Domino’s is a chain of pizza delivery and bakeries. The company’s corporate headquarters are in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The chain operates more than 8,600 locations in the United States and Canada, as well as a few international stores. It employs more than 36,000 people worldwide. Domino’s is an example of a business that has grown through acquisition and innovative thinking.
In the early days of Domino’s, founder Tom Monaghan struggled financially and had a rough personal life. In 1960, he bought a small pizza restaurant called DomiNick’s in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He changed the name to Domino’s Pizza and opened three more stores in the same year. Domino’s is now a Fortune 500 company with a yearly revenue of more than $943 million.
Like playing cards, of which dominoes are a variant, dominoes are used for a number of games. They are typically twice as long as they are wide and feature a line in the middle to divide them visually into two squares that are marked with a pattern of spots, or pips, on one side and blank or identically patterned on the other. Each domino has a value, usually expressed as a number of pips, and the value of each end is indicated by a numeral, from seven pips up to none (blank) or a zero.
Whether they are stacked in straight or curved lines, each domino is poised to fall over when the first one is knocked over. But before that happens, the unmoving dominoes have to overcome a force known as inertia. A tiny nudge is all it takes to overcome this resistance and push that first domino past its tipping point. Once it does, its potential energy is released, and the rest of the dominoes follow suit in a chain reaction.
A domino set has 28 tiles, and the first player begins by drawing a tile from the boneyard (also known as a stock). Then, they play it by placing it edge-to-edge against another domino with identical values or on a total number value. The players continue this process until one player has played all of their tiles or the total number of tiles becomes zero.
Domino’s believes in a strong culture of communication with its employees. This has helped the company become a top workplace, and it’s also one of its core values. One of the ways they communicate with their employees is through their leadership program, which provides opportunities for advancement based on performance. In addition, the company listens to its customers and uses that feedback when making decisions. This can be seen in the way the company recently made changes to its menu in response to consumer complaints. The company has also focused on technology, with half of its workforce at headquarters working in software analytics. This allows the company to innovate new ways for customers to order their pizzas, from texting an emoji to using devices such as Amazon Echo. It’s a strategy that has worked, as Domino’s has been named a Top Workplace for nine consecutive years.