From Day 1 of opening Jonny D’s Pizza in 2005, owner Jonny Dawson has kept count of every single pie he’s sold at his Huntington, New York restaurant.
Around midafternoon on Saturday, November 1, that number tallied up to exactly 1 million.
Dawson knew in advance that the milestone could make a huge PR and marketing splash. “A few weeks ago, I realized we were approaching 1 million and thought, ‘Let’s have a little fun with this,’” he told the New York Post.
Using social media, Dawson announced that the person who bought all or a slice of the 1 millionth pizza would win free pizza for a year. Keesha Bailey, a 41-year-old single mother of four, turned out to be the winner. For Bailey, it was especially gratifying since she’d “never won anything” in her life—and didn’t even know the contest was going on. Not to mention her kids are athletic types with hearty appetites.
According to Dawson, the promotion resulted in an onslaught of new business for his 20-year-old pizzeria. At the same time—social media being what it is today—he had to contend with skeptics who doubted he could have kept up with that many pizzas for that many years. So Dawson used social media to demonstrate his method for counting every pizza sold on a daily basis.
Click here to watch the video on Instagram.
Ever since Jonny D’s opened, he said, he has placed every each and every panned dough on a rack in the kitchen and counted them all up. That number has been consistently logged into a series of notebooks, which Dawson displayed in the video. “In the mornings we know how many doughs we start with, and at the end of the day we know how many are left,” he said. “And that’s how many pies we know we (sold) for the day.”
Jonny D’s offers large and small round pizzas, plus Sicilian and Grandma squares, all made with a 48-hour fermentation. Interestingly, Dawson’s online menu touts two prices for each pizza—one price for customers who pay in cash and a slightly higher one for credit card orders.
Bailey, the contest winner, happens to be a Jonny D’s regular, as she explained to the Post. “I was sitting on the floor of my new apartment in 2009, eating this pizza before I had furniture,” she said.
She had dropped into Jonny D’s this past Saturday for lunch and let Dawson know she’d return later to pick up a pizza for her 15-year-old son, Rasiere, and his Huntington High School football teammates. “I said, ‘I’ll be back around 3:15 or 3:30 after the game.’ I had no idea this contest was a whole thing.”
When Bailey arrived again with her two youngest children, Dawson was ready for her. “We put a hair trigger on a balloon contraption, so it was ready to pull down, and everybody in the back came out with streamers,” he said.
Now Bailey’s kids have decided they’ll be eating pizza every single day and have no problem with that. She added that Rasiere is “already getting texts from teammates: ‘Pizza on you?’”
