On the Edge: Delivering Pizza
One night in March 1996 Bill Fobbs called Dominos and asked to have a pepperoni pizza delivered to his family. Dominos refused to deliver the pizza to his home and said he would have to come to the outlet to pick up his pizza. The Fobbs, who are black, live in a high- crime, predominantly black neighborhood in San Francisco, California. Mr. Fobbss family complained that the refusal to deliver was an act of blatant racism, and according to his grandmother, It can only be because we are black people. Wally Wilcox, the owner of the Dominos outlet, however, asserted that the issue was one of employee safety since several pizza- delivery people had been murdered while making deliveries, and pizza- delivery people were often robbed, assaulted, and killed. Dominos and most other large pizza chains including Pizza Hut and Little Caesars use computerized systems that designate neighborhoods as green, yellow, or red. Customers in green neighborhoods get pizzas delivered to their door; in yellow neighborhoods customers must come out to the street and get their pizza from the delivery car; red neighborhoods are those considered too dangerous for any home delivery at all, and customers in these areas must drive to the restaurant for their pizzas. Because red- marked neighborhoods are almost always minority neighborhoods, the American Civil Liberties Union criticized this pizza delivery practice as discriminatory. The California Restaurant Association asserted that the practice was part of the employers legal and moral duty to eliminate workplace hazards. a