When you think of domino, you probably picture a long line of black and white rectangles set up in careful sequence to fall with just the nudge of one. Kids love to use them to play games, and adults love to watch a carefully built line of dominoes topple as part of a show or for a special effect. But there’s much more to a good domino story than the fact that it builds and crashes like a tumbling tower.
In a good domino story, each scene adds to the overall tension until climax, which can be dramatic or comic. It’s important to make sure the scenes all fit together smoothly, without a lot of hiccups in logic. Otherwise, your reader may start to lose interest and abandon the story.
Domino’s Pizza CEO Don Meij has a lot of experience with the “domino effect.” He often says that the company’s most important value is “Champion Our Customers.” He has a habit of listening to employee feedback, and this helps him quickly implement new policies and programs at the chain.
For example, when he learned that Domino’s employees were complaining about their outdated delivery vehicles, he decided to do something about it. Meij worked with an outside company to design a purpose-built pizza-delivery vehicle for the Domino’s fleet. The result was a vehicle that not only helped the company save money on gas and maintenance, but it also improved customer satisfaction.
Another example is the company’s emphasis on customer-facing technology. Domino’s has integrated its app with Apple CarPlay, allowing customers to order food from their car’s dashboard. This is an innovative way to capitalize on the growing trend of connected cars and deliver a better customer experience.
Western dominoes were first recorded in the early 18th Century in Italy and France, where they became a popular fad. By the late 18th Century, domino sets were being produced from woods such as ebony and ivory. Some were even made of silver lip ocean pearl oyster shell (mother-of-pearl), which is a rarer and more expensive material. These early sets were used for positional games, in which the player placed dominoes edge to edge so that their identifying marks matched or formed a specified total.
Dominoes are still popular today in many countries. In Latin America, for instance, a domino game called domino tetrabol is played by teams of two, with each player taking turns playing a tile on the board. The winner is the team that places all its tiles on the board before the opposing team.
Other domino games involve scoring points by laying tiles end to end so that their exposed ends match: for example, one’s touch two’s, or three’s touch four’s. Other games duplicate card games, and some help kids learn number recognition.