Pizza Drop! (RAR!)

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Also, you don't need pizza cooks or any kind of pizza place worker type up there. The orders are via app, and all tasks making and packaging the pizza are the ones that are the easiest to automate, and sending it down means it needs such high precision targeting that it also must be done automatically to prevent errors. The business will be 100% automatic. The only people that have a legitimate reason to be up there in the station are engineers, biologists, and veterinarians.

But, would you want to eat pizza made by a machine?

Simon, I see your points.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Well, we were explicitly told the company has 2500 employees, so it's reasonable to assume that all those employees are doing something productive and necessary to the function of the company.

Customer service for the phone lines for when the drop pods ruin their yard?

People to come up with new pizzas/other menu items.

Test kitchens and staff.

Tasters.

Focus groups.

Management.

Maintenance staff.

[KraytKing]

They make the pizza. The OP said it was of high quality, and that sort of thing doesn't come from a factory.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Then you have cooks of every sort as well.

[The Romulan Republic]

Well, we were explicitly told the company has 2500 employees, so it's reasonable to assume that all those employees are doing something productive and necessary to the function of the company.

Customer service for the phone lines for when the drop pods ruin their yard?

People to come up with new pizzas/other menu items.

Test kitchens and staff.

Tasters.

Focus groups.

Management.

Maintenance staff.

Cooks, as noted already.

Security staff (any large corporation has them).

Shuttle pilots.

Station/shuttle engineers, though maybe that falls under Maintenance staff.

Press/PR people.

Medial staff (you WILL have employees get sick or injured, and need treatment immediately, not after a shuttle flight to Earth).

Computer software experts/programmers (especially for a high tech. facility like this).

Really, I'm no expert, but I think that 2500 is probably low-balling it.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Definitely lowballing it, especially if this operation is working around-the-clock on a global scale. You'd basically need three shifts, each with at least the bare minimum of staff needed, and that assumes no one is ill/injured/hungover.

And as much as I hate to think of them, with that many people involved you'll inevitably need HR people. Oh, and accountants. Can't forget them.

[The Romulan Republic]

Yes. Although I dare say some of those jobs could be filled well enough with automation, especially if the stations have robotic technology as far ahead of contemporary Earth as their space technology seems to be.

[Eternal_Freedom]

You can fill some jobs by automation sure, but then you need a bunch more technicians helping fix up the robots, unless you want to go full Skynet and have them build and maintain themselves. And I for one don't like the idea of giving robots the potential to access to a global drop-pod network. That could end badly.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Definitely lowballing it, especially if this operation is working around-the-clock on a global scale. You'd basically need three shifts, each with at least the bare minimum of staff needed, and that assumes no one is ill/injured/hungover.

And as much as I hate to think of them, with that many people involved you'll inevitably need HR people. Oh, and accountants. Can't forget them.

HR people. Isn't that a contradiction in terms?

Yeah, 2500 is lowballing it, but corporations, especially food service corporations, specialize in slave labor on the cheap.

Then, there's food costs to consider. That's one of the hidden killers in this industry.

(and, what happens when we start doing dine in.?Because, someone's going to get the idea that pizza's much better with a view of space.

Then, there's the other idiotic ways to stray from the core concept. Because that happens in the food service business as well)

[bilateralrope]

Then, there's food costs to consider. That's one of the hidden killers in this industry.

There is no mass being shuttled up from Earth.

- The mass is being replaced in an unmentioned manner. Which is unusual for such a detailed scenario.

More mass is collected by collector drones from comets and asteroids.

Zor

[U.P. Cinnabar]

I know, but how much do the collector drones cost? What are the costs for converting said mass to feed for the meat animals on station? The cost of converting mass to soil, fertilizer, etc., for the vegetables. The cost of maintaining the veggies and food animals? The labor cost in maintaining food animals, gardens, food prep, cooking and delivery.

How much does the electric and gas cost to cook the food?

All that determines food costs.

And, even post-scarcoty economies and magic sampos don't work for free

[Zor]

How much does the electric and gas cost to cook the food?

Why the hell would we need Gas to cook food?

Zor

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Natural gas, not gasoline. It's best for cooking, because you can more reliably control your fire.

