung surroundings.

That’s because these 10.5 acres are not part of Vancouver. The development, Sen̓áḵw, is a reserve that belongs to the Squamish Nation (Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw). Before Europeans arrived, the land was a coastal village where Squamish people hunted, fished, and gathered. But in 1913, the provincial government forced the residents to leave and burned the original Sen̓áḵw village behind them.

Much of Sen̓áḵw became the city of Vancouver. Except for 10.5 acres that remained undeveloped. And in the early 2000s, after a long legal battle, the Squamish Nation got that land back. Then they had to decide what to do with it.

Subscribe now

You probably know about the debate over zoning. Are NIMBY homeowners selfishly driving up everyone else’s rents and housing costs by insisting their neighborhoods never change and by blocking the construction of apartment buildings? (And even the occasional duplex.) Or would abolishing single-family zoning just help greedy developers build condos for rich people?

This debate often feels frustratingly abstract. It’s so hard and expensive to build in cities like Vancouver and San Francisco—in part because neighbors delay construction for years via lawsuits and long hearings—that any housing that gets built is inevitably expensive. Which makes it easy to dismiss the NIMBY narrative that a building spree could make rent more affordable.

But since the 10.5 acres returned to the Squamish are reserve land, they were not bound by Vancouver’s zoning laws. The Squamish Nation could make its own rules.

It was an accidental economic experiment: What would happen if the YIMBY and “abundance” crowd got their way and landowners in cities like San Francisco, New York, and Vancouver could build however they wanted? The Squamish Nation had that freedom. They used it to build housing, and to build big: 11 towers as high as 58 stories. In total, they’re building ~6,000 rental apartments. Which is more than the entire city of Vancouver builds in an average year.

I wrote about Sen̓áḵw and the Squamish Nation in a chapter of the Planet Money book and an episode of Planet Money. You can read (or listen) for details of the underdog court case that returned the land to the Squamish and how and why they decided to rent apartments to the public rather than rebuild the village they lost in 1913.

Subscribe to my new podcast!

What I’d like to do here is highlight some of the lessons of this accidental experiment that I couldn’t include or fully explore in the episode and chapter:

1. Make the politics less local: Lawmakers who want to get more housing built, like Scott Weiner in California, often try to elevate zoning decisions so they’re set by the state instead of each town, or so they’re made by politicians responsive to a broad swath of voters (including renters and aspiring home buyers) rather than just a few nearby homeowners. This can be helpful! Even though the Squamish Nation could make their own zoning policy, the city of Vancouver held an effective veto over their plan, since the Squamish needed to connect to city services like the power grid, streets, and sewage. But even as nearby homeowners opposed the project, Vancouver officials signed a services agreement with the Squamish Nation without demanding any downsizing. And then the Canadian government provided a $1 billion low-interest loan to support Sen̓áḵw (via a program meant to boost the supply of rental housing). Opposition to development is usually hyperlocal. But new housing is often popular with the broader public and politicians who know cities need to build to lower housing costs.

2. Deliberate but decisive: Many “abundance” advocates think the U.S. takes far too long to build new housing and infrastructure like transmission lines and high-speed rail. I think it’s very reasonable to worry about the endgame of a movement that thinks big changes to our towns and cities should happen fast and with less opportunity to object. But I think Sen̓áḵw nicely demonstrates a middle ground. Because the Squamish leadership spent years mulling development plans, sharing them with the Squamish people, and eventually holding a democratic vote on the 11-skyscraper plan. The decision was open and deliberative, but then it was final. Which is atypical because…

3. No vetoing: A number of cities in the U.S. and Canada have banned or curtailed single-family zoning and allowed more people to build duplexes and small apartment buildings. But the impact has often been underwhelming, in part because of the other, less-famous obstacle to building new housing: a mandatory approvals process that allows neighbors to object, delay, and wield an effective veto and demand downsizing. (A common tactic is to wield environmental laws. Mountain View, California, infamously blocked Google from building housing on its corporate campus by appealing to its impact on burrowing owls.) The Squamish Nation’s decision on how to zone the land was slow and consultative, but final. Neighbors fought the development: They filed a lawsuit and complained to the press and politicians. (Some in a condescending way, by suggesting Squamish ancestors would want the Nation to build longhouses rather than highrises.) But Sen̓áḵw is reserve land, so the (vocal minority of) neighbors couldn’t stop the development, and the towers are going up remarkably fast.

