My daughter Keely is a poor college kid in Madison, Wisconsin. Actually, she’s also a beautiful, recently married young woman, but “poor college kid” sounds better for the purposes of this blogpost.

I keep her in Toppers gift certificates pretty good, but she eats so much pizza, sometimes she runs out. When she does, she reverts to being a cost conscious pizza customer, and Toppers actually has to fight for her business.

Like most people, she eats at different pizza places depending on a lot of things. She does buy Toppers or other good local pizza, but sometimes she orders the cheap stuff at one of the fast food pizza chains.  She likes to rub my face in it when she does and I like to give her hell about it too.  It’s become something of a fun argument.  It’s basically an argument about whether Toppers is “worth” the extra cost versus the Pizza Huts of the world.  I admit that it makes me wonder about my parenting when she tells me she settled for Dominos.  (I like to think we didn’t raise “pizza sellouts” who will simply eat anyone’s pizza!)

Here’s a random text conversation I had with her a couple weeks after I blogged about Toppers awesome cheese:

Then she called me. “Dad, you can’t sell out and go cheap!  Our cheese is awesome.  Just tell people straight up ‘we’re more expensive because we do it right.’”

The truth is we’re not that much more expensive. We study it of course.  We are about $0.60 – $0.80 more on the average order compared to the cheap places.

Someone on our team recently suggested that we could offer customers to get a couple bucks off their order if they wanted crappy cheese! They were serious.  We role played it when they made the suggestion:  “Would you like our normal 100% Wisconsin Mozzarella Cheese tonight or would you prefer to save $1.50 and get cheese that was frozen and isn’t 100% Mozzarella?”  We decided immediately that it was a crazy idea; no one would ever choose to get the crappy cheese just to save a buck.

Or would they?

I love business! And I love being the business guy that sells the good stuff.

Scott