You can almost smell the Private Equity musk.
you can certainly taste it in their enshittified product
Back in the 80s pizza hut charged premium prices, but tasted fantastic with actual quality ingredients. Tasted even better if you ate it at the restaurant right out of the cast iron.
Then they lost some sales to cheaper on the go places that popped up like Dominoes and little Caesars. Instead of sticking to the higher end and maintaining for customers that we’re willing to spend more on taste, they opted to go down in the mud and compete on cheap, cheaping out on ingredients and cook\prep time. They couldn’t do that as well as the other guys, who’d been doing it from the start. So they completely tanked themselves. Dumb corpo decisions. You can’t make a shit product to compete with other shit product when all your brick and mortar is 4x the size and not designed to sling out pizza as fast. Instead of just excepting that they weren’t going to keep all of the customer base wanting pizza, they shot themselves in both legs.
Growing up, Pizza Hut was the only pizza place in my town. It was your classic building with the red hut roof. I hate to hear the company is doing so poorly, but poor management and business decisions stained the brand. It’s a shadow of its former self. It could be turned around if they bring back their classic pan pizza recipe and leaned more in on nostalgia. Most Pizza Huts nowadays are shoved into strip malls or have had their hut roofs mutilated and I’m like, “Why!?” It’s literally in your name and logo!
Because the the rich people who would pay for quality pizza don’t live there. they live in cities and fancy suburbs.
and poor people that live in those places are not going to pay $50 for a fresh made pizza with authentic ingredients. they are used to paying $10 for artificial chemical pizza products that pizza hut now offers.
Honestly I’d get some Pizza Hut out of nostalgia if they didn’t put all of their delivery through DoorDash. That middleman makes it cost more than actually good pizza.
I worked at a pizza hut as a kid. I honestly didn’t know they were still in operation today.
The niche with Pizza Hut was the dining experience. The red cups, the hut roofs, the whole thing… They gutted all that and kept the subpar pizza. You can get carry out/delivery pizza of same quality from everywhere else. They took away the thing that made them different in the marketplace.
Their pizza used to be much better. They lost some consumers to the places selling worse pizza for cheaper and instead of just excepting it, tried to compete on price. They turned their pizza to shit, just like their competitors. Only their competitors had smaller buildings with less overhead and kitchens designed from the ground up to sling out fast pizza. Super Dumbass move on pizza hut.
I only buy pizza from The Hut.
See, this pizza comes with cheese in the crust; that’s not normal, it’s awesome!
(Seriously tho, the Dominoes is closer, and if someone local was making the equivalent of “sutffed crust”, I’d order from them. But, I’ll pay a premium for cheese in the crust.)
EDIT: TIL Dominos has a stuffed crust option as of May 2025, and Papa Murphy’s might.
As a fellow stuffed crust fanatic, Papa Murphys version isn’t great (despite them being my favorite “fast food pizza”) and im not sure if I’ve had Dominoes version but doubt its that great either.
You’re a custy for life.
Plenty of places do stuffed crust don’t they? We usually get stuffed crust when ordering Papa John’s.
I wonder if this is a regional thing? Dominoes in the UK has had stuffed crust for at least a decade of not longer. At one point they had got dog stuffed crust too, it was divine.
the hut probably owns the cheese in crust patent.
Bring back the 80’s Pizza Hut experience, you cowards.
They just closed the only location with a dining room in my area.
Pizza hut buffet!
that’s mostly just the price, init?
I haven’t had Pizza Hut since I was a kid. It’s not great pizza, but you used to be able to sign up for the summer book club at the library and get prizes for reading so many books. I was a pathetic kid with no friends who read nonstop to cope with the loneliness and boredom and one of the prizes was free coupons for personal pan pizzas. We were the kind of barely middle class that thought burger king was a huge treat we only got once a year, so earning a pan pizza was the absolute shit as an elementary school aged kid. My mom always took me there for my end of summer reward lunch and it always felt incredibly special.
It existed for the buffet, with that gone there was no niche.
Honestly good. Bought some recently on a whim. I’ve had better frozen pizzas. I was in a genuine state of despair when I took the first bite and realized I made a terrible mistake ordering it
All the corporate brands went through more rounds of enshitification recently, a few years ago I got subway for the first time in years, and realized it’s way cheaper than it was, and more expensive. For one thing I noticed way way more salt in the veggies, salt disguises substandard ingredients, as does sugar and fat. So much salt I couldn’t well eat it.
I pickle my own veggies, and don’t use any salt, and it tastes fine, so I know there’s not reason vegetables need that much salt on their own.
But talking to others, they also think they lowered the quality on all of these corporate joints sometime around 2021.
I like the term enshitification. I used the phrase “spreadsheeted the flavor out” many times over the years. And it’s true. They constantly shave quality so that the spreadsheets look better.
That sounds about right honestly. I remember last buying some pizza hut around 2022 and while it wasn’t anything special, it wasn’t as genuinely offensive as my recent experience with them
Back right after covid we did a pizza friday for a whole summer. They had deals for things every week and especially crust seasonings. That lasted about a year. The next summer the deals were massively cut back and the following summer the seasonings were gone. Pretty much stopped since then.
Not in the US, but my wife and I had it last week and we both agreed that it was terrible and our stomach hurt that night/next day.
It’s a little over one percent of their total stores. Last year they closed 1451 stores, so this isn’t some sort of new record. The important bit is the potential of Yum selling off the brand, which I think is honestly a good move. Pizza Hut is falling WAAAY behind Dominos and needs an injection of fresh energy. A new owner might bring that.
They just need to copy the Pizza Hut experience in China.
It’s a black tie affair, with a maître d’ and everything.
Little Caesars makes better Pizza than the Hut. Just let it die.
Honestly couldn’t tell you the last time I had Pizza Hut. Probably over 20 years ago? Just awful greasy pizza.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but as someone who has had both within the last 3 months, I’d say Pizza Hut edges out Little Caesars by a fairly large margin.
One of my favorite pizzas is the Papa Murphy’s cowboy pizza.
Put more than five olives on my pizza and maybe I’d go more often. All the major chains have this problem, though.
This is actually a big reason Papa John’s literally owns their own olive orchards. So they can put more olives on their pizzas with out breaking the bank
Good olives are expensive as fuck
I just make pizza at home at this point. All the pizza chains serve overpriced garbage and the local shops are so expensive.
Good,it was never good anyways.
Used to love it, now it’s the only food I’ve had so far that makes me experience heartburn lol
Or maybe the food degraded ig?
It used to be fun. But it was never good.
I remember having a birthday party there as a kid. They had a create your own dessert bar. That was fun!
The pizza is actually good when it’s fresh. But for some strange reason Pizza Hut has always been allergic to making fresh pizzas to order like every other pizza place on the planet! When I order a pizza (and pay the premium price for the brand) I don’t want a premade pizza that’s just been kept warm until I order!
What that is a thing???
It used to be. Pizza Hut used to be a family restaurant. They had nice, cozy decor and fun stuff like that dessert bar and a salad bar.
