Brad's Underground
For me, pizza has always been a spur-of-the-moment food. It’s what you order when you’re too tired to cook or don’t want all the trappings that come with going out to a full-service restaurant. Most of the pizzas I’ve consumed in a nonprofessional setting have been last-minute orders.
But Brad’s Underground has introduced pizza by appointment only. Want one of Brad’s pies for your dinner tonight? Maybe the day after tomorrow. (Maybe.) And you say you’d like it for dinner? That’s fine, you may eat it whenever you like, but you may have to pick it up at 2 o’clock.
The ability to schedule a pizza is something of an improvement over Brad’s previous business model, which as near as I could tell involved hopeful customers sending him a message via his Instagram page and waiting, sometimes Godot-like, for a response. For some it would take weeks to receive an invitation to place an order; others never did hear back, leaving them to post lamentations on various social media platforms wondering what poor life choices they must have made to render them so karmically unblessed. At least that’s how I read it.
My take? Brad Czerkies – whose nickname is apparently, and perhaps ironically, Flash – is something of a marketing genius. Because the surest way to make people want something is to tell them they can’t have it.