January 9, 2007 6:33 AM

It's a business decision...NOT a question of patriotism

Dallas-based food chain to accept Mexican pesos

Starting Monday, patrons of the Dallas-based Pizza Patr‚àö‚â•n chain, which caters heavily to Latinos, will be able to purchase American pizzas with Mexican pesos. Restaurant experts and economists said they knew of no other food chain with locations so far from the Mexican border offering such a service….”We’re trying to reach out to our core customer,” Antonio Swad, president of Pizza Patr‚àö‚â•n Inc., said Friday….”We know they come back [from Mexico] and have pesos left over. We want to be a convenient place for them to spend their pesos.”

I listened to an interview on NPR with the CEO of Pizza Patron, and I have to admit that I think this is a great idea. I doubt that pesos-for-pizzas will account for a huge volume of business, but we’re talking about a small, regional operator in a highly competitive business. So maybe Swad’s company isn’t going to take down Domino’s or Pizza Hut, but in doing something different, Pizza Patron has managed to generate some buzz, and that certainly isn’t going to hurt business.

Swad’s idea is all about taking care of his customers, about providing a service that perhaps gives them something to think about the next time they want a pizza. That’s all it is- an opportunity for Pizza Patron to provide a service to their customers…and in Texas, with the large Hispanic population, it might just make a difference for a small company trying to compete with national conglomerates like Domino’s and Pizza Hut.

What I find disturbing about Pizza Patron’s program is not that they’re accepting Mexican pesos as payment, but the reaction the company is receiving from some Right-wing loony toons who see this as little more than unpatriotic and anti-American. Hmm…could this reaction have ANYTHING to do with the reality that the people who would buy a pizza with pesos are Brown People?

I never cease to be amazed at how much hate that some people harbor towards a group of people they clearly know nothing about. To most of these hateful trolls, Brown = illegal. If they’re spending pesos on pizzas, how could they possibly be in this country legally?

This is pretty much the only country in the world in which you pay for goods and services in one currency and one currency only. Go virtually anywhere else, and you will find that you can pay for things in more than one currency, usually dollars and/or whatever the local currency is. You learn to figures costs in more than one currency, because that’s just how things are done. Few Americans realize how unique we are in our one-currency economy. Then again, most of the hateful Right-wing trolls taking Swad to task are barely even aware that there’s a world outside our borders.

We really should be commending Pizza Patron for doing something different and for displaying a high degree of creativity in finding new and different ways to take care of their customers. It’s not about patriotism or anything else but their customers. For those of you who see something sinister in Pizza Patron’s program, you have two choices: you can take your business elsewhere, and you can crawl under a rock. PLEASE choose Option 2….

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on January 9, 2007 6:33 AM.

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