4. Build big and redistribute: While making the Planet Money episode, my cohost Jeff Guo cited a working paper by economists Evan Soltas and Jonathan Gruber that cleverly quantified the cost of all these vetoes and delays. They did it by looking at Los Angeles, where developers can buy land that made it through the gauntlet of vetoes and approvals and so is already permitted for development. By comparing the price of land before and after it’s permitted, they calculated that pre-approved land cost 50 percent more. Fifty percent! That is almost pure deadweight loss—the cost of allowing every neighbor to object and cause crippling delays to the construction of new houses, duplexes, and apartment buildings, even when the proposals already follow zoning rules. One reason the Squamish Nation voted to use a culturally and historically important piece of land to build highrises is that all the money normally lost to these delays will instead be profit for the Squamish Nation that can be spent on its healthcare and homelessness programs—and generally benefit the entire nation. Cities sometimes do something similar by allowing developers to build highrises in exchange for “community amenity contributions” that fund affordable housing or new parks, transit upgrades, and childcare centers. But cities could extract way more funding for these public goods (or for tax cuts or lower subway and bus fares) if developers weren’t burdened by delays and objections that limit the size (and profits) of new projects.

5. High housing costs are a solution to high housing costs: As economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok like to say, a price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive. High prices, including high rents and home prices, are yelling, “Way more people want to live here! You can make lots of money by building homes here!” It’s not as easy to build new homes in New York or Vancouver as it is for Apple to ramp up production of iPhones. But prices and the invisible hand can still do their thing in housing—if we let them. That’s what happened when 10.5 acres of Vancouver were freed from the policies that block new construction. If cities do that more broadly, you can get outcomes like Austin, where a historic building spree contributed to rents actually falling.

6. Keep the smart regulations: The Squamish chose to follow almost all Vancouver policies, like fire codes and environmental regulations. They just chose a different path on policies like the requirement to build lots and lots of parking spots for apartment buildings in urban areas with lots of transit options.

Sen̓áḵw is an economic case study with lessons for many towns and cities. It’s also the story of a group of people trying to honor the past and build for the future. I want cities to build more homes so more people can access the jobs, culture, and economic opportunities of places like Vancouver and San Francisco. I’d also understand if the Squamish Nation had decided to rebuild the village that had been destroyed a century ago.

Instead they collectively decided to build 11 towers. There will be expensive apartments with amazing views. There will be an amazing rooftop. There will be at least one hot tub. These are modern, high-end apartments designed to maximize revenues for the Nation.

But the development will also be distinctly Squamish. It will include spaces for ceremonies. Squamish motifs and artwork are part of the towers’ design. And Sen̓áḵw will be a gathering place once again thanks to retail and public space that will draw in neighbors and visitors.

Plus, hundreds of apartments are reserved for affordable housing and Squamish families. So when the first residents move in, later this year, Squamish families will live on the land for the first time since the destruction of the village in 1913.

During my visit, I spoke with Jacob Lewis III, who has helped oversee the Sen̓áḵw development for years. “A lot of people look at us as an Indigenous developer, so they’re expecting longhouses… things like we used to live in,” he told me. “No, we’re creating something new.”

He cares about the land’s history. But he’s building for the future, too.

The mayor was born here; she’s proud of her hometown. But she is civic minded. It bothers her that the “cheapest” house on the market is listed for $900,000. She’s uncomfortably aware that the town’s residents are wealthy and mostly white, while the town’s waiters, teachers, and construction workers (many of whom aren’t white) can’t afford to live in town, and so endure hour-long commutes from poorer areas.

Shouldn’t people be able to live in this great town even if they can’t afford a mortgage of $1 million or more?

At her request, you do some research. The town could buy some homes and turn them into affordable housing. But at the cost of $1+ million per house, it’s just not feasible. You could build new homes to sell or rent at discount rates. But land prices are so high that this would be just as expensive.

You could instead build apartments. But you know that residents of your town—and towns like it—don’t want that. When someone tries to build apartments, they rally to block it. They complain that it will cause more traffic, decrease the value of their homes, and erode the town’s charm. It’ll never happen.

Then you learn about a way that suburban, single-family homes across the country have become more affordable for younger, middle-income families: private equity and other Wall Street investors buying them and renting them out.