Which is why it's preferred in the restaurant business.

[Zor]

Natural gas, not gasoline. It's best for cooking, because you can more reliably control your fire.

Which is why it's preferred in the restaurant business.

You can still do just fine without it, I know this from firsthand experience. Besides, it wastes perfectly good oxygen.

Zor

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Which I'm sure the gardens on station, as well as your magic Sampos can make in quantities enough for that not to be an issue.

And, it is what it is. The restaurant business prefers natural gas cooking, that's what's going to be there, your personal biases notwithstanding.

Unless you want to just use microwaves for everything. That will cut down on the wasted oxygen too

[Imperial528]

Given that we are making pizzas and not, say, stir-fry or other things reliant on flame-pan contact, I feel like natural gas is a bit over the top. We're working primarily in the environment of a convection oven.

The vast majority of common pizza places use electric or gas heated convection ovens with no open flame near the pizza itself. Restaurants and places which make more upscale food may use a brick oven, often made such that the pizza is exposed to the fire to some degree.

Both forms of oven can be replicated using purely electrical means, the former already being employed in many pizza places on Earth, and the latter by a combination of a heated oven and infrared lamps.

And, judging from some of Zor's previous scenarios, these stations are most likely capable of manufacturing (and to a high degree, maintaining) their entire logistics chain, from the collector drones to the material processing and yes, making the pizza.

Given that the OP itself outright states that this entire venture only has 2,500 employees despite having a total useable surface area of at least 1000km^2, it must be heavily automated or else it would simply not function.

You cannot approach this as if it is the foodservice industry. This is, in essence, the largest automated factory known to man (from an in-universe perspective) that just so happens to make pizza. Frankly the only contact those 2500 employees probably have with the pizzas at all is statistical QA for the sheer volume these stations could produce.

Since the US alone is eating 3 billion pizza per year, this venue (12 stations), can only satisfy about 16.67% of the US consumation. Even though the US is excessive in their pizza consumtion, considering that there are 25 other people for each US american on this planet, it's just a small niche company on the global scale.

I wouldn't call 16% niche given that we can deliver to anywhere in the time it takes to punt a pod down to Earth, which if we use a descent path similar to the shuttle, is about 35 minutes. To anywhere. Plus as you noted, the sheer underutilized scale of these stations gives the business a comical amount of room to expand for little comparative investment. Essentially free, really, since the business owns every step in the logistics chain and doesn't have to pay the vast majority of the "workers" in each step.


For Zor: I question the pods costing any monetary value, since presumably the stations manufacture them on-site using the same resources gathered by the automatic collection ships. Thus, while one could say they have value, they do not necessarily cost that value in monetary means to produce outside of opportunity costs.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, there are costs associated with maintaining the equipment, so in effect the pods have a cost.

It's like... Soviet tanks didn't cost the Soviet government money because that's not how the accounting was handled. But they did very much cost money.

You can fill some jobs by automation sure, but then you need a bunch more technicians helping fix up the robots...

To be fair, you've got a network of space stations and nobody else does. You wind up needing a large repair staff by default, and you can't contract out because nobody has the expertise.

Yeah, 2500 is lowballing it, but corporations, especially food service corporations, specialize in slave labor on the cheap.

Nobody said this outfit was supplying all the world's pizza. They may only be able to make a limited number of pizzas, there may be a waiting list to subscribe to their app as they expand the business.

Also, they don't need or want slave labor on the cheap, because too many of the jobs in the company involve stuff you can't cut corners on like piloting spacecraft.

Then, there's food costs to consider. That's one of the hidden killers in this industry.

They have a complete orbital farm infrastructure, which oddly makes me revise upwards my estimates of their manpower needs. It's all very vertically integrated.

(and, what happens when we start doing dine in.?Because, someone's going to get the idea that pizza's much better with a view of space)

Space tourism in general would be an obvious way to branch out, yes.

[FireNexus]

I would sell off the infrastructure and retire rich before the $30 price tag on a large pizza makes me go belly up. That’s twice what one of the highest quality New York style pizzas (the only style worth delivering) costs in my city.

There is no way you can make more profit selling them than Bain capitaling the assets. In fact, you go out of business the very instant the novelty wears off.