KGB Pizza

Ever go into one of those businesses that looks fine on the outside but on closer inspection, you maybe start to notice some things? There's a new pizza place near where I work, and I was really happy given the odd schedule I keep to find that there might be more food available in the area (I can only eat so much tom yum goong soup). It looks non-descript enough, with a sort of Italian color scheme in homage to the motherland of pizza (mama mia!) and there are pizza boxes stacked everywhere and employees standing at attention, there's just one thing missing. When I run in out of the cold trying to grab a quick meal in between shifts, they never, ever have any f***ing pizza. Usually there's a long line of grumpy looking customers waiting with ever decreasing patience and an empty rack where they tell me they sell pizza by the slice, and some cheerful employee telling me if I just wait a bit they'll cook more pizza, but I can't help but wonder how long that's going to take with 20 people in line ahead of me.

But then as I'm ready to turn on my heel in frustration and look for another restaurant, I start noticing some things. Like despite being so busy they're completely sold out of pizza, the glass and aluminum rack for the slice line is so clean it's gleaming in the sunlight, not a drop of pizza grease or a crumb to be seen. It's possible they've got sucha JIT supply chain of pizza that every slice is cut and served within seconds of the pizza coming out of the oven, or maybe that they're just so far behind that their hungry walk-in customers devour whatever comes out of the oven, snapping like jackals. I could see that at lunchtime, but day after day business in the slice line has never slowed down enough to put a single pizza in the rack?


And consider the stacks and stacks of pizza boxes, which are all assembled, ready and aching for piping hot pepperoni and mozzarella to be slid into them, peeping around every corner. If they're so busy, I'd wonder how it is they haven't depleted their pile of boxes. They could be so overstaffed that during slow times they can do an excessive amount of cleaning and fold hundreds of boxes, and there are always about six guys just milling around. But again, it's a bit suspsicious to find a brand new business trying to carve out a niche in a bad economy that's so ridiculously overstaffed. I know what you're thinking, they're all delivery guys, but this brings me to my next point: who delivers pizza in a BMW? I'm not kidding, one of my co-workers has seen a BMW cruising around with their delivery sign on it, making collections delivering pizza.

Since they're clearly not employing all these people by cooking pizza, I'm starting to think that if you were to go into the back of that place you'd find Teddy KGB and Viktor Yanukovich dealing an illegal card game while a whole production line of Russian immigrants bags meth and heroin in pizza box sized quantities. In fact, I'm guessing the #1 selling item on their dessert menu is yellow cake... the kind from Niger that glows in the dark. They've got money out on the street at 2% a week, just pay your driver. If you can't come up with the money on-time you get buried in a hole by the railroad tracks, but for payments of more than $1000 you get a 16" pizza with up to three toppings. And while you can't get any pizza, I bet they can give you a great deal on an ipod that is in perfect working order but was accidentally dropped on its serial number (which explains that big scratch through the number). If this sounds like paranoid stereotyping, I again refer you to the guy "just delivering pizza" in a f***ing beamer.

Now I'm mainly worried about a turf war between them and the Gustavus Adolphus tennis team, who are clearly cooking meth in that big bubble. (Hey, meth did lead Andre Agassi to the first career grand slam in decades after the introduction of hard-courts and the open era.)