I made you read this hypothetical scenario because yesterday Donald Trump announced that he intends to ban private equity and other “institutional investors” from buying single-family homes. Trump posted that he’ll ask Congress to “codify” this, and announce more details and proposals for housing affordability in a few weeks, at Davos.

I am not here to tell you that these corporate landlords are a well-intentioned force for good. But their effect on the housing market surprised me—one research paper summarized it as “Diversifying the Suburbs.” So this ban proposed by Trump, and previously by politicians including Elizabeth Warren, would likely hurt a cohort of Americans it’s supposed to help.

“Diversifying the Suburbs”

Last summer, I wrote an edition of the Planet Money newsletter about new research on the effect of private equity and institutional investors (like Blackstone and Invitation Homes) buying single-family homes to rent them out.

The author of the research, Konhee Chang, was born in Korea. Back then, while a Ph.D. student in economics at UC Berkeley, he found it curious that rentals in America were almost always apartments. Even though Americans idealize suburban, single-family homes with a yard and a fence.

Since 2008, though, big Wall Street firms had been making money by buying single-family homes and renting them out. (I go into this history more in the Planet Money newsletter; I was surprised to learn that the federal government actively encouraged this by holding bulk auctions of foreclosed homes for Blackstone and co. during the Great Recession. Which sounds crazy now, but was then seen as a way to avoid the blight and waste of abandoned homes with no inhabitants.) Chang saw this as a way to study what happens when rental housing becomes available in the suburbs:

[He] assembled and analyzed data on neighborhoods before and after corporate landlords showed up, including demographic data on the residents. His biggest finding? Institutional investors were reducing segregation. When private equity rented out homes, the new tenants tended to be lower income than the prior owners and more likely to be young and nonwhite.

“I think I was most surprised by the fact that the effect was so sharp and immediate,” says Chang, who has since earned his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. He took it as a sign that these families really wanted to live in these areas but were prevented by the lack of rentals and their inability to get a mortgage.

Chang ended up titling his research findings “Diversifying the Suburbs.”

But Trump, Warren, and others are correct that some Americans are hurt by private equity buying single-family homes. Chang and others have documented that Americans on the cusp of homeownership are losing out when they are outbid by firms like Invitation Homes.

This is the annoying tradeoff that prevents us from helping middle-class Americans at the expense of wealthy investors: banning these corporate landlords will also harm families who are even less financially secure than the aspiring homeowners it could help.

Treating the symptoms

I am writing this substack from a single-family rental in Boulder, Colorado. My landlord is not private equity or a wealthy financier. My landlord is an economist who used to live here but then moved for work.

I previously lived in a single-family home in Brooklyn. Our landlord owned a pizza shop nearby and sometimes gave my roommate a slice when he dropped off our three rent checks.

This is why the housing economist Daryl Fairweather calls private equity in housing a “boogeyman.” In the U.S., most single-family homes are owned by the people who live in them. Some are owned by corporate landlords, but most of them are “mom & pop” operations like my current and former landlords. Only a tiny minority, perhaps two percent, are owned by firms like Blackstone.

That doesn’t mean there’s zero reason for alarm. Private equity could have an outsize impact (raising rents and home prices) by focusing on certain areas, and they have pulled shit like aggressively lobbying a small town to lower the assessments of their properties’ value in order to decrease their tax bills.

But private equity and institutional investors are a distraction, a scapegoat, a boogeyman to point to when the real reason Americans increasingly can’t afford homes is that we just haven’t built enough of them. Here’s a visual from the Planet Money newsletter of our epic failure to build homes last decade despite our growing population:

This is why private equity got interested in the housing market in the first place. Across the country, we built so few houses that there was a business opportunity in renting out homes to people who can’t afford to buy them—despite the many ways the government already subsidizes and enables homeownership.

Right now is also a particularly bad time to ban or limit corporate landlords, for two reasons:

1. Today’s high interest rates make buying a home more expensive. So, compared to the past few, low-interest decades, renting is both more feasible and more likely to be the better financial call for families.

2. Private equity has now been in the buy-to-rent business so long that they’re running low on good prospects (homes that can profitably be rented out) and so are building new single-family homes to rent out. This is helpful! They are financing the construction of new homes in places with a housing crisis.

