Papa Johns: Delicious? Maybe. In Violation of the TCPA? Definitely
I don’t know if it’s too late for Papa Johns to back away from it’s 2! Million! Pizzas! Giveaway! — because it’s looking like the pizza franchise that alleges it has both “better ingredients” (?) and “better pizza” (???) might very well get saddled with a $250 million dollar lawsuit for TCPA violations.
Usually on insideARM.com, if we’re writing about TCPA violations, we’re covering an agency that may have fell afoul of the confusing 1991 law. What had once been a piece of legislation to protect consumers from unwanted telemarketing calls (i.e. ALL telemarketing calls, amirght?) has instead become one of the new go-to suits against the collection industry.
So we were surprised to see Papa Johns Pizza on the wrong side of the TCPA.
A class action suit is alleging that Papa Johns Pizza — pizza for when you just don’t care about taste or flavor — sent out text message blasts to customers through the mass texting service OnTime4U. According to the story on the Atlantic Wire blog, “Plaintiffs say they sometimes received 15 or 16 text messages in a row, sometimes in the middle of the night, for a grand total of 500,000 unwanted texts.”
That’s the equivalent of three grounded teenagers’-worth of texts. And some plaintiffs have complained of getting between 15 and 16 texts in a row.
The plaintiffs in the class-action suit are hoping for $1,500 per text — that is, if the judge agrees that the pizza chain knowingly and willfully broke the law. If you’re a betting man — and if you’re eating Papa Johns pizza, you’ve already shown yourself to be a risk-taker — the safe money is on the courts finding for the plaintiffs in this matter. “Courts are notoriously unsympathetic to companies that spam their customers.”
Mike Bevel is an editor at insideARM.com. When not obsessing over the novels of Henry James, he is available to judge all of your food choices. Email him at editor@insideARM.com.
This is politically based.
Well, if by “politically based” you mean those pizzas are a war crime against delicious then yes: the politics of those pizzas is nauseating.
No, really, tell us how you really feel about Papa John’s Pizza…I don’t think we quite got that.
I’m glad you asked, brockm34: Papa John’s Pizza — brought to you by a man who wears smugness as comfortably as last year’s sweater — is the worst pizza to ever be made in the history of food. If time-travel were possible, I’d go back and make sure that I made that abundantly clear in my article.
The pizza is subpar at best–but what national chain pizza delivery outfit exists that makes quality pizza?
Where I think my esteemed colleague, Mr. Bevel, misses the mark is on the importance of Papa’s garlic dipping sauce. It’s the champagne of saturated fats. If it were a shampoo, and if I had hair, I would lather its creamy deliciousness into my locks every day of the week. Were I to fall–tragically–into a coma from which I could not recover, I hope that one of you would have the good sense to replace the drugs in my I.V.s with Papa Johns garlic dipping sauce.
Mmmmmm…
“Were I to fall–tragically–into a coma from which I could not recover”
Someone has a birthday coming up…