The time is 1991. I was managing a pizza delivery store whose name (Domino’s) I won’t mention. Oops, I mentioned it. I had just taken over this store and was very excited about building sales. This unit was in a sorry state when I took over, and the key to building sales is marketing of course. Excellent service is actually more important, but I rested secure that my team would offer the best service on the planet. With this in mind, I set off to conquer my marketing needs.
One of the most important things you need in order to do marketing is proper marketing material. National campaigns are all fine and dandy, but since I can do anything better than everyone else (please remember that I was still young and amazingly pompous at the time), I figured the best thing to do would be to run some of my own coupons. This should be simple! Simply call up corporate headquarters and talk to the marketing people, right? I had an opportunity to place a free ad in an apartment newsletter, and they were even going to hand it out to their tenants for me. In a budget conscious company, free is worth a lot. All I had to give them the creative (that’s the ad), and the deal was done. So I called the corporate lackeys at corporate headquarters to get what I needed. They took a mere 6 weeks to give me an ad that I would have rejected if I were editing a high school newspaper.
Needless to say, this was very frustrating. You would think that I could get some quality support from a company that was doing more than a billion dollars a year in pizza sales (FYI, I figure I have slapped, topped, boxed, or delivered in excess of 200,000 pizzas in my lifetime). Alas, this was not the case.
I have always been a big believer that if you want something done right, do it yourself. So I marched down to my local Kinko’s, a copy shop that many of you reading this are probably familiar with. I took some camera-ready logos and some Noid artwork (why Domino’s canceled the Noid is as big a mystery to those of us who were with Domino’s as it was to the outside world, and now they have this ridiculous “Bad Andy” character…), and was all set to start cutting and pasting. Literally, I was going to cut and paste up a new ad with scissors and glue.
Fortunately for me, the people at the copy center suggested I try to go make my ad at their computer center, which was right across the street. It was like 3:00 AM, and their computer center was just as open as their copy center. This was cool! There was only one problem; my computer skills were about 5 years out of date and did not include anything about “desktop publishing.”
I had taken some programming classes in high school on an Apple ][e, BASIC and PASCAL to be specific (ask me about my senior PASCAL project…). My friends and I would also gather around another semi-wealthy friend’s Apple ][e and play some games. I had my own TI 99/4a (oh yeah!), and I had even done some programming on a Sony computer of some sort owned by my mother a few years earlier. More recently, I had played some games on various DOS computers owned by friends. For those up on computer history, you might have noticed all this “experience” was many years out of date in 1991.
Anyway, I went over to the computer center where there was this guy named Kyle, not to be mistaken for our own Kyle D’Addario. Kyle looked tired. And harrassed. It was about two weeks before the semester was out, and this particular Kinko’s served the University of Texas campus. There was only one customer there, but apparently the place had been packed full of pinheads only a few minutes before. Kyle was patient enough, barely, to help me choose between Aldus Pagemaker and Quark Xpress to make my coupons. He suggested Pagemaker as it would be easier for me to work with. Translation: If I used PageMaker, there was a small chance that he would be asked fewer questions than if I picked Xpress. Kyle helped me do this magical thing called “scanning” where he scanned in my logos and showed me some basics. By the end of the night (6:00 AM), I had my first coupon that I had made myself!
I was amazed. I ended up going to Kinko’s a lot, and I always went at night. Not only did this work for my schedule, I learned that Kyle actually liked people who were not complete pinheads, had a love for the Mac (which I had quickly found myself), and didn’t ask the same question more than once. Before long, he wasn’t charging me for my time (he would charge me for scanning and prints), and I got everything I needed done.
I ended up setting store sales records at every Domino’s I managed, all but one I still hold today. Ok, I think one other manager beat me at the campus store in Austin a couple of years after I left that store, but he was stealing so much money (and keeping it off the books), my record *officially* still stands. That’s another story though. I was able to set these records with two things; the first was excellent service that I pursued ruthlessly, the second was the fact that I made my own marketing materials, almost exclusively at Kinko’s. I made them on a Mac, and it would not have been possible to have done so on a PC at the time. This was Windows 3.x days, and none of the software that I used came on the PC. The ease of use was another big factor, and all of these Macs were mere IIci’s!
It was this love for what was obviously a superior machine that led to my buying my first Macintosh (compatible), a PowerCenter 100 from Power Computing, in 1996. It was also this love that led me to become involved with Webintosh and eventually to turn Webintosh into The Mac Observer with the help of Dave Hamilton.
Kyle, if you are out there, I owe you a big thank you! You showed me so much, and you only let me give you a couple of free pizzas during all that time. I have talked to many other people who also got their start on the Mac at Kinko’s, so I know my story is not unique. Over the years, I have mentioned this beginning of my Mac travels to many of my friends, peers, and acquaintances, and I have been surprised at how many people have encouraged me to write this piece.
I think we all owe a bit of thanks to this chain and its employees, and I offer a big Mac Observer Salute right now.
Your comments are welcomed.