Dimo’s v. DoorDash (Not Really)

Dimo’s is a place where we are unconventional, genuine, and perhaps bizarre. We are connected amongst ourselves and within our community as a band of people on paper disconnected from each other. The driving communal force is not pizza (sorry) but a desire to have a home base, a post practice, post bar, post breakup locale that is nothing more specific than a gathering place. The point is not being different or unlike the rest, but being joined in our shared queer, alternative, drunken, disheartened, lonely, ecstatic, confused, exhausted, overjoyed, disheveled, everyday experiences. 

As your local catchall-karaoke-poetry-gaming-pizza joint, we stay up late, stretch dough into the night, and clean until dawn breaks. And because we do this labor of love, we believe that we reserve the right to a little bit of playfighting, pushback, nonsense. Admittedly, a lot of you come to us drunken and hungry, occasionally angry, and we don’t blame you for this, it’s all a part of the pizzaverse. But in turn, we reserve the right to mess with you back, sell you slices with ridiculous names, tell you the bathroom key is ‘The Key to the City,’ give you a little flack if you can’t remember what slice you ordered, etc. This is the nature of the game, we are the late night refuge, we are a hub of unpredictability. 

You may have seen that recently we’ve been social media experimenting. And you may have seen that this involves a fair bit of teasing. And in truth, we cannot tell a lie : ) Sometimes the work is hard. And we know that a lot of you know what it’s like, to work the long hours, to talk to the drunken crowds, to love it and hate it all at once. To feel the strain of the continuous picking things up, and putting them back down. And at our core, we want to make you laugh, so that it’s all one joke we’re in on together. And we might start poking fun at whatever is deserving of laughter, which in our opinion is mostly everything. Laughter lightens the load, and we’re not really trying to apologize, we want to inform you of what we mean! we cannot make fun of what we truly hate. We are laughing at things that display parts of ourselves, things we resonate with, things that are too arduous or mundane to be serious about. We are asking you to play along.

All this leading up to say: Dear Doordashers, (all third party delivery service workers included) we don’t hate you. We don’t hate the customers either, and all the jokes are in jest. We know you hate when we make you wait for an order, we are not doing all this by choice! We work as hard as we can, and often the pizza desire overwhelms our pizza output. We try our best and we respect that you do as well. But there is humor in this feigned rivalry. We both serve those who want pizza, it makes no logical sense to be at odds, and yet? The pressures of the service industry affect us all, and once the shift is done and we head home, the stress fades and we can recognize our equal diligence. 

We are proud to collaborate with CutCats, a worker-owned collective that delivers food via bicycle. In the wake of the 2008 recession and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, we started to seriously consider what it means to be a capitalist, and how we could make a meaningful difference. We wanted to make sure we had a focused mission, and this birthed our purposeful passions: Education, Art, and Bicycle Advocacy. At our start, we had our own internal bicycle delivery team, which led into our partnership with CutCats. The worker-owned model allows for improved worker rights, and in Chicago, is often faster than car delivery. 

Third-party delivery services are often exploitative towards their workers, and feed into the demand for high-speed, low-cost, faceless systems that deepen the rift between consumers and the service providers. In our utopia, the world is not so pressed for measurable output, for exploitation in the name of cashflow. In our utopia the uber delivery driver and the pizza cook have no reason to butt heads, and yet in the real world, we do. And if we can’t make light of this, we have to reckon, without cushions, with the fact that the billionaires have exploited the working class to the point of self hatred and infighting. And yes, clearly we are conscious of this, and yes, at 8pm on a Friday we might fight with a Doordasher. Because we are human. Let us have the humor to reckon with it, let yourselves laugh with us. And let us look towards a more cooperatively owned future. And try to remember, it is just pizza. We love it, but it is only the catalyst for human connection. 

With love,
Dimo’s Pizza