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{{trope}}
[[File:SAC Pizza Delivery Service.jpg|thumb|350 px|When you care enough to send the very best]]
{{quote|''"Wise men say forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for a late pizza."''|'''Michelangelo''', ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (film)|Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]]: [[The Movie]]''}}▼
{{quote|''"Wise men say forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for a late pizza."''
▲
A pizza is ordered. If it fails to arrive within a certain time frame, it's free! <ref>This practice was at one point used in [[Real Life]], but was mostly ended because so many delivery drivers got speeding tickets or caused accidents.</ref>
Can be done from the perspective of the irate customer or the put-upon delivery guy—who may well have his job dependent on getting there in time. Comedic versions may have someone order pizza from some outrageous location in the middle of nowhere, such as the middle of the jungle, Antarctica, or the moon. Most of the time, the pizza still gets there on time (or two minutes late).
{{examples}}
== [[Advertising]] ==▼
▲== Advertising ==
* A pizza place commercial, aired on a Toronto radio station in the 1980s, satirized this with a reporter giving a play-by-play of a fictitious restaurant's thirty-second delivery, with predictably disastrous results. ("Oh no, there's tomato sauce all over the road! Someone get a serviette!") The commercial's concluding slogan: "No gimmicks. Just great pizza."
* An ad for Western Union shown in Australia had a student order a pizza and then realize he didn't have the cash to pay for it. He phones his father overseas for his allowance, who wires it to him. A split screen shows the pizza being prepared and delivered while the student goes to collect his cash. He gets back to his apartment just before the pizza delivery guy gets there, just before the thirty-minute deadline. After the original version became well-known, it was changed so that at the end the pizza is ruined in the box because of all the weaving through traffic the delivery guy did. The student was not happy with his pizza.
▲== Anime & Manga ==
* The second segment of the [[Ecchi]] anime ''Tales of Titillation'' by U-Jin makes use of this trope for outright parody. A trio of sisters persecute the deliverymen of "Pizza Tokyo" with acts of ''blatant exhibitionism'' to delay them past the thirty minutes mark. The funniest part is when the clueless (and virgin) rookie is sent to do the delivery, and all his co-workers act as if they were in a war movie and watching him go into a suicide mission, with "Taps" playing in the background as he drives off.
== [[Comic Books]] ==▼
== Card Games ==▼
* In ''[[Ninja Burger]]'', the rule is "Delivery in thirty minutes or we commit [[Seppuku]]." Based on Greenwich Mean Time for locations in geosynchronous orbit. And there's one city they don't deliver to ({{spoiler|Detroit. Anything but Detroit.}}). Aside from that—yes, the extreme case. Lost hikers, hostages, recluses or dictators who don't want to have to turn off their security, submarine crews... thirty minutes, pretty much guaranteed.▼
** They even mention that [[Stock Unsolved Mysteries|Jimmy Hoffa]] is one of their best customers. And yes, they do deliver to the Bermuda Triangle.▼
== Comedy ==▼
* One stand-up comic had a routine about a city he visited which straddled a time zone. Right across the street was a pizza joint.▼
{{quote|"The second you order it, it's already late!"}}▼
* [[Bill Hicks]]' recipe for a perfect world? Let everyone stay home, get stoned, and order pizza.▼
{{quote|Domino's Pizza trucks passing each other on the highway. Let ''them'' get stuck in traffic - ''all'' our pizza will be free!}}▼
▲== Comic Books ==
* ''[[Archie Comics]]'':
** Jughead encounters this problem when he has to deliver a pizza to a house atop a rocky cliff on an island.
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* In a ''[[Ren and Stimpy]]'' comic, the two have only thirty ''seconds'' to deliver a pizza with absurdly many toppings.
== [[Film]] ==
== Films -- Live-Action ==▼
* ''[[Spider-Man (film)|Spider-Man]] 2'': Peter Parker lost a job as a delivery boy due to arriving late having to give the food to the customer for free. His responsibilities as Spider-Man kept getting in the way. Though watching Spider-Man swinging through the skyscrapers of New York with pizza boxes was pretty badass.
{{quote|"Hey! He just stole that guy's pizzas!"}}
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* ''Dirty Work'': In the beginning, [[Norm MacDonald|Norm MacDonald's]] character was fired from pizza delivery after failing to deliver a pizza within thirty minutes because a car accident blocked his route. The [[Jerkass]] customer informed him for being two minutes late. This makes it the fourteenth time the character was fired in the past three months.