Rather than treating the disease, banning Wall Street from buying and renting homes would be treating the symptoms—and not all that well.

But like all great resolutions and goals, I’ll start doing that in the New Year. For now, I’m sharing two articles I loved writing that I think you’ll enjoy.

1) How plants and fungi trade resources without a brain

Over the past few decades, scientists have come to increasingly appreciate plant intelligence. Plants communicate and alert each other to predators. They mount defenses, such as releasing toxic or unpleasant chemicals when animals munch on their greenery, and learn to ignore harmless stimuli. They may even form memories.

Many scientists have described plant (and especially tree) intelligence and behavior as highly cooperative—like they are all part of a collective mother nature, or a high-functioning socialist cooperative.

But evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers thought this conception of plants and fungi sharing resources like well-behaved kindergarteners underestimated them. Why wouldn’t these amazing organisms, these survivors of millions of years of evolution and resource competition, try to cheat each other? Why not take their partners’ resources and offer nothing in return?

In the years since, she has conducted clever experiments to show that they are, in fact, savvy trading partners. They respond to supply and demand. They retaliate against freeloaders. They specialize in producing certain nutrients when they can trade with other species for other nutrients they need.

I thought Kiers (who won a MacArthur “genius grant” since we last spoke) would be impressed by how much fungi and plants ran human-like economies despite their lack of a brain. Instead she suspects they’re better at creating economies than we are.

You can read the article on the NPR website »

2) A Whole New Species of Coffee

Before she opened a popular café in Saigon, Vietnam, and before she became a coffee pioneer with a burgeoning global reputation, Hana Choi read an obscure reference in a coffee manual about roasting Liberica coffee. She’d never heard of it.

As she started her coffee career, Choi kept thinking about that cryptic reference. She wanted to champion Vietnam’s best coffees. But even though Vietnam is the world’s 2nd-largest coffee exporter, few of the country’s beans make it to high-end coffee shops. Vietnam grows robusta beans, which are sold in commodity markets, often for instant-coffee mixes, and are considered inferior to the arabica beans savored in upscale establishments. (An aside: I’m a big fan of robusta!)

Liberica, though, was terra nova, unknown to even coffee aficionados. And it grew in Vietnam.

Since then, Choi and her business partner, Thai Dang, have pulled off a remarkable feat: tracking down Liberica trees, working with coffee farmers to cultivate it, and successfully experimenting to figure out how best to roast, prepare, and serve this whole other species of coffee. (It’s literally a different species than the coffee you and I drink every day.) Since it’s naturally sweet, it’s especially good in cold brew and milk-based drinks.

Also: Unlike mainstream coffee beans—which are so finicky and susceptible to warm temperatures that climate change has closed countless coffee farms and sent coffee prices surging—Liberica is resilient. Dang and Choi have visited coffee farms where drought has killed off arabica and robusta but left Liberica trees hale and healthy.

You can read the full article, including my taste test with local coffee roasters, on Saveur’s website »

Hi! You’re receiving this email because you at some point signed up to receive my articles and journalism in your inbox. Possibly years ago! I’m now finally news-lettering. I hope you’ll stick around for free, weekly-ish emails, each sharing my latest article or podcast episode, an original essay, or insights from a nonfiction book I recently enjoyed. The theme is business and economics, especially the hidden and surprising ways they shape our lives. Especially their impact on food and restaurants.

For years, I had a hunch that the Domino’s pizza tracker was Important.

I didn’t quite know why, but I suspected that Domino’s colorful progress bar—which tells you that your pizza is being prepared, then in the oven, and then out for delivery—was influential and ahead of its time.

Then I had a conversation with my girlfriend, who works in design research. “The pizza tracker? Yeah, we talked about it with clients all the time.”

That led me to write an article about the pizza tracker: “How the Domino’s pizza tracker conquered the business world.” A few things I learned:

1. The pizza tracker was part of a remarkable corporate turnaround. Around 2008, Domino’s sales were in decline and its pizza tied for last in industry taste tests with Chuck E. Cheese. So corporate decided on a strategy of radical transparency: They aired ads of executives apologizing for their pizzas’ terrible taste and made a quasi-documentary about improving their ingredients and recipe. (The pizza tracker was part of this transparency push.) When Stephen Colbert tried the new pie, he crooned, “Is that pizza, or did an angel just give birth in my mouth?”

