Posted in: NFL, Sports | Tagged: #TakeTheKnee, Colin Kaepernick, nfl, papa johns

Oblivious CEO Thinks People Aren't Buying Papa Johns Pizza Because Of NFL Protests

Published Wed, 01 Nov 2017 15:15:49 -0500

Papa Johns CEO John Schnatter has blamed sluggish pizza sales on the NFL's #TakeTheKnee protests, a new report reveals. Schnatter blamed the NFL during a conference call with other disappointed Papa Johns executives, according to a report from ESPN.

"The NFL has hurt us," Schnatter said. "We are disappointed the NFL and its leadership did not resolve this. Leadership starts at the top, and this is an example of poor leadership."

In response to the protest, in which players kneel during the National Anthem in order to raise awareness of the murder of young Black men at the hands of police officers, Papa Johns execs say they pulled their advertising for NFL games, a situation which COO Steve Ritchie says will "persist unless a solution is put in place" to stop the protests.

Schnatter said that he thought the protests were "nipped in the bud" a year and a half ago. It's unclear what Schnatter could be referring to, considering the protests only started picking up steam about a year ago. Perhaps he's mixing up his timeframe and referring to Colin Kaepernick's effective blackballing from the NFL. It was in September, 2016 that the 49ers announced that Blane Gabbert, not Kaepernick, would be their starting quarterback, kicking off a chain of events that saw Kaepernick decline to renew with the 49ers at the end of that season and no other NFL team hire him in 2017 despite him having a higher rating than many employed starting quarterbacks.

Of course, NFL protests are only one possible reason any rational person could come up with for why Papa Johns pizza sales might be in decline. First and foremost, Papa Johns pizza is terrible. Surely Papa Johns must know this. You can't make that many pizzas and not know that they suck. Perhaps people have simply decided that, with all of the misery and suffering in the world right now, there's no reason to add to it by willingly consuming bad pizza.

Like other discount "pizza" chains, Papa Johns' produces a product that appears to be pizza-like, which is more than can be said for some pizzas, such as the ones produced in several parts of the Midwest which are cut into offensively tiny rectangles rather than the triangle-shaped slices that God intended pizza to be cut into. But upon closer inspection, it's obvious that Papa Johns pizza does not contain the signature pizza ingredients of chewy hand-tossed crust, tomato sauce, cheese, and a thin layer of orange grease that are the hallmarks of true pizza. Papa Johns is more like bread-colored cardboard with vaguely sauce and cheese-like substances baked on top, and no amount of free pickled peppers is going to make up for that.

The question Papa Johns executives should be asking themselves is not "why aren't more people buying Papa Johns pizza," but rather, "why did people ever pay money for this in the first place?" Following that inquiry, the natural path to pursue to increase sales would be to market Papa Johns more to masochists, ironic hipsters, and people whose taste buds were destroyed by tragic accidents such as accidentally attempting to consume Papa Johns pizza.

Here at Bleeding Cool, we understand that not everyone has the privilege of living in New York or New Jersey, which are the only places where true pizza can be reliably located. But that doesn't mean they have to punish themselves by eating Papa Johns. There are plenty of other options out there for game day foods that are not only less harmful to the mind and body, but which also don't directly provide money to buffoonish executives who cut advertising for their products in response to a protest and then complain that less people are buying those products.

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