== [[Jokes]] ==
* At one point in [[The Eighties]], when mobile telephones were available but still a relative novelty, the joke was that they were mostly useful for "ordering food, then outrunning it until it's free."
== [[Literature]] ==
* ''[[Far Fetched Fiction]]''
** In the novel ''Waiting for Godalming'' by Robert Rankin, Lazlo points out that if they make this offer they are going to find you rather than give you a free pizza. He experimented with this fact by hiding in his house, leading the pizza deliverers to abseil down to his window.
** Lazlo also uses this knowledge to escape from a secret underground base, by ordering pizza, relying on them delivering in under thirty minutes, then paying extra to get a lift out. Taking this to illogical extremes, oh yes.
* ''[[Snow Crash]]'' begins with a [[Mundane Made Awesome|suspenseful, high-speed version from the pizza guy's point of view]]. The pizza company is run by [[The Mafia]], and their guarantee is that if the pizza is late, the customer (who is in a different country due to the way the US developed in the wake of the federal governments' collapse) will get it for free, ''and'' Uncle Enzo himself will drop whatever he's doing to come and apologize immediately, in person. The book never says what, exactly, would happen to the delivery boy, but given that Uncle Enzo is the head of the east coast Mafia and that he would have had to interrupt whatever he was doing to apologize to some schlub in the middle of nowhere, no-one really wants to find out. The Uncle Enzo guarantee only covers the time the pizza arrives in. Not the shape. Since part of the "apology" includes, among other things, a vacation in Italy it's implied that a lot of people just order pizzas as a form of gambling.
* In an episode of ''[[Better with You]]'', Debra Jo Rupp and Kurt Fuller's characters [[Kick the Dog|deliberately make the delivery]] [[Jerkass|guy wait outside their door]] for 12 minutes, just so they don't have to pay.
* An episode of ''[[Due South]]'' utilized this, when Ray called a place far away on purpose in the hopes that the delivery boy would be late and the pizza would be free.
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* In ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' season 8 episode "Gemini", General O'Neill mentions that Thor will deliver in thirty minutes or it's free—except it's not a pizza here, but an Asgard satellite of Replicator disruption.
▲== [[Stand-Up Comedy]] ==
▲* One stand-up comic had a routine about a city he visited which straddled a time zone. Right across the street was a pizza joint.
▲{{quote|"The second you order it, it's already late!"}}
▲* [[Bill Hicks]]' recipe for a perfect world? Let everyone stay home, get stoned, and order pizza.
▲{{quote|Domino's Pizza trucks passing each other on the highway. Let ''them'' get stuck in traffic - ''all'' our pizza will be free!}}
==
▲* In ''[[Ninja Burger]]'', the rule is "Delivery in thirty minutes or we commit [[Seppuku]]." Based on Greenwich Mean Time for locations in geosynchronous orbit. And there's one city they don't deliver to ({{spoiler|Detroit. Anything but Detroit.}}). Aside from that—yes, the extreme case. Lost hikers, hostages, recluses or dictators who don't want to have to turn off their security, submarine crews... thirty minutes, pretty much guaranteed.
▲** They even mention that [[Stock Unsolved Mysteries|Jimmy Hoffa]] is one of their best customers. And yes, they do deliver to the Bermuda Triangle.
* Ordering a mid-battle delivery in ''[[Disgaea]] 2'' warrants the response, "If it's not there in thirty minutes or less, just wait longer!"
* One of the [[Easter Egg|fake hint messages]] in ''[[Nethack]]'' is a plug for a nonexistent pizza delivery shop, promising it "in thirty turns, or it's free!"
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* One of the Reaper's [[Stop Poking Me]] quotes in ''[[StarCraft II]]''.
{{quote|'''Reaper:''' I'm bringin' the pain, and the pizza, in thirty minutes or it's free!}}
* The
==
* In ''Absurd Notions'', the characters call out for pizza when there's 5 feet of snow on the ground. The result:
{{quote|'''Warren:''' But you do have some kind of delivery guarantee, don't you?
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** In a later strip, he's revealed to have a "dead in thirty minutes or you go free" guarantee.
== [[Western Animation]] ==▼
* ''[[Garfield and Friends]]'':▼
▲== Western Animation ==
▲* ''[[Garfield and Friends]]''
** An episode has Garfield at war with a pizza delivery service which kept ''almost'' arriving on time, but each delivery-person fell prey to elaborate traps Garfield had set to weasel his way out of paying.