2. Companies like FedEx had long used progress bars to show packages in transit . But Domino’s pioneered the use of status bars in less-obvious contexts. When you watch your driver approaching, block by block, on the Uber app, you’re living in the world the pizza tracker built. Ditto when Intuit’s TurboTax software shows you your progress toward finishing your tax return.

3. Domino’s pizza tracker became the quintessential example of “operational transparency,” an idea from MBA world. Its proponents believe that showing customers some of your effort and work—and the people behind your products or the sophisticated technology under the hood—can boost appreciation and sales. One example: Researchers found that customer satisfaction with cafeteria food went up when they had a glimpse of the cooks at work. Which helps explain why franchises like Starbucks have added cameras and video displays to drive-throughs.

I’m writing this Substack to share the article. Go read it! It’s a fun one!

But I’m also writing because, somewhat annoyingly, the key lesson of the Domino’s pizza tracker only recently crystallized for me.

Subscribe now

The true power of the Domino’s pizza tracker isn’t really transparency. Even proponents of operational transparency advocate for being selective in what you reveal (i.e. don’t show the sausage getting made), and the internet is full of mini investigations into whether the pizza tracker is “real.” (Did someone at Domino’s really push a button to update the tracker after putting my pizza in the oven? Or does the tracker advance automatically based on how long it’s been since I placed my order?1)

Instead the power of the pizza tracker is that it gives customers a calming sense of control and progress.

“Communicating progress gives people a sense of feeling in control, because they’re aware of what’s going on,” Marty Gage, the longtime VP of User Experience Research at Lextant, told me. “If you don’t feel in control, you’ll never be able to relax.”

When Gage and his colleagues convene panels of potential customers to design better “user journeys,” they show them “stimuli,” which often include an image or gif of Domino’s pizza tracker. He recalled a session in 2014 for Pep Boys where participants picked out the Domino’s pizza tracker. They wanted their experience with the auto shop to be like ordering Domino’s.

It’s not that they wanted the full play-by-play of mechanics checking their cars’ brakes and changing their oil. They wanted regular updates and a comforting sense of progress. They wanted to regularly be told “all good!” so they didn’t worry. As I wrote in the article:

When Gage told me about his Pep Boys work, I realized I was living in the world he’d designed, with help from the pizza tracker. A week earlier, I’d dropped my car for routine servicing at a dealership. After two hours, I wondered if something was wrong. If they’d forgotten me. If I should call.

Then I got a text: They were inspecting my car. A visual depicted the inspection as the first step of five. I felt calmed. Twenty minutes later, a new text alerted me that they’d moved on to repairs (step 2), and I could watch a video of their inspection.

At one point, when Gage and his Lextant colleagues searched for commonalities in their client work, the top-level finding was that people wanted to feel relaxed when using a product or service.

D’uh! But how do you make people feel relaxed and in control when they are relying on teenagers across town to bake and deliver their pizza? Or hoping the mechanic will service their car in time for them to take the kids to soccer practice?

That is the genius of the pizza tracker: It gives people that comforting sense of progress and control when they’re not in control at all.

(Another example: The inner workings of chatbots and LLMs like ChatGPT are opaque and mysterious, even to the engineers who design them. But many chatbots are programmed to break down questions from users into a step-by-step process, the way a human might, and show that process to users so we have a reassuring sense that we understand what’s going on and how our question was answered.)

You don’t have to be a product designer to benefit from this insight. Whether you draw a literal progress bar or not, you can give people a calming sense of control by communicating progress on a roadmap:

• If you’re working on a big project, you can proactively communicate progress to your client, boss, or colleagues like advances on a progress bar that ends with the successful outcome they want

• If you’re planning a vacation, write down everything you need to do (book the flight, choose between a road trip or single city, book hotels, etc) before you get started, so you’re not anxious and distracted by thinking about what else you may need to do

• If you’re a hiring manager, please, please tell applicants how many rounds of interviews and exercises to expect—and the schedule for hearing back about each

• If you’re a parent, you can signpost transitions for your child by sticking to a regular routine, sharing plans in advance, and providing a countdown like, “Okay, 10 minutes until we go” and “Remember, 5 minutes until you need to put your shoes on so we can leave”

We all have plenty of reasons to worry as we go about our day. But by following the tao of the pizza tracker, we can have (and cause) fewer of them.