My childhood pizza place did not have a Joust game. It did have an Arkanoid machine, which was usually out of order, and a pinball machine, which was always out of order and was based on the theme of assembling different parts of a female android. There was also a refrigerator (a white one, not one of the ones with glass doors) that held a bunch of tubs of Ben and Jerry's and was covered in flyers held up by refrigerator magnets. Every year around Halloween, they'd hold a "Pizzapalooza" event outside featuring local bands and a septuagenarian Elvis impersonator. A street map on the opposite wall showed the borders of "The Pizzaland Empire" within which they would do delivery.
It was mostly just a delivery place, with a couple of those prefab round table/bench arrangements out front that were hardly ever used. The same franchise owned a sit-down pizza place at the big intersection about a mile up the road, but I only ever went there once and it wasn't all that interesting. After I graduated from high school, I learned that they both belonged to the brother of my AP history teacher. My family lived just far enough away that if we ordered pizza for pickup when we left home, it was almost ready by the time we arrived, and we would just hang out with the guys behind the counter for five or ten minutes. They actually tossed all the pizzas right behind the counter as well, then ran them through this conveyor belt oven device, so we got to watch them make more pizzas while we talked.
There was a point when I was about ten or eleven when things got even weirder. At the time the employees there comprised a bunch of vaguely punkish college kids who spent a lot of their time on the job smoking weed around the back of the building. They did put out a jar next to the tip jar and the UNICEF box to raise money for the "Kitty Fund" to support a stray cat that had taken up residence in the overgrown area out back, which was nice, but the quality of the service, and the pizza itself, became a lot less consistent. There were a couple of times when they ran out of toppings and we'd end up with a "Canadian bacon" pizza made with supermarket-bought mozzarella and slices of Kraft honey ham. Ultimately they came up with a big plan to buy the place off the teacher's brother guy and run it collectively, but that fell prey to internal squabbling (which had been ongoing, and was at least as big a reason for the crappy pizza as their being stoned all the time). The group came apart at the seams and eventually they all left except for this one guy who'd been less of a flake than the others and had managed to stay pretty mellow about all the stupid stuff that had been going down.
The pizza place is still open. The Arkanoid machine is gone now, but the fem-bot pinball table is still there, and still doesn't work, and to this day that one guy is still there behind the counter. He has a wife and a kid of his own now; whether she's the breadwinner of the family or he just somehow manages to support them all on a pizza dude's salary I have no idea.
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Topic: 14th May 2008 - Where the living buy bread from the already dead (Read 8869 times)