{{quote|'''Garfield:''' Thirty-one minutes. Sorry.}}
* In an episode of ''[[Robot Chicken]]'', astronauts on the Space Station called pizza deliveries with this policy in order to get unlimited free pizza for the guys at NASA.
* In ''[[Recess]]: School's Out'', Ms. Finster says this phrase when she hears a knock at her door.
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* In an episode of ''[[Pucca]]'', the Go-Rong restaurant has a "thirty minutes or it's free" policy, so the [[Goldfish Poop Gang|Vagabond Ninjas]] plan to get free Ja-Jang Noodles by making deliverygirl Pucca late. One of the attempts were to disguise themselves as a dragon. {{spoiler|They eventually succeed, but get arrested for impersonating a dragon, and the police officer gets their noodles.}}
* On ''[[Chowder]]'', Chowder and Schnitzel had to deliver an order before sundown or else it was free. The customer lived on top of a giant. They finally make it just before sunset, but the customer delays them until the time is up. Then the giant helps them out by walking west until the sun was up again.
*
* ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'':
** The "138th Episode Spectacular" contains an outtake from the "Devil and Homer Simpson" segment of "Treehouse of Horror IV", in which Marge hires lawyer [[Ambulance Chaser|Lionel Hutz]] to represent Homer after seeing a Yellow Pages ad in which Hutz promises "Your case won in thirty minutes or your pizza's free". At the end of the clip, Hutz gives Marge a pizza box; when she points out that they actually ''did'' win the case, he tells her the box is empty anyway.
** There's also the time Homer ran a break-up service: "We're there in thirty minutes, or your next break-up is free!"
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* In ''[[The Batman]]'', Joker once ambushed someone by waiting outside their door dressed like a pizza boy. When the victim phoned for pizza, his reply was that it would be there in thirty ''seconds'' or it was free before immediately knocking on the door.
* ''[[Kick Buttowski]]'': A ridiculously intricate version was done in "Stand and Delivery" where a mysterious customer keeps ordering food from Battle Snax and delaying the order so he'll get it for free, almost running the Magnusson family out of business.
* ''[[Phineas and Ferb]]''
*
* ''[[The New Woody Woodpecker Show]]'' has an episode where Woody tried to delay Dooley so his pizza would be free. His efforts not only failed, but also ruined the pizza. When Woody tried to protest, Dooley said he guaranteed delivery, not satisfaction. Because Woody didn't have the money to pay for the pizza, Dooley had him work off the debt as a delivery boy.
* [[Teen Titans Go! (animation)|''Teen Titans Go!'']] episode "Hey Pizza!" has Cyborg and Beast Boy trying desperately to nab a free pizza this way, only for the delivery guy to frustrate their efforts in increasingly inexplicable ways.
== [[Real Life]] ==▼
▲== Real Life ==
* The [[Trope Namer]] is a Domino's Pizza ad campaign wherein if customers didn't get their pizza at their door in thirty minutes, the pizza was free. Unfortunately, it [[Gone Horribly Wrong|went horribly wrong]], with Domino's drivers running red lights, exceeding speed limits and causing car crashes in an attempt to beat the [[Exact Time to Failure|thirty minute time limit]]. Domino's was eventually sued and forced to stop using the promotion.
** Domino's brought it back in the late-00's with an ad campaign stressing realistic and silly things one can do in the thirty minutes while waiting for pizza. Of course, the small print indicates that the thirty minutes is not a guarantee due to the inherent danger.
** Places that still do have the "thirty minutes" deal nowadays mean "thirty minutes from when it leaves the parlor, not from when you place the order" giving drivers more leeway (and ensuring their safety) while still technically keeping their word.
** In Brazil, (or at least in Rio de Janeiro), Domino's "thirty minutes" deal came with a disclaimer: it was not valid if the order was for more than five pizzas and/or the destination was out of their delivery area.
* The Canadian pizza chain "Pizza Pizza" (not to be confused with Little Caesar's, whose ''slogan'' was "Pizza pizza"),
* Read any messageboard where delivery drivers post. People still appeal to this policy to try to get free food, even if it's not pizza.
* Some McDonalds restaurants once had a guarantee on how long it would take from ordering to receiving your food at the drive-thru, complete with a clock installed at the drive-thru window that counted how long it's been. That didn't last very long. Among other problems, service for customers inside the restaurant suffered badly.
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[[Category:Thirty Minutes Or Its Free]]
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Mail, Post and Parcel Tropes]]
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